What Is Nationalism and What Do Nationalists Want?

What Is Nationalism and What Do Nationalists Want? by Alfredo Rocco is the latest in our series of early 20th century works on Italian politics. Originally published in 1914 as Che cosa è il nazionalismo e cosa vogliono i nazionalisti, it discusses what nationalism is and isnʼt and why; Italian political parties of the period; why nationalists are not liberals, nor conservatives, nor radicals, nor republicans, nor clericalists, nor socialists. It discusses objections to and criticisms of nationalism, and finally to whom nationalism appeals. 

Alfredo Rocco (AD 1875 – 1935) was an Italian jurist and politician. Born in Naples, he was the son of engineer Alberto Rocco and Maria Berlingieri. His three other brothers were, like him, all jurists.

A Professor of Civil Procedure at the University of Parma from 1906-1909, and at the University of Palermo from 1909-1910, Rocco later taught Economic Legislation of Labor and Commercial Law at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he also served as rector from 1932-1935.

Originally a member of the Italian Radical Party, Rocco become a Nationalist in 1913, while teaching at the University of Padua; it is during this time that he wrote the present work.  He was a staunch advocate of Italyʼs intervention in the First World War.   

Rocco was responsible for, and his name is associated with, the Italian Penal Code (the Codice Rocco) much of which remains in force in Italy today and which he had a direct hand in. 

Under Mussoliniʼs government, Rocco served as Undersecretary of State, first for the Ministry of the Treasury, then Finance, from 1922 to 1924; in 1924 he was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies. From 1925 to 1932 he was Minister of Justice. From 1934 until his death, he was a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. 

What Is Fascism by Sergio Panunzio (originally published in 1924 as Che cosʼè il fascismo in Italian) is, as the title suggests, an attempt to explain and define, not only what the term “fascism” means, but also the political movement it named, together with the historical circumstances that led up to it. 

Of Fascism, Panunzio says, “it is a movement unto itself, original, atypical... essentially historical [in] nature... the product of two crises: the general crisis of Socialism throughout Europe... [and] the crisis of war and post-war Italy... until the Blackshirts entered Rome.” In other words, Fascism is and was preeminently Italian in nature; it was both “revolutionary and conservative” at the same time. 

The book also discusses what Panunzio calls the Italian Revolution – a bloodless revolution in contradistinction to the Russian one – which began “in May 1915 with the intervention of Italy” in World War I, and which culminated in the March on Rome, in October 1922.   

Sergio Panunzio (AD 1886-1944) – an Italian jurist, political scientist, philosopher, and journalist – was a leading authority on and proponent of Revolutionary Syndicalism, which later transformed into National Syndicalism before finally informing and merging with Italian Fascism. He was one of the main ideologues of Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini.       

Italian Nationalism is a series of talks given by Enrico Corradini between 1908 and 1914 on the subject of Italian nationalism. But nationalism did not exist in a vacuum then, or now, – it coexisted and competed with other political, economic, and social movements and ideas, including socialism, liberalism, democracy, to be sure, but also imperialism, internationalism, European plutocracy, monarchy, and even (later) fascism. 

Originally published in 1914, in Italian, under the title of Il nazionalismo italiano, it is Enrico Corradiniʼs contribution to the sometimes contentious, ever and ongoing conversation about the place, duties, and responsibilities (not just the rights or “freedoms”) of the individual in the larger construct of the state or nation. And the nationʼs place, duties, and responsibilities in the world. 

Enrico Corradini (AD 1865-1931) was an Italian journalist, novelist, editor, and senator. He was the founder and leader of the Italian Nationalist Association (L'Associazione Nazionalista Italiana), 1910-1923, an important Italian political party that later merged with the National Fascist Party in 1923. 

 … democracy is the insurance policy that is paid in public for oneʼs private use. 

All contemporary democracy has a criminal nature... [it is] a political display of altruistic, popular... progressive and civil character, as a cover up... [for] its true nature which is made up of selfishness and egotistical exploitation.  

What is Fascism is a collection of essays, newspaper articles and interviews, discourses and polemics on the subject of fascism by Giovanni Gentile (AD 1875-1944), the “philosopher of Fascism.” The collection was written (or spoken and later transcribed) over the course of several years prior to its publication in book format, in 1925, under the Italian title of Che cosa è il fascismo.   

Trained as a philosopher, Giovanni Gentile spent many years as an academic, writing books and teaching. He held multiple posts as professor of philosophy, at various Italian universities including the University of Rome. Later, he served as the Minister of Public Education during the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. His major contribution to the history of philosophy includes his own brand of absolute idealism, or new-Hegelianism, known as “actual idealism.”

Readers new to Gentile, or to fascism in general, may be surprised, if not shocked, depending on their political leanings, to understand how close fascism is or was to the liberalism of the 19th century. “Seeing that, in part, fascism is liberalism: at least the liberalism of men who sincerely believed in freedom, and had however an austere concept of it... liberalism, as I understand it and as the men of the glorious Right of the Risorgimento understood it, the liberalism of freedom in the laws and consequently in the strong State and in the State conceived of as an ethical reality.”