compromise its future.  Mussolini has boasted that he is a tempista, that his real pride is in “good timing.”  He makes decisions and acts on them at the precise moment when all the conditions and considerations which make them feasible and opportune are properly matured.  This is a way of saying that Fascism returns to the most rigorous meaning of Mazzini’s “Thought and Action,” whereby the two terms are so perfectly coincident that no thought has value which is not already expressed in action.  The real “views” of the Duce are those which he formulates and executes at one and the same time.

Is Fascism therefore “anti-intellectual,” as has been so often charged?  It is eminently anti-intellectual, eminently Mazzinian, that is, if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice.  Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to face the test of reality.  It is hostile to all science and all philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence.  It is not that Fascism denies value to culture, to the higher intellectual pursuits by which thought is invigorated as a source of action.  Fascist anti-intellectualism holds in scorn a product peculiarly typical of the educated classes in Italy:  the leterato—­the man who plays with knowledge and with thought without any sense of responsibility for the practical world.  It is hostile not so much to culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which does not make men, but rather creates pedants and aesthetes, egotists in a word, men morally and politically indifferent.  It has no use, for instance, for the man who is “above the conflict” when his country or its important interests are at stake.

By virtue of its repugnance for “intellectualism,” Fascism prefers not to waste time constructing abstract theories about itself.  But when we say that it is not a system or a doctrine we must not conclude that it is a blind praxis or a purely instinctive method.  If by system or philosophy we mean a living thought, a principle of universal character daily revealing its inner fertility and significance, then Fascism is a perfect system, with a solidly established foundation and with a rigorous logic in its development; and all who feel the truth and the vitality of the principle work day by day for its development, now doing, now undoing, now going forward, now retracing their steps, according as the things they do prove to be in harmony with the principle or to deviate from it.

And we come finally to a third point.