A. James Gregor (1929–2019): è stato Professore Emerito di Scienze Politiche all’Università di Berkeley, in California. Ha pubblicato trenta volumi accademici che trattano del fascismo come fenomeno storico e come concetto delle scienze sociali. È stato Fellow del Center for Advanced Studies in Social Science presso la Hebrew University di Gerusalemme e docente a contratto presso il Dipartimento di Stato degli Stati Uniti. È stato insignito del titolo di Cavaliere dell’Ordine al merito dal governo della Repubblica Italiana. Tra le sue pubblicazioni: Mussolini’s Intellectuals. Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton 2006; trad. it.: Gli intellettuali di Mussolini. Il pensiero sociale e politico del fascismo, Lecce 2016); Fascism and History. Chapter in concept formation, Cambridge 2019.
Abstract
Italian Fascism was a contingent phenomenon, but soon it needed to develop an ideology that would merge the ideal impulses that emerged from the Great War, nationalism and interventionism. Fascist ideology was defined over time and in reference to the temporal dimension, that is to say placing fascism within Italian history, which required the development of a specific philosophy of history. Its reconstruction requires some conceptual premises: to recognize in it a perspective interpretative mechanism and to admit that fascism developed it within the framework of a fragmented political discourse. «Enciclopedia italiana» (1929-1937) and «Dizionario di politica» (1940) are the sources for reconstructing a philosophy of history in which the principle of constant linear progress and that of eternal return are found simultaneously, even if they are antithetical. Fascism predicted a political-spiritual revolution and believed to be its vanguard, recognizing mythically the Great War as its founding event.
Keywords: Nationalism, Fascism, Great War, Hierarchy, Mythopoiesis.
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