SOURCE: “Giovanni Gentile,” in Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present, Polity Press, 1987, pp. 100-14.

[In the following essay, Bellamy questions whether or not Gentile's concept of actual idealism always leads to fascism.]

Giovanni Gentile was born at Castelvetrano in Sicily on 30 May 1875, and assassinated by communist partisans on 15 April 1944. Best known as the philosopher of fascism, he was as important as Croce, with whom he collaborated until 1924, in reviving the idealist tradition in Italy. In some respects his influence was greater than Croce's, since his university position gave him more opportunities for building up an academic school. This was particularly true after the fascist seizure of power when, as Minister of Education in Mussolini's first government, he was able to apply his ideas in a comprehensive reform of the educational system, and ultimately became the official cultural spokesman of the regime. Above all, the principle doctrine of his social philosophy—the unity of thought and action—forced upon him the moral duty, as he saw it, of putting his ideas into practice. This [essay] will therefore investigate the extent to which ‘actual idealism’ necessarily leads to fascism.

THE REFORM OF THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC

Gentile's philosophy was more firmly rooted in the native idealist culture than Croce's. His philosophical works are written at a high level of abstraction and assume a detailed knowledge of his sources. His thought is therefore best elucidated in the context of the tradition of post-Kantian idealism in Italy which he aimed to develop.

Actualism was a radical attempt to integrate our consciousness of experience with its creation, thereby abolishing the distinction between thought and practice. He claimed that his main thesis could already be found in his doctoral dissertation of 1897 on the Italian neo-Kantians, Rosmini and Gioberti, where ‘to explain the value of Rosmini's philosophy and hence of Kant's [I maintain] that a profound difference exists between the category (which is the act of thought [l'atto del pensiero]), and the concept (which is the fact thought about [il pensato]). From then on I have considered thought as real only in its actuality, as a priori'.¹ Kant rejected the empiricist epistemology which regarded human knowledge as the product of sense impressions of external objects. He replaced this model with the notion of an a priori synthesis, whereby the concepts by which we interpreted reality constituted the objects of experience. Thus the causal connection of events was not supplied by experience but by the Understanding, as a necessary condition of our awareness of causality. However Gentile, following Hegel, did not believe Kant was radical enough in his criticism of ‘realism’. Having rejected the empiricist idea that objects were given in experience, Kant reintroduced it in the guise of a given in the Understanding—his fixed set of categories for interpreting the world. By positing a fixed noumenal world as the transcendental ground of phenomenal experience, Kant ended up denying the truly creative faculty of the Understanding.²

According to Gentile, Hegel was the first to appreciate the fully autonomous nature of thought, in virtue of which different ‘forms of consciousness’ produced different concepts and categories of Understanding. In the Phenomenology, Hegel attempted to show that these ‘forms of consciousness’ followed a logical sequence from ‘sense certainty’ to ‘absolute knowing’. Empiricism and Kantian Understanding were therefore stages in the development of consciousness. However, Hegel did not wish to replace transcendental idealism with subjectivist idealism. The contribution of the thinking subject was vital, but this did not mean that all knowledge was relative to the knower. Hegel's epistemology was underwritten by an ontological argument, which regarded being and consciousness as logically related as part of the development of a metaphysical entity—Spirit or the Idea—immanent to them both. This was a historical process, which Hegel identified with the revelation of God to humankind within Christianity:

The world spirit is the spirit of the world as it reveals itself through the human consciousness; the relationship of man to it is that of the single parts to the whole which is that substance. And this world spirit corresponds to the divine spirit which is the absolute spirit. Since God is omni present in everyone and appears in everyone's consciousness, and this is the world spirit.³

Spirit or mind was thus a self-constituting subject which culminated in philosophy, the ‘inwardizing’ of the successive phases of Spirit's unfolding. The ontological status of the content of human thought was thus solved by bringing humanity to recognize it as the working of Geist, of Spirit or reason, in humankind and the world. As we saw, this is the fundamental tenet of Croce's absolute historicism. Gentile, in contrast, was unsatisfied with Hegel's solution because, he argued, the Hegelian Spirit was as transcendent from the human viewpoint as the Kantian categories. This stemmed from the Hegelian distinction between the Phenomenology, or the development of individual consciousness, and the Logic, which regarded reality as the product of Spirit, thereby creating an apparent dualism between Spirit, as the essence of everything, and human thought.⁴

Gentile's argument was again occasioned by the study of an Italian thinker—the Neapolitan Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa, whose follower, Donato Jaja, was Gentile's mentor at the Scuola Normale in Pisa. Under Jaja's influence, Gentile came to regard Spaventa as the principal continuator of the idealist tradition, and republished his main writings. Spaventa's radical solution to the alleged Hegelian dualism, which Gentile made his own, was to identify the individual mind of the Phenomenology with the Spirit of the Logic. Transcendence was finally overcome in a philosophy of absolute immanence, in which the activity of the thinking subject was the sole basis for human knowledge, and hence of the objects which constituted experience.⁵

Gentile, via Hegel and Spaventa, concluded by transferring the faculties originally ascribed by Kant to the transcendental subject, and by Hegel to Spirit, to thought tout court:

The method of immanence, therefore, consists in the concept of the absolute concreteness of the real in the act of thought, or in history [past thought]: an act that one transcends when one begins to posit something (God, nature, logical law, moral law, historical reality conceived as an assemblage of facts, spiritual or psychological categories beyond the actuality of consciousness) which is not the self-same Ego positing itself, or as Kant put it, the I think.⁶

Thought is a ‘pure act’ that is presuppositionless—the absolute foundation of the human world of experience. Gentile revised Vico's aphorism verum et factum convertuntur to mean that the criterion of truth was within the thought of the agent, through whose activity the world of fact was created. Vico's motto was hence rephrased verum et fieri convertuntur.⁷ This was the unity of thought and will in the self-constitution [autoctisi] of reality—the true synthesis a priori of self and world which made objective knowledge possible.

Gentile provided two proofs of his ‘theory of spirit as pure act’. First, he aimed to show that it was the logical outcome of Western philosophical thought since Descartes and, borrowing from Hegel, the essence of Christianity. Second, it was equally the phenomenological development of human self-consciousness. Philosophy and history coincided, therefore. To illustrate his first proof, Gentile adopted Bertrando Spaventa's theory of the ‘circulation of European thought’ to show how the ideas of the German philosophers he admired were adopted, or independently conceived, by Italian thinkers as part of a single philosophical tradition reflecting the unity of Spirit.⁸ The concept of bildung—of the development of self-consciousness through the education of experience—was central to the second aspect of Gentile's theory, and was elaborated in a number of his works devoted to pedagogy.⁹ The history of culture and the theory of education were the twin poles of Gentile's demonstration of the truth of his ideas, and formed the bulk of his writings. They will only be examined here, however, to the extent that they affect his social and political thought.

UNIFYING THEORY AND PRACTICE

Gentile's ‘actual idealism’ entailed the unity of theory and practice, since for Gentile to know the world was to make it. This doctrine was at the heart of Gentile's social philosophy, and was first formulated in his early writings on Marx. This was hardly coincidental, for as we saw, Labriola's Marxism had its origins in the Spaventian reform of Hegel which actualism develops. Gentile's interpretation of Marx was largely based on Labriola's commentary on the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He also attributed great importance to The Theses on Feuerbach, which he translated into Italian for the first time.

He assimilated the Marxist doctrine of praxis to the Vichian principle that history was a human product—‘ … thought is real, because it is to the extent it posits the object. Either thought is, and thinks, or it does not think and isn't thought. If it thinks it acts (fa). Therefore reality, the objectivity of thought, is a consequence of its own nature. This is one of the prime consequences of Marxist realism.’¹⁰ The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach was read in a strongly idealist manner to mean that thought creates reality. This, he claimed, vitiated Marx's professed materialism, leading to (Gentile's habitual criticism of other philosophers) a ‘more or less Platonic dualism’ between mind and matter within Marxism. This could only be resolved within an idealism which regarded everything as the product of Spirit. Indeed ‘the matter of historical materialism, far from being opposed to Hegel's Idea, is contained within it, is one with it.’¹¹ Marx's theory of praxis could therefore be assimilated to the reform of Hegel in the direction of a subjective idealism by which human beings' self-critical activity, rather than Spirit's, produced their environment.

Gentile regarded his actualism as the only philosophy compatible with human freedom and morality, in the Kantian sense of autonomy. Moral freedom was brought back to earth from the noumenal world where Kant placed it, to become part of our everyday experience for which we are totally responsible.¹² In many respects Gentile's theory seems to involve a subjectivism so radical in kind that it falls into complete solipsism. It is hard to see what political consequences are likely to follow from this theory beyond the anarchism of bellum omnium contra omnes. For there is no basis for presupposing that my conception of my interests should coincide with that of my fellows. We each have equally valid grounds for regarding our own will as an autonomous spiritual creation, and those opposed to it as objects to be absorbed and organized within it. The only solution to an otherwise eternal conflict would be via the domination of a particular will over all others. In many respects. Gentile's fascism can be traced to this impasse in his thought.

His Foundations of a Philosophy of Right, published contemporaneously with his General Theory of Mind as Pure Act in 1916, provided a vivid illustration of this problem. Gentile's book was clearly modelled on Hegel's Philosophy of Right; however, he accused Hegel of having an a priori and rationalistic view of law and morality.¹³ Gentile, on the other hand, regarded society as the product of the dialectical development of conflicting interests towards a unity supplied by a universal consciousness common to all. Just as a plurality of particular objects was resolved within the single unifying consciousness which created connections between them, so the ‘naturalistic’ conception of particular individuals was overcome in a common conception of society:

Robinson Crusoe on his island, before meeting Man Friday, can only realise his own will by going through the same process that is proper to the will of every individual living in society: that is by negating what is opposed to his own will within its universal value, which constitutes the particular or finite moment of the will in society. Hence [society], though empirically it is the accord of individuals, is speculatively definable as the reality of the will in process of development. The universal value is established through the immanent suppression of the particular element. [Society], therefore, is not inter homines, but in interiore homine, and it is between men only to the extent that all men, with respect to their spiritual being, are one single man with a single interest that continually increases and develops: the patrimony of humanity.¹⁴

Gentile was only able to overcome the conflict of particular wills by presupposing a spiritual unity in the ‘patrimony of humanity’. This solution, however, was in conflict with the fundamental tenet of actualism as a philosophy without presuppositions. Gentile explicitly rejected the Hegelian thesis that the social world was the manifestation of a metaphysical entity, Geist, within human affairs as a priori or ‘transcendent’. He was equally opposed to the nationalist claim that membership of a given community automatically bound one to it, condemning it as ‘naturalistic’. Gentile insists our obligation to the state was always ‘internal', and that the social relations which unite us to others were a product of our will. He was therefore committed to showing how a community of will could emerge spontaneously amongst individuals interacting in society. This, as the above passage illustrates, he singularly failed to do. Instead each individual sought to negate the particular wills opposed to his or her, supposedly universal, will. The individual was only likely to recognize the universality of others if forced to do so.

This indeed is precisely what Gentile suggested when, in the next chapter, he identified force and law. ‘Law is for the subject the very act of his self-realisation’: force and law could only be abstractly distinguished therefore, ‘because the law is neither a prius nor a posterius with respect to the power which posits it and freely obeys it.’¹⁵ We were literally ‘forced to be free’ by virtue of recognizing the compulsion imposed by the will of the stronger. Nationality and culture, which in Hegel were the basis of communal life in the state, were interpreted by Gentile as a product of the state—that is, the effective will. The state was not the will of all the people to realize themselves, but the will which had successfully realized itself—be it that of the tyrant or the rebel. The result was that an individual's will was totally subordinate to that of the state, to the extent of being identical with it: ‘I, then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its law in such a manner that to will its transgression is to aim at the impossible. If I did so, I should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be disintegrated and scattered. I then want what the law wants me to want’.¹⁶

Actualism would seem to have such radically subjectivist premises that as a social doctrine it could only lead to anarchy or dictatorship—a consequence foretold by Hegel in his criticism of the French Revolution as an attempt to remake society entirely according to the prescriptions of human reason, what Hegel called ‘absolute freedom’.¹⁷ Croce had warned Gentile of this danger in his public critique of ‘actual idealism’ of 1913. He argued that the insistence on the simple unity of the ‘pure act of thought’ led either to mysticism, the ‘transcendental loneliness’ of the individual subject, or megalomania. The latter was, practically speaking, the most likely and the most dangerous, because actualism abolished the distinction between truth and falsehood, good and evil, since whatever the agent believed or did at a given moment was ipso facto true or good. The transcendental idealism of Hegel and Kant assumed an objective foundation in Spirit or Reality which structured consciousness. By abandoning any notion of reality beyond the ‘pure act of thought’, Gentile undermined rationality as an independent standard as well. Activity was praised regardless of its content, and the only standard of worth was that of success.¹⁸

Regrettably, the First World War prevented their differences from remaining purely theoretical. For Gentile regarded the war as providing the moment of conflict necessary for the spontaneous creation of a moral unity of consciousness and will amongst individuals, by centring their thought and action on the defence and extension of the state. That the vast majority of soldiers killed or demoralized in the trenches were conscripts, rather than ardent nationalists, does not seem to have bothered him. Unfortunately the defeat at Caporetto was far from redeemed by the Vittoria Veneto; and it required the authority of ‘l'Uomo’, in the shape of Mussolini, to enforce the identity of individual and state that Gentile's social theory required.

THE PHILOSOPHER OF FASCISM

Gentile believed that the Italians' defeat at Caporetto in 1917 had resulted from a lack of patriotism, of united moral purpose, which was the real foundation of the state. However, the war provided the opportunity to create this cohesion and to prove that the Risorgimento had been a genuine act of will, rather than a combination of fortuitous circumstances and external aid.¹⁹ He claimed the rout of the Austrians at the Vittoria Veneto provided such a proof,²⁰ but the peace soon showed this to have been an illusion and the years from 1919 to 1922 were probably, with the exception of 1943, the period of greatest social and political agitation in modern Italian history. Gentile placed the blame for this state of affairs on the ‘realist’ attitude predominant in the schools and the political parties of the time.

‘Realism’, in Gentile's terminology, was the antithesis of ‘idealism’. Realism posited a reality apart from thought, which it should mirror. This led to individualism—the pursuit of purely material interests which could not be shared as a common spiritual interest—or passivity—acquiescence to the supposed natural order. Idealism, on the other hand, regarded the world as within consciousness. The individual was tied to his fellows via a common consciousness—national culture. Moreover, it was active, moulding nature rather than conforming to it.²¹ The key problem, as we saw, was how this unity of purpose was to be achieved. In wartime it was provided by the need to defeat the enemy, but no similar common aim existed after 1918. Gentile believed that it could be created through education, and it was Mussolini who provided him with the opportunity to put his ideas into practice.²²

As the same men who had ruled Italy since 1900 returned to office. Gentile became increasingly disillusioned with the liberal party. He regarded the fascist takeover as justifiably getting rid of the liberal old guard of Giolitti, and reaffirming the strength of the state. This favourable impression was confirmed when he was asked to become Minister of Education. Gentile had long argued for the reform of education in line with his idealist conception of mental development, and had helped prepare a comprehensive overhaul of the system for Croce, when he was the minister under Giolitti from 1920 to 1921. Mussolini now gave him to chance to complete this programme. Although the resulting Riforma Gentile was hailed by Mussolini as ‘the most fascist of the reforms’, it was not initially conceived as such. Gentile was not a party member when appointed, and his scheme was a continuation of his earlier ideas for a national revival produced by the return of idealist principles in the schools.

He aimed to increase elementary schooling and improve teachers' conditions, whilst making secondary and higher education more specialized and selective. His new curriculum centred on the Hegelian triad of art, religion, and philosophy as the ideal stages of human consciousness towards absolute knowledge. Thus Italian literature and the Catholic religion were the core subjects of the elementary schools, whilst classics and philosophy predominated in the liceo and university. Finally, a single state exam was to apply a universal standard throughout both public and private schools.²³ Gentile believed that the school completed the spiritual awakening of the child and prepared him for citizenship. The school therefore replaced civil society in Gentile's revision of the Hegelian triad—family, civil society, state—in the socialization of the individual.²⁴

Education should have offered a solution to the problem, noted earlier, of how to create a unity of will amongst conflicting wills which was consistent with actualism's subjectivist principles. Gentile regarded this as ‘the fundamental antinomy of education’. The pupil's spiritual development should be ideally totally free and personal. Education, however, usually required the imparting of knowledge to the pupils by the teacher. This circumstance could potentially lead to a conflict between the pupils' liberty to learn in their own way, and the authority of the master to teach what he believed to be important. However, Gentile simply resolved this problem in the familiar way by arguing that the will of the master must become the universal will, overcoming the particular wills of his pupils. This was achieved by discipline, whereby the teacher's will became an active force uniting the wills of his or her students.²⁵ His conclusion, that discipline thereby achieved the moral freedom of the pupil, could only be accepted if might was taken to be right, a view, as the last section demonstrated, to which acutalism tends.

Gentile seems to have regarded his solution to the problem of authority in the classroom to be extendable to the nation as a whole. On 31 May 1923, with the Riforma Gentile coming to completion, he applied to Mussolini to become a member of the Fascist Party. It was, he wrote, ‘a moral obligation’ for him to join, since liberty only existed ‘within the law and therefore through a strong State, through the State as ethical reality’, an ideal represented in Italy ‘not by the liberals,’ who are more or less openly your opponents, but on the contrary by you yourself’.²⁶

His view of authority in school and state was essentially the same—it must be created by the teacher and by the politician respectively. Yet at the same time he wished to maintain that the individual's capacity to act was not thereby curtailed. This was achieved by appealing to the doctrine of the state in interiore homine, referred to earlier, and was central to Gentile's fascist philosophy. Gentile argued that the state could not exist outside the consciousness of the citizens who made it up. This would be plausible as a theoretical proposition, an ideal to be attained, but Gentile asserted that it was necessarily a reality as well, so that the actual state could claim to be the conscience of the individual. As we saw, Gentile was only able to achieve this unity by dint of force. He now justified the fascist seizure of power in precisely the same terms used in his Foundations of a Philosophy of Right:

Liberty is certainly the supreme end and rule of every human life, but only so far as individual and social education make it a reality by embodying the common will, which takes the form of law and hence of the State, in the particular individual … From this point of view State and individual are identical, and the art of government is the art of so reconciling and uniting the two terms so that a maximum of liberty harmonises with a maximum of public order not merely in the external sense, but also and above all, in the sovereignty ascribed to law and to its necessary organs. For always the maximum liberty coincides with the maximum force of the State.²⁷

This argument follows the same stages noted in the passage from the Foundations quoted above. He asserted that particularity must be subsumed under the universal. This enabled the individual to realise his or her own moral autonomy, and was paralleled by society as a whole. Once this stage was accepted, then it followed that liberty and law were identical and that freedom was ipso facto power. Yet he had still to explain how the moment of particularity could be overcome. The answer was again the same—the universal was that which had the force to make itself such. It was impossible

to distinguish moral force from material force: the force of the law freely voted and accepted, from the force of violence which is rigidly opposed to the will of the citizen. But such distinctions are simpleminded when they are sincere! Every force is a moral force, for it is always an expression of will, and whatever method of argument it used—from sermon to blackjack—its efficacy cannot be other than that of entreating the inner man and persuading him to agree.²⁸

Gentile sought to justify the fascist seizure of power further by claiming it to be the continuation of the Risorgimento. Mazzini, whose doctrine of ‘thought and action’ he interpreted in actualist terms, was turned into a proto-squadrista, whose revolution the fascists were completing.²⁹ He deployed this argument to deprive the liberal regime of any legitimacy. Like Croce, he maintained that the true Italy was within those who shared the spirit of its founders.³⁰ Gentile's reference to the history of Italy to bolster his political doctrine paralleled his use of the history of philosophy to support his actualism. Both could only claim universality if they could be shown to represent the working out of the immanent logic of human self-realization in thought and practice. Only then could he claim fascism to be ‘God's will', and Mussolini to be a ‘world historical individual'. However, unlike Croce, whose analysis of history produced important revisions in his historicism, Gentile's actualism was self-confirming rather than self-critical, and his researches into the past increasingly propogandist and dogmatic.

The sophistry behind Gentile's identification of individual and state appears just as clearly in his constitutional programme creating the fascist system of corporate representation. The corporations were to organize the moral will of the people within the political force of the state. The unions or ‘syndicates’ constituted the corporate personality of the worker, which together with the employers' federations were to be brought within the framework of the national personality—the state. As a result, the individuals pursuing their private interest would come via the corporation to a consciousness of the general interest. Gentile's theory seemed to be little more than a mechanical exposition of the Hegelian state, in which people did not enter the political arena directly but via associations, guilds etc.³¹ Hegel believed that the classes of society were so sharply differentiated from each other, that the notion of direct participation in politics was a non-starter, since self-interest could never generate a sense of the common good. It was necessary, therefore, to have a degree of corporate autonomy in public life, whereby groups could regulate their own affairs. He argued, however, that at a higher level the individual would become aware of the interrelatedness of the ‘system of needs’—that all labour is social as well as individual—and that consciousness of this fact would promote the development of a community within civil society.³² This was a perception open to the representatives and bureaucrats who formed a universal class through their direct allegiance to the state, rather than all members of society. Gentile, however, obviously trivialized the Hegelian analysis by simply creating the differentiation which existed in Hegel's day, and identifying the will of the individual somewhat arbitrarily with that of the fascist government. Under totalitarianism the citizen had no volition of his own at all. Gentile restricted the individuals to seeking their private interests in that of the group, since there was no incentive for them to transcend it. The general interest was the concern of the state authority. Thus the corporate state could in no sense be called a higher form of self-government, as individual interests were manipulated rather than allowed to develop freely.³³

Far from providing an organic unity of state and individual, the corporations were simply the institutionalization of the liberal individualism Gentile claimed to have rejected. The individual was forced to identify with a particular set of narrowly-defined material interests, which were harmonized by being restricted to a particular sphere. This was the mechanical unity of the technical or bureaucratic state, not the organic unity of the state in interiore homine, which existed and developed in the thoughts and acts of autonomous individuals. The state was totalitarian only in the empirical sense that it included everything, not in the ideal sense desired by Gentile of organizing the whole of the nation's will, thought and feeling.³⁴ For Gentile's theory to escape this descent into coercive authoriarianism, he needed to provide some convincing account of the genesis of a will common to individuals and society alike, yet consistent with the radical subjectivism of the ‘pure act of thought’. This he attempted to provide in his final work on the Genesis and Structure of Society.

GENESIS AND STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY

Gentile's last book was written as a ‘relief for the soul' following Mussolini's overthrow in 1943, and before the division of Italy into the allied occupied south and the German puppet Fascist Social Republic in the north.³⁵ Villified at the time by fascist and anti-fascist alike, because of his attempt to remain neutral between the two, the book made a serious attempt to consider what, other than force, united a society. It is certainly the most profound of Gentile's political works although, for reasons given below, ultimately mistaken in its central thesis.

In the preface Gentile directed the reader to the fourth chapter on the ‘Transcendental society or society in interiore homine’, as the most important and original in the book.³⁶ This doctrine had been the crux of his philosophical defence of the fascist state. Gentile now elaborated that thesis at some length in order to show why the subject of the self-creative activity, upon which actualism was premised, was not the individual but society, and ultimately humanity, as a whole. He began with the Aristotelian observation that ‘man lives in society’, but denied that this could be correctly understood as simply an empirical statement—one could not create a community from ‘individual social atoms’.³⁷ Human self-expression was always social because, in attempting to be universal, it aimed at membership of an ideal society. Language was the most tangible example of the existence of this ideal community. Language was always expressive of the personality and the originality of the individuals—‘Yet no one talks so individualistically for his words not to echo all around as a human expression of something human, which all are disposed to welcome and recognise as real in the spiritual life which embraces all men of all places and of all ages.’³⁸

Gentile then amended his account of the development of individual consciousness in order to show why this ideal community was not a personal vision, but necessarily one which included respect for others. The ‘transcendental society’ developed, ideally and within the subject, via the self-distinction into subject and object—‘Because there is no Ego, in which the individual realises himself, which does not have, not outside, but within himself, an alter, which is his essential socius: that is an object, that is not simply an object (thing) opposed to the subject, but is also a subject, like him’.³⁹

The world and consciousness required each other to be, the latter endowing the former with a spiritual life of its own so that it was not just an object to be overcome, but an alter ego with which mind could converse. This primitive spiritual unity occured in the childish personification of the external world, and developed into an ‘internal or transcendental dialogue’, in which ego and alter-ego could converse and collaborate in a common spiritual life. This passage of the not-I from being an object of consciousness to membership of an internal spiritual society was present in every instant of human experience. In this manner the ‘transcendental loneliness’ of the Ego was overcome.⁴⁰ This process occurred within the individual subject alone, without the stimulus of other people—‘We speak to others because first of all we speak to ourselves’.⁴¹ Society, arose from this dialogue within the agent, in which the object ceased to be a ‘thing’ and became a partner in the transcendental society innate in the transcendental Ego. The ‘moment of otherness’ did not refer, then, to the empirical separateness of different objects and persons, but was part of the synthesis of I and not-I within the consciousness of the Ego. It was analogous to the unity of love, which developed from the mutual, but, he claimed, entirely separate development of sympathy within the minds of two lovers.⁴² Gentile, therefore, traced the origin of society to the immanent dialectic of the ‘act of pure thought’, unifying subject and object—‘All of society in its infinite forms is here, in the dialectical union of alter with ipse.’⁴³

This chapter must be considered his most successful attempt to derive society from the self-constituting activity (autoctisi) of the individual subject. Its claim to originality has been rightly criticized as exaggerated, since this doctrine is fundamental to the political thought of Plato and Hegel.⁴⁴ However, Gentile's search after an ideal unity had the concomitant result of regarding all distinctions, such as those urged by Croce, as empirical and insufferable in a philosophy which ‘overcomes’ them. But human reason could never fully absorb the real into the ideal. Hegel's moments of civil society and the state, or Croce's distinction between the Useful and the Good, recognized this basic aspect of human existence. The individual remains a physical body, which is part of a physical world, and the body within this self-conscious self is a partly but never wholly transcended element. There can thus be no complete transcendence within the state of the practical individual. The ethical state as a practical reality will inevitably be totalitarian—the total subordination of the individual's practical and intellectual will to government. It was precisely this identification of real and ideal that Gentile sought to achieve via the unity of thought and practice. Philosophy was thereby always complete and self-sufficient—the contrasts of reality abolished forever, as Croce feared. Human experience, however, reveals an irresolvable asymmetry between real and ideal at all levels of human existence, so that no philosophy can be successfully constructed wholly a priori. This was the objection Aristotle made to Plato's Republic in the Politics,—that the heterogeneity of human goods could not be abolished by asserting a single moral and social order. The state was ‘Man writ large’ only by virtue of our continued participation at all levels of human existence, from the family through to the life of contemplation. If in pursuit of the ideal one forced development to the highest stage, then one destroyed human nature.⁴⁵

This point was made by Professor Arangio-Ruiz, in an early ciritque of Gentile's doctrine of the state, when he argued that a distinction should be made between the state in interiore homine and that inter homines.⁴⁶ It was the complete resolution of the empirical distinction, implied by the latter, into the ideal of the former, which was Gentile's main error. As he replied to Arangio-Ruiz's article, the distinction was superfluous since he

had clearly shown that the individual, who is in essence the State and from whom it eternally derives, is not the particular, naturally given, individual: but the individual who overcomes his own particularity in the universal will (which is neither more nor less than the universal will) … but then, if this is the case, to emphasise one term rather than the other is pointless, because they are not two terms, but one.⁴⁷

Gentile simply avoided the whole problem of legitimating the relations between people by assuming away the particularity of the individual.

His whole fascist creed, assiduously elaborated in much of the rest of the book, flowed from this error. The humanization of culture was to be followed by the humanization of labour—the complete transendence of God and nature by man, for economic action was only moral action viewed externally.⁴⁸ All human activity was to be organized within the Fascist Corporate State which represented ‘the fundamental unity of man, which is articulated in all its dimensions’.⁴⁹ This was the concrete human will, which was the essence of all history. Force remained indispensable to the life of the state, which was the true subject of history. But it was only by rewriting history that Gentile could prove fascism to be the ideal implied by all human activity, and hence justify coercion to realize it.⁵⁰ The belief that ‘no love is a more secure and solid possession than that which is won via an apprenticeship of conquest and of brotherhood of the enemy with us’⁵¹ had to be regarded as a pious hope that, which ever side lost, they would ultimately acquiesce and resign themselves to the rule of the other. Yet it proved no more realistic in 1943 than a similar sentiment, expressed in 1925, had been at the start of the fascist débâcle. Namely that ‘A spirit of compromise will become more pronounced day by day, progressively as, when the second term is fulfilled, the first term of the great Roman admonition appears even more opportune and more just: parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.’⁵²

Here lies the contradicition at the heart of Gentile's fascism—that the more authoritarian the state was, the freer the individual citizen would become. This paradox was necessitated by a philosophical theory which denied all opposition beyond the dialectic of a subject and an object, which is not the same thing as the contrast of real and ideal, or that between subjects explored above. It is noticeable that Gentile was much less tolerant in the ideal realm of ideas than he was in practical politics. As director of the Fascist Institute of Culture and editor of the Enciclopedia Italiana he attempted, against strong opposition from the authorities, to maintain a largely open policy towards opponents of the regime.⁵³ But he damned the belief that culture as contemplation was the highest truth as ‘intellectualist’.⁵⁴ The only valid ideas remained those which were practically victorious over others—which succeeded as action and not as mere thought.⁵⁵ It is not surprising that Gentile should have ultimately sided with Mussolini's last-ditch stand against the allies, and his violent death by assasination was a sad but appropriate end to his career.

Notes

1. G. Gentile, ‘Intorno all'Idealismo Attuale. Ricordi e confessioni’ (1913), reprinted in Saggi Critici, seria seconda (Florence, 1927), p. 12.

2. Gentile, ‘Il Metodo dell'Immanenza’ (1912), La Riforma della Dialettica Hegeliana (Florence, 1975), pp. 221-5.

3. G. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 52-3. See also Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Millar (Oxford, 1979), paras 5, 90, 785, 800, 808. I owe this interpretation of Hegel's relationship to Kant to R. C. Solomon, ‘Hegel's Epistemology’, American Philosophical Quarterly, XI (1974), pp. 277-89.

4. Gentile, ‘Origine e Significato della Logica di Hegel' (1904), La Riforma, pp. 69-96; ‘Il Metodo dell'Immanenza’, ibid., pp. 225-9.

5. Gentile ‘La Riforma della Dialettica Hegeliana e Bertrando Spaventa’ (1912), La Riforma, pp. 27-65; B. Spaventa, La Filosofia Italiana nelle sue Relazioni con la Filosofia Europea con note e appendici di documenti, ed. G. Gentile, 3rd edn (Bari 1926) pp. 28-9, 122 ff, 130 ff, 203, and the comments of I. Cubeddù, Bertrando Spaventa (Firenze, 1964), pp. 51-4.

6. Gentile, ‘Il Metodo dell'Immanenza’, p. 232.

7. Gentile, Teoria Generale dello Spirito Come Atto Puro (1915), 3rd edn (Bari, 1920), p. 16.

8. B. Spaventa, La Filosofia Italiana, pp. 233-4.

9. Gentile's principal works on the philosophy of education are: Sommario di Pedagogia come Scienza Filosofica, 2 vols (Bari, 1913-4); and La Riforma dell'Educazione: Discorsi ai Maestri di Trieste (Bari, 1920). In addition there are three volumes of various Scritti Pedagogici which make up vols XXXIX-XLI of the complete works.

10. Gentile, ‘La Filosofia della Prassi’ (1899), in La Filosofia di Marx (Florence, 1974), pp. 72-4, 82.

11. Gentile, ‘Una Critica del Materialismo Storica’ (1899), in La Filosofia di Cronache Marx p. 55. See the analysis of E. Garin, largely followed here, in Cronache di Filosofia Italiana, 2nd edn (Bari, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 213-15.

12. Gentile, Teoria Generale, pp. 81-4, 91-2.

13. Gentile, I Fondamenti della Filosofia dell Diritto (1916), 2nd edn (Rome, 1923), p. 8.

14. Ibid., pp. 63-4.

15. Ibid., pp. 64-7, 69.

16. Gentile, La Riforma Dell'Educazione, pp. 24-6.

17. Phenomenology of Spirit, paras, 582-95.

18. B. Croce, ‘Intorno all'Idealismo Attuale’ (1913), Conversazione Critiche, serie seconda (Bari, 1924), pp. 72-3, 75-6. A remarkably similar criticism is made by H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edn (London, 1954), pp. 402-9.

19. Gentile, ‘La Colpa Commune’, Resto del Carlino, 25 January 1918, reprinted in Gentile, Guerra e Fede: Frammenti Politici (Naples, 1919), pp. 79-83.

20. Gentile, ‘L'Invincibile’, Resto del Carlino, 3 July 1918, reprinted in Guerra e Fede, pp. 315-8.

21. The idealist/realist distinction forms the basis of Gentile's book La Riforma dell'Educazione, especially chapter IV, and even there it is related to the problems of a national revival, set chapter I. He condemns Nitti and the liberals as ‘realists’ in an article ‘Realismo e Fatalismo’ of 1920, reprinted in Che Cosa è il Fascismo (Florence, 1925), pp. 243-58, and it became a standard feature of his later anti-liberal polemics, e.g. Origini e Dottrina del Fascismo, 3rd edn (Rome, 1934), pp. 10, 15-20.

22. Gentile, La Riforma dell'Educazione, pp. 181-6.

23. H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana, 1960), pp. 155-67.

24. Gentile, La Riforma Dell'Educazione, pp. 1-16.

25. Ibid., pp. 32-47, 58-9, and Gentile, Sommario di Pedagogia, vol. II, pp. 37-44.

26. Letter to Mussolini, reprinted in Gentile, Scritti Pedagogici, III (Milan, 1932), pp. 127-8.

27. Gentile, ‘Il Fascismo e la Sicilia’, speech at Palermo, 31 March 1924, reprinted in Che Cosa è il Fascismo, p. 50.

28. Ibid., pp. 50-1. See also his article ‘Il Contenuto Etico del Fascismo’ (1925), in Che Cosa è il Fascismo, pp. 9-39, especially p. 36.

29. E.g. Gentile, I Profeti del Risorgimento Italiano (Florence, 1923) p. ii; and ‘Risorgimento e Fascismo’, in Memorie Italiane e Problemi della Filosofia e della Vita (Florence, 1936), pp. 116-17. These volumes as a whole provide the most complete account of Gentile's version of the Risorgimento.

30. Gentile's preface to C. Cavour, Scritti Politici Nuovamente Raccolti (Rome, 1925), reprinted in Che Cosa è il Fascismo, pp. 179-96. This was deeply resented by liberals, e.g. G. De Ruggiero's review ‘Nuova Letteratura Cavouriana’, Pagine Critiche, 1 August 1926, reprinted in Scritti Politici 1912-26, ed. R. De Felici (Bologna, 1969), pp. 658-67; and B. Croce's comments in ‘Contro la Troppa Filosofia Politica’, La Critica, XXI (1925), pp. 126-8. Croce's remarks drew Gentile's reply that, whether he knew it or not, he was a ‘Fascist without the black shirt’ (‘Il liberalismo di B. Croce’ (1925), Che Cosa è il Fascismo, p. 154), a remark which ended their friendship for ever. The dialogue between them nevertheless continued, and as H. S. Harris points out, Croce is at the foreground of Gentile's later works as well, Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, pp. 19-22, 221-3, 224-39.

31. Gentile, Che Cosa è il Fascismo, pp. 29-33, 41-63, 65-94; Gentile, Origini e Dottrina del Fascismo, pp. 50-1.

32. Gentile, Philosophy of Right, paras 189, 260, 301, 302. See the commentary of C. Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 438-49; and R. Plant, Hegel—an introduction 2nd edn (Oxford, 1983), chapter 7, and R. Bellamy, ‘Hegel's Conception of the State; Political Science, forthcoming.

33. This was the substance of Croce's ciriticism in ‘Politica in “Nuce” ’, La Critica, XXII, (1924), pp. 129-54, especially pp. 132-8.

34. Origini e Dottrina del Fascismo, pp. 36-7. Both Gentile and Gramsci were ‘totalitarian’ in a philosophical sense as implying a ‘total' conception of human activity. Neither successfully removed its current pejorative connotations.

35. Gentile, Genesi e Struttura Della Società (Firenze, 1943), Avvertenza.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

38. Ibid., p. 15.

39. Ibid., p. 33.

40. Ibid., p. 35-9.

41. Ibid., p. 37.

42. Ibid., pp. 39-40.

43. Ibid., p. 42.

44. This point is made by G. R. G. Mure in his review of the book in Philosophical Quarterly, I (1950), pp. 83-4. My own account is indebted to Mure's masterly analysis. I have dwelt on the problems and the alternatives to Gentile's views in R. Bellamy, ‘Croce, Gentile and Hegel and the doctrine of the Ethical State’, Rivista di Studi Crociani, XXI (1984), pp. 67-73.

45. I owe this conception of the idealist approach to politics to G. R. G. Mure's classic article, ‘The Organic State’, Philosophy, XXI (1949), pp. 205-18.

46. V. Arangio-Ruiz, ‘L'Individuo e lo Stato’, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, VII (1926), pp. 132-50.

47. Gentile, ‘Postilla’ to ‘L'Individuo e lo Stato, Giornale Critico, VII (1926), p. 152.

48. Gentile, Genesi e Struttura, pp. 71-87, 111-12.

49. Ibid., pp. 61-6, 114.

50. Ibid., pp. 106-11.

51. Ibid., p. 40.

52. Gentile, ‘L'Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura’ (1925), reprinted in Fascismo e Cultura, (Milan, 1928), p. 62.

53. Gentile, ‘L'Enciclopedia Italiana e il fascismo’ (1926), Fascismo e Cultura, pp. 110-15. G. Turi, ‘Il Progetto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana: l'Organizzazione del consenso fra gli intellettuali’, Studi Storici (1972), pp. 93-152, shows him to have been largely true to his word, asking for contributions from the best qualified, regardless of their political sympathies.

54. Gentile, ‘L'Immanenza d'azione’, (1942), reprinted as an appendix to Genesi e Struttura, p. 173.

55. Gentile, Dottrina Politica del Fascismo (Padua, 1937) p. 19.