ABSTRACT
Giovanni Gentile's political philosophy afforded the general rationale for the Fascist system. A concept like "totalitarianism" serves not to define any political system in all its particulars, but to locate such a system in a schema of classification at a given level of abstraction. Recognizing that the rapid acceleration of economic growth and industrialization was necessary to the renaissance of the nation, Giovanni Gentile, like Michels, recognized that an environment of strict political order, at any cost, would be necessary—if the nation were to survive and prevail in order to fulfill that historic mission. For Sergio Panunzio, like other Fascist intellectuals, totalitarianism, as a complex contemporary reality, was identified as a uniquely modern phenomenon. For Hannah Arendt, and those she influenced, totalitarianism was studied in order to come to some understanding of the "absolute evil" it brought in its train.
