growth through the history of humanity rather than in sacred history.
Vico therefore maintains that doctrines must begin with those subjects
which take up and explain the entire course of civilization.
Experience and not ratiocination, history and not reason must help
human wisdom to understand the civil and political regimes which were
the result not of reason or philosophy, but rather of common sense, or
if you will of the social consciousness of man" and farther on (pages
373-374), "to Vico we owe the conception of history in its fullest
sense as magistra vitae, the search after the humanity of history, the
principle which makes the truth progress with time, the discovery of
the political 'course' of nations. It is Vico who uttered the eulogy
of the patrician 'heroic hearts' of the 'patres patriae' first
founders of states, magnanimous defenders of the commonwealth and wise
counsellors of politics. To Vico we owe the criticism of democracies,
the affirmation of their brief existence, of their rapid
disintegration at the hands of factions and demagogues, of their lapse
first into anarchy, then into monarchy, when their degradation does
not make them a prey of foreign oppressors. Vico conceived of civil
liberty as subjection to law, as just subordination, of the private to
the public interests, to the sway of the state. It was Vico who
sketched modern society as a world of nations each one guarding its
own imperium, fighting just and not inhuman wars. In Vico therefore we
find the condemnation of pacifism, the assertion that right is
actualized by bodily force, that without force, right is of no avail,
and that therefore 'qui ab iniuriis se tueri non potest servus est.'"

It is not difficult to discern the analogies between these
affirmations and the fundamental views and the spirit of Fascism. Nor
should we marvel at this similarity. Fascism, a strictly Italian
phenomenon, has its roots in the Risorgimento and the Risorgimento was