Croce Death of Ideology

Benedetto Croce and the Death of IdeologyAuthor(s): Walter L. AdamsonReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 208-236Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1878395 .Accessed: 19/03/2013 09:29

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Benedetto Croce and the Death of Ideology

Walter L. Adamson Emory University

Socialism? I believe it to be dead. And I believe we ought solemnly to proclaim its death, if only to inhibit those charlatans who pretend to believe that it is still alive and well. We would also be freeing many good people from the distressing situation in which they find themselves, either because they have become guilty of hypocrisy, simulating a faith they no longer feel in their hearts, or, if they have not fallen prey to such hypocrisy, because they have come to be accused of being unfaithful. Why this fear? Everything changes; can socialism alone have the privilege-or the disgrace-of not being able to die?

So spoke Croce early in 1911 in an interview for La Voce, then Italy's leading journal of cultural radicalism.' In light of Croce's critique of Marx and historical materialism in the late 1890s, these words may not seem very surprising. But to take them as a simple extension of the earlier critique would be a serious mistake. Croce faulted Marxism above all for its misunderstanding of the relationship of theory and practice: against any notion of a dialectical mating of the two, he had insisted on their strict separation. Even if its historical and theoretical analyses were correct, he argued, Marxism could not necessarily expect to gain adherents for its socialist program.2 By the same token, the denial of those analyses did not necessarily imply a rejection of socialism, and Croce had in fact accepted socialist principles, first in Marxist, and then for nearly the entire decade prior to 1911, in Sorelian form.3 Why then the sudden about-face?

I Benedetto Croce, "La morte del socialismo," now in Cultura e vita morale (Bari: Laterza, 1955), p. 150, hereafter cited as CVM. Edited by Giuseppe Prez- zolini and Giovanni Papini (who would later become a futurist), La Voce was the most avant-garde voice of the new generation; as such it could be quite hostile to socialism (especially the reformist variety then entrenched within the Socialist Party) but was very much open to Sorelian syndicalism and other radical left- wing currents of the day.

2 Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica (Bari: Laterza, 1961), pp. 100, 17.

3 Despite later efforts to portray himself as a perennial liberal, Croce conceded his earlier socialism quite openly during the First World War. See his Pagine sulla guerra (Bari: Laterza, 1928), p. 22, hereafter cited as PSG. While also [Journal of Modern History 55 (June 1983): 208-236] C) 1983 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/83/5502/04$01.00 All rights reserved.


Benedetto Croce 209

The answer begins to emerge from an earlier interview on the "masonic mentality" published in La Voce in November 1910.4 Broadly identifying this mentality with the "encyclopedism and Jacobinism" of the French Enlightenment, Croce decried its "spirit of abstraction and oversim- plification." "The masonic mentality simplifies everything: history which is complicated, philosophy which is difficult, science which does not lend itself to sharp conclusions, morality which is rich in contradictions and anxieties. It passes triumphantly through all these things, in the name of reason, liberty, humanity, fraternity, toleration." The latter are merely abstract geometric ideals, and were recognized as such, Croce argued, by Italian critics of the French Enlightenment like Vincenzo Cuoco, as well as by the later political tradition of the Risorgimento. Socialism too had resisted such tendencies and was quite opposed to them in origin, having been "born of Hegelian philosophy, nourished on historical reality, violence, and a sarcastic sense which made it averse to sentimentalism and brotherhoods." Of late, however, socialism had fallen prey, had become "masonicized."

Socialism, he suggested in the second interview, had been an ideology of "class struggle, of an aristocracy of labor (very different from the ragged proletariat of beggars), which conquers the bourgeoisie and trans- forms society, gains growing dominion over the blind forces of nature and supremacy for technique."5 In its passage under Marx "from utopia to science," it had renounced all merely "arithmetic and geometric concepts" in favor of "organic" ones. Foremost among the "arithmetic" concepts was equality. Thus, egalitarian socialism could be said to have died in the 1840s. The weakness of the Marxist survivor lay not in the spirit of its ideals but in their form. Marx and his generation had been so struck by the great spectacle of the French Revolution that they had actually convinced themselves that capitalism would pass away just as feudalism had-by means of a rising class that would seize on its contradiction with the prevailing mode of production and overthrow it. But

conceding an early passion for socialism, his first autobiography (1915) does say that his "faith had been undermined by my own criticism of Marxism." (See Croce, Etica e politica [Bari: Laterza, 1956], pp. 395-96; hereafter cited as EP). While it is true that he never joined the Socialist Party, it is clear from his political writings in the 1902-10 period that what was "undermined" was socialism in its Marxist and not in its Sorelian form.

4 Croce, "La 'mentalita' massonica," now in CVM, pp. 143-50. See also Croce's articles "Socialismo e massoneria" (October 1910), "Per un'inchiesta sulla massoneria" (August 1918), and "Mentalita massonica" (1915), all now in Pagine sparse, 3 vols. (Naples: Ricciardi, 1943), 1: 393-97, hereafter cited as PS.

5 CVM, p. 152.


210 Adamson

this was not science, it was sheer fantasy, "a fantasy of dreams and poetry." The proletarian who was called upon to play the world-historical role was not the real worker of everyday life but an "idealized" one "adorned with all the virtues that were denied the bourgeoisie," like youth, purity, heroism, and creative morality. No wonder, then, that "the heroic working class, whose imminent triumph in Germany was predicted every ten years or even every five years . . . had become cooled off, domesticated, integrated within the democratic order, allied with the general interests of the country, or rather with those of the ruling class. In Germany! In the homeland of Marx and Engels!"

What had happened was that the admirably scientific cast of Marx's theory had been corrupted by his political vision, which was akin to a religious faith. The result was a radical division between the ideal and the real proletariat which, once it became apparent, served not only to dishearten the real working class and thus to open the division still further, but, ultimately, to corrupt all those socialist movements like Sorel's syndicalis-m-which sought to revive the true Marxist dream by refur- bishing its ethical dimension. All such movements fell prey in the end to the spirit of abstract encyclopedism against which Marx's appropriation of Hegelian organicism and his development of historical materialism were supposed to have immunized them. Thus, Sorel, for example, had abandoned syndicalism when he had seen "reformism, democratism, and demagoguery infiltrate themselves even there."6 Ironically, however, Sorel himself was partly to blame. His reforging of socialism as "myth" had failed in its mission of reinvigorating the proletariat because Sorel himself, "in the act of creating it [myth], had dissipated it by giving it a doctrinal explanation."

What accounts for the extraordinary corrupting power of the Enlight- enment demons? In the "death of socialism" interview, Croce had only a very partial answer, the logic of which appears to be something like the following. Marxist socialism aspires to a "unity of theory and practice," that is, to a vital link between its practical program of social transformation and the theory which clarifies its historical and scientific possibility. But this is a vain hope. No scientific theory-and certainly not Marxism- can hope to answer the sorts of questions which practice demands. Thus Marxism inevitably comes to have an aspect of faith standing behind it. This faith, however, is only a great wish, a fantasy which, in straining to clarify reality while actually growing more and more remote from it, is forced to defend itself on the basis of abstract principles like equality and democracy. Sooner or later the radical distance between such principles and the originally organic, historically grounded theory becomes so evident

6 Ibid., p. 158.


Benedetto Croce 211

that both faith and theory are destroyed. All that is left is the concrete program which, in its isolation from thought, takes on the quality of a mere game.

From this point of view, then, the tendency of thought to regress from a historicist to an enlightenment mode appears to be a function of the inherent impossibility of integrating practice and theory. But if this is so, then not only Marxist socialism but all the nineteenth-century political ideologies would seem to be dead. For however much they varied, these ideologies all were or aspired to be Weltanschauungen in which aspects of faith, theory, and practice would cohere together in a single vision suitable for exacting political commitment.

It was precisely this consequence which served Croce as a point of departure in an article written some nine months after the interview and aptly entitled "Fede e programmi."7 In a highly sarcastic and disparaging tone, Croce charged that all the contemporary Italian political "programs"-as much those of the right as of the left-had become empty of serious content and lacking in genuine emotional and spiritual appeal. At one level this was due to a general penchant for "mistaking and confusing programs with faith." "Programs," claimed Croce, "are neither faith nor can they substitute for it, because faith is something firm and absolute, while programs are contingent and changeable. . . ." Faith must precede and generate programs, not the reverse; to attempt to com- pensate for the lack of faith by erecting ever more grandiose programs is like "using architectural crowns and decorations to reinforce a building without a foundation." Yet the fact that all contemporary political programs were plagued by this same confusion suggested a deeper level of causation which Croce located in the general "economization of the world."

Anyone looking at the Italian scene today, wrote Croce, would recognize that all the great words which had once expressed "social unity"-"King, Country, City, Nation, Church, Humanity"-have become cold and rhe- torical. We have entered a period of decadence and widespread cynicism. We no longer have any "social discipline." Individuals do not feel themselves to be connected to a larger whole, and "good individuality" which affirms itself only in and through these connections has given way to a "bad individuality" that thinks itself capable of more energetic self- affirmation by breaking them. Thus, the Italian political process has degenerated into a kind of "lottery" in which each sector of society, seeking only its own narrow material self-interest, "agitates, threatens, and puts pressure" on deputies and ministers who themselves are only too eager to be bought and sold. "Salvation is [now] sought wholly or

7 Now in CVM, pp. 160-70. It appeared originally in the September 20, 1911 issue of La Critica.


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substantially in material things, in war or industry, in emigration or colonization, in learning to read or in universal suffrage."

And so Croce raises the question, which he calls the "anguished question . . . of Cernicewski and Tolstoy": what is to be done? Faith cannot simply be remade in some machine-like fashion. The materialization of life, the reduction of every aspect of social existence to the economic logic of self-interest, can never be the basis of any genuine faith, for it is nothing other than the final outcome of those rationalist, abstract, Jacobin principles which corrupted socialism and which will do the same to any other political outlook. What must be done, according to Croce, is to identify the "destructive tendencies" and "combat them" with moral education. "We must not try, in short, to create a new world, but to continue to work within the old one, which is always new.

It is upon this logic that Croce, in "Fede e programmi," begins to build the case for his own particular brand of romantic nationalism, inspired above all by the poet Carducci, which he will defend for most of the rest of the decade. Discussion of the nature of this political faith, however, must be postponed. For now what is important to see is Croce's implicit distinction between what might be termed "strong faiths" and "weak faiths." Weak faiths are themselves of two general types: those that are originally "abstract" and "rationalist" or "materialist" like Enlightenment encyclopedism or Jacobin democracy, and those that, while not originally of this first type, are nonetheless yoked to the same project of making a new world. This project, being inherently a fantasy, inevitably gives rise to faiths which will be openly at variance with historical analysis. Such faiths will attempt to preserve themselves by taking on the trappings of that spirit of abstract rationalism to which they were initially opposed.

Strong faiths, in contrast, are those which reject the spirit of abstract rationalism and the materialization of the world, and which seek only to continue creating "the old world." Examples include the political outlooks of the traditional religions as well as secular forms of traditionalism, nationalism, and similar outlooks involving deep emotional (as against mere "intellectual") attachments and recognition of the priority of spiritual as against material needs. Ideologies which are only weak faiths will be short-lived, leaving nothing but the materialistic politics of competing "programs." Yet to designate the other type "strong" faiths is not to say that they will necessarily be longer-lasting. On the contrary, given their contradiction to the prevailing ethos of materialist (technical, con- sumerist, mass) society, they will be difficult to foster and sustain despite the fact that they are less deficient internally.

Conscious of this, and perhaps with the parallel between his own discovery of the "death of ideology" and Nietzsche's "death of God"


Benedetto Croce 213

in mind, Croce anticipates the objection that "this disposition of spirit, this moral faith, presupposes in turn a religion; and since religion is dead, at least for the educated classes, and since it cannot be artificially reproduced, it would be quite innocent to ask men to accept and cultivate something which transcends the i-ndividual and his interests."8 In reply to this objection, which for Croce is evidently quite serious, he attempts to distinguish between the transcendental element in traditional religion, which he concedes is dead, and the "religious or philosophical conception of things, or rather of things under the aspect of the eternal . . . which has various modes and . . . is continually discussed, corrected, modified." Faiths which rely only on the latter, Croce contends, can continue to find adherents and, what is more important, must do so if political life in materialist society is to retain any dignity. If their adherents be few, at least they "will recognize each other and will feel themselves to be brothers in the same work, or, if one prefers less humble language, privileged in the same aristocracy."

Thus, for Croce, the death of socialism was simultaneously the death of all the great nineteenth-century ideologies. For none could resist the political dynamic underlying the new materialistic civilization, a dynamic which undermined all vital, historically rooted world views, converting them into mere abstract principles and thus, in Croce's eyes, fating them to extinction. That he made these discoveries nearly half a century before the so-called end of ideology writers would be led to similar views opens up a fascinating vista which, however, it would be premature to pursue here.9 What I wish to suggest in this essay is how very important this "death of ideology" theme is for understanding Croce's entire political outlook as well as its many (ideological) twists and turns. More specifically, I will argue that the political dynamic underlying materialist civilization and the corresponding weakness of the ideologies: (1) was implicitly understood in the way Croce formulated his own early socialism and, especially, in the relation of that socialism to his "philosophy of practice"; (2) aids us in understanding his move away from Sorelian socialism to romantic nationalism in the 1911-19 period, as well as his brief flirtation with fascism in 1922-24; and (3) is evident in the way Croce theorized his later liberalism, and thus part of the reason why he never succeeded in making his liberalism fully coherent.

8 Ibid., p. 167. 9 For a sensitive treatment of the "end of ideology" theme by a writer who

would later criticize the "orthodox" formulations of Daniel Bell as unhistorical and who makes some suggestive historical connections between the end of the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries in this regard, see H. Stuart Hughes, "The End of Political Ideology," Measure 2, no. 2 (Spring 1951): 146-58.


214 Adamson

I To approach Croce's politics, especially in the years prior to fascism, is to be seized by a welter of contradictions.10 His studies with Antonio Labriola on Marx, his journalism, and his political involvements-he was, for example, a Senator from 1910 onward-testify to an abiding interest in politics. Yet Croce also gives strong evidence of an apolitical, even antipolitical, animus. Prior to 1925 he never joined a political party, he often showed great hesitation in discussing concrete political issues, 1 1 and he evinced an unmistakable element of ivory-tower formalism. In his theoretical writings, Croce treated politics with great contempt, regarding it as hopelessly low-life, mere passion, and unworthy of the man of spirit, even if it must be accepted and endured. His book on Hegel (1906) contains not a word on politics and next to nothing on Hegel's relationship to Marx.

To begin to fathom this complex love-hate relationship with politics, as well as to grasp how this relationship bears on Croce's sense of the inherent weakness of all political ideology, we must consider the major elements of his political writings prior to 1910 and, above all, his conception of the relation of theory and practice. It is in the essays on Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, as we have noted, that Croce first formulates his distinction between theory and practice. Already in the first essay (1896), we find implicit Croce's distinction between the intellect and the passions: not only will the intellect often fail to lead to practical action, it is ultimately irrelevant to it.12 Action is motivated by many things -among them ideals, faith, interests, and "enthusiasms"-but not by intellect or theory. The latter may serve to clarify problems or historical situations, but one can never infer "prac-

10 Secondary works on Croce's politics represent a very small fraction of the Croce literature as a whole, but their number is nevertheless quite vast. For some of the more important treatments, see Raffaele Colapietra, Benedetto Croce e la politica italiana, 2 vols. (Bari: Edizioni del Centro Librario, 1969); Emilio Agazzi, II giovane Croce e il marxismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1962); Norberto Bobbio, Politica e cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1955), chaps. 7 and 8; and Giovanni Sartori, Stato e politica nel pensiero di Benedetto Croce (Naples: Morana, 1966).

" This is often appparent in interviews. See, for example, his opening remarks in "La 'mentalita' massonica," CVM, p. 144; and in two of his interviews on fascism, now in PS, 2: 371-72 and 376-79. In his first autobiography, he discusses his politics in the 1890s, but then, as he moves beyond 1900, he focuses entirely on philosophy, thus leaving the impression that he had considered the earlier politics only because it was so central to his development as to be unavoidable. In summing up his early views here, he considers aesthetics, ethics, history, and the theory of knowledge but leaves out politics entirely. See EP, pp. 394-403, 410.

12 Croce, Materialismo storico, p. 17.


Benedetto Croce 215

tical programs from scientific propositions," and the latter in turn can never be "proved. " "The desirable is not science nor is the practicable. " 13

These assertions become the fundamental rationale underlying the highly compartmentalized design of Croce's "philosophy of spirit," first articulated in the Aesthetic (1902) and then, following his 1906 showdown with Hegel's dialectic, in the Philosophy of Practice (1908) and the Logic (1909), where the "theory of degrees of spirit" is fully articulated. According to this theory, though mind is ultimately a unity, it has two distinct forms: theory and practice (or intellect and passion, thought and will, cognition and volition). These forms may each be subdivided into two moments or degrees: intuition and logic within theory, the economic and the ethical within practice. In each case the second moment is higher than (i.e., more developed than and inclusive of) the first, but as a quartet they move in a circle, with none of the moments really first or last. Most importantly, each moment defines the terrain of a particular form of study-aesthetics, philosophy, economics, and ethics-which must be preserved in their mutual autonomy. History, for example, needs to respect these divisions by writing separate accounts of art, thought, economic activity, and moral life.

To say, however, that there are forms of knowledge corresponding to the domain of practice is not to say that this knowledge can ever be put to use in actual practice. Such knowledge is always historical, always of past practice, since practical concepts "do not precede but follow a volition that has taken place." Thus while there may be a "philosophy of the practical," there cannot be a "practical philosophy.""4

These divisions among the forms of spirit, while subject to continual tinkering and minor modification, remain central to Croce's philosophical position for the rest of his very long life. And Croce so often reaffirms the underlying distinction of theory and practiZte,15 with its convenient implication that the man of theory can never, as a man of theory, say anything at all about proposed courses of practical action, that we are apt to lose sight of its origin. Yet that origin is crucially important. For what calls Croce's attention to the need for the distinction is the deficiency

13 Ibid., p. 100. 14 Croce, Filosofia della pratica (Bari: Laterza, 1957), pp. 31, 35. 15 See, for example, his "Come nacque e come mori il marxismo teorico in

Italia (1895-1900)," in Antonio Labriola, La concezione materialistica della storia (Bari: Laterza, 1947), pp. 290-91; his first interview on fascism, "Liberismo e fascismo" (October 27, 1923), now in PS, pp. 371-72, his 1924 Elementi di politica (EP, p. 238); and his 1947 statement that "the mind clarifies the situation . . . but only the heart suggests lines of action," in Filosofia e storiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1949), p. 289.


216 Adamson

of Marxism as an ideology, that is, as an effort to claim that socialist practice is a necessary consequence of historical materialism.'6 If he does not yet perceive its "death" as a result of its attempted unity of theory and practice, he certainly traces the disparity between its promises about future history and its actual political position in European society to this source.

By denying the unity of theory and practice, Croce extracts three major advantages for his politics. First, he believes himself able to produce a far more realistic account than Marx does of the way men actually act in history, precisely because he recognizes the far greater importance, as historical motivators, of ideals, fantasies, and myths as against ideas, philosophies, and theories. Here is one aspect of the intellectual kinship he will soon feel with Sorel. Second, he can develop a theory of life which is clearly not an ideology, and even a philosophy of practice which has no political component or implication. Thus the tendency of earlier historicisms and counter-Enlightenment philosophies to become ration- alized through their contact with the political arena can be obviated from the start. Finally, he can engage in practice and even produce practical political writings which articulate goals and principles, while contending that such goals and principles do not issue from any ideology or world view; that they are pure products of will absolutely unconnected with philosophy. In short, he can have the best of both worlds. He can be a better historian and philosopher precisely because his thought is carefully preserved from ideological contamination, while he can also descend as he desires into the political and ideological controversies of the day, leaving his theoretical life safely behind. Politics and antipolitics can each have their place.

Thus, if we turn to Croce in the fall of 1902, we find a repudiation of contemporary Italian politics in the programmatic statement of the first issue of La Critica, which appeared that November. Here Croce refers to recent social and political thinking as so many "attempts to introduce impossible and ridiculous innovations, and to persuade adults to become children again," a tendency which he "abhors" and pledges to keep out of La Critica's pages."7 This is clearly a pronouncement intended to

16 It has been argued, I think rightly, by some (e.g., Agazzi, p. 481) that Croce's sharply compartmentalized philosophy also reflects his desire to combat positivist determinism by denying that any single form of analysis is appropriate for all subject matter. Croce himself seems to make this point in polemic with Gentile in 1923; see CVM, p. 246. Yet there is no doubt from the Materialismo storico essays that what drives Croce to a sharp theory/practice distinction is above all Marxism rather than positivism.

17 The program is reprinted in Conversazione critiche, 5 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1950), 2: 353-57; see p. 355. For a later reaffirmation that La Critica was a


Benedetto Croce 217

place Croce and his new enterprise au dessus de la melee. Yet it is at just this moment that Croce himself is making his first major political- ideological reassessment.

Croce's considerable sympathy for orthodox Marxist socialism in the 1898-1900 period is clear from a number of indications, including his financial support of the socialist journal Avanti!18 Even as late as 1902, in a review of Pareto's Les systemes socialistes, Croce had defended Marxist socialism in general terms, though the attentive reader might have noticed a slight distancing."9 However, in 1903 he wrote two articles which were highly critical of socialist orthodoxy from a vantage point quite close to the later "death of socialism" interview.20 The first, a long essay on the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, offers the following summary assessment of European cultural development in the nineteenth century:

In the field of thought, the natural sciences, disguising themselves as philosophy, have destroyed the world which religion and idealistic philosophy had presented as "cosmos," as something alive, a drama which we ourselves act out, and they have substituted a series of dead and heavy classificatory schemes, so dead and heavy as to take on the solemn appearance of determinism. In the field of practical life, the industrial bourgeoisie has destroyed the perfect companionship of the populace with God and with Christ, substituting for that the competition in greed; and socialism, having gone to school in politics, has become aware that it can do no better than to ask the bourgeoisie for a loan of its materialistic philosophy and its class struggle, and it has succeeded so well that now, changing roles, it passes as the inventor of that which it simply found ready-made and to whose strength it bows down.

Croce sees "a cold wind of cynicism and brutality" blowing through the world, a wind which inflates the "pseudonaturalist superstitions" and "neomystical hypocrisy" of a D'Annunzio into expressions of culture, thus making possible the apparent success of his brand of hedonist dil- ettantism on the current literary scene.21 Yet it is not D'Annunzio who

"literary and philosophical, not a political review," see Croce's letter (November 29, 1918) to Francesco Coppola, now in his Epistolario, 2 vols. (Naples: Instituto Italiano per gli studi storici, 1967), pp. 32-33.

18 See Agazzi, pp. 96-97. 19 The review is reprinted in Croce, Conversazione critiche, 1: 279-82. 20 In partial explanation of this shift, it might be noted that 1903 was the year

in which Filippo Turati, the reformist leader of the Italian Socialist Party and about whom Croce had written approvingly in years past, was offered a ministerial post by Giolitti. Though Turati turned it down, it was obvious that he enjoyed the invitation and was favorably disposed to Giolittian democracy.

21 The essay is reprinted in Croce, La letteratura della nuova Italia, 6 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1964), 4: 7-74; see pp. 12-13.


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is to blame. He simply exploits the situation already created by the natural sciences, the bourgeoisie, and the socialist party.

The antimaterialist accents already evident in this passing condemnation of socialism reveal their source when we turn to the second of the articles: a highly favorable review of Sorel's Saggi di critica del marxismo.22 Here Croce, again stressing the distinction between theoretical Marxism (which must be largely rejected) and Marxist practice (which may be largely accepted), links his approval of the latter directly to Sorel, whose writings represent a "fine school for the practical man." Sorel is praised as "a true Marxist, perhaps the only Marxist worthy of the name," above all because of the "great weight he gives to workers' syndicates as means to the creation of a new form of society" and thus, by implication, because of his rejection of the orthodox socialism which is only another party in the prevailing game of bourgeois materialism.

But by 1910 Sorelian socialism had been rejected-by none other than Sorel himself. He had accused it of the very sins to which the bourgeoisie had long ago fallen prey and from which socialist syndicalism was to have saved the working class. With this shift comes Croce's pronouncement not only of the death of socialism but, as we have seen, of the death of all ideology.

Where then was Croce to turn? He could perhaps renounce all politics and devote himself entirely to a life of disinterested scholarship. But this was never a serious option. Whatever his philosophical side might have said, Croce did have a genuine moral commitment to post-Risor- gimento Italy which would never have permitted him such a course of action. He had to take up some new political position. But this could not be any of the prevailing ideologies like anarchism or futurism which he abhorred, or Catholicism which he considered culturally superseded, or bourgeois liberalism which, in so far as it sought to be a vision of anything at all, was subject to the same disease which had killed socialism. Croce had to adopt some "strong faith" which had not been culturally superseded and which, if currently suffering, could conceivably be revived. What he chose was a simple patriotism, a uniquely romantic and nonimperialist (though otherwise forceful) version of nationalism.

II This departure was not quite so abrupt as it may appear. Not only had Croce sought in socialism many of the same virtues he now located in nationalism, he had always been a staunch patriot and had long shown affinities for some nationalist ideals and some forms of nationalist thought.

22 The review is now in Conversazione critiche, 1: 282-85.


Benedetto Croce 219

As far back as 1903, in the essay on D'Annunzio, he had expressed regret that "nation and humanity have become old-fashioned words," that "the family has come to appear as a physiological relationship or an organism of capitalist economy."23 In 1909, he published a major study of Giosue Carducci, whom he praised to the skies as Italy' s greatest national poet, the creator of beautiful and inspiring cadences about Ri- sorgimento Italy as the new Rome, and Garibaldi as its "new Romulus."24

Moreover, while nationalism may have been Croce's only real option as a new political faith, given his analysis and critique of nineteenth- century ideology, his perception of the current political situation made this far from a reluctant or hesitant choice. He did not endorse the Na- tionalist Party when it celebrated its first major congress in Florence in 1910. On the contrary, he had always rejected and would continue to reject in the strongest terms all the belligerent overblown rhetoric of imperialism, irrationalism, and glorification of violence in which the Nationalists reveled. Yet he was not simply a nationalist liberal either. The language of his first openly nationalist article, "Fede e programmi," is anything but liberal, however mightily one stretches the concept away from its associations with democracy or egalitarianism and toward its aristocratic origins. Central to his polemic is an unqualified condemnation of "social atomism," an alignment of the "spirit of individualism" with that of "materialism," and a desperate pleading for a return to community.

Until our souls shine with the conviction that life is disinterested work, that the individual is in control of what he had inherited from the past and is able to hand it down to the future, and that men are not abstract individuals but fully reconciled with one another; until family, country, and humanity regain their sincere meanings and warm our hearts as they always did when history was history; until the last traces of bourgeois and socialist utilitarianism are eradicated, it is vain to hope that this or that contingency can improve society and restore Italy to greatness.25

Croce's antiliberalism becomes still more evident in his political articles of 1912 and in his Pagine sulla guerra, a collection of his political writings from 1914 to 1918.26 In 1912 he introduced his concept of the nation in a negative way, by contrasting it sharply with the Mazzinian idea of democratic nationalism as well as with the nationalist imperialism

23 Croce, Letteratura della nuova Italia, 4: 13. 24 Croce, Giosue Carducci (Bari: Laterza, 1953), p. 102 and passim. 25 CVM, p. 166. Croce's aversion to "the atomic individualism from which

we all still suffer" is repeated in a second 1911 article, "L'aristocracia e i giovani," CVM, p. 177.

26 For the former, see especially "Contro l'astrattismo e il materialismo politici" and "II partito come guidizio e pregiudizio," CVM, pp. 182-90 and 191-98.


220 Adamson

of the dannunziani. These remain the two extremes between which he attempts to steer, and critiques of proponents of both tendencies continually reappear in the Pagine sulla guerra. At the same time, in these latter pages, the positive content of his ideal begins to take on a more definite shape. In particular, its Carduccian origins, several times reiterated, are tied to several new concepts; among them "national-socialism" and nationalism as a representation of the "state as force."

Of "national socialism" Croce writes:

I was once enamored of the socialism of Marx, and later of the socialist syndicalism of Sorel; I hoped in each case for a regeneration of present social life. And both times I saw that ideal of work and justice broken up and scattered. But now the hope has come to me of a movement of the proletariat, resolutely placed within historical tradition, towards a socialism of state and nation, and I think that . . .it may well be Germany which provides the model and the example [in

this respect] to other peoples. . . . I believe that those German socialists who feel a collective togetherness with the German state and its iron discipline, will be the true promoters of the future of their class.27

Beyond this he does not spell out the principle of national socialism, and it is perhaps less illuminating to read it in light of the tragic tones it takes on in hindsight, than in terms of the ironic twist it represents in Croce's own political-intellectual biography. Just four years before, as we have seen, he had rejected socialism because of its capitulation to bourgeois democracy-above all " in Germany, in the homeland of Marx and Engels!" In revulsion, he had turned away from socialism and toward nationalism, a faith in which he saw a stronger potential for the moral- spiritual regeneration he and Sorel both so desperately wanted. Now, with his memories before him and with a trace of nostalgia, he appears to want to complete his personal quest by uniting the old moral-spiritual force he had located in the proletariat's historic struggle for emancipation with the new one he had found in the nation.

Yet, if there are signs of an ethical impulse underlying Croce's nationalist politics, the central ideal to which it is linked in the Pagine sulla guerra is that of the "stato come potenza," the state as force.28 In his war writings, Croce continually emphasized the idea of "the autonomy of politics," that is, its complete independence from ethics. The following passage is typical:

If we do not profit from this hard war by liberating ourselves from abstractly humanitarian preconceptions and become familiar with the true doctrine of the

27 PSG, p. 22. For the further development of Croce's "national socialism," see his "Tre socialismi" (September 1918), PSG, pp. 238-87.

28 Ibid., pp. 74-1 1 1 and passim.


Benedetto Croce 221

state, when will we become wise? Thus, it seems to me . . . that politics, like economics, has its own laws independent of morality; and that to be moral is not to rebel in vain against these laws but rather to adopt them, incorporating them into one's sense of ethical duty as, for example, in fighting for one's country: "rightly or wrongly, is my country." This brings . . . a profound cor- rection to the Hegelian doctrine of the state, since it still thought of the state as "superior" to morality, while my theory conceives it as "inferior... 29

The founder of the "true doctrine of the state" was not Hegel but Ma- chiavelli-with a strong second from Marx.30 Croce's goal was only to restate their insight in terms of his own conception of "practice." Practice has two moments -the economic (or utilitarian) and the ethical-and politics, he now argues, lies in the former realm but not the latter. Ethics continues to bear a relation to the political world, but only in that separate and superior fashion embodied in Jesus' conception of "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's." 31 Insofar as we are political actors we inhabit Caesar's realm and must pursue its logic. Since we live in a nation, we must care above all for its strength and "potency" vis-'a-vis other nations.

Croce's own most significant opportunity to live up to these principles arrived in June 1920 when he was asked by Giolitti, who once again became Prime Minister, to serve as Minister of Instruction. Deeply im- pressed by a personal session with Giolitti, whom he had not previously met, Croce suppressed some doubts about his fitness for the post and accepted it.32 Ironically, it was through this bit of personal sacrifice for the nation that Croce began the last major turn of his own political development: from nationalism toward liberalism.

The turn, however, was by no means immediate, and it was far from straightforward. In 1919, in the atmosphere of postwar crisis and proletarian revolt, Croce wrote several articles for the ultra-nationalist and proto-fascist journal Politica, and he was active in the fight against Wil- sonian principles of liberal internationalism.33 Never had Croce's nationalism been so forcefully expressed, particularly through the Ma-

29 Ibid., p. 105. Croce puts the phrase "rightly or wrongly, is my country" in English.

3 Ibid., pp. 60, 83. For the link between Marx and the idea of the "state as force," see Croce's 1917 introduction to Materialismo storico, pp. xii-xiii.

31 Croce reminds us of this in his forward to PSG which, however, was written in 1927 after he had moved into the liberal, antifascist camp. See PSG, p. 6.

32 For Croce' s account of this experience, see his Nuove pagine sparse, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1966), 1: 63-79.

3 The Politica articles are not included in the PSG, pp. 218-26, 250-55, 263 -70, and 287-90, and in EP, pp. 165 -73. For an instance of the anti-Wilson polemic, see PSG, pp. 290-94.


222 Adamson

chiavellian theme of the inherently nonmoral nature of all politics. Nor does this rhetoric abate after 1920. It is in full evidence in a number of his political writings of 1923-24.34 Nonetheless, signs of a new liberal theme do begin to appear almost immediately after Croce's assumption of his new political duties. Central to it is the idea of the importance of "rivalry and competition" among parties and ideologies within the state as well as the positive value placed on social "variety"-principles which appear to run directly counter to the earlier ones of "social discipline," "social unity," and the determining weight of the "general interest. "

One is tempted to explain these new views, which are offered only in occasional short remarks and never fully developed, as tactical devices in Croce's effort to gain a working rapport with the many factions with whom he had to deal in his new role. However, this would be both to underestimate and to overestimate their significance. It would be to underestimate it because Croce does indeed seem to have been genuinely and deeply influenced by Giolitti, whose liberalism was more democratic than Croce could ever defend, but who showed how masterful political leadership and the promotion of "rivalry and competition" were not only not contradictory but mutually supportive practices.36 Moreover, Croce seems to have believed that the politics of liberalism were favored by the spirit of the times and destined to win out sooner or later. In 1919 he apparently told Guido de Ruggiero that the most noteworthy outcome of the war had been the victory of liberalism over more organized and centralized societies. By 1923 he was openly calling himself a "liberal." And in many of his pre-1925 remarks on fascism, he made it plain that he was lending the latter his support only because the liberal politics of

3 See, for example, his 1923 review of Gaetano Mosca's Elementi di scienza politica, now in Nuove pagine sparse, 2: 220-27, in which he joins Mosca in defending an ethically based patriotism; or his review, also in 1923, of Vilfredo Pareto's Trattato di sociologia generale, now in Conversazione critiche, 4: 167- 70, in which the only redeeming aspect of the book is located in its "anti- democratic polemic and exaltation of force" as the "creator of political deeds." See also his own Elementi di politica (1924) in EP, pp. 217-78, which includes a sharp critique of the natural law tradition.

3 See his remarks to the National Assembly of July 7, 1920, and his interview for "Il Resto del Carlino" of August 29, 1920, now in PS, 2: 263-71 and 272- 76.

36 Croce's high regard for Giolitti in this period is above all evident in the praise with which Giolitti is showered in the History of Italy, 1871-1915, trans. C. M. Ady (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), praise which is certainly at odds with Croce's view of Giolitti in the prewar era; see the History, pp. 183, 215- 18, 227, 230, 252, 256-58, 261, 263, and 274. See also his January 1, 1923 letter to Giolitti in his Epistolario, 1: 97.


Benedetto Croce 223

1919-22 had so "degenerated" that a temporary suspension of liberty was necessary to prepare the way for the "more severe and sagacious liberal regime" whose return was "ineluctable."37

Yet to see Croce's pre-1925 liberalism as tactical would also in a sense be to overestimate it. It is clear that he did not regard the apparently new value he placed on "rivalry and competition" as anything more than an elaboration of his belief in "social unity" and in no way at odds with it. Liberalism, he declared, supports a state "healthy enough to be able to aggregate antithetical tendencies and permit them to develop, all the while maintaining equilibrium among them and establishing a unified structure of general and national interests."38 Liberalism, then, is simply the nationalist objective of social unity.

In any case, it is from the vantage point of Croce's long-standing nationalist commitment and the new liberal twist he gave it that we must approach the delicate question of his pre-1925 attitudes toward fascism. Among the central documents for grasping these attitudes are three interviews he gave in October 1923 and February and July 1924.39 Essen- tially, what emerges from them are a series of rationalizations for a policy of benign neglect: fascism is judged to be a transitional regime which will strengthen the Italian state and thus serve liberal ends in the long run. Croce stresses the historical context. The level of "bestiality" by the left in the immediate postwar years, which culminated in the "parliamentary paralysis" of 1922, destroyed the Italian state and will be "difficult to exceed." Thus, the present "is not a question of liberalism or fascism, but only a question of political strength." Given the lack of any alternative, fascism, which is not contradictory to liberalism and clearly preferable to socialism, must be actively supported. Indeed, it ought to be granted a parliamentary majority.

Croce went farthest in the direction of a positive portrait of fascist politics in his second interview, which came in the midst of the parliamentary campaigns of 1924. In its "heart," he maintained, fascism is "love for the Italian nation." It is based on "the correct conviction that

3' The remark to De Ruggiero, made in private conversation, was reported by the latter in the January 28, 1919 edition of II Tempo and has been reprinted in his Scritti politici, ed. R. De Felice (Bologna: Cappelli, 1963), p. 196. For Croce's 1923 profession of liberalism, see PS, 2: 373, and CVM, p. 245. For its "degeneration," see his letter to Sebastiano Timpanaro (June 5, 1923), now in Epistolario, 1: 100-101. The characterization of liberalism's return as "ineluctable" may be found at PS, 2: 379.

38 PS, 2: 375-76. 3 The three interviews -the first and third for the Giornale d'Italia (October

27, 1923 and July 1924), the second for the Corriere italiano (February 1, 1924)-are now in PS, 2: 371-73, 374-76, and 376-79.


224 Adamson

the state without authority is not a state." It is "the sentiment of the nation's salvation, of the salvation of the state." It is not so far from liberalism which, since it is not democratic, also supports a "healthy state." It is capable of "giving tone and vigor to Italian political life." Yet it is not really a new and fully developed ideology or political design. Thus, it cannot be expected to shape a new state and will mark only "a transition toward the restoration of a more severe liberal regime."

Croce's claim about the inadequacy of fascism as ideology offers perhaps the best clue to the deeper levels of his political thinking in 1922-24 and thus an appropriate point of departure for explaining how he came to a set of views he would himself wholly reject in a few months. Again in his second interview, Croce makes an aside which strikingly recalls the "death of ideology" thesis of 1911: "From ideology comes the utopian part of every political movement, that which becomes eliminated in the movement itself. In the course of the nineteenth century, there were often longing glances back at the past, fond dreams of restoration traceable to dangers prior to liberalism: theocracy, medieval kingdoms, communal laws, renovated feudal aristocracies, absolute monarchies like that of Louis XIV, and the like. What hasn't been lamented and ideologized? Well, none of it was ever realized." In context, this remark clearly indicates Croce's sense both of the danger of would-be ideologies -Marxist socialism especially-and the futility of all attempted political resolutions based on ideological designs. Fascism is only nationalism and power politics in somewhat disagreeable garb; liberalism will be the same thing in more moderate guise.

Thus Croce's perception of the death of ideology makes it easier for him to accept a fascist gamble. And he is further encouraged in this by his theoretical view of politics as the "economic moment" of practice, and of the "state as force." If all politics is only utility and not morality, then it becomes relatively easy to treat fascism's more disagreeable features as necessary aspects of politics per se. And its one agreeable feature that it is really only a version of nationalism and therefore an aid in restoring a "strong faith" can be accepted without taking its specific ideological pronouncements very seriously.

Moreover, Croce was clearly encouraged in his gamble by the many liberals he saw taking the same road. Prior to the Matteotti murder, among prominent liberals only Piero Gobetti, who had associated with Gramsci and was as much social reformer as liberal, was unequivocably opposed to fascism. And the dominant view on both sides of the barricades was that Italy had become politically polarized between parliamentary liberalism and nonparliamentary socialism; fascism was not to be taken with equal seriousness. Thus the Communist Amadeo Bordiga regarded liberalism and not fascism as the real danger, while liberals like Giolitti


Benedetto Croce 225

took it to be socialism or communism rather than fascism. Indeed, since Giolitti also did not support the Aventine parliament, Croce might have appeared to have been simply following Giolitti's lead.40

Recent scholarship has dealt with several intellectuals in the interwar period who gambled on fascism because, though they came from nonparty backgrounds, they wanted to be engage', yet detested socialism and communism for what they perceived as their shallow materialism and simplistic mass appeal.4" Croce made the same gamble, and for many of the same reasons, yet he was never for a moment fully committed to fascism nor did he have any desire to be engage'. Later he would suggest that his mistake had resulted from a "facile optimism and insufficient political foresight."42 Yet if his belief that fascism would remain moderate and ultimately conducive to the return of a revivified liberalism was overly optimistic and lacking in foresight, it is also true that his support for fascism emanated from a deep political pessimism, one which perceived a loss of direction in a world where nineteenth-century ideologies had ceased to make any sense. And it is the pessimism that is more significant. For Croce's pessimism will continue to undermine his efforts at a new political faith long after his "facile optimism" had been recognized and corrected.

III Early in 1925, after Mussolini's assumption of dictatorial powers, Croce penned a blistering attack on fascism, directed specifically against those intellectuals like Gentile who continued to work and write on its behalf.43 With this attack, Croce moved decisively into the opposition camp, though he continued to entertain the illusion well into 1926 that fascism might yet serve liberal purposes. There have always been some, however, who have questioned the depth of his antifascist commitment. As Salvemini put it: "Croce's 'no' always remained a quietistic 'no'; it never became an activist 'no' which risks bread, liberty, and even life." Yet Croce's

40 For Bordiga, see his Scritti scelti, ed. F. Livorsi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), pp. 163-71; and Franco Livorsi, Amadeo Bordiga: Il pensiero e l'azione politica, 1912-1970 (Rome: Riuniti, 1977), pp. 198-224. For Giolitti, see Giolitti e il fascismo, ed. G. de Rosa (Rome: Edizioni di storia a letteratura, 1957).

41 Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu La Rochelle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); David L. Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), who deals with Robert Bras- illach; and Frank Field, Three French Writers and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), who deals both with Drieu La Rochelle and Georges Bernanos.

42 PS, 2: 371, n. 1. 43 Croce replied on May 1, 1925 to the "Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals"

of April 21; see PS, 2: 380-83.


226 Adamson

example did influence a whole generation of Italian youth in the direction of the antifascist resistenza.44

More interesting, in my judgment, than the question of how deep Croce's antifascist liberalism went, is how difficult it was for him to square his new antifascist liberalism with the previous evolution of his philosophy about politics. Croce, as we have seen, began as a socialist. By 1911 he had rejected it in a general disillusionment with all political ideologies or "faiths" which had their sources in the rationalist-jacobin- democratic tradition broadly conceived. So he turned toward nationalism and, finally, under Giolitti's influence, to a nationalism tempered by the conservative liberalism which he believed had been vindicated by the war. Once fascism had shown not only that it was no longer in any way consistent with liberalism, but also that it represented a far more virulent nationalism than Croce had ever defended, he had thrown that over, too. Yet now that fascism had appropriated the nationalist "strong faith" for its camp, Croce was reduced to a defense of liberalism.

A strange itinerary. When Croce's liberalism began in full force he was nearly sixty. He had never had a mentor or intellectual influence from the liberal camp and had firmly rejected the doctrines that had previously been used as liberalism's philosophical underpinnings: the theories of natural law and utilitarianism. Both were too deeply rooted in the eighteenth-century rationalist and materialist traditions that Croce had always rejected.45 About the only liberal principle to which he had been committed for his entire life was the one which grounded his own activity as an intellectual: the independence of culture from manipulation by politics and the concomitant responsibility of "men of culture" to act as the nation's moral conscience, particularly in times of crisis.46

Not surprisingly, then, there were serious tensions between the purposes Croce wanted his antifascist liberalism to serve and the thrust of his previously developed ideas about politics, theory, and practice. To carry weight, he apparently felt his liberalism needed an anchoring not only in his philosophy of practice but in theory; his had none. To be consistent with his death of ideology thesis, he had to show not only that liberalism clearly fell outside the rationalist tradition he opposed, but also that it

4 For the persistence of Croce's illusions, see his letter to Roberto, Bracco (August 16, 1926), now in Epistolario, 1: 131-32; for Salvemini's statement, see his "La politica di Benedetto Croce," Il Ponte 10 (November 1954): 1741- 42; for evidence of Croce's antifascist influence, see Piero Calamandrei, "Ben- edetto Croce," in Uomini e cittd della resistenza (Bari: Laterza, 1955), p. 121. Calamandrei, a liberal, was editor of II Ponte after the war.

45 For early critiques, see the Filosofia della pratica, pp. 336-40, 383. 46 See Norberto Bobbio, "Croce e la politica della cultura," in Politica e

cultura, pp. 100-120.


Benedetto Croce 227

was a ''strong faith" entailing deep emotional and spiritual commitments. And to wage a critique of fascist politics on the basis of liberal principles, he had to show why the separation of politics and ethics, which his theory of the degrees of spirit had led him to posit for the world of practice, did not also imply that the fascists as political actors were free of ethical responsibility.

Prior to 1912 Croce had fully separated theory and practice, as well as the philosophy of practice from practice itself. The latter was in turn subdivided into "faith" and "program"; though concerned with socialism as faith, he did not give any significant attention to it as program. In his nationalist period this remained largely true, though then he made some connections between his nationalist faith and his philosophy of practice. The central one was his idea of the "state as force," which was both an aspect of his nationalism and connected to his philosophy of practice through the concept of the autonomy of politics. With this new liberalism, however, Croce forged a link not only between faith and philosophy of practice but also between faith and theory.

One can only speculate about his reasons for this departure. Clearly, however, liberalism was not so obviously a strong faith as nationalism, and he very likely realized that it needed more external supports than nationalism had. From his 1911 point of view, of course, to connect a liberal faith with theory did involve the risk that it would become infected by rationalism just as socialism had. That Croce was prepared to take this risk may reflect his recognition that he had no other choice: as long as he was stuck with liberalism, he might as well give it the strongest possible basis. But he appears to have had some confidence that his theory, which was after all nothing other than "real" history-rather than the "philosophy of history" of the Marxists or the natural-law rationalism or utilitarianism of earlier liberals -would be adequately in- oculated against materialist infection.

We see this confidence already in 1923, in one of Croce's first articles that reflected positively about liberalism:

The idealistic theory of reality and history, because it is dialectical, is liberal, and recognizes, given the necessity of struggle, the legitimacy and the necessity of all the many diverse parties and men. This theory excludes, as theory, the various other opposed theories, for example, the Catholic one and the democratic, socialist, or communist one, which both base themselves on a history, which is not history itself but a transcendental ideal, a paradise in heaven or on earth. . . . But the dialectical or liberal theory of history, though it combats the diverse and opposed theories . . . as theories, does not combat them as parties, or rather as political facts, but rather in this regard embraces them. . . . It even embraces . . . the so-called liberal party, as a party among parties. . . .

4 CVM, p. 245.


228 Adamson

In addition to its connection between liberalism and a theory of history, this statement indicates another element that Croce will use in fashioning his liberalism. To separate liberalism from ideology, he will make it clear that liberalism bears no connection with socialism or democracy but is rather their antithesis. Moreover, liberalism will be separated from ideology because it had nothing to do with parties or programs including "the so-called liberal" ones; it is what Croce will later term a "meta- political" doctrine, "a religion of liberty," in other words, a purported "strong faith," a spiritual ideal exacting emotional commitment. What is missing in this statement is only some attempt to deal with the problem of the relation of politics and ethics, but this is not yet a problem for Croce since his liberalism is not yet an antifascism.

To see how Croce sought to use history as a theoretical ground for liberalism, we may begin with his 1925 critique of the "Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals." Here the connection, barely revealed in 1923, between the high values liberalism places on "rivalry and competition," diversity and struggle, and its fundamentally historical character, emerges openly. The fascist intellectuals are accused "of doctrinal confusions and unclear reasoning: as when they equate the atomism of certain con- structions of eighteenth-century political science with the liberalism of the nineteenth century, which is to say, anti-historical and abstract-math- ematical democratic thought with the extremely historical conception of liberal competition and the alternation of parties in power, where, thanks to opposition, progress gradually occurs....948

The innovation which this connection represents for Croce is clear when we glance back at the Teoria e storia della storiografia. There he had not been concerned with establishing any relation between history and politics. His focus had been on establishing the epistemological identity of history and philosophy. Philosophy is only history, he had contended, since there exists neither a transcendent realm nor a fixed order of nature upon which a perennis philosophia or closed system might be based. And history is only the record of concrete human action. As such it represents a gradual movement toward "truth" (even if "definite" or "final truth" never arrives) since every historical act is productive in its own way and amounts to an immanently derived manifestation of "progress." Yet the progressive revelation of "truth" is not "liberty." On the contrary, if anything, Croce's conception implied a confidence in ruling classes and thus a quiescent acceptance of the status quo.49 It

48 PS, 2: 381. 49 Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1963), pp. 52-54,

68, 77-80. "History never metes out justice but always justifies." See also Filosofia della pratica, pp. 65-66.


Benedetto Croce 229

is a measure of the change in his politics that, in 1925, we see the connection drawn, not between history and the emergence of philosophical "truth," but between history and the emergence of "liberty," the "negative liberty" of the nineteenth-century liberals.

The fullest statement of this new conception of "history as the story of liberty" is, of course, the book, given that title in its English translation, which appeared in 1938 as La storia come pensiero e come azione. Here Croce distinguishes between "historiography," which "liberates us from lived life," and "lived history" or "new history" in which we have the "potentiality for action." This potentiality, he says, is "animated by the principle of liberty." By liberty he means "activity or spirituality"-the basis of real creativity. "A forced creation, a mechanical creation, creation on command, or in chains, has never been tried nor can it be imagined." Thus all history is action, real creation, and in that sense "progress." Even if we can and do speak of "decadence" in a cultural sense, strictly speaking it does not exist. It is possible, he says, that "progress" may only be "an ever higher and more complex form of human suffering," but it is nonetheless real since, so long as "new history" continues, there will be a development toward greater complexity and variety. Lib- eralism is simply the political outlook based on the recognition of this fact. Liberty is the "moral ideal of humanity," and liberalism carries it forward.50

Except for its connection to liberalism at the end, this conception of history is likely to remind us of nothing so much as a Hegelian cunning of reason. Yet Croce denies this repeatedly and vigorously: the "Hegelian conception has not only been philosophically refuted by the critics [for its false transcendence], but completely shattered and crushed by actual history, which in the course of a century has gone beyond all the Hegelian end-points. . . ."Sl In seeking to rid his conception of history of any hint of a providential design or definite outcome, however, Croce, it seems, has succeeded in establishing only a simple tautology: history is liberty because it is active creation. As such it can do little to ground liberalism or any other political doctrine. Indeed it would seem to be equally good (or bad) as a ground for all political doctrines, since there is none which does not seek to engage in some form of active creation. Hegel and Marx

5 Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione (Bari: Laterza, 1952), pp. 37, 38, 39, 48-50, 223.

51 Ibid., pp. 40-41. It is not without reason, then, that many critics, particularly in the Anglo-American community, call attention to the quasi-Hegelian character of Croce's argument despite his own denials. See, for example, Denis Mack Smith, "Benedetto Croce: History and Politics," in Historians in Politics, ed. Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse (London and Beverly Hills: Sage Publi- cations, 1974), pp. 149, 151, 153.


230 Adamson

may have been wrong, but their conceptions of history carried far more political weight.

Having rejected nature and utility, Croce had turned to history to anchor his liberalism; but having also rejected any "philosophy of history," any totalizing conception which failed to grant proper weight to historical particulars, his history was too philosophically anemic to anchor anything. In this respect, his early rejection of Marxism as ideology and philosophy of history might be said to have returned to haunt his own later attempt at liberalism.

Yet Croce did have what for him were good historical reasons for believing in liberalism, ones which came to him from the study of that "actual history" which he thought had destroyed Hegelianism and Marx- ism. For these the central text is the History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Readers who pick up this book expecting a conventional history are likely to be quite surprised. The first three chapters move forward seemingly without "facts," and in a manner much closer to epic poetry than to history. As the general argument of the book emerges, it is clear that Croce's purpose is not simply to reconstruct the nineteenth-century past but to use that past as a way of offering an apology for liberalism. The book ends with a plea to "work according to the line that is here laid down for you, with your whole self, every day, every hour, in your every act." Yet the apology and the plea, if full of high-minded passion and nostalgia for the reverence in which the "religion of liberty" was once held, seem to be full of doubts about its future. Liberalism, we are told, in a way which recalls the analysis of 1911, suffered a setback, if not a death, in 1870. The combination of the Bismarckian state, "perfect in its mechanism and in its administrative work" but empty of real human content, and the new science, which "discredited" all the earlier philosophical "ideas and ideals," was a recipe for disaster. The ideal of liberty held on in spite of great self-doubts until the crisis of the First World War, but now, Croce concedes, it too "has fallen from the minds of men even where it has not fallen from their institutions.""2 Unfortu- nately, in such a historical context, a plea to "work hard" to save liberty is bound to sound utopian if not empty. Even if we accept Croce's romantic characterization of pre-1870 liberalism, we are apt to wonder how it can possibly revive itself.

These considerations, if near fatal for the historical underpinnings of Croce's liberalism, did encourage him to stress again and again both the death of ideology thesis and the dangers this death represented. Thus,

52 Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, trans. H. Furst (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), pp. 362, 255, 258, 352.


Benedetto Croce 231

as Croce wrote in 1939, ours "is not a crisis of a particular ideal (like that of the ancient polis with respect to the Empire, or that of the feudal order with respect to absolute monarchy, and so forth) but a crisis of ideals as such. . . ."After 1870, the spirits of Bismarck and Marx had "conspired to discredit the ideal of liberty" and to found a purely "material and economic way of life." It follows that liberalism has not been the only casualty. And given that its pre-1870 history shows it to have been a "strong faith," it does offer the hope of a human alternative to the Bismarckian state in which the rationalist tradition has unwittingly culminated. "Human society," Croce reminds us, "has passed through other periods of moral weariness and choking materialism, and has always emerged from them through a spontaneous rekindling of enthusiasm and ideals, a reblooming of spiritual springtime. ..." 53

However, to sustain the hope of a springtime in which a hundred liberal flowers bloom, Croce's liberalism must fall clearly outside the rationalist- democratic tradition and be developed as a "new religious faith for humanity or for the civilized peoples. . . . In practice, this meant not only that he had to reject liberal democracy, but also that he had to write entirely at the level of principles rather than with specific programs or sets of institutional arrangements in view. Both requirements, unfortu- nately, become restrictions which very much undercut the degree of realism and specificity that the doctrine can have. To insist on liberalism without democracy in the mid-twentieth century has a definite air of unreality; to write without reference to programs and institutions is to risk being accused of impossible vagueness, if not worse.55

Croce had to reject liberal democracy, he thought, because democracy and liberalism were antithetical and, as opposing "religious faiths," irreconcilably So. 5 One cannot mix religious faiths without seeing one ultimately destroy the other, and, in the present political climate, he had no doubt which would be the victor and which destroyed. At the same time, liberalism had to be kept strictly separate from any program or institutional arrangement-free trade "liberismo" for example57-because to allow liberalism to become identified with any political program would

5 Croce, "Principio, ideale e teoria della liberta," in Filosofia, poesia, storia, ed. A. Gerbi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1955), pp. 627-28.

Ibid., p. 627. 5 Italian liberals in the 1950s sensed these limitations in Croce's liberalism

and accused him of being partly to blame for "the sterility of the [post-World War II] years of reconstruction." See Bobbio, Politica e cultura, p. 246.

56 Croce, History of Europe, p. 31. 57 See the contrast between Croce and Luigi Einaudi on this point in the volume

aptly entitled Liberismo e liberalismo, ed. P. Solari (Milan: Ricciardi, 1957).


232 Adamson

be to risk infection by Bismarck's Disease in which all programs become reduced to the status of alternate means for achieving the ends of materialism. To keep liberalism free from the taint of materialism, it must be identified not as a program but as a "concept of life."58 Moreover, strictly speaking, according to Croce, one cannot develop a program theoretically; programs are aspects of practice and, as such, derive not from thought but from volition. "The mind of the practical, political man takes up an attitude essentially of 'faith.' " His action is based on a volition itself governed loosely by this faith, but it is never "the translation or application of a ready-made program." 59

These inadequacies of unreality and unspecificity which Croce's liberalism harbored because of his "death of ideology" analysis proved especially grave in the postwar period after fascism's defeat. Earlier, in the period of fascism, his liberalism's gravest problem was something very different: its inability to offer a full ethical critique of fascism and still remain true to its own theoretical underpinnings. To see why this is the case, we must return to Croce's conception of the two moments of practice and his resulting conception of the relation of politics and ethics.

Sartori has written that "the economic-political Croce of the 1896- 1924 period is above all intent on saving politics from ethics . . ., while the liberal-moralist Croce of the succeeding period is wholly intent on saving ethics from politics."60 Yet this difference, as Sartori recognizes very well, is a tactical move from advocacy to defense without any well- articulated theoretical change in the politics-ethics relation. As we have noted, Croce insisted in Pagine sulla guerra (1915-16) that politics and ethics were distinct moments of practice. The logic of their relation is an instance of the general theory of degrees of spirit; as such this relation is one of "distinction-unity." Politics as the "lower" and "pre-moral" moment is wholly distinct (autonomous) from the ethical; but the ethical moment is "higher" and thus not "pre-" but "supra-political." From its perspective there is a "unity" of the two moments in that the higher subsumes the lower. Sartori's claim otherwise stated is that the late Croce stressed this unity, while the earlier Croce had stressed the distinction-politics as autonomous science.

Yet what does it mean to say that the ethical is the "higher" moment which subsumes the two? For the early Croce it meant that while there may be (often will be) political action which is not moral, there cannot

58 EP, pp. 291-300. 59 Croce, La storia, pp. 172-73. 60 Sartori, pp. 51-52. Sartori's analysis has very much influenced my own

account below of the ethics-politics relation in Croce.


Benedetto Croce 233

be ethical action which is not also political (i.e., useful or economical). One is never violating one's interest by acting ethically even if one must often ignore strictly ethical duty in acting politically.6" The point then is to uphold the primacy of the ethical in order to provide a single consistent orientation for individual action, which must of necessity reconcile con- traries. Yet the early Croce explicitly denied that morality can regulate or impose its standards on the economic-political world.62 For the late Croce, this restriction becomes an annoying obstacle. While he refuses to give up his political realism, and in particular the doctrine of the autonomy of politics, he also senses and fears the power of contemporary politics to erode any and all ethical bearings. He turns therefore from a concern with grasping the hierarchy of spheres which governs the practical action of individuals to a concern with gaining leverage for ethics as a whole over the collective world of politics.

A good example of Croce's effort to make this turn is his 1928 essay, "International Justice."63 In view of his earlier opposition to the League of Nations and to Wilson's brand of idealist internationalism in general, one is prepared for another defense of realism, and this is indeed the note upon which he begins. A man who holds political office, whatever his personal ethics or beliefs, must "act solely on the basis of the state's welfare, with which he is wholly identified in that act." Consequently, "to seek the solution of the moral problems of mankind by perverting the State and politics from their true nature is an error of logic... Yet Croce does not then go on to oppose efforts at moralizing states by building supranational legal institutions. "Mankind," he declares, "has not renounced its yearning and its demand for a more just, moderate, and civilized world," a world without war and with human rights, a world composed of "ethical States" or "States of culture." And mankind is perfectly correct to seek such ends. If the principles of political realism were to contradict them, he says, it would be "so much the worse for them [the principles]," for they would only be "exposing their falsehood." Yet realist principles are "reconcilable" with these larger ethical desires. Poetry, he maintains, is completely distinct from philosophy, yet philosophy exerts a "perpetual influence on poetry, knocking at its door and being welcomed by it." And "just as the poet, who knows only states of mind and not philosophical concepts, finds his states of mind pervaded with new thought, so the politician, who knows only interests and utility, finds himself among new interests and a new utility which have arisen from new moral needs, needs which he cannot evade and

61 Croce, Filosofia della pratica, p. 238. 62 Ibid., p. 247. 63 EP, pp. 353-57.


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with which he must reckon. He must accept the new material along with the old-and in the same way that he accepted the old-and he must give them both political form." If ethics, which remains wholly distinct from politics, translates its "yearnings" and "demands" into interests that politicians can understand, then they are as valid as any other set of interests and must be taken into proper account.

Croce's effort to perform yet another dialectical high-wire act is im- pressive, but the problems with it are obvious. In the first place, it is not at all clear that the analogy he draws between the poet and the politician leads to the conclusion he seeks to obtain. For, even on his own account, the poet who finds "new thought" pervading his art is perfectly able to attempt to free himself from it, or, if it has arrived there unconsciously, he is certainly under no obligation to acknowledge it. Why then should the politician be obliged to take the new moral interests into account and even to give them "political form"? And this leads to the still more troubling question of what actually remains of the autonomy of politics when the politician is obliged to take morality, in whatever form, into account. Of course, Croce's language intimates the possibility that his formulation has become contradictory. But if this is so, then his entire philosophy of politics is in need of some new form of architecture other than the theory of degrees.

Gramsci, who considered himself a follower of Croce (albeit a critical one), thought he had an answer to the problem of how to conceive the relationship of ethics and politics .64 His move, in essence, was to historicize the relationship along Marxist lines; the result is what has come to be known as his theory of hegemony. Like Croce, Gramsci separated the moments of "politics" and "ethics," or as he also referred to them, of "force" and "consent," "domination" and "hegemony," "state" and "civil society." Yet, unlike Croce, Gramsci treated politics and ethics, or state (i.e., government) and civil society as aspects of a whole which he termed "state" in a broader sense. This state, he argued, has been undergoing continual evolution as part of the general logic of historical development. In the bourgeois form of this state, politics and ethics were strictly separate; while a bourgeois government might use consensual means as a way of increasing or protecting its power, such means were never truly ethical, that is, based on the rational acceptance of a fully self-conscious ("hegemonic") working class. Once that "hegemony" has been achieved, the bourgeois state will sooner or later pass away,

64 For a fuller treatment of this theory, see my Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), chaps. 5-6.


Benedetto Croce 235

and the resulting proletarian state will become a "regulated society" in which politics and ethics will be so fully reconciled and harmonized that they will disappear as separate moments.

Croce, however, could never entertain such a historicist solution. However much fascism might have tempted him to adopt one, his distance from necessary Marxist premises, like classes as leading historical actors and the proletariat as the "universal" class, was simply too great. And, of course, in the most important sense he was correct. Gramsci's historicism ultimated foundered, in large part because his concept of the proletariat as the leading and universal class proved to be only a "faith" (as Croce suspected), and one which was never historically realized. Yet this contrast between Gramsci and Croce brings us to the heart of Croce's political thought, to its central antimony. On the one hand, he felt the need to uphold some larger world view or "faith" attached to a set of theoretical principles which could offer hope and direction. On the other hand, he believed not only that contemporary "materialist" civilization was inherently antagonistic to any political world view or ideology other than its own vulgar rationalist one, but also that it had rendered suspect and nonserviceable all the tools of the traditional ideologies like philosophies of history, appeals to purely spiritual commitments, and any idea of social reform for an end other than that of producing greater wealth. Like his conception of history,65 then, Croce's politics are necessarily ironic-a restless movement from ideology to ideology in full knowledge that the modern world rejects them all.

Thus the consequences for Croce of his 1911 discoveries were very grave. These discoveries meant his rejection of socialism and his recognition of the antispiritual consequences of any politics of social reform; they led him to nationalism and made him vulnerable for a time to a misplaced trust in fascism; and they were responsible for some of the central weaknesses in his late philosophy of liberalism. Yet, to balance the essentially negative thrust of this essay, one must also recognize that Croce had his finger on the most profound development of twentieth- century politics. We are today familiar with many versions of the thesis that the dominant form of organization in the most advanced nations has become the "technological society." This is a society so wholly governed by the logic of techne that praxis is largely reduced to administration and, insofar as this is not the case, involves little more than selecting the means to keeping technology moving forward or, less optimistically, keeping technological complexity under control. Despite his endorsement

65 See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), chap. 10.


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of something close to (and arguably more subtle than) the "end of ideology" thesis now sometimes associated with that of the "technological" or "post-industrial" society, Croce did not foresee the technological society and thus did not grasp the "death of ideology" thesis as the reflection in thought of its rise. If he had, he would not have fallen back on the cyclical historical explanation implicit in his view that we may still hope for a spiritual springtime to follow the winter of our materialist discontent. But, like .Weber and Thomas Mann in Germany, he did see that European civilization after the First World War was in the throes of a crisis so profound as to call into question the entire modern project. Like them too, he responded by moving from a nonliberal past toward a politics of toleration, flexibility, and the search for stability around some form of a liberal political principle. But Croce lived three decades longer than Weber and, however conflicted he was about politics, he was much more the political thinker than Mann. His politics are perhaps the most significant bridge we have between our world, which Croce never fully knew, and the older one of vibrant ideologies persuasive to many, which Croce did know we had lost.


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Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 191-387Front Matter [pp. ]State-Building in Early Modern France: The Role of Royal Officialdom [pp. 191-207]Benedetto Croce and the Death of Ideology [pp. 208-236]The Impact of Russian Popular Theatre, 1886-1915 [pp. 237-267]Review ArticleIlliberalism and Beyond: German History in

Croce Death of Ideology

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