Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 243 Benedetto Croce als Kritiker aeiner Zeit. By Karl-Egon LSnne. (Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, Bd. 28. Tilbingen: Niemeyer, 1967. Pp. x+400. DM 46) The author attempts in this study sponsored by the German Historical Institute in Rome to describe Benedetto Croce's career as "a critic of his times." The impact of the Neapolitan philosopher and historian--almost a polyhistor--on the intellectual life of Italy since the last decade of the nineteenth century was enormous. Some called him an Erasmus of his epoch; G. Prezzolinl thinks that he was since the death of the poet Giosue Carducci till the European war the greatest star of Italian culture. Some say that he exercised a spiritual dictatorship in Italy between 1900 and 1920. This was certainly due more to his powerful personality and to the variety of his interests embracing most of the humanistic sciences and also practical politics than to his originality as a thinker. Twice he was minister of education and a long time "senator of the realm." The approach of the German author especially to Croce's politics is rather cautious. He abstains from criticism in this respect. Crnce was basically a conservative and an intellectual aristocrat. He was deeply influenced by German philosophy, especially Hegel and--partly in a negative sense--by Karl Marx. This school of thought came to him first through Francesco de Sanctis in whose History of Italian Literature he got a first glimpse into German idealistic aesthetics and this was precisely the branch of philosophy to which Croce made his most original contribution. As an idealistic philosopher Croce was irreconcilably opposed from the start to positivism of the Comte and especially Spencer variety. The latter dominated Italian thinking in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century. His companions in arms in that respect were the philosopher of law Gagtano Mosca, the economist and sociologist Vilfredo F. Pareto and his most intimate friend and aide in editorial matters Giovanni Gentile who became later the chief ideologist of fascism bitterly opposed by Croce. The chief organ of Croce's critical activities became his journal La Critica which he edited 1903-1944, i.e., till the collapse of fascism. This was a "review of philosophy, history and literature," of which two-thirds were written by Croce himself. Croce's fierce opposition to positivism paralleled the idealistic movements elsewhere: the philosophy of Henri Bergson, neo-Hegelianism in Germany as well as the evolvement of a theory of the "Geisteswissenschaften" in that country by Windelband and Rickert. Croce's attack on positivism started in aesthetics when he rejected "pleasure" as basis of the aesthetic judgment and saw the core of art in "expression" (of a certain content) and when he stressed that all objects become "beautiful" in art when their expression is perfect in an artistic sense, while different conditions obtain in the real world. But he viewed art as the representation of reality just as do Marxists today. He rejected the distinctions of different kinds of art as inessential and likewise minimized the articulation of different branches of literature. As for the concept of history he grappled with it throughout his whole life. First he called it a narration of facts and subsumed it under "art." He denied like the positivists the scientific character of history. "Historiography," Croce affirmed (p. 39) "does not elaborate concepts but reproduces the particular in its concreteness.... " "[It] is that kind of artistic production whose objects are the events as they really happened." Art is the domain of the possible, and history that of the real. Thus Croce narrowed down positivistically the field of sciences while adding to the dignity of history in putting it into art in a broader sense. Croce denies the existence of any laws of history affirming that man is the creator of his history and saying that if there were such laws, they would encroach on human freedom. While 244 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY he required for art in its proper sense 0rdy subjective truth, he demanded for history objective truth. But Croce's theory of history "underwent many changes, it escaped more and more from the fold of art...