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Paolo Orano (15 June 1875 – 7 April 1945) was an Italian psychologist, politician and writer. Orano began his political career as a syndicalism in the Italian Socialist Party. After 1910 he became influenced by the ideas of Georges Sorel and left the Socialist Party. During the First World War he adopted a nationalist position and supported the Italian war effort. After the war, he joined the Italian Fascism. He later became a leading figure within the National Fascist Party, in part through his legitimization of antisemitism in the 1930s.
Along with fellow syndicalists Arturo Labriola and Robert Michels, as well as nationalist Enrico Corradini, Orano became part of a group of intellectuals who followed the ideals of Georges Sorel.Matthew Affron & Mark Antliff, Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, 1997, p. 6 To this end he founded his own weekly journal, La Lupa, in October 1910.Sternhell et al, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, p. 236 It came to represent the first collaboration between syndicalists like Orano and nationalists like Enrico Corradini.Sternhell et al, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, p. 32 Benito Mussolini would later claim that this paper was an influence on his political ideas. Orano became a strong critic of democracy, seeing it as the cause of Italy's ills and his rhetoric, along with that of fellow syndicalists such as Filippo Corridoni and Angelo Olivetti, was by 1914 very similar to that coming from the Italian Nationalist Association.Anthony James Gregor, Mussolini's Intellectuals, 2004, p. 58 Orano supported the First World War, ostensibly because he hoped that it would strengthen both the bourgeoisie and proletariat and thus hasten the process of class conflict and revolution. However his views caused considerable controversy within the syndicalist movement and helped to bring about its fragmentation as many of those associated with the movement, in particular Leone, were anti-war.Michael Miller Topp, Those Without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists, 2001, p. 75 By the end of the war his positions were largely indistinguishable from those of the nationalists.Gregor, Mussolini's Intellectuals, p. 85
His most notable contribution to fascism was his antisemitism and he was the author in 1937 of the book The Jews in Italy.R.J.B. Bosworth, The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 308 The book was influenced by Bernard Lazare in so much as it accepted his thesis that the activities of the Jews themselves helped to cause antisemitism, although it made no reference to Lazare's refutations of the prejudice.Wiley Feinstein, The Civilization of the Holocaust in Italy, 2003, p. 164 In the book Orano expressed affection for some individual , notably Ettore Ovazza, but nonetheless the book helped to legitimise antisemitism as a part of Italian fascism and laid the groundwork for later persecutions. Despite this the non-biological nature of his antisemitism meant that he did not go far enough for Giovanni Preziosi, who attacked Orano's work in his journal La Vita Italiana.David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism, 1979, pp. 323-4
Captured in 1944 he was held along with many fellow fascist officials at a prison camp at Padula where he died the following year following complications with a peptic ulcer haemorrhage.
His 1902 book Psicologia Sociale sought to attack transpersonal psychology and instead argued in favour of materialism and inductive reasoning that took into account the works of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin.Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871-1899, 1992, p. 88
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