Well, no, Mussolini’s, not mine. It seems to be forgotten sometimes that Mussolini was originally considered a leftist and a number of people with impeccable liberal credentials (for example, H.G. Wells, Lincoln Steffens, W.E.B. DuBois, and Will Rogers) expressed admiration for him. It therefore appears prudent to see what Il Duce actually had to say about Fascism (the book includes an article Mussolini wrote about Fascism for the Encyclopedia Italiana.)


The initial surprise is the Foreword and putative authorship. Richard Washburn Childs was the American ambassador to Italy under the Harding administration, and, in the Foreword, states he wrote the book from Mussolini’s notes and dictation. It’s rather difficult to imagine a current American ambassador ghost-writing the autobiography of a foreign dictator. There’s something not quite right with the chronology here; the book was published in 1928; however in his introduction Washburn repeatedly compares Mussolini with Roosevelt (in language complimentary to both). In 1928, though, F.D.R.’s political service had been as a New York state senator, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and unsuccessful vice-presidential candidate; it would seem therefore that the Foreword was written well after the book was published. It’s full of embarrassingly fulsome praise for Mussolini, who is described as decisive, as having “cat-like” grace, athletic, intelligent, profound – Washburn was putting his thesaurus to work.


There’s nothing very useful here for elucidating what Fascism was about; most of the book is a laudatory history of Mussolini’s life up to the publication date without much commentary on political or social philosophy. The best you can say in Fascism was whatever Mussolini said it was. Mussolini, of course, was originally a prominent Socialist until he was expelled from the Party for advocating Italian participation in World War I, and he states here he is “of the Left”. He once comments he wants Italy to be a “corporate” state; there’s a lot of facile social media commentary seizing on this and claiming it means “controlled by corporations”. Mussolini doesn’t explain further what he means by a “corporate” state but the actual performance of Fascist Italy shows it most certainly doesn’t mean “controlled by corporations”; Web searching suggests the idea was organizing Italian citizens into “corporations” with sort of the meaning of medieval guilds. Mussolini criticizes capitalism a few times but doesn’t go overboard with it; the general feel is more or less like Hitler’s later approach; industries were forced to institute various social policies like minimum wage, health care, and pensions but left more or less alone as long as they did so. Il Duce’s most vehement criticism is not for capitalism, but for Freemasonry, which gives the narration an antiquated feel; he’s also critical of clerical activism and parliamentary democracy, with the distinction that he sees Freemasonry and clerical activism as actual threats to Fascism while parliamentary democracy gets contemptuously dismissed as ineffectual.


It’s a bit frustrating to find that neither in the book proper nor the encyclopedia article is there any actual statement of what the policies of Fascism are; instead it’s all “Fascism is great, Fascism is wonderful, Fascism is the Wave of the Future” without any explanation of what Fascism is actually supposed to do. About all you can say is modern liberals define Fascism as anything they don’t like and actual Fascists defined it as anything they did like.


Short and clearly written; some parts, where Mussolini goes into the details of his early parliamentary maneuvering, are tedious unless you are really interested in (for example) who the Italian Secretary of the Interior was in 1924. Worth it as a reference; the major problem is it stops too early in Mussolini’s career and you have to fill in the events from 1928 to 1945 from elsewhere. ( )