Ideological Origins: Fascism and National Socialism

Italian Fascism emerged from a convergence of radical nationalism, revolutionary syndicalism, and a cult of violent action, drawing heavily on the Futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and on Georges Sorel's theory of political myth and revolutionary violence. It rejected both parliamentary liberalism and internationalist Marxism, exalting the nation as an organic entity superior to the individual and glorifying war as a force of regeneration. Central to its imagination was the myth of "Romanita," the heritage of the Roman Empire, feeding a vision of the totalitarian state as the fusion of nation, state, and people, and it proposed corporativism as an alternative to Marxist class struggle. It also absorbed the earlier nationalism of Enrico Corradini and the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana.