42 Facts About Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce had a long career in the Italian Parliament, joining the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy in 1910, serving through Fascism and the Second World War before being elected to the Constituent Assembly as a Liberal.

Benedetto Croce was a longtime member of the Italian Liberal Party, serving as its president from 1944 to 1947.

Benedetto Croce was the president of the worldwide writers' association PEN International from 1949 until 1952.

Benedetto Croce was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 16 times.

Benedetto Croce is noted for his "major contributions to the rebirth of Italian democracy".

Benedetto Croce was an elected International Member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Benedetto Croce was born in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzo region of Italy.

Benedetto Croce's family was influential and wealthy, and he was raised in a very strict Catholic environment.

Benedetto Croce kept this philosophy for the rest of his life.

Benedetto Croce studied law, but never graduated, at the University of Naples, while reading extensively on historical materialism.

Benedetto Croce's ideas were publicized at the University of Rome towards the end of the 1890s by Professor Antonio Labriola.

Benedetto Croce was an open critic of Italy's participation in World War I, feeling that it was a suicidal trade war.

Benedetto Croce was Minister of Public Education between 1920 and 1921 for the 5th and last government headed by Giovanni Giolitti.

Benedetto Croce was instrumental in the relocation of the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III to the Royal Palace of Naples in 1923.

Benedetto Croce initially supported Mussolini's Italian fascism government that took power in 1922.

In May 1925, Benedetto Croce was one of the signatories to the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals which had been written by Benedetto Croce himself; however, in June 1924, he had voted in the Senate in support of the Mussolini government.

Benedetto Croce later explained that he had hoped that the support for Mussolini in parliament would weaken the more extreme Fascists who, he believed, were responsible for Matteotti's murder.

Benedetto Croce later became one of the firmest opponents of fascism.

In 1928, Benedetto Croce voted against the law which effectively abolished free elections in Italy by requiring electors to vote for a list of candidates approved by the Grand Council of Fascism.

Benedetto Croce frequently provided financial assistance to anti-fascist writers and dissidents, such as Giorgio Amendola, Ivanoe Bonomi, and Meuccio Ruini, as well as those who wanted to maintain intellectual and political independence from the regime, and covertly helped them get published.

Benedetto Croce was seriously threatened by Mussolini's regime, and suffered the only act of physical violence at the hands of the fascists in November 1926, when fascists ransacked his home and library in Naples.

Benedetto Croce later coined the term onagrocrazia to emphasize the anti-intellectual and boorish tendencies of parts of the Fascist regime.

However, in describing Fascism as anti-intellectual Benedetto Croce ignored the many Italian intellectuals who at the time actively supported Mussolini's regime, including Benedetto Croce's former friend and colleague, Gentile.

When Mussolini's government adopted antisemitic policies in 1938, Benedetto Croce was the only non-Jewish intellectual who refused to complete a government questionnaire designed to collect information on the so-called "racial background" of Italian intellectuals.

Benedetto Croce voted for the Monarchy in the 1946 Italian constitutional referendum, after having persuaded his Liberal Party to adopt a neutral stance.

Benedetto Croce was elected to the Constituent Assembly which existed in Italy between June 1946 and January 1948.

Benedetto Croce spoke in the Assembly against the Peace treaty, which he regarded as humiliating for Italy.

Benedetto Croce declined to stand as provisional President of Italy.

Heavily influenced by Hegel and other German Idealists such as Schelling, Benedetto Croce produced what was called, by him, the Philosophy of Spirit.

Benedetto Croce's preferred designations were "absolute idealism" or "absolute historicism".

Benedetto Croce calls his way immanentism, and concentrates on the lived human experience, as it happens in specific places and times.

Benedetto Croce had great esteem for Vico and shared his opinion that history should be written by philosophers.

Benedetto Croce declined an invitation to attend the event, but he wrote the lessons and submitted them for translation so that they could be read in his absence.

Benedetto Croce believed that art is more important than science or metaphysics since only art edifies us.

Benedetto Croce claimed that all we know can be reduced to imaginative knowledge.

Benedetto Croce was the first to develop a position later known as aesthetic expressivism, the idea that art expresses emotions, not ideas.

Benedetto Croce's theory was later debated by such contemporary Italian philosophers as Umberto Eco, who locates the aesthetic within a semiotic construction.

Benedetto Croce did not agree with John Locke about the nature of liberty.

Benedetto Croce believed that liberty is not a natural right but an earned right that arises out of the continuing historical struggle for its maintenance.

Benedetto Croce defined civilization as the "continual vigilance" against barbarism, and liberty conformed to his ideal for civilization as it allows one to experience the full potential of life.

In Etica e politica, Benedetto Croce defines liberalism as an ethical conception of life that rejects dogmatism and favours diversity, and in the name of liberty and free choice of the individual, is hostile to the authoritarianism of fascism, communism, and the Catholic Church.

In contrast to the socialists, who Benedetto Croce viewed as part of modernity along with liberals, his condemnation of reactionaries is unremittingly harsh.