Giovanni Gentile
Italian philosopher and politician (1875–1944), born in Castelvetrano, in Sicily, trained at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa under the influence of Donato Jaja, and professor of philosophy at various Italian universities, where he developed, alongside Benedetto Croce, with whom he would later break politically, the project of renewing contemporary Italian philosophical idealism through the journal La Critica. His central philosophical work, known as 'actualism' or 'actual idealism', systematically set out in The General Theory of Mind as Pure Act (1916), radicalises Hegelian idealism to the point of arguing that the only authentic reality is the very act of thinking in its permanent becoming, denying any stable distinction between thinking subject and thought object, between the act of thinking (thinking thought) and its already fixed contents (thought thought), and dissolving in this ceaseless dialectical process all traditional philosophical categories into abstract moments of a single absolute spiritual activity. Minister of Education under Mussolini's first government (1922–1924), Gentile carried out a profound and lasting reform of the Italian school system, known as the Riforma Gentile, which reorganised the entire structure of the country's primary, secondary and university education along strongly idealist and humanist lines. Principal author, alongside Mussolini, of The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), Gentile offered the regime its most systematic philosophical justification, presenting fascism as the coherent political expression of his own actualism: a totalitarian ethical state in which the individual attains full spiritual reality only through complete identification with the collective will of the nation. This constant and never-disavowed adherence to fascism, even after the regime's fall in 1943, when Gentile supported the Italian Social Republic of Salò, cost him his life at the hands of communist partisans in 1944. Gentile's figure remains the subject of complex historiographical and philosophical debate over the never fully resolved relationship between the originality and depth of his idealist philosophical system and his totalitarian political commitment.