Introduction
“The problem consists in this: that our doctrine necessitates a new criticism of the sources of history” declared the Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola in his acclaimed Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire of 1897.[1] Labriola was the “most faithful interpreter of Marxist thought” and the “most profound of Italy’s socialist thinkers” according to Benito Mussolini himself, and his Essais referenced a source deeper than historical documents.[2] Labriola alluded to an “immediate source” behind documents proper, an “economic processus,” which qualified social existence across history.[3] That “processus” was the social “production of the immediate means of subsistence” – or the “basis of all history” according to Karl Marx’s materialist method, and a paradigm that largely emerged in Italy because of Labriola himself.[4] Even prior to formal organizations like the Italian Socialist Party and the Critica sociale, Labriola envisaged an Italian Worker’s Party rooted in the historical conclusions of Marx’s “objective theory of social revolution” and therefore “aware of its own destiny.”[5] Yet, after the dramatic rise of socialist politics across the nation only a decade later, rather than citing socialist activism or national changes in political sentiment, Labriola’s Essais focused the core of change on the “immanent necessity of history.”[6]
Labriola’s essentialist and teleological concept of history was not novel. Many of Europe’s most significant theorists of the period – George Hegel, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer – had advanced “universal” histories from “pure being” to the “absolute idea,” from primitive society to communist revolution, or from the cosmos to modern society at large.[7] To be sure, in large part due to the exclusivity of these paradigms themselves, Labriola’s thought has been interpreted principally in the canon of global Marxism, albeit at a peripheral level, rather than historical thought generally. This is especially because of Essais’ positive reception by legendary Marxists like Friedrich Engels,[8] George Sorel,[9] Leon Trotsky,[10] and Antonio Gramsci.[11] However, this has equally led to neglect over Labriola’s importance in focusing larger questions of historical development and historicity for Italy’s most important theorists of the period, most notably Benedetto Croce and Mussolini’s own “philosopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gentile. Indeed, the international neglect of Italian social theory has only exacerbated things.[12] A great deal of modern Italian thought is relegated to “ideology” in a largely political or outright superficial sense, which in historiography of fascism until the late twentieth century, meant abandonment by the insistence that Italian fascists did not have a coherent ideological code.[13] Nonetheless, the questions that Labriola raised in Essais, as well as its marked national success, reflected far more than the rise of Italian Marxist thought, socialist politics, or even Italian “ideologies” of radical revolutionism. As I shall argue, it reflected a larger rising culture of Italian historical theories – theories concerning the nature of historical development and processual change, of historical knowledge and representation, and of radical historicity and national consciousness.
Labriola’s Essais was a major work in a greater revival of Italian historical thought around the turn of the nineteenth century. In large part inspired by international theorists, abstract concepts of history erupted in Italy as evolutionists, Marxists, and Hegelians articulated and defended their rival claims to a true “science” of history. This theoretical culture shared many parallels with the German historical Enlightenment decades earlier, which birthed a school of thought committed to radical historicity and opposed to French and English empiricism.[14] However, unlike the German Enlightenment, Italian intellectuals centered historical thought across materialist, Idealist, and even positivist fault lines.[15] The outcome was a larger historicist “culture” across disciplinary boundaries, albeit highly divided over which theory truly represented experience and knowledge. Nonetheless, the process by which rival schools and disciplines came to focus history is highly reminiscent of its German predecessor: Italian social evolutionists, Marxists, and Hegelians increasingly debated the abstract laws, logic, and trajectory of history – at least, until questions of historical determination and radical historicity came to dominate theory. It was the economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, for example, who based his whole “scientific” enterprise on the pursuit of uniform “laws” of reality – a judgement that made him come to view history as cyclic. The historicist philosopher Benedetto Croce, meanwhile, imagined history as the very “logic” of life itself. These intellectuals focused history at the heart of theory, and fostered the rise of a unique culture of Italian historicist thought.
To be sure, the nation’s turbulent environment – from mass emigration, the banking collapse, and the rise of socialist politics – contributed to broad concerns over the significance and directionality of history. After Charles Darwin’s critical blow to concepts of divine history and historical providence, the belief that the past revealed the “successive manifestation of the living Word of God,” as the Risorgimento leader Giuseppe Mazzini professed decades earlier, gave way to a surge of secular interpretations into the nature and telosof history. [16] Luckily, Italians could draw inspiration from their tradition notions of universal history and absolute subsistence from philosophers like Giambattista Vico, Giordano Bruno, and the Neapolitan Hegelians that taught the next generation. The nation’s theoretical turn to history, therefore, must be examined in light of intellectual debates, philosophical legacies, and the larger national anxieties that defined its unique character. It was this backdrop that led Italian intellectuals to focus their national historicity – for out of their turbulent context, theorists widely turned to the past for answers. If they could comprehend history in its full logic, they could understand their national turmoil, understand themselves as a nation, and perhaps, even direct history to a “renewed” Italy.
Historiography of Italian Historicism
The subject of Italian historicism has not been ignored by scholars. The fascist period is defined by the widespread appeals to a mythic national past, or in the words of George Mosse, the “cult of the Roman past.”[17] These depictions have a longer historiographical story, but only recently have they gathered into fully thematic monographs on fascists’ historicist culture, like Claudio Fogu’s seminal The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (2003). Indeed, Fogu outright posits the “formation of a collective historic imaginary… was at the root of fascism’s mass appeal.”[18] Still, The Historic Imaginary and other recent works have primarily focused aesthetic and religious-ritual aspects of “fascist history making,” from the mass commemorations of the March on Rome to the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution.[19] This is inspired by Emilio Gentile’s The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (1993), and has brought needed cultural analysis into the centrality of aesthetic appeals.[20] At the same time, these cultural symbols necessitate insight into the national significance of historical knowing – even Roman monuments that aesthetically “made the past present” across Italy required an interpretational allure to establish mass consensus. However, the substance of that conceptual resonance has been concentrated in Risorgimento discourses, meaning that the success of Roman “monuments of memory” reflected already historically established national beliefs of a “parental-genealogical” connection to the ancient past.[21] In this paradigm, Italian “liturgies of memory,” family-lineage discourses, and historical appeals are overwhelmingly conceived as nationalist, cultural vestiges invented during the Risorgimento.[22]
According to Alberto Banti’s pathbreaking The Nation and the Risorgimento, a “bond of historical memory” connected different generations across early Italy.[23] Banti is inspired by Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities, and writes on the origins of Italian national identity as a “community of kinship and descent, endowed with its own genealogy and its own specific historicity.”[24] Appeals to “blood” and “lineage” held weight because they “connote the links that bind people to the community.”[25] The Risorgimento consciousness predominantly uses history to “presage an event” or connote a genealogical link according to Banti, however, and doesn’t exhibit a clear “morphological” character.[26] However, these same cultural codes reappear in Italian fascism – Banti observes age-old “blood, descent, and genealogy” discourses animating their historicist problematics.[27] Yet, in the process, Banti neglects the vibrant culture of historicist thought that emerged during the 1890s in Italy. He assumes Mussolini and Gentile’s emphasis in The Doctrine of Fascism, that fascism was a “doctrine arising from a given system of historical forces in which it is inserted, and working on them from within,” merely reflected nationalist appeals to historicity, rather than the distinct Marxian and Hegelian concepts that structured those “forces,” or their conscious exploit by the fascist doctrine.[28] As I shall argue, the larger historical resonance and distinct historical conceptions by fascists were not simply unbroken survivals from Risorgimento nationalists, but resulted from a novel order of historical thought in the Giolittian Era.
As the Risorgimento reached its apogee and the nascent nation was now culturally tasked with “making Italians,” a small but notable cohort of Italian philosophers particularly embraced historicist problematics to articulate and substantiate their national identity. The story is important for Italian theory, but like Labriola, is largely neglected in international historiography.[29] In 1861, the chair of philosophy at the University of Naples, Bertrando Spaventa, urged Italians to seek their national identity in light of Italy’s philosophical history. As Spaventa argued, “philosophy is the final and clearest expression of the life of a people,” and it contained “all the previous moments of the spirit.”[30] Spaventa’s Hegelian colleague at the university, and one of the most important translators of Hegel in Europe, Augusto Vera, similarly argued the “state, art, religion, science” all “enunciated and suppose[d] the unity of history, and the unity of history in the unity of the spirit.”[31] Vera continued, “each evolution of thought is like a mirror in which the past and the future are concentrated and reflected.”[32] Still, this historicist cohort of Unification Hegelians was hardly constitutive of a larger national tendency. Of course, the mythos of the “Risorgimento” itself conveyed temporal connotations, and Banti is correct to focus insistent appeals to common heritage in the Risorgimento “canon.”[33] However, the rise of a unique fascist conception of history was a development of the 1890s and 1900s – largely by intellectuals who assimilated historical theories from across Europe. While Neapolitan Hegelians were an early forerunner, it would be only in the decades following their brief success that a surge of Italian theorists across disciplines would unilaterally center the deeper laws and logic of history.
This essay begins in the 1890s because several highly popular historical theories converged during the moment. It was the pinnacle of Italian evolutionism, and the origins of socialist politics and Marxist theory in Italy. Labriola’s Essais was a crucial key to this development – he was directly a student of the Neapolitan Hegelians, and eventually became a friend and mentor of the young Benedetto Croce. It was this relationship that contributed to the Hegelian “rebirth” in Italy. Curiously, there was also a linearity to the story. A novel group of positivists accepted evolutionist and Marxist thought largely to advance the “scientific” nature of their disciplines, and to defeat the “metaphysical” and religious dogmas of old. However, their inflexible and rigid historical formulas of socialist revolution or social Darwinism were soon critiqued by a burgeoning cohort of Hegelians. In radical rejection of rigid historical determinations, these young Hegelians began to champion absolute historicity, and by the 1900s, claimed it as central to Italian national identity. This essay traces this story from evolutionists, Marxists, and then to the Hegelian revival. Finally, it concludes by reference to the broader legacy of Italian historicist thought for fascists.
The Meaning of History in Italian Thought
Italian Evolutionism and the Origins of History
The story of Charles Darwin’s investigations upon the H.M.S. Beagle is legendary. It was there that he collected facts that cast “light on the origin of species.”[34] Although Darwin’s On the Origins of Species (1859) was devoted to non-human animals, he speculated in the conclusion of the light yet to shine “on the origin of man and his history.”[35] Darwin clearly alluded to the extension of his evolutionary model to humans – a concept he would later explore in The Descent of Man (1871). Today, our idea of “evolution” does not immediately recall the social Darwinist conceptions that once dominated Europe and colonial projects globally – nor does it ordinarily relate to classical metaphysical “philosophies of history” so often associated with Hegel or Marx. What Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species definitely accomplished in Italy, however, was a determinate focus of theorists onto the abstract, secular nature of history.
Darwin’s Origins first reached Italy in translation in 1865 by the biologist Giovanni Canestrini and engineer Leonardo Salimbeni. It was immediately interpreted as teleological – translating “favored races” as “perfected races,” and concluding that “all the qualities of body and spirit will tend to progress towards perfection” by natural selection.[36] As the historian Andrew Robbins points out, this was likely an effort to negate the “indifference of natural selection” and therefore imbue historical development with purpose.[37] To be sure, Darwin was not the only source of evolutionary thought in Italy, and perhaps, not even the most popular. Herbert Spencer, the English sociologist who most famously extended evolution into the social domain and coined “survival of the fittest,” reached Italy in translation just two years after Darwin in 1867.[38] Spencer was an immediate hit: the first decade witnessed a total of 12 translations and reprints, followed by 23 in the subsequent decade, and a remarkable 27 the next.[39] Indeed, the historian Paolo Govoni explains the “Spencer Effect” in Italy that took off after his first translation, where scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, economists, and even educators such as the well-known Maria Montessori took broad interest in Spencer’s evolutionary theories.[40] By the 1900s, even Canestrini himself had differentiated evolution from Darwinism proper.[41]
It didn’t take long for evolutionary concepts to ignite discussions over the nature of historical change in Italy. The first promoter of Marxist thought in Italy, the economist and sociologist Achille Loria, thought that “[s]ocial evolution is regulated by a law which asserts itself with inflexible logic.”[42] Although Loria subscribed to Marx’s historical materialism, he integrated “evolution” extensively into his works, a maneuver unexpectedly common in Italy. In fact, Canestrini himself argued that socialism could defend against conservative forces that threatened to “regress” the nation backward on the evolutionary track. One article even appeared in the famous socialist journal Critica sociale titled, “Carlo Marx killed by Charles Darwin according to the opinion of one of our Darwinians” in 1892, and received a response from Filippo Turati himself, the founder of the Italian Socialist Party.[43] To be sure, many Italian Marxists readily embraced evolution for its secular, naturalistic viewpoint. Karl Marx had, in fact, applauded Darwin’s “natural-scientific basis” for his own theory of “class struggle in history.”[44] Italian positivists widely accepted evolution for similar reasons.[45] As the positivist sociologist Enrico Ferri claimed in Socialismo e scienza positiva (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) (1896), which received a scathing response from Spencer himself: Darwin and Spencer’s theories “lead inevitably to the negation of God.”[46] Ferri had declared his entrance into the “glorious positivist army” decades prior, and in Socialism e scienza positiva, he outright claimed that the “supreme law of nature” of “social Darwinism” led to the natural and “inevitable” socialist revolution.[47] According to Ferri, “scientific socialism” even predicted that historical development with “mathematical certainty.”
While positivists and socialists widely assimilated evolution into their own theories, Italian liberal economists confronted the concept in several unnamed articles in the Giornale degli economisti, in 1891, that claimed evolution was outright false. The author attacked the premise of economics as a discipline, especially if the only difference between a “cockroach and Michelangelo Buonarroti” was a graduated scale of intelligence.[48] They argued, if evolution was correct, economics would merely be natural history. According to the mysterious writer, the problem was the historical link in the process: there was a “hiatus” between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Those “missing” links of evolution, those hiatuses, were evident in differences of intelligence, conscious purpose, and music, the author claimed. [49] For them, the true force of humankind was the hedonistic thesis: humans sought to satisfy their most needs with the least effort.[50]
Indeed, “hedonism,” “egoism,” or what Vilfredo Pareto called homo economicus, were analytics that radicals and liberals widely connected to evolutionary thought. Generally, the concepts functioned as hermeneutics of human culture and nature, that according to Italian theorists, could one day wither away by “evolution.” As Achille Loria maintained in the preface to The Economic Foundations of Society (1899), his book’s success was due to revealing the “secret to the world” that “cupidity, narrow, mean egoism and class spirit ruled in our so-called democracies.”[51] Yet, this was, according to Loria, “merely the outcome of certain historical tendencies that are destined to disappear at a later stage of social evolution.”[52] In fact, Enrico Ferri thought that “anti-social egoism” was the most “highly developed” cultural fact under capitalism, and he imagined its “evolution” from “savage humanity to the less brutal egoism of the present epoch, and finally to the more fraternal egoism of the coming society.”[53] Even Maffeo Pantaleoni’s seminal marginalist Principii di economia pura (1889)detailed the “evolution” of egoism by natural selection.[54] Pantaleoni suggested, like radicals, that egoism of a species (or a sort of communalism) would likely persist over pure individualistic egoism.
At the same time, however, evolutionary theory faced severe criticism in Italy, and not only by sociologists and economists. Already in his Cours d’économie politique (1896-7), Vilfredo Pareto himself rejected that a “universal” process of natural selection completely accounted for social behavior.[55] Still, Pareto envisaged tracing the “uniformities” of evolutionary change to ultimately “predict the future from the past.” The philosopher Antonio Labriola agreed with Pareto’s rejection of evolution’s universality, and he warned against making hasty analogies between human and non-human animals out of the dramatic “hiatus” between them.[56] Above all, Labriola rejected the “imperative” and “fate” that Darwinists had made from survival of the fittest.[57] It was such dramatic levels of theory that Labriola claimed reduced the “infinite processes” of reality into one fantastic “Evolution.” Curiously, the unnamed author in the Giornale had also thought there were different “particular evolutions” that debunked the Spencerian model, which was nothing other than the “boundless exaggeration of a true, but not unlimited, principle.”[58] By 1898, the future president of Italy, Luigi Einaudi, mocked that there seemed to be a “new theory on the origins and evolution of society every month.”[59]
Benedetto Croce, like his friend and mentor Labriola, condemned evolution as an “empty and indeterminate generality” that, even if it only meant “reality evolves,” that is to say reality changes, was still a transcendent and irresistible force that negated the historical, contingent nature of change in the first place.[60] Indeed, Croce’s uncle Bertrando Spaventa had similarly rejected a singular “evolution”a decade earlier – one “evolution” necessitated a “previous evolution,” and then another, ad infinitum, until one arrived at an indeterminate “first base,” that is, Hegel’s pure being.[61] Another Idealist theorist, Giovanni Gentile, meanwhile scoffed at socialists like Ferri who attempted to integrate natural selection into their theories – for if socialist communalism could triumph over that “natural” law, it wasn’t truly a rigid “law” at all.[62] Gentile was scathing in his critiques of evolution, and he charged Darwin with the spread of realist and positivist thought in Europe, which he regarded as the “negation of all philosophy.”[63]
Italian Marxism and the Revolution of History
Where evolutionary thought drew Italian intellectuals into debates over the nature of historical change, the introduction of Karl Marx’s historical materialism would soon base radical implications upon the past. As Marx himself had written: the real “driving force of history” was not merely “apparitions” of the mind, of purely intellectual concepts – it was the “practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug.”[64] According to Marx, this very process was “revolution” itself. Indeed, he professed to have discovered the “real ground of history” in the “sum of productive forces” of a given historical and cultural context. Yet, Marx was notoriously vague over the imminence of “revolution,” and the question was largely left to loom over European and Italian thought as a specter for decades. Whatever Marx intended by focusing “revolution” as the driving force of history, by the 1890s, the thesis of an inevitable, imminent, and Marxist-inspired revolution erupted in Italy.
Already by the early 1890s, Achille Loria advanced the theory that the “natural development” of society would result inevitably in the collapse of capitalism and socialist revolution.[65] Indeed, Enrico Ferri thought the same, and credited Loria for completing his “scientific education in socialism.”[66] Even a decade later, in 1906, the Italian syndicalist pioneer Arturo Labriola outright thought that revolution was the “very imperative of economic necessity.”[67] However, Arturo mocked Loria and Ferri’s passive trust in the “organic development of things” as though socialism would arrive by an “automatic and irresistible” force.[68] He thought the notion was “historical fatali[sm]” and an “imaginary goddess” that merely served to “mystically qualify the logic of a social system.”[69] As Arturo explained, the “agents of our destiny are ourselves,” and not external deterministic forces of history. Indeed, Benito Mussolini wrote in the early 1900s that “the revolution is merely the critical moment of evolution” that arrived not by passive quietism, but by a “bloody duel between the forces of conservation and those of becoming.”[70] It would be this “insurrectional storm,” Mussolini thought, that would lead to the “advent of socialism.”
Italian theorists were, thus, confronted with questions of “philosophies of history,” of concepts that could make “scientific,” accurate predictions of the future from historical inquiry. Antonio Labriola had famously qualified the notion in Essais, where he claimed Marx merely provided a “morphological prevision” but not a definite “prophecy or a promise.”[71] Benedetto Croce accepted this explanation in one of his first entries of philosophical thought, and characterized historical materialism as a simple “philosophizing about history.”[72] It wasn’t until the 1890s as Croce attempted to initiate a national history of Italy, at a career turning point, when he claimed to have found himself brought “unconsciously” to the “problem of the nature of history and of knowledge.”[73] Then in 1895, after Antonio Labriola himself sent him the first chapter of his Essais on the Communist Manifesto, Croce felt his “whole mind burst into flame” as he became “powerless” but to halt his historical studies and dive “with inexpressible fervour” into economics, and Marx’s economics in particular.[74] In an article in 1896, Croce accepted Labriola’s qualification and himself toned down the certainty of Marxian concepts: Croce rejected teleologies and a priori historical schemes; he interpreted historical materialism as a mere canon or hermeneutic lens; and he framed any historical “laws” as truisms and tendencies.[75] Above all, Croce rejected “philosophies of history” for their reduction of allfacts into a single fact.[76] It was here that Croce began to build the foundations for his later historicist theories, for without any a priori historical determination or model, the historian and literary critic Hayden White writes, Croce came to question “whether the endeavor of specifying history and human life was possible at all.”[77]
The philosopher Giovanni Gentile, meanwhile, read Labriola and Croce’s work and began a decades long correspondence with Croce in the summer of 1896. For Gentile, the question of whether Marx’s historical materialism was a “philosophy of history” had not been satisfactorily resolved.[78] He wrote to Croce, a “morphological prevision” still referred to a “future process” traceable between “known points” in space and time. With any level of future predictionat all, then, Gentile thought, the concept was,in fact, a“philosophy of history.” Interestingly, Vilfredo Pareto thought such a broad use of “philosophy of history” overextended the concept. After all, he thought, the assumption of “uniformities” between the past and future was necessary for “science” at all.[79] To be sure, Pareto still rejected one singular “formula which one established at the outset, and which one claims to extend to all peoples and all times.” Between 1902 and 1903, Pareto even published an over 800-page two volume work, Les systèmes socialistes, where he scoffed at socialists’ claims of uncovering the “true” revolution as a “deceptive mirage… akin to the golden age of the millenarians.”[80] In fact, Pareto urged Croce to read the volumes for his influence on the text, which was evident in the introduction, where he criticized the reduction of the diverse facts of “social evolution” to a single force or variable as a “reckless enterprise.”[81] It was this insight that Pareto used to disaggregate the Marxian class struggle, for the “true” struggle occurred across an “infinity of groups” all with particular and divergent interests, and not a dialectic between two classes. Indeed, even the young socialist Benito Mussolini wrote that beliefs of the “unity” of society had been “demolished by Vilfredo Pareto.”[82] To dismiss the natural divergences within society, explained Mussolini, was to misunderstand the nature of society itself.
These divergent perspectives reflected greater conflict over whether capitalist “breakdown” was truly imminent at all, a controversy that centered around the Marxian theorists Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein in the late 1890s that became known as the “crisis of Marxism.”[83] It was partially a reaction to the success of economies across the West rather than a “breakdown” that socialists had predicted throughout the Long Depression. Even by 1896, the famous socialist George Sorel, in his preface to Labriola’s Essais, denied that Marx ever asserted an “evolutionary apocalypse.”[84] Labriola, meanwhile, doubted that a “crisis of Marxism” was happening in Italy considering the rise of the socialist voter base.[85] If anything, the question of breakdown had taken on a life of its own in the nation in the evolutionist interpretations of Ferri, and the “Roman-Style” collapse that Pareto himself began to predict in the 1890s. More importantly, the debates over Marxism continued the focus on the logic of history in Italy. By the 1900s, theoretical entries on the concept had become so abstract that intellectuals relapsed into questions of “philosophies of history.” Where evolution had prompted questions over historical logic and history’s implications for humankind, Marx had shifted that analysis to the future. In the process, their results carried few Italian theorists into the most elementary “determinations” of history, into its most essential “logic.”
Italian Hegelianism and Absolute Historicity
In Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1825-6), he wrote that philosophy reflected “the very fruit of the labor of millennia; this philosophy is the result of all that has gone before.”[86] He continued, “[t]here is a development in it too, but one that is occurring in the present day.” There, Hegel would make a provocative conclusion on the relationship of philosophy to history: the “history of philosophy is the same as the system of philosophy.”[87] As we have seen, Bertrando Spaventa himself had conceived philosophy as the product of “all the previous moments of the spirit.” The Italian Hegelian Augusto Vera, who translated much of Hegel’s most popular works into French, including the gigantic two-volume Science of Logic, similarly thought that history was the “living manifestation and the highest and truest expression” of “reason.”[88] Indeed, Hegelian historicism was the subject of one of Antonio Labriola’s earliest critiques of his professors at the University of Naples in 1869, where he rejected the equation of philosophy and its history as the “dogma of the century.”[89] To be sure, it was only that same decade when a small few Hegelians in Naples and southern Italy earned stable employment as professors and government employees.[90] In the years leading up to Italian Unification, Hegelian notions were largely confined outside of official instruction in private schools, even if the first cohort were enthusiastic to study and interpret Hegelian theory into their own anti-Bourbon politics. As Spaventa recounted the moment, “the Hegelian idea penetrated the mind of the young cultivators of science, who, uniting fraternally, took to advocating it in speech and in writing as if moved by saintly love.”[91]
By the end of the century, however, after most of the Neapolitan Hegelians had passed away, the theoretical movement in Italy virtually perished. Antonio Labriola, in 1897, wrote that “[n]ow every trace, and even the memory, of this movement has passed away among us after the lapse of but a few years. The writings of these thinkers are not found anywhere but in the shops of antiquarians and second-rate book dealers.”[92] After all, the push against Hegel was a major preoccupation of the founder of Labriola’s own materialism – Marx sought to stand Hegel “right side up again” off his head to “discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”[93] Marx outright imagined himself fixing historicist thought into the actual, concrete world of mankind, and out of the abstract “misty realm of imagination” of Hegelian metaphysics.[94] In fact, the term “metaphysics” was reviled already in Hegel’s day.[95] Unsurprisingly, then, the first translation of Hegelian thought in Italy dismissed him as “ultra-metaphysical” and something to avoid at all costs.[96] Although the Hegelians in southern Italy would reach significant success in the middle of the century, even Spaventa himself reflected by the 1880s that the “realm of the a priori, of abstract entities, of metaphysics” was over, and the tides had turned to the “a posteriority, the concrete, the positive, [to] positivism.”[97]
Hegelian ideas, however, were about to enjoy an “Idealist rebirth” by a few Italian philosophers in the late 1890s. Giovanni Gentile formed a passionate attachment to Spaventa’s work, and he wrote to Croce that he committed himself to studying “methodologically and diligently… all of Spaventa’s thought” in 1898.[98] As Gentile explained to Croce, Spaventa had attempted to “shape the Italian mind” by “form[ing] a philosophical conscience as a development of our history.” However, Gentile explained, after the Risorgimento and the great Italian Hegelians died out, “philosophy declined in Italy” and the “flame died out.” Interestingly, Gentile’s thesis for graduation at Pisa, in 1897, repeated Hegel’s historicist thesis: “consciousness is itself a formation, and therefore historical life, in which each degree summarizes all the previous ones, or it is completely inconceivable. Therefore, philosophy and the history of philosophy are one and the same thing.”[99] Soon after, Gentile pioneered an extensive republishing effort of Spaventa’s works, since, he thought the “spiritual situation of Italian culture” in Spaventa’s times “cannot be said to be substantially different from the present.”[100] In fact, in preface to Spaventa’s acclaimed La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea (1862), Gentile outright claimed Spaventa’s call for Italians to turn to history to uncover their own national identity arose from the “scientific” concept that philosophy and its history “are the same thing.”[101]
If Gentile appropriated the pure historicist thesis of Hegel’s Lectures, Benedetto Croce would draw from The Science of Logic (1812). To be sure, Hegel’s logic was not an encyclopedia of syllogisms, but a “pure science” according to Hegel, of the very “logical nature” of consciousness.[102] As Augusto Vera explained, Hegel’s logic was a science of the “absolute forms of thought and existence, forms which mark all things with their imprint.”[103] Indeed, it was in Croce’s own Logic as Science of the Pure Concept (1906), that he carried over the recent debates over evolution and Marx into a novel concept of history. In Hegelian terms, Croce wrote that the various aspects of “Spirit” were not completely exhausted by prototypical “philosophy of history” models.[104] According to Croce, these theories merely rearticulated the problem of historical change, rather than addressing the logical basis of that fact – such theories were not the “explanation of facts, but is the fact itself.” Indeed, reminiscent of Kant’s critical philosophy, Croce explained that perception itself was a “complicated fact” with its own historical existence.[105] It was its historicity, in fact, that enabled conscious life at all: “History renders existent all the manifestations of reality, qualifying them in their varying nature.” Croce’s “logic,” then, was the identification of historical change itself as an essential “category” of conscious experience.
Outside of that “logic,” according to Croce, reality was wholly distinct and in constant flux.[106] The “uniformities” of Pareto were merely arbitrary abstractions as “pseudoconcepts.” Indeed, it is apparent how Hegel related to Italian theorists’ intellectual backdrop here. If Croce rejected the static conceptual classifications of evolution and Marx, his response to view radical historical contingency as “logic” itself isn’t surprising. As Croce said, “not a leaf moves that does not give rise to a historical fact,” nor was any individual negligible in that development: “History is everything that happens.”[107] If Croce followed Gentile in imagining change simply as history itself, Italy’s theoretical culture offered plenty of direction to that end. What Croce’s “specification” of history, then, was none other than the exaltation of abstract “history” as the specifying agent, as the “logic,” of conscious life at all.
Fin de siècle Italy and the Purpose of History
A complete explanation of Italian theorists’ focus on abstract, historical concepts would require a larger project, but it is necessary here to tentatively point out factors behind that production. Of course, there was the distinct tradition of Hegelian historicism, but Italy’s broader context is significant for understanding theorists’ historical determinations. Indeed, the nation faced some of its toughest economic years at the tail end of the Long Depression, along with large scale corruption, a catastrophic banking crisis, protests and riots, and the rise of socialist politics. Despite this instability, however, Italy eventually saw the first signs of an economic convergence with the largest Western economies in the late 1890s. This rapidly changing environment not only furnished abundant material for Italian theorists, then, but contributed to concerns over abstract “philosophies of history” in the first place. Indeed, if Italian intellectuals needed a reason to seek “uniformities” and simple models of historical change, especially for answers to their present and even future malaise, the nation’s turbulent period offered plenty of ground.
After all, the Italian economy changed radically between 1890 and 1900. The nation’s economic rate of growth between 1870 and 1896 was remarkably slow – less than half that of Germany – as Italy faltered through a tariff war with France, and then a disastrous banking crisis the next year.[108] The economic historian Gino Luzzato aptly called 1889 to 1894 the “blackest [years] for the new Kingdom’s economy.”[109] Of course, Italian theorists were aware of the nation’s economic inertia – economists in the Giornale published statistics showing that national imports and exports plummeted almost a quarter in the decade after 1882.[110] In fact, even before Pareto critiqued socialists’ visions of imminent revolution, in 1891, he thought that a Roman-style “dissolution” to “barbarism” was impending because of economic protectionists’ “ever-growing destruction of wealth.”[111] By 1895, Pareto wrote that he had scientifically “predicted” and “verified” that protectionism harmed economic prosperity. [112] Still, by the late 1890s, Italy had developed an industrial base to launch an economic “take-off.” Indeed, Italian industry by 1907 had over doubled that of 1880, with nearly 70 percent of that expansion coming after 1897.[113] At the same time, the nation gradually opened itself to global markets; non-European trade expanded by about 250 percent between 1886 and 1913.[114] It was this moment of radical global trade and industrial expansion, in fact, that was the case model Alexander Gerschenkron used to illustrate the sources of economic growth in “backward economies.”[115] As Gerschenkron explained, it was “undeniable that by 1914 a great industrial transformation had taken place in Italy.”[116]
The lives of most Italians, however, maintained astonishing continuity. In the first place, Italians overwhelmingly continued to work agricultural occupations: in 1871, about 68.1 percent of the workforce were in agriculture, and that proportion only slightly dropped to 59.1 percent by 1911.[117] The United Kingdom’s shares were 22.2 percent and 11.8 percent respectively those same years.[118] Italy’s retained emphasis on agriculture meant that economic output per citizen was strikingly low, in fact, at levels reminiscent of the Renaissance.[119] Labor conditions were also poor, for even by 1911, about 44.8 percent of Italian children aged 10 to 14 were in the workforce.[120] At the same time, Italians faced one of the lowest life expectancies and literacy rates of developed countries in the West.[121] The Italian adult in 1900 expected to live about 43 years, and almost half were completely illiterate.[122]
As significant as theoretical legacies were, then, we can begin to see how Italy’s context attracted intellectuals not just to universal explanations, but to those that imbued purpose into their turbulent world. Theorists could unite a host of large-scale economic and social movements – from the nation’s widespread corruption, record emigration, and rampant protests – into unilateral “laws” or “teleologies” of development. After all, Italy had the second highest emigration in Europe during the 1890s, and by the next decade it was second to none by at least double margins.[123] A whole corpus of essentialist explanations suddenly emerged – from “cephalic index” charts, Malthusian population theories, to Marxists’ visions of imminent revolution.[124] Indeed, Antonio Labriola himself reduced Italy’s mass exodus down to the mere dynamic of capitalist exploitation, only aggravated by the universal process of capital’s drive towards foreign markets, especially in imperial campaigns in Africa.[125] To be sure, the nation also faced widespread government corruption, which reached a boiling point in the catastrophic banking crisis and consequent collapse of Italy’s two largest banks in 1893.[126] The scandalous affair culminated in the resignation of Italy’s Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti.[127] Curiously, Pareto believed this turbulence, as well as Italians’ own hardship, was simply characteristic of the “natural evolution” of society.[128] Pareto wrote with an air of inevitability, and he remarked, “[h]ow these struggles end, history teaches.”[129]Achille Loria, meanwhile, castigated politicians for disregarding the “laws” of economics. Their negligence, he thought, was responsible for the “bankruptcy of the state; the chaotic condition of the banks; the discontent of the people; [and] the poverty prevalent among all classes of society.”[130]
Aside from the “laws,” or “social evolution,” imagined by Italian theorists, the “purpose” behind the nation’s turbulent context was most clearly expressed by Italian Marxists. Indeed, the social discontent that arose within Italy not only reflected a reaction to that national hardship, but for Marxists, it was a “scientific” confirmation of Marx’s theoretical project.[131] In the 1890s alone, violent strikes, anti-war protests, and insurrection attempts surged across nearly every major Italian city.[132] Italy witnessed the rise of widespread Marxist politics, union organization, and novel leftist parties like the Italian Socialist Party.[133] The average number of annual strikers jumped approximately 250 percent between the 1880s and 1890s.[134] In 1901 alone, in fact, there was over twice the number of strikers than in the entire decade of the 1880s combined.[135] As we have seen, it was figures like Filippo Turati and the radical movement around him in the Critica sociale that fueled these numbers. The discontent, for them, had a “purpose.” The “inevitable,” or mathematically “certain,” revolution of Italian Marxists would be the result, the “purpose” behind that national cataclysm. It is no wonder, then, why the secular “indifference” of evolutionary theory still had many proponents simultaneously convinced of an “inflexible” road toward Italian revolution. This “purpose” was a function of evolution from the beginning in Italy, even for scholars that rejected the link between humans and other animals, and for those that imagined egoism, “destined to disappear,” in the rise of truly fraternal communalism.
It was this same quest for certainty by theorists who came to reject historical “models” at all. It was the “destinies” of Arturo, the Socratic “becoming” of Mussolini, and the pure, historicist individuality of Croce and Gentile. Without an empirical “model” of what would necessarily happen in Italy, therefore, theorists could turn to “history” for an affirmation of pure contingency, of conscious intention as the source itself, albeit quintessentially Romantic, behind purposefulness. This was not merely an interpretation into the sources of national malaise, but for some, into the very distinct makeup of “Italianness” at all. Gentile thought as much in his address at the University of Naples, entitled The Rebirth of Idealism (1903), where he interpreted the national hardship as a reflection of disenchanted, materialist and evolutionist notions of being. He explained, “[e]yes turn naturally to the past… [and without an answer] eyes also turn to the beyond.”[136] Without the Ideal, without Idealism, integral of the true “Spirit,” according to Gentile, Italians were outright alienated from their full being.
The vast, universal character of the problematic, furthermore, speaks to the coherence, or lack thereof, of the problem itself. In a few fell swoops, Italians’ monolithic analytics could comprehend the breadth of uncertainties into synthetic, simple “laws,” or “formulas,” ready for assimilation in minutes if one knew the hermeneutical keys, irrespective of disciplinary background. That is, at least, until theorists came to reject “formulas” forthright. To be sure, Italian theorists could look to their own philosophical legacy for precedents of “totalizing” and historicist notions. There was Giordano Bruno’s Cause, Principle, Unity (1584), that proclaimed the universe itself was “One,” with a “single principle of subsistence for all existing things.”[137] There was also Giambattista Vico’s The New Science (1725), that sought to make a science of an “ideal eternal history” of nations.[138] This was a period where Italian intellectuals attempted to recast their role in the Western philosophical canon, in fact, through these very theorists.[139] Benedetto Croce’s own The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1911) would especially popularize Vico for a new generation of not just Italians, but Europeans at large.[140]
Italian Fascism and Historicist Thought
If anxieties in Italy brought theorists to seek certainty in “models” of prediction, or in the absolute rejections of “models” outright, the resonance of this theoretical culture for later Italian intellectuals is abundantly clear. By 1907, Filippo Marinetti wrote in “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” “[f]or the sickly, the ill, or the imprisoned—let them go and visit: the admirable past is perhaps a solace for their troubles, since the future is now closed to them… But we intend to know nothing of it, nothing of the past.”[141] It was a conscious rejection of that historical focus that defined the Futurists’ ideological movement – Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà explicitly dreamt of “destroy[ing] the cult of the past.”[142] A year earlier, in a statement reminiscent of the Italian Hegelians, Mussolini encouraged readers to see the present as the “ultimate conditions to which all the efforts of the past have arrived.”[143] In The Doctrine of Fascism, he even maintained that governments themselves expressed a “political evolution, the history, the traditions, and the psychology of a given country.”[144] Indeed, like Pareto, Mussolini rejected one universal “doctrine suited to all times and to all people,” and declared that Italian totalitarianism merely reflected the “acquired facts” of history.[145] In fact, by Pareto’s Treatise on General Sociology (1916), Pareto again affirmed that the quest for uniformities was an “end in itself,” and that therefore history, in some way, is “always repeating itself” in “numberless copies” and an “endless series” of similarities.[146] Giovanni Gentile, meanwhile, depicted the “Fascist conception of history,” as the acquired customs of a “people, historically perpetuating itself.”[147] It was this same fascist historicist program that Hayden White thought Croce’s Theory and History of Historiography (1917) pushed against. There, Croce explained, it would be “impossible to understand anything of the actual process of historical thought unless one begins from the principle that the spirit itself is history, and in all of its moments a factor of history and the result at the same time of all previous history; so that the spirit carries in itself all its history, which then coincides with itself.”[148] According to White, ironically, Croce’s work represented a “sustained warning to Europe against the dangers of simplicism in thought and fanaticism in action in their constant repetition of the conviction that even the highest ideals become arid and oppressive when they are pushed to the outer limits of their potential development.”[149]
Indeed, it is difficult to neglect the “simplicism” of the historical culture of Italian theorists. Even without the plainly “simple” predictions of Marxists, the “novel” entries of Croce and Gentile’s pure historicism hardly reached beyond rebranding “change” into history. Questions of evolution were often equally simple – Gentile noted that most Italians came to refer to evolution as quintessentially “change,” as well, rather than the specific theories of Darwin or Spencer. In fact, Croce did just that in his own Logic. In the words of historians Pietro Corsi and Paul Weindling, Italians’ debates over evolution by the late 1890s turned not just “generic” but “trivial.”[150] Nonetheless, the persistence of the “historical” for theorists stands as a key in their development of cultural identity, to the point that some historicist visions came to represent the theoretical foundations of the “totalitarian” state. Even where Italian theorists rejected universal “models” of identity, history could at least constitute the “specifying” logic of a radically contingent existence. To be sure, there was still a “logic” there, a conceptual “model” that accounted for practically anything a priori, and that could thus stand as its own basis of a unique national identity. The historical not only represented the source of “change,” of difference and purpose in conscious life, therefore, but of a uniquely “Italian” cultural existence at all.
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Notes
[1] Antonio Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire (Paris: V. Giard & Brière, 1897), pp. 130-131.
[2] Benito Mussolini, Opere Omnia, vol. I (Firenze: La Fenice, 1951): p.145.
[3] Labriola’s italics. Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire, pp. 68, 138-139.
[4] The historian Marcello Musto claims Antonio Labriola was the “first to genuinely introduce Marx’s thought in Italy, rather than interpreting, updating or ‘completing’ it with the help of other authors.” Marcello Musto, “Dissemination and Reception of The Communist Manifesto in Italy: From the Origins to 1945,” Journal of Socialist Theory 36 (2008): p. 453. For Marx’s quote, see Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 188.
[5] Antonio Labriola, Scritti varii: editi e inediti di filosofia e politica (G. Laterza, 1906), p. 353. Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire, p. 192.
[6] Ibid., p. 287.
[7] Here, I reference Hegel’s The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Herbert Spencer’s “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” in Essays: Science, Political, and Speculative, Volume 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891).
[8] See the correspondence between Engels and Labriola in Antonio Labriola, Carteggio III, 1890-1895, ed. Stefano Miccolis (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2003).
[9] Antonio Labriola, Socialisme et philosophie (Paris: Giard, 1899): pp. 171-183.
[10] Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York: Dover Publishing, 2012): p. 91.
[11] See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), pp. 719-722.
[12] Of course, there are notable exceptions. There is Richard Bellamy’s Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). For Italian historicist thought particularly, see especially David Robert’s several essays in David Roberts, Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), and chapter 1 in Pier Giorgio Zunino, L’ideologia del fascismo: miti, credenze, valori (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985).
[13] For a large survey of this historiographical tendency, see James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 1.
[14] I refer to Peter Hanns Reill’s The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
[15] For an example of the nationalist hermeneutic in German historicism, see especially George G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), pp. 11-12.
[16] Mazzini’s italics. Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti editi e inedité di Giuseppe Mazzini (Roma: G. Daelli, 1870), p. 177.
[17] George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), p. 28.
[18] Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 10.
[19] This is the phrase of the sociologist Mabel Berezin. This strain of historiography includes Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 73, 77, and chapter 3 especially; Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi’s Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023); Antonio De Francesco, The Antiquity of the Italian Nation: The Cultural Origins of a Political Myth in Modern Italy, 1796-1943 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
[20] A fascinating example that connects aesthetics and concepts is Mario Isnenghi, Storia d’Italia: I fatti e le percezioni dal Risorgimento alla società dello spettacolo (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa, 2013). See Also Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996).
[21] Alberto Banti, Sublime madre nostra: La nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al fascismo (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 2011), pp. 15-22, 143, 151.
[22] Ibid., p. 178.
[23] Alberto Banti, The Nation of the Risorgimento: Kinship, Sanctity, and Honour in the Origins of Unified Italy (London: Routledge, 2020): pp. 63-67.
[24] Banti, Sublime madre nostra, p. 15.
[25] In contrast to Anderson’s focus on “invention,” Banti places greater emphasis on historicity and explains that “national discourse largely determined by its capacity to evoke familiar echoes, well-known images, and values that were already appreciated, into which people had already been socialized in myriad ways.” Banti, The Nation of the Risorgimento, pp. 131-132. See also Ibid.
[26] Ibid., p. 66.
[27] Banti, Sublime madre nostra, p. 171.
[28] Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 2006), p. 7.
[29] An exception is Fernanda Gallo’s not yet published monograph, Hegel and Italian Political Thought. Gallo has published several essays on the Neapolitan Hegelians, most notably Fernanda Gallo and Axel Körner, “Challenging intellectual hierarchies. Hegel in Risorgimento political thought: an introduction,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 24, pp. 218-219.
Fernanda Gallo, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
[30] Bertrando Spaventa, La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1908), pp. 8-9
[31] Augusto Vera, Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: A. Franck Éditeur, 1855), pp. 214-215.
[32] Ibid., p. 216.
[33] The temporal connotations of the “Risorgimento” is concisely presented in Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation-State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 39-41.
[34] Charles Darwin, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” in Evolutionary Writings, ed. James Secord (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 107.
[35] Ibid., p. 210.
[36] Charles Darwin, Sull’origine delle specie per elezione naturale, ovvero Conservazione delle razze perfezionate nella lotta per l’esistenza, trans. Giovanni Canestrini and Leonardo Salimbeni (Modena: Nicola Zanichelli e soci, 1865), pp. 156, 387.
[37] Andrew Robbins, “The Translation of Darwin and the Struggle for Italy,” Annali d’Italianistica vol. 38 (2020): p. 156, 159.
[38] Paolo Govoni, “The Importance of Being Quantified: Herbert Spencer in Liberal Italy (1870s-1910s), and Beyond,” in Global Spencerism: The Appropriation of Herbert Spencer, ed. B. V. Lightman (Boston: Brill, 2016), p. 220.
[39] See Table 10.1 in Ibid., p. 238.
[40] Ibid., pp. 225-226.
[41] Giuliano Pancaldi, Darwin in Italy: Science Across Cultural Frontiers, trans. Ruey Morelli (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 102-103
[42] “l’évolution humaine est réglée par une loi qui s’affirme avec une logique inflexible,” Achille Loria, Les bases économiques de la constitution sociale (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1893), p. 314.
[43] Guglielmo Ferrero, “Carlo Marx ucciso da Carlo Darwin: SECONDO L’OPINIONE DI UN NOSTRO DARWINIANO,” Critica sociale 2, no. 9 (1892): pp. 133-138. See also Ibid., pp. 161-162.
[44] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 565.
[45] For an introduction to Italian positivism in the period, see Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 8-10.
[46] Enrico Ferri, Socialismo e scienza positiva (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) (Roma: Casa editrice italiana, 1894), pp. 59-60.
[47] Ibid., pp. 55-57, 127, 148-149.
[48] “L’ ECONOMIA POLITICA IN OPPOSIZIONE ALLA TEORIA GENERALE DELL’EVOLUZIONE,” Giornale Degli Economisti 2, no. 2 (1891): pp. 556-559
[49] “HIATUS,” Giornale Degli Economisti 3 (Anno 2) (1891): pp. 27-29, 35. “HIATUS MAJOR (Continuazione),” Giornale Degli Economisti 3 (Anno 2) (1891): pp. 116-121.
[50] Ibid., p. 23.
[51] Achille Loria, The Economic Foundations of Society, trans. Lindley Keasbey (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1899), p. xi.
[52] Ibid., p. 1.
[53] Enrico Ferri, Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx), trans Robert Rives La Monte (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1917), pp. 124-125, 204.
[54] Maffeo Pantaleoni, Principii di economia pura (Firenze: Barbèra, 1889), pp. 28-38.
[55] Vilfredo Pareto, Cours d’économie politique: professé à l’Université de Lausanne, volume II (Lausanne: Rouge, 1897), pp. 32-39, 185-186.
[56] Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire, pp. 139-144.
[57] Antonio Labriola, Socialisme et philosophie (Paris: Giard, 1899), pp. 87-88.
[58] “LE COSÌ DETTE ‘RAZZE INFERIORI’,” Giornale Degli Economisti 3 (Anno 2) (1891): p. 499.
[59] Luigi Einaudi, “Come si scrivono i libri di sociologia,” in Scritti politici e sull’Europa (1894-1925), ed. Cesare Panizza (Torino: Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 2017), p. 54.
[60] Benedetto Croce, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Bari: Laterza, 1902), pp. 65-66, 134.
[61] Bertrando Spaventa, Esperienza e metafisica: dottrina della cognizione (Torino: Ermanno Loescher, 1888), 70.
[62] Giovanni Gentile, La filosofia di Marx: studj critici (Pisa: Enrico Spoerri, 1899), p. 29
[63] Ibid., pp. 100-101
[64] Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 188-189.
[65] Loria, Les bases économiques de la constitution sociale, p. 384.
[66] Ferri, Socialismo e scienza positiva, pp. 39, 127, 148-149.
[67] Arturo Labriola, Riforme e rivoluzione sociale (Lugano: Società Editrice Avanguardia, 1906), p. 130.
[68] Ibid., pp. 1-4
[69] Ibid., pp. 131-132.
[70] See Benito Mussolini, “La necessità della politica socialista in Italia” and “Intorno alla notte del 4 Agosto,” in Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, ed. Edoardo and Duilio Susmel (Firenze: La Fenice, 1951), pp. 18, 62-63.
[71] Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire, pp. 61-62.
[72] Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia Marxistica, p. 13.
[73] Benedetto Croce, An Autobiography, trans. R.G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 52-53
[74] Ibid., pp. 56-58.
[75] Croce, Materialismo, pp. 211-212, 214-215
[76] Ibid., pp. 13-14.
[77] Croce’s theories of history in his Teoria e storia della storiografia (1917) was most notably received attention by R.G. Collingwood and Hayden White, although much of his key philosophical insights were developed already in his Logica come scienza del concetto puro (1905). Collingwood thought that Croce deserted philosophy for history: “Croce’s desertion of philosophy for history may be only an unconscious step forward in philosophy: a kind of philosophical suicide by which, casting off’ the abstract ‘philosophy of the spirit,’ which by now has become intolerable even to himself, he can reach the point of absolute idealism to which his successors Gentile and De Ruggiero have already carried his thought.” See Hayden White, “The Abiding Relevance of Croce’s Idea of History,” The Journal of Modern History 35, no. 2 (1963): pp. 115, 119 and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), chapter 10. See also R.G. Collingwood, “Croce’s Philosophy of History,” Hibbert Journal 19 (1920): pp. 277-278 and R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), pp. 190-204.
[78] Gentile to Benedetto Croce, 17 January 1897, 1.168.6, Series 1, Unit 168, Letter 6, Fondazione Croce, Patrimonio dell’Archivio Storico: Senato della Repubblica, Via della Dogana Vecchia, 29, 00186 Rome. https://patrimonio.archivio.senato.it/inventario/scheda/benedetto-croce/IT-AFS-021-004207/giovanni-gentile-benedetto-croce-6. (hereafter cited as Gentile to Croce, 17 January 1897, Fondazione Croce).
[79] Pareto, Cours d’économie politique: volume II, p. 397.
[80] Vilfredo Pareto, Les systèmes socialistes: Volume I (Paris: Giard, 1902), pp. 60-61.
[81] Ibid., p. 41. For Pareto’s insistence to Croce, see Pareto, Epistolario, 1890-1923, pp. 434, 447.
[82] “Uomini e idee: l’individuel et le social,” in Mussolini, Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, pp. 73-74.
[83] Terrance Mcloughlin and R. T. Drake, “The First Crisis of Marxian Theory and the Bernstein-Kautsky Debate,” Praxis, no. 3 (1976): pp. 27-28.
[84] Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire, p. 6.
[85] Antonio Labriola, “A proposito della crisi del marxismo,” Rivista italiana di sociologia 3 (May 1899): pp. 317-331.
[86] Georg Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825-6, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), P. 54
[87] Ibid., p. 55.
[88] Vera, Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel, p. 27
[89] “L’Introduzione Alla Filosofia Della Storia” Di Augusto Vera,” in Antonio Labriola, Tutti gli scritti filosofici e di teoria dell’educazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2014), pp. 120, 122-123.
[90] Gallo and Körner, “Challenging intellectual hierarchies. Hegel in Risorgimento political thought: an introduction,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 24, pp. 218-219.
[91] Quoted in Ibid.
[92] Translation from pp. 54-55. Labriola, Socialisme et philosophie, pp. 65-66.
[93] Marx, Selected Writings, p. 458.
[94] Ibid., p. 210.
[95] Frederick Beiser, “Introduction: Hegel and the problem of metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3-4.
[96] Nonetheless, one respondent affirmed “preservation and reproduction” as the true forces of historical change. Gian Romagnosi, “Alcuni pensieri sopra un’ultra metafisica filosofia della storia,” Antologia: giornale di scienze, lettere e arti 16 (1832): p. 32.
[97] Spaventa, Esperienza e metafisica, pp. 11-12
[98] Gentile to Croce, 3 March 1898, Fondazione Croce.
[99] Giovanni Gentile, Rosmini e Gioberti (Pisa: Fratelli Nistri, 1898), pp. IX-X.
[100] Bertrando Spaventa, La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea, ed. Giovanni Gentile (Bari: Laterza and Figli, 1908) p. vi.
[101] Spaventa, La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea, pp. xv-xvi.
[102] Georg Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 17, 29.
[103] These “forms” were what Kant called “categories,” that is, the fundamental “logical functions” that qualified and made experience possible at all. Vera, Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel, p. 176. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 212.
[104] Benedetto Croce, Lineamenti di una logica come scienza del concetto puro: memoria letta all’Accademia Pontaniana del 10 Aprile e 1 Maggio 1904, e del 2 Aprile 1905 (Napoli: Francesco Gianni and Figli, 1905), p. 8
[105] Ibid., pp. 52-53.
[106] Ibid., p. 68.
[107] Ibid., p. 55.
[108] See Table 1.1 in Gianni Toniolo, “An Overview of Italy’s Economic Growth,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification, ed. Gianni Toniolo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 4, 42.
[109] Quoted in Gianni Toniolo, An Economic History of Liberal Italy, 1850-1918, trans. Maria Rees (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 85.
[110] Rodolfo Benini, “CALCOLO DELLE PERDITE SUBITE DALL’ ITALIA IN CINQUE ANNI DI CRISI: NOTA DI STATISTICA,” Giornale Degli Economisti 6 (Anno 4) (1893): p 409.
[111] Pareto, Lettere a Maffeo Pantaleoni, 1890-1896, p. 131.
[112] Vilfredo Pareto, “Cronaca,” Giornale Degli Economisti 9 (Anno 5) (1894): pp. 302-303 and Vilfredo Pareto, “TEORIA MATEMATICA DEL COMMERCIO INTERNAZIONALE,” Giornale Degli Economisti 10 (Anno 6) (1895).
[113] Using Fenoaltea’s numbers, I have calculated that growth rate to be about 1.23 percent between 1880 and 1897 and 2.79 percent between 1897 to 1907. See Table 4.1 in Stefano Fenoaltea, Reconstructing the Past: Revised Estimates of Italy’s Product, 1861-1913, pp. 70-72.
[114] Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860-1990: Recovery after Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 122-124.
[115] Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).
[116] Ibid., p. 72.
[117] See Table 4 in Claire Giordano and Francesco Zollino, “A Historical Reconstruction of Capital and Labour in Italy, 1861-2013,” Quaderni di Storia Economica 37 (November 2016): p. 30.
[118] GDP per capita by Unification was only 32 percent higher than in 1500, and that ratio grew remarkably slow between Unification and 1913: about 1 percent annually until 1901, and then 1.7 percent until 1913. Ibid.
[119] Figure 1 on p. 36 in Andrea Brandolini and Giovanni Vecchi, “The Well-Being of Italians: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Quaderni di Storia Economica 19 (October 2011): pp. 6-7, 36.
[120] See Table 3 in Gianni Toniolo and Giovanni Vecchi, “ITALIAN CHILDREN AT WORK, 1881—1961,” Giornale Degli Economisti e Annali Di Economia 66, no. 3 (November 2007): pp. 425-426.
[121] For life expectancy comparisons see Figure 11 in Brandolini, “The Well-Being of Italians,” p. 41. Illiteracy decreased 61.3 percent since 1881, but the share of completely illiterate adults in 1911 was still 38 percent. See Table 30 in Carlo Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (London: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 127.
[122] Ibid.
[123] See Table 1 in Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “What Drove the Mass Migrations from Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century?” Population and Development Review 20, no. 3 (1994): p. 536.
[124] Georges Lapouge, “Le leggi fondamentali dell’antropo-sociologia,” Rivista italiana di sociologia 1 (1897): pp. 319-328. Friedrich Ratzel, “Il suolo la popolazione,” Rivista italiana di sociologia 2 (1898): pp. 140, 146, 149-151.
[125] Labriola, Socialisme et philosophie, p. 199.
[126] Harold James and Kevin O’Rourke, “Italy and the First Age of Globalization, 1861-1940,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification, ed. Gianni Toniolo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 52.
[127] At a conservative estimate, the bank incurred 65,600,000 lira in total losses, and several other banks crashed in the wake. See Table 4 in Ibid., pp. 44, 49.
[128] Vilfredo Pareto, “Cronaca,” Giornale Degli Economisti 12 (Anno 7) (1896): p. 523.
[129] Vilfredo Pareto, “Cronaca,” Giornale Degli Economisti 10 (Anno 6) (1894): p. 768
[130] Achille Loria, Contemporary Social Problems: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the University of Padua, trans. John Garner (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1911), p.10.
[131] Paolo Favilli, The History of Italian Marxism: From Its Origins to the Great War (Boston: Brill, 1996), p. 133.
[132] Charles Tilly, Tilly Louise, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), see Appendix B and Tables 9 and 10 in Ibid., pp. 156, 157, 307.
[133] Ibid., pp. 143-164.
[134] My calculations use data from Table 1 in David Snyder and William R. Kelly, “Industrial Violence in Italy, 1878-1903,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 1 (1976): pp. 139, 140.
[135] David Snyder and William Kelly write that “fluctuations in strike activity were largely a function of changes in the form and scale of labor organization and government actions toward workers and their association.” Trade unions were illegal until 1890, but that decade saw considerable growth of unions until the Zanardelli-Giolitti government in 1900 and the rise of large scale union organization in Italy.
[136] Giovanni Gentile, La rinascita dell’idealismo. Prolusione ad un corso libero di filosofia teoretica letta nella regia Università di Napoli il 28 febbraio 1903 (Naples: Alfonso Tessitore e Figlio, 1903), pp. 6-8, 12-13.
[137] Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, ed. Richard Blackwell, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 75, 88.
[138] Giambattista Vico, The First New Science, ed. and trans. Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 66.
[139] See the Introduction and chapter 1 of Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
[140] Ibid., p. 9.
[141] Filippo Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 52.
[142] Umberto Boccioni, et al., “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters,” in Ibid., p. 63
[143] Mussolini, Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, p. 225.
[144] Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, p. 22.
[145] Ibid., p. 26
[146] Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, Volume 4, ed. Arthur Livingston (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), pp. 1736-1738,
[147] Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, pp. 10, 12.
[148] Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1917), p. 16.
[149] White, “The Abiding Relevance of Croce’s Idea of History,” p. 122.
[150] Pietro Corsi and Paul Weindling, “Darwinism in Germany, France, and Italy,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 716.