The ethical State concept was borrowed by fascism from Croce

Evidence

The idea of the “ethical” State is associated with Croce. For the latter, the two moments of the State were the “ethical” and the “political” (or the “moral” and the “useful”); he saw these as being in perpetual dialectical contradiction— a conflict which he represented symbolically as that between Church and State. The term was also adopted by fascism, see e.g. Mussolini, in “The Doctrine of Fascism ”, 1932: “The fascist State has its own consciousness, its own will, and for that reason is called an ‘ethical’ State. In 1929 … I said ‘For fascism the State is not the night-watchman … it is a spiritual and moral fact… it educates the citizens to civil virtue . . etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2341

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the Crocean ‘ethical State’ concept and its fascist appropriation as a vocabulary item.
• XREF: Connects to notions of State as educator/moral agent that recur in Gramsci’s hegemony theory and later in Islamophobia critiques of the state. — connects to: Fascism appropriated the Hegelian idea of a national spirit to justify state power — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2124; Corporatism predates Fascism and was co-opted by Mussolini
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2341

Related

• Corporatism predates Fascism and was co-opted by Mussolini (similarity 0.90)
• Fascism appropriated the Hegelian idea of a national spirit to justify state power (similarity 0.85)
• Ethical and interventionist state concepts have distinct philosophical and economic origins (similarity 0.78)
• The State is an equilibrium between coercive political society and hegemonic civil society (similarity 0.78)