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This essay examines the origins of three political doctrines of the twentieth‐century—Communism, Fascism, and Marxism—which Berlin linked through attributing to them the assumption that human life tended in ‘only one direction’. He contrasted this briefly with his own view that human goals were really various and ‘at times incompatible’.

Since the early post-war years, parties have been central to Italy's political system and have regulated the recruitment patterns and socialization of members of the large political class, which was quite strictly separated in a national and a sub-national circuit. Consequently, in this so-called age of 'particocrazia', political reforms were mostly intended to strengthen the party control of Italian politics. The drastic change in the party system and the electoral system in beginning of the 1990s has then led to a considerable exchange of the political class' background, composition, and professional status. Yet, it seems that by now a re-professionalization is already under way, albeit not a return to a strictly party-dominated system.

In recent decades, a fair amount of controversy has been generated surrounding both Mircea Eliade’s youthful political association and his academic methodology. One particular trend in recent critical literature draws a causal connection between Eliade’s scholarship on religion and his association with the Romanian Iron Guard. According to this critique, Eliade’s approach to the study of religion is symptomatic of his Fascist political leanings and continues to encode and circulate a Fascist mentality in the academy today. This chapter argues that, by means of rhetorical fallacy and semiotic inversion, Eliade’s scholarship has been systematically mapped onto Fascist thought through a number of keyword associations. As a result, the sui generis approach to the study of religion, as well as interest in mythology and the esoteric aspects of religion, becomes problematically construed, in and of themselves, as Fascist enterprises.

This chapter argues that the political position evident in the work of Mircea Eliade is an opposition to Communism. The chapter utilizes a combination of Eliade’s academic, fictional, personal, and early political writings to trace out (1) an opposition to philosophical Marxism, (2) an opposition to invasive governments generally, and (3) an opposition to specific Communist and Fascist regimes. The chapter contends that the political sensibility available in Eliade’s writing is deeply conservative but not Fascist or paramilitary.

The chapter starts with a survey of fascist policies designed to give a fresh dynamism to a stagnant regime in the later part of the 1930s (these included the Racial Laws of 1938) and then passes to a survey of popular responses to an increasingly ‘totalitarian’ assertion of the regime's authority. It charts mounting hostility to the regime among large sections of the population, tired of fascist rhetoric, disgusted by the behaviour — particularly at the provincial level — of the ‘new caste’ of fascist leaders, and dismayed by the prospect of a generalised European war with fascist Italy fighting alongside Mussolini's ally, Nazi Germany.

The chapter examines the formation of the fascist project. It illustrates the objectives of the fascist movement in the light of pre-First World War intellectual currents of both left and right, of the experience of the war itself, and of problems of the immediate post-war. It discusses the utopian project of national transformation, to be realised through the transformation of Italians. While arguing that the project, in its utopian form, was bound to fail, the chapter does point to ways in which the aim of social transformation could have been at least partially implemented.

This chapter interrupts Gu”non’s biography to look at the development of political Traditionalism. The chapter first considers the involvement of Rudolf von Sebettendorff in the foundation of the German Nazi Party. It then turns to Julius Evola, the most important political Traditionalist, examining his development of Gu”non’s work and his involvement with Italian Fascism and German Nazism before and during the Second World War. The chapter ends with a consideration of the group of Traditionalists in Romania before the Second World War, a group which combined political and spiritual interests and from which emerged Mircea Eliade (later an important scholar of religions in America).

This chapter examines how the specter of a demonic Communist enemy came to occupy a central place in the Italian Fascist imaginary during the regime's mobilization of the politics of fear. Two critical periods in Italian Fascism's wars are discussed: the military participation on the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), framed by the Fascist regime as a “holy war” against communism, and Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union (1941–1943). The chapter shows how Fascist propaganda depicted Italy's wartime enemies in a way that tapped into the deepest fears of many Italians and their feelings of uncertainty about issues such as family, morality, and the Church. Facing waning support and growing resistance, the regime found that terror and anxiety were more effective in forging a connection between it and the population than a defense of Fascism.

This chapter completes the history of political Traditionalism and covers Evola’s biography from the end of the Second World War until his death. It considers Evola’s postwar modifications of political Traditionalism, and the terrorist activities of the various “neo-fascist” and Extreme Right groups that took their inspiration from Evola’s Traditionalism, especially as modified by Franco Freda. It ends with a discussion of contemporary political Traditionalism in countries other than Russia.

The concluding chapter summarises the various ways in which the fascist party failed in its objectives of national transformation. It argues that the party was central to fascist objectives and that the failure of the party signified, in effect, the failure of Fascism. Lack of success is linked to a weak political message and to the unhappy relationship between local and national, with local fascists following narrow, parochial, and personal priorities rather than national, public, objectives, usually to the detriment of the regime, and the central authorities unable to dominate totally these tendencies. The chapter ends with some observations on the fact that, in Italy, use of political power for private ends has not been confined to the fascist period.

The Introduction points first to the persistence of strong local and regional differences in Italy after Unification and to the ways in which the powerful centrifugal forces in respect of the Italian State generated by these differences were reflected in the early fascist movement and in its later organisation and functioning. It suggests that the preference given to local priorities was in persistent conflict with the nationalising and centralising project of the fascist regime. The Introduction also presents the second aspect of the book, that of the inefficiency of local fascist officials and their abuse of power, factors which provoke an extremely negative popular reaction.

The chapter stresses the provincial origins of the fascist movement and underlines the degree to which the first Fascism was made up of a constellation of local initiatives, often with little contact between them. The unifying element was the reaction against central government in Rome, thus reflecting the strong centrifugal thrust of the movement. The chapter examines the ways in which local strongholds were established by fascist leaders (the intransigent ras) — leaders often more concerned with their own personal positions of provincial power than with the establishment of a strong central government — and discusses the tensions between centre and periphery which become evident with the murder of Matteotti in 1924.

The chapter examines the popular reactions to the many kinds of abuse of power within the provincial fascist organisations during the 1930s and seeks to illustrate the diverse expressions of political disaffection in a context of increasing apathy. It argues that the discontent with the functioning of the fascist party was also evident among fascists themselves, as is made clear by the open criticisms of the malfunctioning of the local federations and the arguments about the direction Fascism should take in the future. The chapter also looks at the role of the so-called ‘second generation’ of young fascists and examines their attitudes towards the regime.