Maggi's Croce, Sasso's Gentile and the riddles of twentieth-century Italian intellectual history

REFERENCES

• Eugenio Garin, Cronache di flosofia italiana 1900/1943 (in appendix 'Quindici anni dopo, 1945/1960') (Rome and Bari, Laterza: 1975), vol. 2, p. 621. This work was published first in 1955, then in definitive form in 1962.
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• Writing in 1937, the exiled Italian scholar Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, by now a longtime antagonist, found Croce 'the most famed Italian abroad, at least in the scholarly world, since the days perhaps of Galileo'. See his Goliath: the March of Fascism (New York: Viking, 1937), pp. 295-6.
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• This was true abroad as well. In the United States, the historian Chester McArthur Desder found Croce not only the major source of a deplorable new presenterai in historiography but also the outstanding exponent of a dangerous new philosophy that stressed relativism in values, impressionism in the arts, subjective activisim for the individual, violence as a mode of social action, and success as the supreme value in public affairs. Croce, according to Destler, had thereby 'helped lay the intellectual foundations of Italian Fascism'. See Chester McArthur Destler, 'Some observations on contemporary historical theory", American Historical Review 55 (1950): 504,517.
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• Raffaello Franchini, Intervista su Croce, ed. Arturo Fratta (Naples: SocietÀ Editrice Napoletana, 1978), p. 5.
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• Keith Luria and Romulo Gandolfo, 'Carlo Ginzburg: an interview', Radical History Review 35 (1986): 104-6; Carlo Ginzburg,'Microhistory: two or three things I know about it', Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn 1993): 29.
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• Frederic S. Simoni,'Benedetto Croce: a case of international misunderstanding', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11 (September 1952): 7-14. The quoted passage is from p. 9.
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• Carlo Ginzburg, 'Just one witness', in Saul Friedländer (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation:Nazism and the 'Final Solution' (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 82-96. Important reflections on the controversy included Martin Jay, Of plots, witnesses and judgments', in the same volume, pp. 97-107 (see especially pp. 101-2); and Jeremy Varon, 'Probing the limits of the politics of representation', Neu> German Critique 72 (Fall 1997): 83-114 (see especially p. 91).
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• Though he began as a Croce partisan, White explicitly rejected Croce in his pathbreaking Metahistory, where Croce nonetheless plays a crucial role as the ironically sterile culmination of nineteenth-century historiographical traditions. See Hayden White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), chapter 10, especially pp. 378-9, 385, 397-400. To my knowledge, the sources and implications of White's willful, even bizarre misreading of Croce have yet to be probed systematically in print. Ginzburg's case against White rests in part on White's brief but significant reference to Gentile on'the historical sublime'in his influential article of 1982,'The politics of historical interpretation: discipline and de-sublimation,' now in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 74-5; see also pp. 66-7,69,72, for the keys to the context of this reference. White's way of linking Gentile to Nietzsche got the Italian thinker almost precisely backwards.
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• Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: the Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). On p. 9, Gleason notes thatthe philosopher Giovanni Gentile, operating in the highly abstract vocabulary of conservative Hegelianism, produced a brilliant and premonitory justification of the totalitarian state that seems amazingly like Hannah Arendt's and George Orwell's demonic visions of the later 1940s, only with the value signs inverted.The basis for the link to Orwell is clearest on pp. 94-5, where totalitarianism is to be internalized and willed by all - true to Gentile as far as it goes, but why would anyone advocate thafi We get no insight into Gentile's vision even from Arendt and Orwell. On p. 19 Gleason notes that 'Gentile deserves to be called the first philosopher of totalitarianism'.
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• Writing in 1985, the noted historian Rosario Romeo lamented the 'denationalization of culture' in postwar Italy. Openness to every current from abroad had gone hand in hand with a kind of cultural self-denigration; thus the cultural mediocrity of contemporary Italy. From Carriere delta Sera, 2 November 1985, as quoted in Domenico Settembrini, Storia dell'idea antiborghese in Italia (Rome and Barti: Laterza, 1991), pp. 459-60. Writing in 1993, Michele Ciliberto took it for granted that during the reign of Croce and Gentile, Italians had indeed been too quick to assume the universalism of the Italian tradition. But by now, he said, the commonplace charge of provincialism had itself become an ideological prejudice - the mirror image of the earlier provincialism. It was time for a reassessment, which Ciliberto sought to promote in his aptly tided collaborative volume Croce e Gentilefra tradizione nazionale efilosofia europea (Rome: Riuniti, 1993). See Ciliberto's introduction, p.x, for the point here.
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• Introducing his translation of Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), H. S. Harris noted that'the possibility of Gentile having any influence in America perished when [Josiah] Royce died at the age of sixty-one in 1916' (p. 24). During his last years, even after most American philosophers had abandoned idealism for a radical empiricism and naturalism, Royce had sought to work from the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce to a kind of idealist historicism. So his death removed the most likely avenue for Gentile to affect philosophical thinking in the United States.
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• Said Cassirer:[Croce's] whole doctrine, even though it proclaims logic as the basic science, in fact turns out to be an unlimited historical relativism in which change is studied so to speak for its own sake, in which no objective-logical enduring factors of any kind are discerned or set off.Cassirer understood that Croce's was no ordinary logic; it was rather a kind of giving in to history, and he himself wanted no part of it. See Ernst Cassirer, 'Erkenntnistheorie nebst den Grenzfragen der Logik', Jahrbücher der Philosophie l (Berlin, 1913): 34.
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• Benedetto Croce, Discorsi di varia filosofia, 2 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1959), vol. 2; pp. 15-17 (1945).
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• Eugenio Garin,'Agonia e morte dell'idealismo italiano', in Adriano Bausola et ail La filolosofia italiana dal dopoguerra a oggi (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1985), pp. 25-6.
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• Despite Garin's emphases on disparity, the recent Italian effort at reassessment has included a growing recognition that for certain key questions we need to conceive Croce and Gentile as pillars within a single tradition. Among the examples are Croce e Gentile un secolo dopo; Ciliberto, Croce e Gentile; and Jader Jacobelli, Croce Gentile: DaI Sodalizio al dramma (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989).
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• Michle Maggi, La filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1998), pp.1-371, 60,000 lire. See pp. 315-16 for the point here.
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• ibid.,p. 66.
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• ibid.,pp. 111-12,139,149,153.
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• ibid.,p. 263.
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• On p. 239n., Maggi refers to Giuseppe Galasso, Croce e Io spirito del suo tempo (Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori 'Il Saggiatore', 1990); pp. 376-7, as an example of what he takes to be a misplaced emphasis on rupture. Whereas Galasso finds a svolta from conservatism to liberalism, Maggi insists that, whatever the earlier Croce might have said about immediate political matters, his later liberalism followed easily from his overall historicism.
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• Maggi, La filosofia di Benedetto Croce, p. 333. Croce's need to sharpen the categories occasionally led him to a level of abstraction that recalled his more or less systematic works of the first decade of the century. In connection with La poesia of 1936, Maggi offers some especially effective discussion of Croce's changing ideas on language, translatability, die conventions of communication, and the creativity of reliving or reception. And Maggi concludes that new preoccupations had led Croce to a problematic that was altogether different from that of his Logica of 1908. But Maggi still takes pains to accent continuity; Croce did not find it necessary to repudiate what he had said earlier.
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• Maggi, La filosofia di Benedetto Croce, p. 361. See also pp. 239-40,248,264.
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• ibid.,pp. 266,269,273,304.
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• See ibid., p. 313, for Maggi's point. See also Benedetto Croce, II carattere della filosofia modema, 3rd edn. (Bari: Laterza, 1963), p. 119, on idyll and tragedy, a passage that Maggi quotes as part of his argument on p. 313.
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• Benedetto Croce, 'L'anticris to che é in noi', in Benedetto Croce, Filosofia e storiografia: Saggi, 2nd edn (Bari: Laterza, 1969), pp. 313-19.
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• 'Antistoricismo' was the tide of one of Croce's most sustained early diagnoses, offered first as a lecture at die Seventh International Congress of Philosophy, Oxford, 3 September 1930, and now in Benedetto Croce, Ultimi saggi, 3rd edn. (Bari: Laterza, 1963), pp. 251-64.
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• Against die longstanding tendency to play down die totalitarianism of Fascist Italy, in comparison with Nazi Germany or die Stalinist Soviet Union, the recent work of Emilio Gentile (no relation to Giovanni Gentile) argues convincingly that totalitarianism was central to the complex dynamic of Mussolini's regime. See especially his La via itatiana al totalitarisme: Il partita e Io State net regime fascista (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scienrifica, 1995).
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• Gennaro Sasso, Le due Italie di Giovanni Gentile (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), pp. 1-588, 50,000 lire.
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• Gennaro Sasso, Benedetto Croce: La ricerca delta dialettica (Naples: Morano, 1975). The book numbers 1,172 pages.
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• Most recent is Gennaro Sasso, Filosofia e idealisme, IV: Paralipomeni (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2000), pp. 1-577.
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• Marta Herling and Mario Reale (eds.) Storia, filosofia e letteratura: Studi in onore di Gennaro Sasso (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1999).
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• Sasso engages Del Noce (1910-89) throughout Le due Italie, especially in the notes. For important examples, see pp. 199n-200n, 386n-387n and 399n-400n. For Del Noce's argument, see especially August Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile: Per una interpretazione filosofia delia storia contemporanea (Bologna: II Mulino, 1990). See also Augusto Del Noce, II problema del ateismo, 2nd edn. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990); Augusto Del Noce, II suicidio della rivoluzione (Milan: Giuffré, 1978); and Augusto Del Noce, L'epoca della secolarizzazione (Milan: Giuffré, 1970).
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• Sasso, Le due italic, pp. 280,286,568-9.
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• ibid., pp. 45,145-6.
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• ibid., pp. 191-2,216-18,241,244-53.
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• ibid., pp. 266-8,390-2,511-13.
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• ibid., pp. 243,445.
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• ibid., pp. 447-51,455-6.
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• ibid., pp. 528-9,556.
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• ibid., pp. 266-7,274-5,507-8.
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• ibid., pp. 402-3.
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• Emanuele Severino, 'Giovanni Gentile distruttore degli assoluti', in Maria Ida Gaeta (ed.) Giovanni Gentile: La filosofia, la politico, l'organizzazione delia cultura (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), pp. 57-9; Emanuele Severino, Pensieri sul cristianesimo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1995), pp. 64-7; and Emanuele Severino, Oltre il linguaggio (Milan: Adelphi, 1992), pp. 88-99.
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• Sasso, Le due Italie, p. 576; see also pp. 294-5.
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• Giovanni Gentile, Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, 2 vols, 3rd edn (Florence: Sansoni, 1959), vol. l;pp. 33-4,
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• Sasso, Le due Italie, pp. 9,548-9.
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• The import of Gentile's embrace of Bruno is especially clear in his 1912 essay 'Veritas filia temporis', now in his Il pensiero italiano nel rinasamento, 3rd edn (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1955), pp. 331-5; see especially pp. 337-9. Sasso comes close to the key point in Le due Italie, p. 140, bu t his overall accent is on Gentile's hesitations and uncertainties in dealing with Bruno and late Renaissance thought See pp. 133,136-8,140.
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• Sasso, Le due Italie, p. 565.
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• ibid., p. 315.
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• Severino,'Giovanni Gentile distruttore degli assolud', pp. 57-9.
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• Sasso, Le due Italie, pp. 59-61.
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• ibid., pp. 139,446-7. Even as he usefully warned against any preoccupation with this sensitive issue, Sasso was himself prepared to confront it on occasion. Exploring Gentile's relations (or non-relations) with Heidegger, especially in the context of Heidegger's 1936 visit to Rome to lecture at the German Academy, Sasso accented the mutual indifference of the two thinkers, despite the efforts of Ernesto Grassi and Armando Carlini to establish bridges between them. Sasso found Heidegger's attitude symptomatic of German cultural arrogance in general and anti-Italian prejudice in particular. But he also noted that Gentile showed no more interest in the possible encounter than Heidegger did. See Gennaro Sasso, Filosofia e idealismo,vol,2: Giovanni Gentile (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1995), pp. 383-97, especially pp. 393-4.
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• Croce,'Antistoricismo'.
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• Some typical indications come up in Maggi, La filosofia di Benedetto Croce, e.g. pp. 328, 329,347.
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• Even in the wake of the split by 1925, Gentile and other Fascists continued to claim that Croce was one of them,'a fascist without the black shirt'. See especially Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa é il fascismo: Discorsi e polemithe (Florence: Vallecchi, 1925), pp. 153-61; and Gioacchino Volpe, Guerra dopoguerra fascismo (Venice: La Nuova Italia, 1928), pp. 293-9. Note also the whole argument of Ulisse Benedetti, Benedetto Croce e il fascismo (Rome: Volpe, 1967).
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• Giovanni Gentile, Origini e dottrina del fascismo (Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1929), pp. 43-8, especially pp. 46-8. See also pp. 35-6,52-3.
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• Among Italians taking that tack were such long-time allies as Guido De Ruggiero, who explicitly criticized what now seemed die dangerous emptiness of Croce's position. See his IL ritomo alla ragione (Bari: Laterza, 1946), especially pp. 13-16, from an essay originally published 21 January 1945. Croce's response, entitled 'Indagine storica e risoluzione morale' and dated 30 January 1945, is now in Nuove pagine sparse, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Bari: Laterza, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 151-9. See also Benedetto Croce.'Agli amici ehe cercano il "trascendente" ' (8 May 1945), now in his Etica e politico (Bari: Laterza, ed. economica, 1967), pp. 378-84.
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• Giovanni Gentile, Saggi critici, 2nd ser. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1927), p. 29.
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• I have sought to show how Croce might be newly encompassed in contemporary cultural debate in Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Nothing but History: Reconstruction and Extremity After Metaphysics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). I develop aspects of the Croce-Gentile contrast in'History as thought and action: Croce's historicism and the contemporary challenge', in Jack D'Amico, Dain A, Trafton and Massimo Verdicchio (eds), The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); see especially pp. 209-24.
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• Writing in 1974, E. J. Hobsbawm noted that the Italian culture from which Gramsci had emerged, around the time of World War I, was 'both extremely sophisticated and relatively provincial'. See E. J. Hobsbawm, 'The great Gramsci', New York Review of Books, 4 April 1974, p. 39.
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