GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

CHAPTER XVI: THEORY OF
FASCISM
I. INTRODUCTORY. ETHICS AND
POLITICS REUNITE
Throughout the exposition continued in the two preceding
Parts I have endeavoured to treat ethics and politics
separately. The endeavour on occasion involved the
subjection of the material to considerable strain, nor, it
must be confessed, has it been completely successful. In
Part III, for example, ethical questions could not be
wholly avoided, and in the immediately preceding chapter,
devoted to the exposition of the idealist theory of the
State, the attempt to "keep ethics out" was, it was obvious,
beginning to break down. For the idealist theory, though
it is primarily a theory of the State, is also a theory of
individual conduct, which declares that a man's moral
of wholes
life is "filled up by his station in that system
which the State is". 1 The theory also insists that his
moral is intimately bound up with his civic life, while
the announcement that "the conception of the Nation-
State involves at least an outline of the life to which,
as a power, it is instrumental", 1 entails the view that there
is a good life to the living of which the State is a necessary
means, and that our conception of the nature and function
of the State is, or should be, determined by our conception of
the nature ofthe good life. Thus the idealist theory subscribes
to the Greek view that the moral life is one which can be
realized oftly in the State, which is itself a means to the
realization ofthe end, which is the moral life. It is, then, only
by an arbitrary and division of
possibly unjustifiable subject
matter that I have allocated the last chapter to Part HI.
1 Sec Chapter XV, p. 593- Sec Chapter XV, pp. 594~596.