Abstract

The young Croce conceives a historical materialism as a realistic reading of the historical world that is very different from the model of natural sciences. This idea of historical materialism, born of a neo-Kantian idea, can be renewed today in a perspective that, like the one we propose here and according to some Marx’s suggestions, thinks the concrete human understanding as a form of “reproduction ”. This new “realistic” historical materialism is a radical criticism of that sort of metaphysical-materialistic economicism involved in the ideology of contemporary financial capitalism. This is an ideology that compels men to self-conceive themselves as “type specimens” of a supreme Law, the Law of a new Providence: the “markets”.