Benedetto Croce

Born Feb. 25, 1866, in Pescasseroli, near L’Aquila; died Nov. 20, 1952, in Naples. Italian idealist philosopher, historian, literary scholar, critic, publicist, and political figure; neo-Hegelian.

From 1902 to 1920, Croce was a professor in Naples. In 1903, together with G. Gentile, he began publishing the journal La critica, which subsequently turned into a publication containing almost exclusively Croce’s own articles and reviews. (After 1944 the journal appeared irregularly under the title Quaderni della critica.) Croce was the most outstanding representative of Italian liberalism. In 1910 he became a senator; in 1920–21 he was minister of public instruction. After Mussolini came to power and throughout the German occupation of Italy, Croce was an opponent of the fascist regime. From 1943 to 1947 he headed the Liberal Party, which he refounded.

Croce’s world view was formed under the influence of the school of Neapolitan Hegelianism (B. Spaventa and F. De Sanctis). Thanks to A. Labriola, whose lectures he attended, Croce became acquainted with Marxism; however, despite his interest in Marxist philosophy and sociology (shown in his work, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, 1901), Croce remained an opponent of Marxism. He played a prominent role in the struggle against positivism in Italy.

Croce’s study of G. Vico greatly contributed to the formation of his own philosophy, which he defined as absolute idealism. Spirit manifests itself in theoretical (logical and aesthetic) and practical (ethical and economic) forms. While the logical and the ethical are directed toward the universal, the aesthetic and economic are directed toward the particular. Therefore, Croce’s philosophy is divided into four spheres: aesthetics, logic, the philosophy of economics, and ethics. Croce describes the relationship between the forms of spirit in terms of a dialectic of unity and distinctness of concepts, which he substitutes for the Hegelian principle of contradiction. These spiritual forms are joined into dyads; the first level, aesthetic intuition, is autonomous in relation to the second level, which is the logical concept (the moment of distinctness); but the second level presupposes the first (which is the moment of unity).

In the process of cognition, Croce laid great stress on intuition, which, in distinction to logical thought, grasps the world in its concreteness and unduplicable individuality. Intuition is embodied in an infinite variety of works of art. Therefore, the philosophy of intuition is, precisely, aesthetics, which Croce defined as “the science of expression” and identified with “general linguistics.” Croce saw the essence of poetry in “pure” or “lyrical” intuition, free from logical or moral demands; for this reason, he juxtaposed poetry, as a form of disinterested contemplation, to “prose” and “literature,” which express moral, intellectual, and similar cultural values.

Since for Croce spirit is historical in its nature, philosophy is essentially the philosophy of history, just as history, for its part, is also philosophy, since the historian recognizes the universal in the particular, always understanding the past on the basis of the present. Croce was the founder of the influential “ethical-political school” of Italian historiography and was himself one of the most important Italian historians of the 20th century and the author of numerous works on the history of culture, the arts, and social life, including the history of Italy between 1871 and 1915 and the history of Europe in the 19th century.

Croce’s aesthetic ideas received their greatest recognition outside Italy and had a significant influence on the development of literary scholarship and linguistics (including the idealist school of philology of K. Vossler and L. Spitzer). Croce had a very great influence on all branches of the humanities in Italy during the first decades of the 20th century. His influence declined in the 1940’s, thanks in particular to the works of the Italian Marxists (for example, A. Gramsci), who subjected the idealist views of Croce and his followers to criticism.