Books: Cultural Amnesia — Benedetto Croce | clivejames.com
Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) was the philosopher of twentieth-century Italy. One says “the” philosopher because nobody else came close, and even those intellectuals who disagreed with him most violently—Giovanni Gentile, who pledged allegiance to Fascism, was one of them—were obliged to take account of what he said. A practising politician as well as a political theorist, Croce was impressed by Mussolini in the beginning but soon saw the threat to liberalism. He went into internal exile and continued with his writing. After the war Croce was offered the presidency of Italy but declined, although in other respects he was crucial to the rebuilding of the country’s liberal institutions. Lending him almost irresistible force as a thinker was the riverine flow and clarity of his prose style, fully equal to Shaw at his best, but without the paradoxes. Unfortunately no comparable stylist ever tried to translate him, and although some of his central works were brought over into English, they ne