Benedetto Croce Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) was an Italian philosopher of history and aesthetics who emphasized the importance of the human imagination, consciousness, and intuitive understanding in the concrete experiences of living. Born near Naples, Croce was raised in a wealthy family. In 1883, only Croce and his brother survived the earthquake of Casamicciola, which killed his parents and sister. At age sixteen, he went to Rome to live with his uncle, Silvio Spaventa, who introduced Croce to art and politics. He studied law at the University of Rome without taking a degree, returned to Naples, and enriched his intellectual life by traveling to Spain, Germany, France, and England.

In 1910, Croce was made a life member of the Italian Senate in honor of his work. When Mussolini rose to power, Croce left his one-year tenure as minister of education (1920–1921). Croce’s 1925 Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals severed his relationship with philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), who supported Mussolini’s Fascism. Croce continued to be a critic of the Fascist regime, publishing his bimonthly review La critica from 1903 to 1944. Subsequently, the Fascists raided his personal library was raided, and his books were banned. Due to his international reputation, Croce avoided imprisonment. After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, Croce led the Liberal Party and remained its president until 1947, the same year he established the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.

GiambattistaVico, Giovanni Gentile, and G.W. F. Hegel were major influences. Croce applied Vico’s cyclical theory of social progress to the relation between art, philosophy, and practice. Also, many scholars view Croce as neo-Hegelian because of his view of history as dialectical and progressive. Unlike Hegel, Croce opposed idealism as a systematic, utopian philosophy, because of human’s lower nature. Croce also rejected materialism and positivism as morally bankrupt. Fighting against the ideological illusion of systematic certainty, he argued for moral ambiguity in knowing the ethical ideal. Since Croce believed logic rested on intuitive knowledge, the foundation of his philosophy as aesthetics was an ongoing process of moral experience and expression. Croce’s core philosophical writings are Aesthetic, published in 1902, along with Logic and The Philosophy of the Practical, both published in 1908. Because of his stress on the arts and the power of symbols and language as the imaginative source for knowledge, Croce’s liberalism was aristocratic.

In History as the Story of Liberty, published in 1938, Croce distinguishes four forms of history: politics or economy, ethics or religion, art, and thought or philosophy. The standard of judgment correlated to these forms are the useful, the true, the beautiful, and the good. Underlying these diverse forms is one individual human spirit of liberty activating its expression. The unity is organic as new realizations of particular premises revise earlier manifestations of the same type of knowledge. In Croce’s view, political philosophy arises from the particular individual acts in society, which ideally express morality and truth. It is only in the concrete historical situation that one can realize one’s higher nature in politics. Croce defined philosophy as historical, and hence aesthetic and practical, a view criticized as historicism—giving undue credence to immanence as if transcendence were not a separate metaphysical, spiritual reality.

Bibliography:

D’Amico, Jack, Dain A.Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, eds. The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Orsini, Gian N. Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961.
Rizi, Fabio Fernando. Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Roberts, David D. Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Ryn, Claes. Will, Imagination, and Reason: Babbitt, Croce, and the Problem of Reality. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997.