Benedetto Croce
Italian philosopher, historian, literary critic and statesman (1866–1952), born in Pescasseroli into a wealthy aristocratic family, permanently marked by the death of his parents and sister in the 1883 Ischia earthquake, which he himself survived almost miraculously, and who decided to devote his immense inherited fortune to building an intellectual life in Naples entirely independent of the university and any official institution. The dominant figure in Italian philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century, Croce developed his own idealist system — known as 'absolute historicism' — set out in his tetralogy Philosophy of the Spirit, which reformulates Hegelian dialectic into four distinct but interrelated moments: aesthetics (intuition), logic (concept), economics (particular will) and ethics (universal will), a system in which all reality is conceived as the activity of spirit unfolding itself in history, with no remainder of metaphysical transcendence beyond this immanent process. His Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902) proposes an influential theory of art as pure 'intuition-expression', distinct from and irreducible to logical concept, exerting a decisive impact on literary and artistic criticism throughout the twentieth century, while History as the Story of Liberty argued that all history is inevitably 'contemporary history', written from the vital concerns of the present. Editor for more than four decades of the influential journal La Critica, from which he wielded almost unrivalled intellectual authority in Italy, Croce openly opposed Mussolini's fascism — drafting in 1925 the 'Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals' in response to Giovanni Gentile's pro-fascist manifesto — an attitude that, thanks to his international prestige and political discretion, allowed him to survive the regime without exile or imprisonment, going on after the war to become a key symbolic figure in Italy's democratic and cultural reconstruction, eventually serving as minister and senator.