The economic policies of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany resembled the ‘state socialism’ which Lenin wanted to institute in Soviet Union upon … - Richard Pipes

Aristotle argues, possessions enable men to rise to a higher ethical level by giving them the opportunity to be generous: ‘liberality consists in the use which is made of property’—an argument which would greatly appeal to Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s preferred regime was one founded on a middle class, with an equitable distribution of assets.

If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies.

Marxism and Bolshevism, its offspring, were products of an era in European intellectual life that was obsessed with violence. No-one embraced this philosophy more enthusiastically than the Bolsheviks: ‘merciless’ violence, violence that strove for the destruction of every actual and potential opponent, was… the only way of dealing with problems.