Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce, OCI, COSML (/ˈkroʊtʃeɪ/ KROH-chay; Italian: [beneˈdetto ˈkroːtʃe]; 25 February 1866 – 20 November 1952) was an Italian idealist philosopher, historian, and politician who wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, historiography, and aesthetics. A political liberal in most regards, he formulated a distinction between liberalism (as support for civil liberties) and "liberism" (as support for laissez-faire economics and capitalism). Croce had considerable influence on other Italian intellectuals, from Marxists to Italian fascists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Giovanni Gentile, respectively.

He had a long career in the Italian Parliament, joining the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy in 1910, serving through Fascism and the Second World War before being elected to the Constituent Assembly as a Liberal. In the 1948 general election he was elected to the new republican Senate and served there until his death. He was a longtime member of the Italian Liberal Party, serving as its president from 1944 to 1947.

Croce was the president of the worldwide writers' association PEN International from 1949 until 1952. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 16 times. He is also noted for his "major contributions to the rebirth of Italian democracy". He was an elected International Member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

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 Roman Catholic environment. Around the age of 16, he quit Catholicism and developed a personal philosophy of spiritual life, in which religion cannot be anything but a historical institution where the creative strength of mankind can be expressed. He kept this philosophy for the rest of his life.

In 1883, an earthquake occurred in the village of Casamicciola on the island of Ischia near Naples, where he was on holiday with his family, destroying the home they lived in. His mother, father, and only sister were all killed, and he was buried for a long time and barely survived. After the earthquake, he inherited his family's fortune and—much like Schopenhauer—was able to live the rest of his life in relative leisure, devoting a great deal of time to philosophy as an independent intellectual writing from his palazzo in Naples (Ryn, 2000:xi).

He studied law, but never graduated, at the University of Naples, while reading extensively on historical materialism. His ideas were publicized at the University of Rome towards the end of the 1890s by Professor Antonio Labriola. Croce was well acquainted with and sympathetic to the developments in European socialist philosophy exemplified by August Bebel, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Paul Lafargue, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Filippo Turati.

Influenced by Neapolitan-born Gianbattista Vico's thoughts about art and history, he began studying philosophy in 1893. Croce also purchased the house in which Vico had lived. His friend, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, encouraged him to read Hegel. Croce's famous commentary on Hegel, What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, was published in 1907.

As his fame increased, Croce was persuaded, against his initial wishes,^{[verification needed]} to become involved in politics. In 1910, he was appointed to the Italian Senate, a lifelong position (Ryn, 2000:xi). He was an open critic of Italy's participation in World War I, feeling that it was a suicidal trade war. Although this made him initially unpopular, his reputation was restored after the war. In 1919, he supported the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti while also expressing his admiration for the nascent Weimar Republic and the Social Democratic Party of Germany. 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.