Giovanni Gentile

Philosopher of Fascism

A. James Gregor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765805935
• eBook ISBN: 9781351517508
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism

The recent rise in Europe of extreme right-wing political parties along with outbreaks of violent nationalist fervor in the former communist bloc has occasioned much speculation on a possible resurgence of fascism. At the polemical level, fascism has become a generic term applied to virtually any form of real or potential violence, while among Marxist and left-wing scholars discredited interpretations of fascism as a "product of late capitalism" are revived. Empty of cognitive significance, these formulas disregard the historical and philosophical roots of fascism as it arose in Italy and spread throughout Europe. In Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, A. James Gregor returns to those roots by examining the thought of Italian Fascism's major theorist.In Gregor's reading of Gentile, fascism was-and remains-an anti-democratic reaction to what were seen to be the domination by advanced industrial democracies of less-developed or status-deprived communities and nations languishing on the margins of the "Great Powers." Sketching in the political background of late nineteenth-century Italy, industrially backward and only recently unified, Gregor shows how Gentile supplied fascism its justificatory rationale as a developmental dictatorship. Gentile's Actualism (as his philosophy came to be identified) absorbed many intellectual currents of the early twentieth century including nationalism, syndicalism, and futurism and united them in a dynamic rebellion against new perceived hegemonic impostures of imperialism. The individual was called to an idealistic ethic of obedience, work, self-sacrifice, and national community. As Gregor demonstrates, it was a paradigm of what we can expect in the twenty-first century's response, on the part of marginal nations, to the globalization of the industrialized democracies. Gregor cites post-Maoist China, nationalist Russia, Africa, and the Balkans at the development stage from which fascism could grow.The f

1 The Life of Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily, of Giovanni and Theresa Curti on the 30th of May 1875 and completed his elementary schooling in his native township. In nearby Trapani, he attended the ginnasio and the liceo before being admitted to the Scuola normale superiore of Pisa, where he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1897. His thesis involved treatment of the ideas of “Rosmini and Gioberti.”¹ From Pisa, he undertook advanced studies at the University of Florence. From there, he commenced his teaching career in the lyceum at Campobasso and Naples (1898-1906).

From 1896 forward, Gentile developed an intellectual friendship with Benedetto Croce and in 1903 conducted a course of instruction at the University of Naples on the subject, “The Rebirth of Idealism”— thereby commencing a philosophical program that would occupy him for the remainder of his life. In 1906, Gentile was called to the University of Palermo to fill the chair in the history of philosophy—to remain there until 1914, when he was invited to Pisa, there to take up the responsibilities of the chair of his former teacher Donato Jaja.

Jaja had been a student of the Italian neo-Hegelian idealist, Bertrando Spaventa (1817-1883). Through Jaja, Spaventa was to exercise significant influence on the thought of Gentile.²

In 1917, Gentile returned to the University of Rome and in 1925, founded there the School of Philosophy. In 1920, Gentile founded his own philosophical review, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana. He remained a professor of philosophy at the University of Rome until shortly before his death.

In October 1922, immediately after the Fascist March on Rome, Gentile, a Nationalist and a Liberal, was invited by Benito Mussolini to serve in his first cabinet as Minister of Public Instruction—a position Gentile held until July of 1924. During this period, on the 31st of May 1923, Gentile formally applied for membership in the Partito nazionale fascista.³ During his twenty months of service in the new administration as minister, Gentile initiated a reform in public instruction—the first organic reform of public education since the Casati law of 1859. On the 5th of November 1923, Gentile was appointed senator of the realm, a representative in the Upper House of the Italian Parliament. In that same year, he founded L’Educazione politica, which, in 1925, became the journal of the Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura. Between 1927 and 1933, the journal was entitled Educazione fascista and after 1933, Civiltà fascista. From 1929 through 1930, Gentile was director of Bibliografia fascista—a systematic bibliographical collection of literature devoted to Fascism.

Immediately upon his resignation from his ministerial post in 1924, Gentile served, at Mussolini’s invitation, as president of the “Commission of Fifteen,” and subsequently the “Commission of Eighteen,” devoted to the constitutional reform that followed the accession of Fascism to power. The reform focused, basically, on the new role the prime minister, as head of state, would play in the new Fascist government, and the problem of how corporativist legislation could be accommodated by the Albertine Constitution—the constitutional instrument by which Italy had been governed since its unification.

From the very commencement of the Fascist regime,⁴ Gentile’s public service both expanded and became increasingly complex. He served as president of the Superior Council of Public Instruction in the years between 1926 and 1928. He was a member of the Grand Council of Fascism from 1923 to 1924, and from 1925 through 1929, first as minister of the cabinet, and then as president of the Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura, which he founded in 1925 and over which he presided until 1937.⁵ He served as the president of the Italian Institute of Germanic Studies from 1934 and of the Institute for the Study of the Middle and Extreme Orient from 1933 until his death in 1944.

From 1925 until 1944, Gentile supervised the publication of the Enciclopedia Italiana, serving as its scientific director. It was during that period, and in that capacity, that Gentile was charged by Mussolini, over the objections of the Roman Catholic Church⁶, to write the first part of the offical “Dottrina del fascismo” that appeared as an insert in volume XIV of the Enciclopedia Italiana in June 1932. The “Doctrine” was described as “the fundamental and synthetic foundation for any study, historic or theoretical, concerning the development, thought and practice of Fascism.”⁷

The first part of the Dottrina, written by Gentile, was a summary statement of his Actualism, the neo-Hegelian philosophy he had formulated. Although almost entirely written by Gentile, the first part, the “Fundamental Ideas,” appeared over the name of Mussolini—thereby endowing it with an official character.⁸ The relationship of Gentile’s philosophy and Fascism was thereby formally established. As a consequence, among the orthodox and until the end of the regime, Fascism was described, in its propaganda literature, as a “luminous historic example” of Gentilean Actualism.⁹

Throughout the history of Fascism, Gentile was among the most prominent of the Italian intellectuals who identified with Fascism, largely without qualification—until the affiliation with National Socialist Germany became intimate in the mid-thirties. At the end of the regime—when Fascism was confined to northern Italy—he was among the few intellectuals who committed themselves to its service. Gentile volunteered to serve Republican Fascism, the Fascism that survived Mussolini’s dismissal by Vittorio Emanuele III, the king of Italy, on 23 July 1943.

After the dismissal of Mussolini on that date and the subsequent collapse of the Fascist regime, General Pietro Badoglio assumed responsibility for the nation—and proceeded to surrender to the Allied powers—to subsequently seek “cobelligerancy” status with them in the war against National Socialist Germany (and, by implication, with the Republican Fascist regime¹⁰ that established itself in the German-occupied north of the Italian peninsula).

In the Repubblica di Salò—the Fascist republican government in northern Italy that prevailed between 1943 and the end of the Second World War in April-May 1945—Gentile served, until his death in April 1944, as president of the Accademia d’Italia, Italy’s foremost intellectual institution. In effect, from 1922 until his death in 1944, Gentile served Fascism as one of its principal intellectual spokesmen—providing it not only vindication, but its rationale as well. On the 15th of April 1944, Gentile was assassinated by Communist terrorists. He is buried in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence—beside the remains of Galileo and Machiavelli.

2 The Background of the Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile

The philosophical thought of Gentile grew out of a protracted intellectual crisis that beset post-Risorgimento Italy—newly reunited Italy— at the turn of the twentieth century. The nature of that crisis is rarely considered by Anglo-Americans when dealing with Gentile’s work and life. Knowing something of the nature of the intellectual and political crisis that tormented Italy at the turn of the twentieth century contributes to our understanding of Gentile’s thought. Reading the opening sections of his Origini e dottrina del fascism (Origins and Doctrine of Fascism), and the first pages of Che cosa e il fascismo (What is Fascism),¹ one cannot fail to appreciate the deep sense of disappointment that oppressed Gentile when he discussed post-Risorgimento Italy.

For Gentile, Italy’s nineteenth-century Risorgimento—its “resurgence,” its “renovation,” its “redemption”—had failed. The “new Italy,” at the beginning of the twentieth century, was not what it could, and should, be. Renaissance Italy had been a magnificence of individual creativity in art and literature—and then it had succumbed to time and circumstance, to decay into the Italy of the late nineteenth century. By that time, Gentile lamented, the Italy of the Risorgimento came to serve as little more than the “easy prey of foreigners, an indifferent factor in a world of hegemonic powers.... [It was an Italy] without power, life and reality.. .. The new Italy, formally constituted in 1861, remained . .. more a presumption than a reality.”²

Post-Risorgimento Italy was conceived, by Gentile and virtually everyone at the end of the nineteenth century, as a nation of negligible consequence in a dynamic world of industrial growth and colonial expansion. At that time, about 18 million Italians lived on doles—on monies transferred to them from Italian emigrant workers living in foreign lands—a humiliating and offensive reality.³ The nation had little sense of unity and purpose. A flawed assay into African colonialism brought only further humiliation to a government that failed to govern. Millions of Italians had fled the peninsula in order to survive—to labor in the homes, mills, and mines of foreigners—as their servants and manual laborers.

Italian intellectuals responded to all of this with a kind of intensity that found diverse expression in revolutionary velleity, self-deprecation, reactive nationalism, traditionalism, positivism, skepticism, relativism, or idealism—much of it in a confused effort to try to understand Italy’s place in the rapidly evolving history of Europe. In the confusion, for example, there were books, written by Italians, themselves, that spoke of the basic inferiority of Latins and the intrinsic superiority of Northern Europeans.⁴ The sense of collective failure, humiliation, and inferiority ran deep in the Italian psyche.

Among thinkers, there was an attempt to understand the role of Italian thought in the philosophical processes that accompanied the economic, political, and imperialist development of the major nations of Europe. In the years since the first intimations of industrial development, the thinkers of Northern and Western Europe gave themselves over, more and more, to thought that was largely predicated on the conviction that the purpose of reflection was to make and transform things—to produce.

In England, from Francis Bacon through Thomas Hobbes, one of the central convictions of thinkers was that knowledge should be power. Hobbes held that “the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, of things to be done.” Thought was too difficult, he insisted, for human beings to engage in it solely for the “inward glory and triumph of mind.” The purpose of thought was to aid in construction, engineering, architecture, and navigation. It found its purpose in utility, in the doing of things.⁵

Later, for David Hume, intelligence was the maidservant of the survival needs necessitated as a consequence of operating in the world governed by sentiment, belief, and passion. A major thrust of philosophy was to “consider man as chiefly born for action” in a complex and hazardous world—with reasoning supplying a utilitarian guide to behavior.⁶

The acknowledged companion of British empiricism, and utilitarianism, in general, was a notion of science as form of calculation designed to further operations in the world. Similarly, in France, for the Cartesians, thought served to penetrate the mechanics of nature. Out of all this, trends began to separate themselves out of the excitement generated by just such reflections about the natural world.

Materialism made its appearance. In the Germany of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Buechner, Jakob Moleschott, and Karl Vogt conceived the universe as the arena for the operation of determinable and determinate material laws governing all phenomena. The mind, itself, was simply a by-product of the laws of the evolving material universe.

In France, Auguste Comte argued that the world was eminently penetrable, with understanding a function of the recognition of positive empirical laws that governed all things and their development. Darwinism contributed to the process and scientific positivism—together with monistic evolutionism—came to dominate the speculation of philosophers like Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and Ernst Haeckel. For positivism, philosophy came to be understood as nothing other than unified science—its purpose to understand how to discern the discriminable processes that governed nature.

One of the most memorable products of this period was the classical Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It gave expression to a form of materialism that conceived the universe and human society intelligible only in terms of “scientific” lawlike processes. The development of nature and society followed a pattern of “ineluctable” outcomes—”dialectical and historical materialism”—in which human beings participated as constituent elements in objective and “materialistic” processes over which they had little, if any, conscious control.⁷

In effect, classical Marxism was a form of nineteenth-century positivism. For all its insistence on its “dialectics”—in the forms expressed by its advocates—Marxism was very much like the evolutionary and deterministic positivism entertained by the Comteans, the Spencerians, and the Darwinians. It was fully compatible with the Weltgeist of the period. For at least that reason, Marxism was welcomed by many intellectuals in the more industrially advanced nations of Europe and North America during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

During this period in Italy, positivism emerged as one of the most popular philosophical currents. A significant number of intellectuals imagined that it represented the thought of the philosophers of the most advanced industrial nations. Italian thinkers sought to identify themselves with the more progressive communities of the North. By the end of the nineteenth century, positivism, in the form provided by philosophers like Roberto Ardigò and Erminio Troilo,⁸ came to dominate Italian thought.

Commencing at least as early as midcentury, Carlo Cattaneo had spoken of the “science of facts” to distinguish “progressive” thought from what he held to be the empty, and purposeless, speculations of philosophical idealism—the neo-Kantianism, Thomism, and Hegelianism of nineteenth century Italian philosophy.⁹ In the prevailing environment in newly reunited Italy, it was evident that “progressive thought” was identified, almost exclusively, with the systematic rejection of traditional religious beliefs, moral philosophy, and any idealist interpretation of reality.

Italian positivists had committed themselves to the utilitarianism and the scientism of British empiricism and French mecha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Fmchapter
• Content Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgment
• Preface
• 1 The Life of Giovanni Gentile
• 2 The Background of the Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile
• 3 The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile
• 4 Gentile’s Political Philosophy
• 5 Gentile and Marxism
• 6 Gentile and Fascism
• 7 Fascism and Gentile
• 8 Gentile and Fascist Racism
• 9 Conclusions
• Notes
• Index