History as the Story of Liberty
History as the Story of Liberty
THE LITERARY WORK
An extended essay pertaining to Western politics, history, and culture; published in Italian (as La storia come pemiero e come azione, or History as Thought and Action) in 1938, in English in 1941.
SYNOPSIS
Addressing cultural problems in Italy and the West more generally, Croce argues that a new understanding of the human relationship with history can revitalize liberal democracy.
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was born into a family’s of wealthy landowners in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzi region of central Italy. He attended a Catholic boarding school in his youth, then, at age 17, lost his parents and his younger sister, who died in an earthquake in which he himself was injured. Afterward Croce moved to Rome to live with his father’s cousin, the noted thinker and political leader Silvio Spaventa, through whom he met other major thinkers, including the philosopher Antonio Labriola. Croce briefly studied law, then abandoned it to dabble in literature and local history. But by 1893 he was ready to address the current philosophical controversies concerning the status of history as a form of knowledge. He gained European renown in 1902 for his Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale), which offers a conception of creativity in language with grandiose implications for the place of humans in an evernew world. From the Aesthetic he went on to produce, in 1908, the twin works Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, on the theoretical side of human activity, and Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic, on the practical side.
When he published History as the Story of Liberty, Croce was one of the world’s best-known intellectuals. His bi-monthly review La critica (Critique), which appeared for more than four decades after its inception in 1903, was among the most respected journals of its kind ever to be published in the Western world. Based in Naples, independently wealthy, remarkably prolific, Croce became known especially for his contributions to aesthetics, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history.
With Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) as his junior partner, Croce embarked on a broad program of cultural renewal prior to the First World War. The advent of the Fascist regime in the 1920s led each of the two thinkers to devote greater attention to politics. But the result was a dramatic split. Gentile became the most significant European intellectual to play a central role in fascism; Croce, perhaps the world’s best-known anti-Fascist.
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
The emergence of the fascist challenge
Appearing at the height of the fascist period in Italy, Croce’s essay responds to both fascist totalitarianism and the wider challenge bound up with the making of the modern, secular society. These two forces, the specific and the broader challenge, seemed related: to many, the fascist reaction against liberal democracy suggested some deeper crisis within Western culture, though the relationship was and remains difficult to pin down.
Fascism was an Italian invention; the term itself was coined only in 1919 with the emergence of the first Fascist movement, led by Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). Growing out of Italy’s experience of World War I, Fascism reacted against the liberal regime that had emerged from the Italian Risorgimento, the movement for unification and independence that produced the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Although by some reckonings the new Italy was on its way to modern democracy by the first decade of the twentieth century, critics worried. They found Italy’s parliamentary government corrupting and ineffectual, incapable of realizing the promise of national renewal bound up with the Risorgimento itself. In light of Italy’s wartime experience, many of the disaffected concluded that the old liberal ruling class was exhausted—but also that Italy was now poised to do better. Fascism was to provide a post-liberal alternative that would not only realize Italy’s potential but also offer a new direction for the modern world.
Modern uncertainties and Croce’s wider cultural program
During the first decade of the century, before the term, fascism had even been coined, Croce and Gentile embarked on a broad program of cultural diagnosis and prescription, seeking to specify human possibilities and priorities in light of changing modern conditions. In the 1880s, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, giving extreme expression to the notion that, for better or worse, Western culture would have to do without the religious underpinnings that had long sustained it. Raised a Catholic, Croce had begun losing religious faith in his late teens. Looking back years later, he observed that it had been the task of his generation to address explicitly the challenge that had gradually arisen over the past several centuries and translate the wisdom embodied in traditional religion into purely secular terms. The challenge was not so much to destroy the old, which was disintegrating on its own, but to construct anew, while salvaging as much of the old as possible. There was thus a need to translate religious categories like faith, prayer, grace, and immortality into modern secular terms. At the same time, Croce, like Nietzsche, felt that it was not only belief in a transcendent God or revealed religion that was falling away. There seemed nothing higher, nothing transcendent; thus there was no natural law specifying “values” or “rights” or “standards.” Philosophy was no replacement; it could not establish cultural foundations or disclose (as G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx had claimed to do) the shape, direction, and goal of history.
Many believed that science offered the essential alternative to religion and philosophy. In science, they saw the key to understanding the world and humanity’s place in it. Indeed, confidence in science reached its peak when positivism, the doctrine that only sense perceptions provide the basis for genuine knowledge, came into vogue during the last decades of the nineteenth century. But Croce was central to a generation coming of age in the 1890s and reacting against, or at least questioning, the cultural role of science, and especially the applicability of the natural sciences to the human world. He insisted that science, though essential in its sphere, merely offers rough-and-ready generalizations about particular, historically specific instances, in response to questions human beings have asked. It does not serve as a key to the way things really are, apart from human needs and purposes. Whatever we might learn through study of the natural world, science was being over-sold; it could not provide a cultural core.
Although he did some systematic philosophy during the first decade of the century, Croce was not a philosophical system-builder. Indeed, he sought to show why there could be no systematic philosophy above and beyond history, no set or a priori rules. He was a philosopher of openness, of freedom, of the human creativity that, he insisted, is first expressed in language itself. The flip side of any systematic philosophy was, for Croce, the endless novelty and incompleteness of the world, which is forever coming to be over time, through history. History results from free creative human response to what the world has become so far, which is itself the result of previous creative human response. So what the world becomes depends on our collective response at every moment. Though such responses may be self-serving, they may also stem from our ethical capacity, our care for the world. And we can orient ourselves for action by learning how the present world came to be through history. We can use our human abilities to arm ourselves with knowledge that prepares us to pursue potentially successful forms of action in the current moment. Although we lack overarching “values” or “principles” to guide us, we have, as humans, the capacity to judge, to understand, and to respond, based on the historically specific situations we endlessly face.
Croce, Gentile, and Fascism
The rise of Fascism forced Croce to think more explicitly about politics and led him to deepen his diagnosis and prescription. When the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini became Italian prime minister in October 1922, it was not immediately clear that a change of regime, replacing Italy’s parliamentary democracy, was in the offing. Mussolini represented something new, to be sure. But perhaps it was simply the revitalization of the Italian governing class that many found necessary in light of the Italian war experience and the political un-certainty that followed the war. In the first years of Mussolini’s government, before its direction was clear, Croce was among the many prominent Italians who adopted a wait-and-see attitude, based on a sense that the liberal political elite was exhausted—and that an alternative to Mussolini’s rule might well prove worse. But Croce became a diehard opponent early in 1925, when it became clear that continued government by Mussolini meant the advent of a one-party dictatorship.
Meanwhile, Croce’s long-time collaborator Gentile served as minister of education in Mussolini’s first cabinet, then joined the Fascist Party in 1923. Gentile quickly emerged as a major Fascist ideologue and cultural power-broker, pushing for the creation of a totalitarian state, limitless in its aims, and propelled by constant mobilization and participation. Early in 1925, while forming the new Fascist National Cultural Institute, Gentile prepared a manifesto, signed by a number of Italian intellectuals, that portrayed Fascism as the political outcome of the best in contemporary Italian culture. Together with another liberal, Giovanni Amendola, Croce responded with an influential counter-manifesto disputing Gentile’s claims. From then on, Croce would be central to anti-Fascism—and a bitter critic of his erstwhile partner Gentile.
Though Croce’s opposition was obvious, the Fascist regime tolerated him to a degree (when typically it muzzled opponents; see Letters from Prison, also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). Mussolini valued Croce as a national asset in light of his fame abroad. The one act of Fascist violence that Croce suffered, an invasion of his house by militants in 1926, provoked an international outcry. Still, although his relative freedom is striking, Croce was subject to constant police surveillance and occasional harassment. It was never clear what might befall him next.
Though the fascist regime was repressive and totalitarian in direction, its priorities evolved over time. Only during 1935–36, with the conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), did it turn to overt imperialism. This venture prompted sanctions from the League of Nations. The sanctions, spear-headed by Britain and France, seemed hypocritical, even to many Italians who disliked Fascism; Britain and France, after all, were themselves major imperial powers. Among these Italians was Croce, who responded to a governmental appeal by donating his gold senatorial medal in support of the Italian cause.
But the conquest of Ethiopia was followed by further aggressiveness on the part of Mussolini’s regime, including intervention in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), on the side of the insurgent Nationalists, and ever-closer relations with Nazi Germany. After Mussolini began speaking of a Rome-Berlin axis in 1936, the two sides signed a military alliance early in 1939. More-over, the Italian Fascist regime began adopting anti-Semitic measures for the first time in 1938. It was in this context, as Fascism came to seem ever more aggressive and brutal, that Croce wrote History as the Story of Liberty.
Croce’s anti-Fascism
Croce continued to publish La critica throughout the Fascist period (1922-43), and he offered a number of books and articles with a clearly, if covertly, anti-Fascist thrust. His A History of Italy, 1871-1915, published in 1928, defended liberal Italy from Fascist slurs. Another one of his works, The History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1932, offered a critical review of the rise, the seeming triumph, and the subsequent weakening of the liberal ideal. In closing, Croce called for liberal renewal while assuring readers that human freedom could not be extinguished. Each book enjoyed considerable commercial success in Italy.
GIOVANNI GENTILE AND THE TOTALITARIAN ALTERNATIVE
Gentile and Croce understood the modern cultural challenge in comparable terms, but Gentile felt it was possible to achieve a grandiose new mode of collective history-making by creating a totalitarian ethical state. To his way of thinking, as the state’s reach became limitless, the human sense of responsibility could be nurtured and focused to enable everyone to participate. Gentile went so far as to insist that people are genuinely free only to the degree that they concentrate power in such a state, through which they can all act collectively. Everyone must participate, essentially all the time. The effort to actually create such a totalitarian state in Fascist Italy led to repressiveness, to merely superficial participation, and ultimately to defeat and ignominy.
Through sustained activity in a variety of interlocking roles, Croce became the key link within a web of exchange among anti-Fascists in and even outside Italy, including some who had gone into exile. His publications, and his ideas for post-Fascist renewal, served as rallying points. Croce, moreover, offered personal support and often generous but discreet financial help to friends and the friends of friends forced to make difficult choices under the repressive Fascist regime. In short, he was central to the moral community that sustained anti-Fascism during the long years of opposition and harassment.
With Fascist Italy facing military defeat during World War II, Croce was called upon to play a more specific political role, even to help mediate between the emerging post-Fascist Italy and the victorious allies. In that context, he sometimes seemed to suggest that Fascism had been a mere “parenthesis,” an interlude stemming from a spiritual crisis that was by no means confined to Italy. In Croce’s view, Italy’s experience with liberal democracy had been reasonably successful; it followed that it would be possible, and sufficient, simply to reconnect with liberal traditions after the Fascist interlude. In making such arguments, Croce was at once seeking favorable treatment from the victors and denying the claim of more radical Italians that socio-economic revolution was necessary to create the conditions for genuine democracy in Italy.
But Croce had insisted again and again that a broader rethinking of the liberal tradition and modern political possibilities was essential. The problem was by no means specifically Italian; the challenge was not simply for Italy to catch up to the more successful democracies. Indispensable though it had been, the nineteenth-century liberal tradition had entailed limits and blind-spots. Croce in fact thought extending the vote to more people was progressive, and he explicitly criticized the fashionable disillusionment with parliamentary government. But he also observed that the lack of an adequate understanding of the underlying bases of liberal democracy made politics seem lackluster and unimaginative; there had followed a tendency to abandon rational approaches and reach for irrationalist and morbidly aestheticist ways to fill the apparent void. But now it was essential to gain a deeper understanding, to push beyond conventional notions of utility, individual rights, and negative freedom (or “freedom from”) to an understanding of human freedom as positive and constructive, bound up with the human relationship to history.
The Essay in Focus
Contents summary
The title chosen for the English translation of Croce’s essay, History As the Story of Liberty, plays up the work’s anti-Fascist thrust, but is in fact taken from just one chapter. The original Italian title, La storia come pensiero e come azione, is easily rendered into English as “history as thought and action” and better conveys the overall thrust of the essay. Indeed, the phrase nicely sums up Croce’s overall program for cultural renewal. Though his argument proceeds unsystematically, Croce sought to address the deepest cultural needs of the age as he explored the intersection of philosophy, history, and politics in this essay.
In this essay, as in earlier ones, Croce insists on a reversal of the conventional relationship between philosophy and history. In light of its historical nature, people get a handle on the world not through philosophy, as has so long been assumed, but through historical inquiry and understanding. Philosophy simply shows people how to understand and respond to history. However, because the world, through history, is constantly changing, we must often re-form such categories as materialism and democracy, or redefine such concepts as justice and utility, to come to terms with the fresh circumstances generated by history. His own philosophical categories, admits Croce, had grown from his encounter with the concrete problems of life and were subject to adjustment. Philosophy in the abstract is useless.
People need to understand their present world so they can better respond to it in action. But any present situation can only be understood by examining its genesis, how it came to be historically. (In other words, “history” can no longer be understood as the inquiry of detached, aloof scholars who objectively study the past, somehow for its own sake, shunning responsibility and struggle in the present.) Any inquiry that is genuinely historical, rather than mere antiquarianism, starts with a problem, some contemporary issue that leads the inquirer to ask how this or that present situation came to be.
So in opposition to the commonplace notion that history deals with the past as opposed to the present, Croce portrays historical inquiry as the key to present orientation. Even when focused on the distant past, history seeks the seeds of the next moment, the process that leads to the future, not the past on its own terms, taken as an end in itself. Thus, focusing on history does not tie us to the past, as we might first assume; it enables us to respond creatively to the present. Thus, Croce’s insistence that writing history “is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past…. The writing of history liberates us from history” (Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, p. 44). To transcend Fascism, for example, it was necessary to understand how it had emerged, in light of inadequacies in the earlier liberal tradition. Mere moral rejection would not be sufficient.
But to feature this present-minded, moral-practical impetus for historical inquiry does not warrant reading present-day concerns into the past, maintains the essay. Nor does it warrant using history as a storehouse of examples to exemplify or dramatize some a priori or preconceived moral principle. Nor, finally, does it invite “party history,” the serving of some political interest that turns history into mere propaganda. On the contrary, the need to act in response to the present leads to a genuine search to learn. Insofar as people inquire in this Crocean spirit, open to learning, they come up with a true historical account. Put differently, truth is what happens when people question the world in a certain spirit or frame of mind. Like the capacity for moral response, the capacity to search for truth, to be open to it, helps define existence.
This notion is especially hard to grasp because we tend to assume a “correspondence” theory of truth; that is, we assume that a historical account seeks to represent reality, the past as it actually happened. Croce denies the validity of any such notion in an endlessly historical world; indeed, the conventional notion of historical truth is incoherent. For one thing, the meaning of the past is constantly changing as ever more happens and the world grows. But even supposing the aim is to convey the actual experience of those living through this or that, regardless of outcomes, truth would require an inconceivable totality.
In making this argument in History as the Story of Liberty, Croce was relying on a point he had first made, in dramatic fashion, in a 1912 article attacking the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s ideal of a “universal history.” In his famed novel War and Peace (1869), Tolstoy had imagined such a total history, encompassing the lived experience of every participant in a great event. He even suggested that conventional historical accounts, being selective, amount to little more than myths. In response, Croce admitted that in some of our moods we think we would like completeness, the whole historical record laid out to us. But can we even conceive of having all our historical questions answered? When we try, we realize that there could be no end, that every answer gives rise to a new question. Skeptics might argue that unless people know everything, they know nothing. But in his 1912 article, Croce insists that they already have what they need; it is not the infinite that expands every time we touch it, but rather the finite, the concrete that is the base of our existence and the point of departure for our actions. Even if infinity or completeness was somehow within our grasp, we would still concentrate on the particular finite strand that responds to an active, living problem—and forget the rest.
On this basis, Croce sought to be reassuring in History as the Story of Liberty. If we are uneasy about the incompleteness and finite nature of historical understanding, it is only because we assume there is some historical “thing in itself,” a fixed, completed past reality that we seek to render once and for all. In the ever-growing human world that we inhabit, there is no such thing, but that is not what we need to understand in any case. It is important to know that we seek not to reconstruct past reality, but merely to construct a history, some particular, finite connection or process, which affords the mode of understanding we need for response to the present. In doing so, we participate in the ongoing reconstruction of the world as it continues to develop in some finite, particular way. Insofar as we understand that we construct our histories in order to deal with some present problem, says Croce, we free ourselves from the fallacy that history is a copy or imitation of reality (Story of Liberty, p. 133).
By providing an orientation, historical understanding prepares us for action, but Croce reminds us that it cannot determine action, in the sense of specifying what people are to do, thereby relieving them of making an ethical decision (Story of Liberty, pp. 187-88). On the other hand, we can make such a decision rational by basing it on historical understanding.
History is “the story of liberty” because it is generated by free, creative human response to whatever has resulted from prior free, creative human response. So liberty is not merely a goal of history, Croce insisted against Hegel, but is itself the creator of history—and so the subject of every history. What people do as free human beings, when responding in their ethical mode, is overcome obstacles to free creativity and so liberate themselves to create, to go on building the world. Whether reacting against fascist censorship or economic exploitation, people are forever seeking to establish the political, social, and even economic conditions for more intense liberty.
Croce’s theme of “history as action” means not only that what we do has history-making implications. To experience the history-making weight of what we do, recognizing that what will matter is not our subjective experience but what becomes of what we do, reinforces the ethical concern that both stimulates us to act and opens us to a true understanding of the genesis of some present situation. To experience what we do as history-making thus carries us beyond any premium on being authentic or making a personal gesture.
Not that Croce denied subjective experience; indeed, he suggested that life in this fundamentally historical world entails ever higher and more complex forms of human suffering. But rather than dwell on personal anxiety, we should embrace the vocation that seems best to suit us, do what we take to be our duty, and look to the consequences. And though some of Croce’s characterizations seem to deny the masses any genuinely historical role, he insisted that we are all historical actors caught up in the same overall process, making some small contribution, as the next moment results from the interaction of all we do.
As Croce saw it, the contemporary fascists, Nazis, and communists had fundamentally misconstrued the relationship between history-making and the political sphere. In a sense, in fact, they were fleeing from the freedom and attendant responsibility that had opened up in the modern world. Croce attacked the exaltation of the state in Fascist Italy, the accent on race in Nazi Germany, and the communist insistence on what he viewed as an impossible equality. Race, he maintained, is not fixed, but historical. It offers, at best, rough classification as an aid to memory, but no basis for judgment according to value. The Nazi insistence on racial determinism denied both human freedom and the fundamental commonality of humanity.
Responding to the excesses of totalitarianism, Croce champions a new kind of liberalism, one that requires limits, humility, pluralism—and openness to the input of all individuals, even those who may fail to conform to abstract ideals of freedom, reason, or justice. Individuals need not be specially mobilized, educated, or liberated before their input counts. Though some will be more active and influential than others, all must have access, the opportunity to participate, including freedom of speech and assembly. In the same way, a plurality of political parties best serves collective history-making by enabling varied points of view to be expressed.
At the same time, Croce reacts against those anti-totalitarians who, he feels, are drawing the wrong lessons from the totalitarian challenge. The new liberalism does not require a restricted state or free-market economics; the reach of the state and the form of economic organization are empirical matters to be determined by the community, in light of historical circumstances. Indeed, Croce observes that “the absolutists of private enterprise are no less Utopian than the absolutists of communism” (Story of Liberty, p. 244).
From within the new liberal framework, the essay explains, people must learn to operate on two levels simultaneously. They make individual commitments and act on the basis of them, seeking to influence others as they do so, but they need to recognize their limits as individuals at the same time. Indeed, they need to acknowledge that the agent, the maker of the world, is collective, encompassing everyone, and that individuals are only finite parts of it. To be sure, we all, says Croce, using the inclusive “we” that implicates himself too, sometimes imagine ourselves to be dictators of the world, putting everything aright, but in our deeper moments we recognize that though we seek to influence what happens as best we can, we would rather entrust the making of history to the interaction of all.
Croce recognized that there was something a little unnerving about the endlessly provisional world he was positing, but the challenge was precisely to conform ourselves to the dynamic nature of reality. It need not sadden us that we are constantly projected forward, that, once completed, even our finest works do not satisfy us. Though there could be no end to the struggle, let alone some Utopian fulfillment, there was no warrant for despair, for loss of nerve, for generalized anxiety, for mere self-indulgence. A culture wound around “history as thought and action” affords people all they need to mesh in a positive, constructive way with the fundamentally historical world.
History, values, and personal decision
At one point in the essay Croce sought to clarify his own position by pointing out what he took to be the errors of the noted German thinkers Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch, with whom he had interacted periodically over the years. The two Germans worried that because we are caught up in history, we can only respond to historically specific situations on the basis of merely relative values, depending on who we are, when and where we live, and so forth. This meant, they assumed, that we are cut off from some higher, truer, stable realm of values, which we at best can glimpse, or apprehend in pale reflection.
Croce was denying any such higher realm—and thus any tension between values and history. There is nothing inadequate about being historical; we are not missing anything, are not cut off from anything, and we do not have to worry that ethical values change depending on who holds them. Thus Croce insisted, in response to Meinecke and Troeltsch, that to accept the fundamentally historical nature of the world does not undermine values but guarantees their inexhaustible vitality by making them concrete, embedded in history itself (Story of Liberty, pp. 83-84). Although we cannot pluck down values from on high, we reinvent justice, or the good, every time we respond morally to a new, historically specific situation. We do not know what to do, on the basis of some overarching value or principle, but we have the capacity to decide what to do. And we endlessly do so. In fact, if there is no one right way that can be specified in advance, the diverse individual moral responses of all human beings help carry the world to the next moment. Thus, Croce offers his humble, pluralistic mode of collective worldmaking as an alternative. He offers it first as an alternative to totalitarianism but also to other forms of thought and action that had already begun to tempt his contemporaries.
Especially in light of the disasters of the World War II era, traditionalists renewed the demand for what Croce saw as a nonexistent higher realm of values above history. Others agreed with Croce that there is no such realm but then assumed that we are left with nihilism, the conviction that nothing matters, that nothing can be known or communicated. Croce claimed to see beyond both such competing alternatives to a new, more hopeful orientation, based on the belief that we as individuals have the capacity to respond morally without absolute values. And insofar as our responses are guided by historical understanding of the situation to which we respond, we do not merely affirm our individual personalities but rather contribute to the ongoing making of the world in history. Herein lies the sense in which “history as thought and action” sums up Croce’s cultural program. Historical understanding provides the orientation that gives our moral responses history-making weight.
Sources and literary context
As he began to grasp the terms of what seemed to be the cultural challenge facing society around the turn of the century, Croce identified especially with a predecessor from Naples, the literary historian Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883). During a period in which Italians sought to forge a solid nation after Unification, De Sanctis had stressed the moral and civic import of cultural renewal. The committed humanistic culture championed by De Sanctis seemed to have been marginalized, almost lost altogether as the late nineteenth century progressed. Croce wanted to reconnect with De Sanctis and his mode of cultural leadership, though he understood that the challenge was now different—and deeper.
In his effort to conceive of the human situation without a transcendent or higher realm, Croce learned especially from an even earlier predecessor from Naples, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), (see The New Science of Giambattista Vico, also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). It was through Vico that Croce came to his understanding of the process through which the human world is built up over time as people continually respond creatively, in language, to a succession of novel situations. Because we have made it, said Vico, we can know the human, historical world as we cannot know the natural world, made by God, and which only God can truly know. Following Vico, Croce concluded that the knowability of the real is not a problem; thought is fully adequate to what the world is—and to what we are, to our place in the world. To be sure, our knowledge is provisional and finite; there can be no final grasp of the whole. But human knowledge is adequate to a world that is forever incomplete, a world endlessly coming to be through time, in history.
OUR COLLABORATION IN HISTORY
One learns from Croce that the world results from the sum of the actions of all who came before us, that we have fallen heir to their collective legacy. This sense of kinship stimulates each of us to do our part, to pick up and transform, through our own present action, the world bequeathed to us. As their collaborators, says Croce, we feel ourselves under obligation to use their legacy well.
Whoever opens his heart to the historical sensibility is no longer alone, but united with the life of the universe, brother and son and comrade of the spirits that formerly labored upon the earth and that live in the work that they completed, apostles and martyrs, ingenious creators of beauty and truth, decent and humble people who spread the balm of goodness and preserved human kindness; and to all of them he makes entreaty, and from them he derives support in his efforts and labors, and or their lap he aspires to rest, pouring his labor into theirs.
(Croce, “Antistoricismo,” pp. 263–64; trans. D. Roberts)
Croce’s early embrace of Vico decisively shaped his reading of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whose thinking Croce first addressed in an essay published in 1907, and to whom he returned repeatedly throughout his career. As Croce saw it, Hegel had been on the right track in conceiving the world as historical, and even as a totality. But even as he understood the significance of historical change up to a point, Hegel was still thinking in terms of stable essences, still supposing that the world has a structure and goal that human beings discover through historical experience. Croce, on the other hand, believed that we don’t discover this structure; we create it. Although a kind of totality, resulting from all that has been done so far and that structures what next becomes possible in life, it is a weak and provisional totality that leaves the future open to creative human response.
With the advent of fascism, Croce responded especially to his erstwhile collaborator Gentile and his totalitarian thinking. For Croce the grandiose totalitarian mode of collective action that Gentile came to advocate rested on a misreading of human possibilities. In its place, Croce offered his own humble, pluralistic mode of collective worldmaking.
Reception and impact
Although it was ignored by the Italian press, Croce’s essay quickly went into a second edition after publication in 1938. Private letters and police reports indicate the book’s considerable impact. It was widely and favorably reviewed when published in English translation a few years later, in 1941. The work was also published in Spanish (1942) and in German (1944).
Into the 1940s, as the effort of post-Fascist political renewal gathered force, Croce remained broadly influential in Italy and highly respected abroad. But his thinking had always been somewhat elusive, its center of gravity hard to pin down. As discussion turned, with the imminent collapse of Fascism, to the immediate requirements for a new liberal democracy, differences in practical priorities emerged even between Croce and those like Guido Calogero and Guido De Ruggiero, who had looked to him for leadership.
By the late 1940s Croce’s influence in Italy was swiftly declining as he became the target of an array of adversaries, from Marxists to Catholics to existentialist philosophers. The communist Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, critiqued Croce’s overall position; his critique helped cement the erroneous notion that Croce’s thought placed more weight on abstract speculation or mere understanding than on concrete action. By the time of his death in 1952, Croce was widely deemed superato, passé. In 1978 Raffaello Franchini, the most distinguished of the last group of Croce’s followers, lamented that Croce had become taboo in the dominant circles of Italian culture. By this point Croce had largely fallen from view all over the Western world.
But together with Gentile, Croce was subject to renewed interest during the 1980s. Some began to suggest that, with his program of “history as thought and action,” Croce could usefully be compared with such recent thinkers as the German Hans-Georg Gadamer and the American Richard Rorty, each of whom, like Croce, tried to specify the terms of a cultural situation in a context in which neither science nor religion nor philosophy seemed to afford the necessary orientation, and whose cultural prescriptions were similarly based on a deeper sense of the human place in history.
Though his influence was waning by the later 1940s, Croce himself found his historicist orientation more relevant than ever in light of cultural tendencies of the era. Although he understood the frustrations and fears that fed such responses, he sought to show how we can operate in a constructive spirit without lapsing back into some authoritarian claim to privilege, and without becoming crippled with anxiety over the human condition. Though each of us is only a collaborator in the flow of history, it is crucial that there is scope for us to collaborate. Through “history as thought and action” we do so in a mature, responsible way, thereby serving the future.
—David D. Roberts
For More Information
Croce, Benedetto. “Antistoricismo.” In Ultimi saggi. Bari: Laterza, 1963.
—. History as the Story of Liberty. Trans. Sylvia Sprigge. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941.
—. My Philosophy, and Other Essays on the Moral and Political Problems of Our Time. Trans. E. F. Carritt. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949.
—. Philosophy Poetry History: An Anthology of Essays. Trans. Cecil Sprigge. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
D’Amico, Jack, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, eds. The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Moss, M. E. Benedetto Croce Reconsidered: Truth and Error in Theories of Art, Literature, and History. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987.
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.
—. Nothing but History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.