ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1932 H.G. Wells (1866–1946), a prominent British writer and intellectual, gave a lecture in Oxford. The occasion was a summer school for liberal youths. Wells was there by his own account to aid ‘a kind of “Phoenix Rebirth” of Liberalism’, 1 a statement that turned out to be no exaggeration. The liberal youths had to leave behind the ‘sentimental casualness’ of nineteenth-century liberalism. The new ideal was that of the ‘Liberal Fascisti’. 2 Like Mussolini's Italian Fascisti the new liberal vanguard had to ensure that state and party became one. Liberalism would thus completely replace the slow, indecisive parliamentary democracy.
