Background
Croce was born in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzo region of Italy. His family was influential and wealthy, and he was raised in a very strict Catholic environment.
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1923
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1963
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critic editor historian philosopher
Croce was born in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzo region of Italy. His family was influential and wealthy, and he was raised in a very strict Catholic environment.
He studied law, but never graduated, at the University of Naples, while reading extensively on historical materialism.
As his fame increased, Croce was persuaded, against his initial wishes, to become involved with politics. He was appointed to the Italian Senate, a lifelong position, in 1910. He was an open critic of Italy's participation in World War I, feeling that it was a suicidal trade war. Though this made him initially unpopular, his reputation was restored after the war. He was Minister of Public Education between 1920 and 1921 for the 5th and last government headed by Giovanni Giolitti. Benito Mussolini assumed power slightly more than a year after Croce's exit from the government; Mussolini's first Minister of Public Education was Giovanni Gentile, an independent who later became a fascist and with whom Croce had earlier cooperated in a philosophical polemic against positivism. Gentile remained minister for only a year but managed to begin a comprehensive reform of Italian education that was based partly on Croce's earlier suggestions. Gentile's reform remained in force well beyond the Fascist regime and was only partly abolished in 1962.
Benedetto Croce was known as foremost Italian philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Croce's greatest contributions were in the fields of aesthetics and of the philosophy of history. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature sixteen times.
Croce was instrumental in the relocation of the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III to Naples' Palazzo Reale in 1923.
He established the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples which is situated in Italy.
Around the age of 16, he quit Catholicism and developed a personal philosophy of spiritual life, in which religion cannot be anything but an historical institution where the creative strength of mankind can be expressed. He kept this philosophy for the rest of his life.
Croce initially supported Mussolini's Fascist government that took power in 1922. However, the assassination by Fascists of the socialist politician, Giacomo Matteotti, in June 1924 shook Croce's support for Mussolini. In May 1925 Croce was one of the signatories to the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals which had been written by Croce himself; however, in June of the previous year, he had voted in the Senate in support of the Mussolini government. He later explained that he had hoped that the support for Mussolini in parliament would weaken the more extreme Fascists who, he believed, were responsible for Matteotti's murder.
Croce was seriously threatened by Mussolini's regime, though the only act of physical violence he suffered at the hands of the fascists was the ransacking of his home and library in Naples in November 1926. Although he managed to stay outside prison thanks to his reputation, he remained subject to surveillance, and his academic work was kept in obscurity by the government, to the extent that no mainstream newspaper or academic publication ever referred to him. Croce later coined the term onagrocrazia (literally "government by asses") to emphasize the anti-intellectual and boorish tendencies of parts of the Fascist regime. However, in describing Fascism as anti-intellectual Croce ignored the many Italian intellectuals who at the time actively supported Mussolini's regime, including Croce's former friend and colleague, Gentile. Croce also described Fascism as malattia morale (literally "moral illness"). When Mussolini's government adopted antisemitic policies in 1938, Croce was the only non-Jewish intellectual who refused to complete a government questionnaire designed to collect information on the so-called "racial background" of Italian intellectuals.
Croce's methodological approach to philosophy is expressed in his divisions of the spirit, or mind. He divides mental activity first into the theoretical, and then the practical. The theoretical division splits between aesthetic and logic. This theoretical aesthetic includes most importantly: intuitions and history. The logical includes concepts and relations. Practical spirit is concerned with economics and ethics. Economics is here to be understood as an exhaustive term for all utilitarian matters.
Quotations:
“Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human ... No people will be truly free till all are free.”
“We shall not understand the history of men and other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied.”
“Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else.”
He was a member of the Italian Senate, member of the Italian Constituent Assembly and a member of the Italian Royal Senate.
Benedetto Croce was married to Adele Rossi in 1914 and had four daughters.
