The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.[960]—Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
No, gentlemen, democracy and socialism are not linked to each other. They are not only different but contradictory things. What if by chance, democracy were to consist of a government more interfering, more detailed, more restrictive than all others, the only difference being that it would be elected by the people and would act in the name of the people? In that case, what would you have done, if not have given to tyranny an aura of legitimacy that it did not previously possess and to have secured for it the strength and omnipotence that it lacked? Democracy extends the sphere of individual independence, socialism restricts it.
Democracy gives the greatest possible value to every man, socialism turns every man into an agent, an instrument, a number. Democracy and socialism are linked by only one word, equality; but note the difference: democracy wants equality in liberty, and socialism wants equality through constraint and servitude.—Alexis de Tocqueville. (1805-1859)[961]Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The International unites the human race.—Eugene Pottier (1816-1887).[962]
Fascism establishes the real equality of individuals before the nation. The difference is in the scale of responsibilities...[] the object of the regime in the economic field is to ensure higher social justice for the whole Italian people...[]What does higher social justice mean? It means work guaranteed, fair wages, decent homes; it means the possibility of continuous evolution and improvement... [] it means that the workers must enter more and more intimately into the productive process and share its necessary discipline...[] As the past century was the century of capitalist power, the twentieth century is the century of the power and glory of labor—Benito Mussolini (1883—1945)4
The indirect powers... seized the legislative arm of parliament and the law state and thought they had placed the Leviathan in a harness. Their ascendancy was facilitated by a constitutional system that enshrined a catalogue of individual rights. The “private” sphere was, thus, withdrawn from the state and handed over to the “free”, that is, uncontrolled and invisible forces of society.—Carl Schmitt (1888-1985)[963] [964]