Genesis and Structure of Society

Introduction

Gentile wrote “Genesis and Structure of Society” in the summer of 1943, in the weeks after Mussolini’s fall, near Florence; it was published in 1946, two years after his death, and translated into English by H. S. Harris in 1960. The book applies actual idealism to ethics and politics. Society, Gentile argues, is not an aggregate of individuals but arises within each person as an inner dialogue, a society “in interiore homine”; law, economy and politics are moments of this ethical life, and the state is its highest form, the will of the community that each individual recognises as their own; a chapter speaks of a “humanism of labour”. Written at the end of fascism and shortly before his violent death, the book has been read both as Gentile’s philosophical testament and as a revised version of his theory of the state; interpretations differ on how far it departs from his earlier justification of fascism.

Connections

Builds on

• Elements of the Philosophy of Right1820 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

More works by Giovanni Gentile

• 1916The Theory of Mind as Pure Act