Benedetto Croce

Works

• 1902Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

  Defines art as intuition, which is the same as expression, separates it from concepts, utility and morality, and adds a history of aesthetics in which Vico appears as its discoverer.

• 1907What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel

  Keeps Hegel’s dialectic of opposites but criticises his confusion of opposites with distinct forms of spirit and his philosophy of nature and of history.

• 1938History as the Story of Liberty

  Presents historical knowledge as the thought of the present about the past and liberty as the moral ideal that gives history its meaning.

Position

Croce is on the map as the central figure of Italian neo-idealism and, for half a century, of Italian culture. His philosophy of spirit distinguishes two theoretical forms, intuition and concept, and two practical ones, economic and ethical will; against Hegel he held that these are “distinct” forms, related as degrees, not opposites to be overcome in a dialectical synthesis. The “Aesthetic” of 1902 defined art as intuition identical with expression, independent of concepts, utility and morality, and presented Vico as the discoverer of aesthetics; it influenced R. G. Collingwood and literary criticism in Italy and beyond, and in 1948 Croce argued that Dewey’s aesthetics rested on idealist premises, which Dewey denied. In his theory of history Croce held that all true history is contemporary history, the thought of the present about the past, and later presented liberty as the moral ideal of history. Gramsci devoted a notebook to an “Anti-Croce” and criticised the speculative and politically moderate traits of this historicism. Croce interpreted fascism as a moral illness and an interruption of Italy’s liberal history; Piero Gobetti had seen it instead as the “autobiography of the nation”, and later historians have debated how far Croce’s reading spared the liberal elites who had helped fascism to power.

Life & context

Benedetto Croce was born on 25 February 1866 in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzi into a wealthy landowning family and grew up in Naples. In 1883 he lost his parents and his sister in the earthquake of Casamicciola on Ischia and was himself buried under the rubble for hours. He then lived in Rome with his uncle, the politician Silvio Spaventa, enrolled in law without taking a degree and attended Antonio Labriola’s lectures. Back in Naples from 1886, he lived as a private scholar on his own means and wrote first on the history and literature of Naples. In 1903 he founded the journal “La Critica”, in which Giovanni Gentile collaborated until 1922, and edited it until 1944. He became a senator in 1910 and was minister of public education in Giovanni Giolitti’s last government in 1920–21. In June 1924, after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, he voted in the Senate for confidence in Mussolini’s government; on 1 May 1925 he published the manifesto of antifascist intellectuals in reply to Gentile and thereafter remained an opponent of the regime in Italy, watched by the police but tolerated. After 1943 he led the refounded Liberal Party, was a minister without portfolio in 1944 and sat in the Constituent Assembly. In 1946 he founded the Italian Institute for Historical Studies in Naples. He died in Naples on 20 November 1952.

Further main works

• Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept (Logica come scienza del concetto puro, 1909)
• Philosophy of the Practical (Filosofia della pratica. Economica ed etica, 1909)
• Theory and History of Historiography (Teoria e storia della storiografia, 1917)