Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), Italian philosopher, historian, and political leader, born at Pescasseroli, Aquila, and educated in Roman Catholic schools and at the University of Rome. Despite thorough training in Catholic theology, Croce became anticlerical and atheistic. In 1903 he founded the journal La Critica, in which he published most of his writings. He became a member of the Italian senate in 1910 and served as minister of education from 1920 to 1921, and again after World War II. An opponent of fascism, he spoke against the government of Benito Mussolini. In 1947 he founded the Italian Institute of Historical Studies.

Croce was greatly influenced by the philosophical system that had been developed by the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Referring to the body of his own philosophical thought as the “philosophy of the spirit”, he expounded his ideas in four major volumes published between 1902 and 1917. Comprising aesthetics, logic, ethics, and the philosophy of history, these works present Croce's thought as a unified system dominated by his concept of human creative power. His aesthetic theory was based on the belief that art, as a form of creativity, is a more revealing criterion than the sciences and that beauty in art depends on the successful translation in communicable form of a fundamental perception in the mind of the artist. In his analysis of logic, Croce contrasted logical thought, as a system of universal relationships, with the more specific forms of individual intuition. He believed in free will and in a way of life based on the appreciation of beauty, and he saw history as philosophy in motion, an interpretation of the past in terms of the present. Because he conceived of historians as expositors of human beings and nature in relation to causes and events, he held that history should be the domain of philosophers. Among Croce's works are Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille (1920); History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1932; trans. 1933); and Croce, the King and the Allies (1951), extracts from his diary of 1943-1944.