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Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952)| Italian philosopher, historian, and literary critic; the personification of the intellectual opposition to fascism. His Filosofia dello spirito/Philosophy of the Spirit (1902–17) was a landmark in idealism. Like the German philosopher G W F Hegel, he held that ideas do not represent reality but are reality; but unlike Hegel, he rejected every kind of transcendence. |
| A leading liberal, he served as minister of public instruction 1920–21 under Giovanni Giolitti, and his later Storia d'Italia dal 1871 al 1915/History of Italy from 1871–1915 (1928) provided a sophisticated vindication of the liberal regime. His ‘Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals’ (1925) marked him out as a prominent opponent of Mussolini. A monarchist, he again served as a minister under Pietro Badoglio and Ivanoe Bonomi 1943–44. |
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| Vico's countervailing emphasis on humanistic inquiry--what the German scholar Wilhelm Dilthey would later popularize as the Geisteswissenschaften or "spiritual sciences"--has largely been responsible for an interest in Vico that during the last century has engaged some of the most influential intellectuals in Europe and America, including Benedetto Croce, Karl Lamprecht, Aby Warburg, Karl Lowith, Erich Auerbach, Isaiah Berlin, Arnaldo Momigliano, Hayden White, and John Milbank, among others. As Benedetto Croce long ago remarked, "all history is contemporary history"; and though it is going too far to embrace the post-modern inflation of this point, which would make the past a mere discursive construct or "text", it is true that we invariably read that past through the prism of the present with all of its political, cultural and ethical passions. Such significant personages as Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, and Bertrand Russell were made honorary presidents. |