Hegemony before Gramsci: The Case of Benedetto Croce

Author(s): Edmund E. Jacobitti

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Mar., 1980), pp. 66-84
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Hegemony before Gramsci: The Case of Benedetto Croce

Edmund E. Jacobitti
Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

Persons familiar with the thought of Antonio Gramsci will recall his
celebrated idea of "culture" set out in Letteratura e vita nazionale:
"But what does 'culture' mean in this case? Undoubtedly it means a
coherent, unitary, nationally diffused 'conception of life and man,' a
'lay religion,' a philosophy that has become precisely a 'culture,'
that is, it has generated an ethic, a way of life, a civil and individual
conduct."' A "culture," in other words, provided the parameters
within which the otherwise open-ended worlds of theory and prac-
tice were confined. It was similar to what Vico in his Scienza nuova
called "common sense." "Common sense is judgment without
reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire
nation, or the entire human race."2
Common sense and culture were for Gramsci, as for Vico, the not
so solid foundations on which nations rested. Without these foun-
dations theory and practice came unhinged, flying off in separate
directions, making behavior unpredictable, and bringing the "un-
heard of" on an equal footing with what was customary and tradi-
tional. Without common sense the king would indeed have no
clothes, and civil institutions hitherto armored in that common
sense would crash down.
To Gramsci, however, "culture" and "common sense" consti-
tuted not simply a defense against chaos but a major element in what
he saw as the "hegemony" of the dominant class of society over the
whole, an element of the "superstructure" used to shield society
from the critical analysis of its opponents. Far from sneering at this
hegemony Gramsci had for it a singular appreciation, seeing there
not only the defensive weapon of the middle class but an example, a
model to be emulated in forging an offensive weapon for the pro-
letariat. In the notion of cultural hegemony Gramsci saw the power
of an ethical-political atmosphere which, though supposedly serving
the interests of only a single class, had come to be the common
sense of the whole society.3
1 Antonio Gramsci,Letteratura e vita nazionale (Rome, 1971), p. 20.
2
GiambattistaVico, Scienza nuova seconda, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari, 1953), 1:77.
3 Gramsci, of course, was to devote the rest of his life to replacingthat dominant
culturalhegemonywith his own hegemony-one he envisioned as serving the interest
[Journal of Modern History 52 (March 1980): 66-84]
?) 1980 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/80/5201-0050$01.51
 Hegemony before Gramsci 67
Cutting through that "bourgeois hegemony" which insulated the
worker from "historical reality" and establishinga "practical" polit-
ical theory in the minds of the workers were the themes which
dominated the works of Gramsci. Indeed the scraping away of
"outdated" and "abstract" prohibitions, natural laws, and other
eternal verities which supposedly masked the forces of the real
world has enjoyed a rich tradition in Italy, dating back at least to
Machiavelli's attempt to set aside Christian"abstraction"in order to
reveal to the Prince the true nature of the world.4 It was only at the
of the proletariat. The thinker thus turned his attention to the interest of the
proletariatso as to overcome the historicalgap between elite and mass. In that union
of thinker and worker would be constituted a living example of the unity of theory
and practice, a marriageof thought and action that was to shatter the "illusion" of
the autonomous intellectual who elaborated a classless and impersonal intellectual
patrimonywhile remainingabove sordid practical interests (see, e.g., Gli intellettu-
ali e l'organizzazione della cultura [Rome, 1971], p. 16). This elaboration of a
proletarianhegemony would disperse those historically"outdated" concepts of reli-
gion, patriotism, and bourgeois "common sense" which had prevented the worker
from operating coherently in a world where theory coincided with (proletarian)
practice: "An active member of the masses operates practically, but has no clear
theoretical conception of this. . . . His theoretical consciousness rather can be
historically in contrast with this activity" (II materialismo storico e la filosofia di
Benedetto Croce [Rome, 1971], p. 13). For Gramsci, theory was to derive from
"real" practice and was to aim at hurryingalong those forces of history he saw as
inevitable: "If the problem of identifyingtheory and practice is posed, it is posed in
this sense: constructingupon a determinatepractice, a theory which, coincidingand
being identifiedwith the decisive elements of practice itself, accelerates the historical
process in being, making practice in every way more homogeneous, coherent, and
efficient" (ibid., p. 45). How to hurryalong the forces of history-how to shatterthe
illusions which concealed "reality" became the central passion of Gramsci's work
whether one reads the Note sul Machiavelli (Rome, 1971), p. 17: "The process of
forminga determinedcollective will for a determinatepolitical end is representednot
through disquisitions and pedantic classifications of principles and criteria . . . of
action, but as quality, characteristicdeeds, necessities of a concrete person, . . .
which give a more concrete form to political passion"; or II materialismostorico, p.
12: "The position of the philosophyof prassi [i.e., Marxism]is antitheticalto [that of
RomanCatholicism]:the philosophyof prassi does not aim at maintaining'the simple'
in their primitivephilosophy of common sense, but instead at conductingthem to a
superiorconception of life. . . . The contact between intellectualsand simple men is
not to limit scientific activity in order to maintaincontact with the low level of the
masses, but precisely to construct an intellectual-moralbase to render politically
possible an intellectual progress of the masses rather than of isolated intellectual
groups";or Gli intellettuali,p. 18: "The mode of being for the new intellectualcannot
consist in eloquence . . . but in the active mixing with practicallife, as constructor,
organizer 'permanent persuader.' . . . From the techniques of work come the
techniques of science and [then] the humanist historical conception, without which
one remains a [mere] 'specialist,' [ratherthan] a ruler (specialist + politician). . ..
One of the most relevant characteristicsof every group that has become dominantis
its strugglefor the assimilationand ideologicalconquest of the traditionalintellectuals,
an assimilationand conquest that is more rapid and efficacious when the given group
spawns its own organic intellectuals."
4 Later, while Europefell underthe sway of an abstractCartesianhegemony, it was

Vico who recalled the Machiavellianconception of a world made by man, a world

68 Edmund E. Jacobitti
beginning of the twentieth century, however, that Gramsci saw for
the first time in modern Italy an example of how one "culture"
might supplant another, how one "common sense" might be used to
assault and then replace an opposing order.
In the hegemony of Benedetto Croce over Italian intellectual life
Gramsci glimpsed the method and the practice of hegemony. "Not
since Goethe," wrote H. Stuart Hughes, "had any single individual
dominated so completely the culture of a major European country."5
No one, Gramsci, or any other, was immune to the impact of the
Neapolitan idealist whose criticisms of Italian positivism and
pioneering work in aesthetics had made him, by the turn of the
present century, one of the leading intellectual figures of Italy and
indeed of Europe as a whole. "I and . . . many other intellectuals of
that period," wrote Gramsci, "you could say for the first fifteen
years of the century, participated entirely or in part in the moral and
intellectual reform promoted in Italy by Benedetto Croce. "6
where there exists "a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has
certainlybeen made by men, and that its principlesare thereforeto be found with the
modificationsof our own minds" (Vico, pp. 117-18; emphasis added). In the Risor-
gimento, men like Francesco De Sanctis and Bertrando and Silvio Spaventa, the
leadingthinkersof the Destra Storica, returnedto the worldly humanismof Vico and
Machiavelli, elaboratingin literature and political theory an immanentistand anti-
transcendentjustificationfor the unificationof Italy and the new Italian state. (The
literatureon De Sanctis and the Spaventabrothersis too overwhelmingto cite but at
least one work of Guido Oldrinimust be mentioned, for here one finds not only a
comprehensive-though hardly unbiased-analysis of nineteenth-centuryHegelian
Italian thought but also a comprehensivebibliography.See his La culturafilosofica
napoletana dell'ottocento [Bari, 1973].) Yet all these thinkers-with the possible
exception of De Sanctis (who had become, as Luigi Russo put it in his Francesco De
Sanctis e la cultura Napoletana, 3d ed. [Florence, 1958], pp. 343-44, a kind of
"national conscience")-had been ill received, establishingno enduringculture, no
hegemony. Nearly everywhere Machiavelli's works were banned and he burned in
effigy. Vico and his works only today have found a wide audience, his publicationof
the New Science occasioning, on the whole, a contemptuous,if uneasy, yawn: "The
book appeared,"he wrote in a letter of 1726, "in an age which, to use the expression
of Tacitus as he reflectedupon his own times-times which are so very similarto our
own-corrumpere et corrumpi 'saeculum vocatur, and therefore, being a book which
dismays or disturbs the multitude, cannot receive universal applause" (Vico,
L'autobiografia, il carteggio, e le poesie varie, ed. Benedetto Croce and Fausto
Nicolini [Bari, 1911], p. 185, Letter to the Abby Giuseppe Luigi Esperti). Bertrando
Spaventa's lectures at the University of Naples were hooted, and during his life he
was unable to awaken the interest of a publisher for his extraordinaryworks (see
Bertrando Spaventa, Opere, ed. Giovanni Gentile [Florence, 1972], 1:5; and also
Eugenio Garin,Cronachedifilosofia italiana [Bari, 1966], 1:18 ff.). With the collapse
of the Destra Storica in 1876 the parabolaof worldly humanismwent into decline.
5 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, 1958), p. 201.
6 Antonio Gramsci, Lettere del carcere (Turin, 1950), p. 132. And Norberto

Bobbio, far off from Naples at the Universityof Turin, similarlynoted: "I belong to a
generationthat was, at least at the University of Turin,naturaliterCrocean. We were
Crocean with the same assurance and the same ingenuousnessthat our parents had
been positivists" ("Benedetto Croce a dieci anni dalla morte," Belfagor 17
 Hegemony before Gramsci 69
Gramsci, of course, did not long remain-if ever he wholly
was-an orthodox Crocean.7 Indeed the two men stood, on socio-
economic grounds, leagues apart. Yet in Croce's domination of the
Italian culture, in his role as a kind of "lay Pope"-as Gramsci
called him-Gramsci saw not only the power of Croce but the need
to open, alongside the "merely economic and political fronts," a
"cultural front."8
This article is not concerned with the content of the "cultures"
proposed by either Gramsci or Croce but with a technique employed
by Croce-and later absorbed by Gramsci-for establishing that
culture in the minds of his contemporaries.It is concerned with the
access to and diligent use of scholarly journals and the scholarly
press to saturate the intellectual life of Italy with a single point of
view, a particularculture, in order to bring about what Croce liked
to call the "cultural rebirth of Italy."
The aim of this culturalrebirthwas the annihilationof the vestiges
of eighteenth-centurythought, the annihilation of "masonic senti-
mentality" and natural-lawphilosophy, but especially it was aimed
against positivism,9 that heir to the Enlightenmentthrone of abstract
[November 30, 1962]: 622). One can gauge the impact of Crocean (and Gentilean)
idealism on Italian intellectual life from the words of Eugenio Garin, the greatest
student of the period. Closing his two-volume study of twentieth-centuryItalian
culture, he warned the reader that "the names of Croce and Gentile have been
excluded from the index due to the frequency with which they appear in the text"
(Garin, 2:621).
7 To Gramsci, Croceanism was the Hegelianism of the twentieth century. In his

work on Croce Gramsci wrote: "It is necessary to make of the philosophical

conceptionof Croce the very same reductionthat the first [Marxist]theorists made of
the Hegelian conception. This is the only historical possibility which will permit an
adequaterebirthof Marxism. . . . For we Italians, to be the heirs of classical German
philosophy means to be the heirs of Crocean philosophy which is the contemporary
world momentof classical Germanphilosophy" (II materialismostorico, pp. 236-37).
Nevertheless, the debate over the Croceanismof Gramsci continues, the search for
the "authentic" Gramsci continues to dominate the intellectuallife of Italy whether
Marxist or anti-MarxistCrocean or anti-Crocean, and a glance at contemporary
scholarlyjournals indicates the enormous proportionsof the debate. Indeed in 1958
the Istituto Gramsciheld a conferenceto search out the authenticGramsci,publishing
the (inconclusive) results in a 592-page text (see Studi Gramsciani [Rome, 1958]).
8 And he saw, too, the error of any Marxist theory which ignored culture, ignored
what Croce called "ethical-politicalhistory." "The most importantelement to be
discussed," in this evaluation of Croce, Gramsci wrote, "is this: whether the
philosophy of prassi excludes ethical-politicalhistory, that is, ignores the reality of
the moment of hegemony, the importanceof the culturaland moral direction, really
judges as 'appearance'the facts of the superstructure.It can be said that not only
does the philosophy of prassi not exclude ethical-politicalhistory, but that the most
recent phase of [its] development consists precisely in vindicating the moment of
hegemony as essential to its conception of the state, and in increasingthe evaluation
of the culturalfact, of culturalactivity, [and]of a culturalfront as necessary alongside
the merely economic and political fronts (II materialismo storico, p. 233).
9 At the turn of the century, Croce explained in 1918, "the philosopher who
70 Edmund E. Jacobitti
thought.10 Against the positivist scientific culture (as well as against
the positivist Marxism of the Italian Socialist party)1" Croce sought
to establish a new consensus, a new cultural rebirth based on a
concrete and immanent historical idealism:12 "In the last half century
enjoyed the greatest fame and following in Italy was Spencer (now almost entirely
forgotten)and with him many other positivists and evolutionists. . . . My first critical
affirmationsthereforetook the form of oppositionto that disoriented,momentary,and
impetuousfad, and especially to those forms of it that collided with or swept away
the very reasons for studying literatureand history which I had cultivated" (Primi
saggi, 3d ed. [Bari, 1951], p. ix).
10 The negation of positivism and with it the negation of every form of transcen-
dence and belief is what is now called the 'rebirth of idealism.' . . . In its rebirth,
philosophicalidealism must recognize and take up again its historical tradition . . .
interruptedfor some decades by the positivist interregnum.Those four thinkerswho
form the philosophical quadrilateralof Germany-Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel- . . . must be recalled to life" (Benedetto Croce, "Per la rinascita
dell'idealismo,"Culturae vita morale, 3d ed. [Bari, 1955],pp. 33-37). Positivismwas
as French, and thereforeas foreignto Italy, as ever the Encyclopedistshad been. One
French invasion was enough for Croce! "The Masonic mentality used to be called
Encyclopedismand Jacobinismin the 18th centuryand Italy suffereda sad experience
at its hands at the time of the French invasions. . . . It can be said [in fact] that the
entire Italian Risorgimento developed as a reaction against that French, Jacobin,
Masonic, direction. . . . [And] it now seems impossible that at the beginningof the
20th century, simply to imitate the French, we again import among ourselves that
calamity from which we have [already] suffered more than a century ago" ("Due
conversazioni," Cultura e vita morale, pp. 145-46).
11Edmund E. Jacobitti, "Labriola, Croce, and Italian Marxism," Journal of the
History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (April-May 1975): 297-318.
12 Althoughany attemptto reduce the complexity which is Croce's philosophyto a
footnote is apt to produce (at least it ought to produce) irreverent snickers, some
attempt to at least outline his thought is necessary if we are to understand the
techniqueshe employed in the disseminationof what he called "modernphilosophy."
For Croce, as for Gramsci, this philosophy had begun with Machiavelli and Vico
whose respective assaults on abstract Christian and Cartesian theories envisioned
concrete man grounded in historical reality, a worldly humanism opposed to
"theologizing philosophy" (filosofia teolgizzante) whether that philosophy was reli-
gious or secular, whether it worshippedGod or Nature. The successful construction
of the eighteenth-centuryHeavenly City, however, with its abstract naturallaws and
its hostility to history and development,had obscured the Wisdomof the early Italian
humanists.Then in the nineteenthcenturypositivism-that offspringof Enlightenment
materialism-threatened again to dim the truths revealed in historical idealism by
trundlingout, only slightly disguised, the notions of eighteenth-centuryfree masonry
and natural-lawphilosophy. In the Classical Germanthought of Fichte, Kant, Schel-
ling, and especially Hegel, Croce saw the foil to static materialism,saw again that
appreciationfor history and developmentwhich he revered in Vico, and saw renewed
in the Hegelian unity of the real and the rational. Yet Germanphilosophy was also
marred, according to Croce, by its tendency to become an orthodoxy, a religion
which seemed to harness the true spontaneityof creative man within a preconceived
dialectic. It was because of this rigidity that by the mid-nineteenth century
Hegelianismwas in crisis, its right wing lapsing into insignificance,its left-having
broken with transcendentHegelian Logos-succeeding only in imprisoningman in
another Logos, a materialist and worldly "philosophy of history." For Croce
Marxism-despite its hostility to abstract schemes-had enchainedman in an "inevi-
table" history as effectively and ruthlessly as ever orthodox Hegelianism had done.
Still, in Marx's revision of Hegel Croce had found an antidoteto dominantpositivism,
 Hegemony before Gramsci 71
the naturalist and mathematicalculture has been raised to the level
of the supreme cultural ideal. . . . These new directors of social life
are entirely insensitive to art, they ignore history, they sneer like
drunken bumpkins at philosophy and they satisfy their religious
needs, if at all, in . . . masonic lodges and electoral committees. The
philosophical and cultural reawakening will have to put the natu-
ralists, doctors, physiologists, and psychiatrists in their place and
destroy their arrogance."'13
To put the opposing culture "in its place" Croce saw that it would
be necessary to appeal to intellectuals outside the "official culture"
and especially outside those citadels of official culture, the univer-
sities of Italy. Instead Croce appealed to those private men of letters
who throughoutItaly, but especially at Naples, regardedthe univer-
sities not only as threats to their own roles as private tutors but as
threats to learning in general. "The cultural rebirth of Italy, Croce
announced, "will have to be [made] by the laity, that is not by the
university men, or by the university men only in so far as they feel
themselves of the laity.'"14
To sustain the cultural rebirth Croce determinedto found a schol-
arly journal in order to put forth an order of ideas which would be
single minded in their orientation. "I intend," Croce wrote in 1902
to his friend Karl Vossler, the German-languagephilosopher, "to
begin the publication of a small critical magazine. . . . The magazine
will be written, at least at the beginning, mostly by myself in order
to give it a determinatedirection.'"15
By definition the idea of hegemony implied a hostility to any
notion of the "free market place of ideas." This was so not only
because Croce was not writing to man in the marketplacebut be-
cause he did not share the view that man would be willing to pay
and in Marx himself a kindredspirit whose rejection of abstract Hegelian thought as
well as the ahistorical materialismof the eighteenth century resembled that earlier
Machiavellian-Vichianrejection of abstract Christian and Cartesian thought. That
Croceremainedan idealistrefusingto accept Marx'smaterialism,that Croce was latera
violent critic of Marx's "unilateral"and "one-sided"economic approachto man, ought
not to obscure for us the similaritiesof their positions: their mutualhostility to eternal
abstractthought, their appreciationfor history and the historicaldevelopmentof man,
the ambiguityof their mutualcontacts with Hegel. If it were possible to reduce Croce's
intentionsat the beginningof the presentcenturyto a singlesentence it wouldhave to be
this: to defeatthe positivistdominationand establishin its place a worldlyimmanentism,
an antideterministhistoricism which was idealist rather than materialistand which
refused to reduce man to any unidimensionalscheme and especially not to the homo
economicus of Marx.
13 Croce, "Il risveglio filosofico e la cultura italiana," Cultura e vita morale, pp.
22-23.
14 Ibid., p. 28.
15
Benedetto Croce, Carteggio Croce-Vossler (Bari, 1951), p. 22.
72 Edmund E. Jacobitti
the price for the best idea even if it were to be found in the
marketplace. Indeed he held to a kind of Gresham' s law in the
matter of ideas, maintaining that bad ideas would always drive out
good ones, for man had an invincible ability to comfort himself in
any pleasant theory which masked the harsh reality of life. To cut
through these sentimental theories and expose the raw flesh of
historical reality there came the journal La critica. The opening
salvo in its first issue made public its opposition to any misguided
notions of tolerance: "We propose to sustain a determinate point of
view. Nothing is, in fact, more dangerous to the healthy develop-
ment of scholarship than that misunderstood sentiment of tolerance
which is in fact indifference and scepticism." 16
Founded in 1903, the magazine immediately declared war "with-
out quarter" against naturalists, free masons, positivists, and the
"Voltairean Jesuits" of the Enlightenment.17 La critica was to be an
instrument of battle rather than a forum. To his friend Giuseppe
Lombardo-Radice, the famous pedagogical theorist, Croce wrote that
the journal would be partisan and hostile to the disparate points of
view tolerated by "false liberalism": "My little magazine will be
exclusive, partisan. . . . We have been ruined in Italy by false
liberalism. . . . On principle we will limit ourselves to a few
collaborators. 18'

La critica was to concentrate on the history of Italian culture,

pointing out its errors and divergences from the modern way, point-
ing out the hitherto unnoticed relevance of such idealists as Vico, De
Sanctis, and the Spaventa brothers. Though the magazine was al-
ways Croce' s, Croce invited the young idealist thinker Giovanni
Gentile to assist him. Hitherto almost unknown save for a few
unique criticisms of Marx, Gentile wrote almost half the journal. Yet
for the first decade of the century he was viewed as-and seemed to
be content to be viewed as-a minor partner jostled by the Crocean
wake into collaboration on La critica. It was Antonio Gramsci who,
in a discussion of the advantages of "disciplined" and "homogene-
ous" journals, journals with a "very single-minded intellectual orien-
tation,"19 put "Critica of B. Croce" first on his list, for in La

"Introduzione,"La critica 1 (January20, 1903): 3.

16
17
"Rejecting the prudence of divide et impera," as Alfredo Parente put it, the
journal "struck out simultaneouslyin every direction; and in this way solicited the
most reluctant and hesitant spirits" (La critica e il tempo della voce [Naples, 1953],
p. 14; and see Fausto Nicolini, Benedetto Croce [Turin, 1962], pp. 205-12).
18 See letter of July 24, 1902, in Raffaele Colapietra,"Lettere inedite di Benedetto
Croce a Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice,"II ponte 24 (August 31, 1968): 977-78.
19 "The editorial orientationought to be vigorously organized so as to produce an
intellectuallyhomogeneouswork . . . for examplethe contents of every issue ought to
be approvedby the editorial majoritybefore publication" (Gli intellettuali, p. 175).
 Hegemony before Gramsci 73
critica "the combinationof directing elements agree." And "agree"
Croce and Gentile most certainly did, for if there were differences
between them, a concordia discors as Harris put it,20 when faced
with a common enemy it was the "determinatepoint of view" which
invariably prevailed. Other contemporaryjournals, La nuova an-
tologia, La rassegna contemporaneo, La rivista d'Italia, seemed, as
Renato Serra, the young Carducci scholar and admirer of Croce,
once put it, "to have been written by a committee." "If you want to
begin a journal," he wrote to his friend Luigi Ambrosini of La
stampa, "think of La critica": "A single issue can appear a little
pedantic, arid, curt. But take a whole year: Croce and Gentile,
Gentile and Croce. That is their power. It is them. They have
become familiar, friends to their readers. Every [two] months you
await their feelings on books and events.'"21
In the early La critica it was not uncommon to find entire issues
written by Gentile and Croce alone, and only graduallywere others
permitted to write in the magazine-so long as they maintainedthe
proper perspective. One then began to see appear in the journal
some of the more famous names associated with the Idealist move-
ment (Adolfo Omodeo and Guido De Ruggiero, for example) as well
as some of the more obscure but fedelissimi crociani.
It is testimony to Croce's success that twentieth-centuryItaly is
far more acquaintedwith the thought of Spaventa, De Sanctis, Vico,
and others of its Idealist philosophers than ever was the Italy in
which those men lived. That these early thinkers were presented not
always as they were, but as precursorsof Croce's own thought, that
they were dissected always according to the formula of "what is
living and what is dead" in their philosophies, and that only now, a
quarter-centuryafter Croce's death, are those orthodox Crocean
interpretations being challanged22is simply further proof of the
Crocean hegemony which began at the turn of the century.
For Croce the effort of La critica was political, "political," as he
put it, "in the widest sense."23 And indeed it was, for it seemed to
envelop politics as a whole, establishingthose parametersof cultural
hegemony which Gramsci so admired in the skill of his teacher,
predecessor, and rival. "Croce's real political strength," noted

20
Henry Stilton Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana, Ill.,
1960), p. 22.
21 Renato Serra, Epistolario di Renato Serra, ed. Luigi Ambrosini, 2d ed. (Milan,
1953), p. 310.
22 That is, challengedby a new orthodoxywhich seeks to make them all precursors
of Gramsci.
23 Benedetto Croce, "Contributoalla critica di me stesso," Etica e politica (Bari,
1967), pp. 334-35.
74 Edmund E. Jacobitti
Garin, "is not to be sought in his participation in the Senate, in the
national government, in local administration, in the marshalling of
parties, groups, and bands ... [but] in opinions diffused through [La
critica], in collaboration with newspapers, or through the medium of
periodicals inspired by him. . .. In a nation of prevalent literary
formation, or as is usually said, 'humanistic,' [formation], the reso-
nance of [Croce's] views was decisive."24
It was in fact exactly the strategy needed to guide a disoriented
culture into a determinate point of view. "The journal," as Gullace
noted, "gave the two men a powerful instrument for the dissemina-
tion of the Idealist philosophy which was to revitalize the Italian
culture. 25 One can sense a little of the drama the journal produced
'

in the words of those men who later recalled their early discovery of
La critica. Mario Vinciguerra, for example, once a young Crocean
enthusiast and later editor of La nuova Europa, reminisced: "That
day . . . I discovered La critica, but I had no need of discovering
Croce. On the contrary, I stood ecstatic for a few minutes before the
journal for I now had the indubitable proof that the star to which we
adolescents were already looking as a guide, was now approaching
its zenith."26
Vinciguerra was not unique. It was not, as he put it while
commenting on his discovery, a year earlier, of Croce's book on
aesthetics, "the case of a boy of acute sensitivity; it was, rather the
spiritual disposition of a great part of our generation."27
Doubtless also important for the young was the constant polemic,
the vituperation poured upon "eminent figures," upon scientists and
university professors ("i signori professori who for years and years
have furnished us with books devoid of any thought or passion")28
whose books were reviewed at the end of each issue with devastat-
ing sarcasm. Giuseppe Prezzolini, editor of another journal,
Leonardo, and friend of Croce, chuckled at the reviews and the
embarrassment of the professors as they stood before their students:
"At least now, before publishing, on the basis of the documents in
their butcher shops, a rehash of ten German authors or an approval
of some author, the philosophy professor or the student of letters
24
Eugenio Garin, Intellettuali italiani del XX secolo (Rome, 1974), pp. 3-4.
25
See Giovanni Gullace in the introductionto G. Gentile, The Philosophy of Art,
trans. Giovanni Gullace (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), p. xii.
26
Mario Vinciguerra,Croce: Ricordi e pensieri (Naples, 1957), p. 11.
27 Ibid., p. 72.
28 Croce, "Ho letto ...," Cultura e vita morale, p. 125; and, in a 1904 La critica: I
write, Croce explained, only to the few, for the majorityof professors, "were they in
a position for an instant to comprehendthe gravity of the charges that I have made
against them, would no longer deserve them" (La critica 2 [1904]: 520).
 Hegemony before Gramsci 75
will think more than twice as he sees rise before him the vengeful
vision of a review signed 'B.C.' or 'G.G.' "e29
The point of the reviews, aside from directing the reader toward
idealism, was to discredit the "official culture" in the minds of the
young students.
Thus of his polemic with the Florentine professor De Sarlo30
Croce wrote to his friend Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice,"I know that
I am right and I know that De Sarlo, because of his position at
Florence has influence and aspires to take authority .... He will not
like my repy [to him] which is already at the printer .... [But] I aim
not at him but at the young who hear and read him."'31
Every two months, year after year, through first one world war
and then another, La critica appeared on schedule, reassuring its
readers by its very presence that although all else had ceased to be
familiar the solidity and dependability of the journal remained un-
shaken. From one end of the peninsula to the other the journal was
read-passed from hand to hand during the Second World War32-
bringing about a transformation, a "reform." "There has been a
reform in Italy," wrote Armando Carlini, "and the decisive begin-
ning of it was signalled by the appearance of La critica in 1903. 33
29
Giuseppe Prezzolini, "La critica," Leonardo 4 (October-December1906): 362.
30
Francesco De Sarlo (1854-1937), from 1900 to 1933 professor of theoretical
philosophy at the Istituto de Studi Superiori in Florence, founder in 1903 of the
Gabinetto di Psicologia Sperimentale, founder in 1907 of the journal La cultura
filosofica which he directed until 1917. De Sarlo was an importantthinkerin Florence
who between 1905 and 1917 enjoyed a devoted following, among them the editor of
Logos, Antonio Aliotta; the senator and undersecretary of public instruction,
GiovanniCal6; Guido Delle Valle, and others. He and his school were opponents of
both positivism and idealism, attemptingto reconcile philosophy with the "science"
of psychology. On De Sarlo's view of Croce and Gentile, see his Gentile e Croce:
Lettere filosofiche di un 'superato' (Florence, 1925). For a taste of Croce and Gentile
on De Sarlo, try Benedetto Croce's Review of I dati della esperienza psichica
(Florence, 1903) in La critica 2 (1904): 142-43, or better yet, his "Il professore De
Sarlo e i problemi della logica filosofica," La critica 4 (1907): 165-69, and "Una
seconda riposta al professore F. De Sarlo," ibid., pp. 243-47. Before Croce's own
star had begun to rise he had in fact a rather amiable relationshipwith De Sarlo,
writingto him on one occasion: "I . . . see with great satisfactionthat you see and
keenly feel the moralproblem.It is truly consoling that students and thinkerslike you
are emerging [!] after the period that has passed when it was, especially in Italy,
absolutely forbidden to pronounce words like moral ideas, absolute value, duty, etc.
One risked being taken for an innocent or sent to Berlin by the so-called positivists"
(see "Un' inedita lettera di Croce a De Sarlo su marxismoe vita morale," Revista di
studi Crociani 5 [1968]: 76).
31 Colapietra, "Lettere inedite di Benedetto Croce," p. 981.
32
Florianodel Secolo, "Croce e la sua casa nel ventennio," La rassenga d'Italia 1
(February-March1946): 235.
33 ArmandoCarlini, "Benedetto Croce e il fascismo," La nuova politica liberale 2

(February 1924): 34. See, too, Alfredo Parente's description of La critica: "An
original movement, in fact revolutionaryin its thoughts . . . with a disconcerting
76 Edmund E. Jacobitti
No modern Italianjournal quite equaled the prestige or commanded
the allegianceof La critica: "[It] will remainin the history of culture
an example, perhaps unique, of the formative and reformativepower
of a journal. He who examines the state of studies in 1903 and the
present state and examines their development during these forty
years will see that philosophy and particularly aesthetics, literary
criticism, history and historical criticism, the criticism of art, lin-
guistics, law, have all felt the influence of the thought that every two
months was spread by that journal."34
And yet a journal, even a journal like La critica, was still only a
journal, its views-its instructions-appearing only once every two
months and then only to a limited, if highly influential,clientele. To
press forward the idealist view, to discredit the opposition, and,
most importantlyof all, to demonstratethat past thinkers-or at any
rate the "living" part of past thinkers-all pointed to the idealist
crescendo, required more than a journal.
The arrival of Giovanni Laterza in Naples at the end of 1901
provided Croce with an opportunityto widen his own role in Italian
life. Young Laterza had recently founded a publishing firm across
the peninsula at Bari, a firm which was, within less than a decade, to
become the largest in the south and one of the most prestigious in all
of Italy. Laterza wanted advice on publishing a series of books on
social and politicalproblems, a series he proposed to call "The Little
Library of Modern Culture."35He had already spoken with other
intellectuals,36who had proposed a text or two within the series,37
but they did not appreciate the significance-the political sig-
nificance-of the series as a whole. In Croce Laterza found pre-
cisely what he needed, an intellectual with a grand design, not for a
book but for an entire press, and in Laterza Croce found precisely
novelty in its historical and critical methodology, with the richness of its investiga-
tions" (La critica e il tempo della voce, p. 9). Luigi Russo put it even more
emphaticallyas he recalled his first reading of Critica: "It was a fascinating and
disturbingreading for me. . . . When I read Croce I felt like a loaded powder
magazine" ("Conversazionicon Benedetto Croce," Belfagor 8 [January31, 1953]:1).
34 Attilio Momigliano,"La critica," La rassegna d'Italia 1 (February-March,
1946):
235.
35 Tullio Gregory, "Biblioteca di cultura moderna," in Catologo generale delle
edizioni Laterza 1973 (Bari, 1973), p. 125.
36 The Neapolitanradical Francesco Saverio Nitti, later prime ministerof Italy, the
militantsocialist deputy Ettore Ciccotti (who broke with the party in 1905 and in the
twenties and thirties became a militantfascist), as well as Gaetano Salvemini, that
never easily pigeonholedrebel whose struggleto aid the south and undo "Ministerof
the Underworld"Giolitti,let him througha long list of oppositiongroupsincludinghis
own Lega.
37 AlthoughNitti proposed a series on its own which would deal with the problems
of the South, a series which lasted only al single year.
 Hegemony before Gramsci 77
what he needed. "The collaboration between Benedetto Croce and
Giuseppe Laterza ... [although]on differentlevels aimed at a single
end, not to passively furnish what the Italian culture requested but
to orient it with a precise criterion for nearly 50 years."38
Six months after their initial encounter Croce wrote to Laterza.
You ought, he said "to make yourself an editor with a determinate
physiognomy, in other words an editor of political and historical
works, of the history of art, of philosophy, etc., an editor of serious
stuff."39 The emphasis was upon the word "serious." It meant, as
Tullio Gregory explained in 1973, that Laterza was to remain "out-
side the academic culture as well as the 'avantguarde'culture"; it
meant, in short, "adherence to the programof cultural renewal that
Croce hoped to promote in those years through La critica. "40
Laterza, at least according to the funeral oration delivered by Croce
in Giovanni's honor in 1944, responded to Croce's invitation with
humble deference: "To me," Croce intoned, "you said simply: I will
follow you in whatever you wish to do; do not give a thought for
me. . ."41 Laterza indeed did follow Croce, and in Croce's aim to
remake Italian culture he proved invaluable. In 1906 he took over
the publication of La critica and, as Riccardo Zagaria noted, the
Laterza press quickly became "the ready, diligent, and precise
instrumentof that active spirit of a man to whom today all Italy pays
honor,"42namely, Benedetto Croce. Forty years later Gregory,in an
article celebrating the sixtieth anniversay of the publishing firm
wrote, "Speaking of the activity of the Laterza publishinghouse one
is tempted to consider it as a moment or an aspect of the complex
activity of Benedetto Croce-so lasting and profound was the as-
sociation between Giovanni Laterza and Croce, so precise the orien-
tation that the Neapolitan philosopher imprinted on the activity of
the Apulian publisher. Croce himself saw his collaboration with
Laterza as a prosecution and widening of the work he was doing in
La critica."43
Enlarging upon Laterza's idea of the "Little Library," Croce
proposed an expansion of the program. He, himself, would be the
director, and the title of the series became the Library of Modern
- "La mostra storica della casa editrice Laterza a Milano," Culturamoderna, no.
5 (December, 1961), pp. 25-26. Culturamoderna is the journal of the Laterza Press.
Its lead articles, being written by the editorial staff, are frequently unsigned.
39 Tullio Gregory, "Per i sessant'annidella casa Laterza," Belfagor 17 (November
30, 1962): 702.
40
Gregory, "Biblioteca di culturamoderna,"pp. 125-26.
41
Benedetto Croce, "Proemio," Quadernidella Critica 1 (1944): 1.
42
Ricardo Zagaria, "Bari," La voce 4 (February 15, 1912): 757-58.
43 Gregory, "Per i sessant'anni," p. 701.
78 Edmund E. Jacobitti
Culture, the diminutive Little Library being deemed insufficiently
ambitious-and rightly so, for by 1920 over 100 titles had appeared,
by 1930 200, by the time of Croce's death in 1952 500. Croce himself
had written twenty-one of the series, edited or introduced another
twenty. Gentile had written three, introduced another half dozen,
while Guido De Ruggiero, then still a follower of Gentile, contrib-
uted another handful. Indeed a list of the writers in the Library of
Modern Culture bears a marked resemblance to the list of the
writers in La critica and other journals inspired by Croce. The tone
of the Library of Modern Culture series was set by one of its first
publications, Croce's own (1907) What Is Living and What Is Dead
in the Philosophy of Hegel, an irreverent denunciation of Hegel's
dialectic in favor of Croce's. There was, as well, the publication of
the works of De Sanctis with interpretive introductions by Croce
which have set, until the last decade, the standard view of the
nineteenth-centurycritic and political leader. Gentile likewise pro-
vided, for the same period of time, the orthodox view of Spaventa.
In 1907 came, also, the Reflections on Violence, Sorel's antipositivist
and antimaterialistrevision of Marx enthusiastically introduced by
Croce. There was, too, the publication of many of the works of the
great Marxist thinker Antonio Labriola along with the critical re-
marks of Croce. "They were [those texts on Marxism, Labriola, and
Sorel] works which for a long period of time introduced and con-
ditioned the discussions of Marxism in Italy."44 Indeed not only
were the discussions of Marxism "conditioned," but Marx himself
was absorbed into that long itinerary of thinkers who pointed the
way to Croce. Even after Croce had become persona non grata in
the fascist regime, noted Norberto Bobbio at the University of
Turin, any discussion of Marxism "intended not to arrive at Marx,
but to better understandCroce. I don't ever recall having heard of
Marx or Marxism in either philosophy or jurisprudence classes."45
How profoundly Croce has affected Marxist studies may yet be
gauged today by glancing through contemporary Marxist journals
where the names of Croce, Labriola, and Gramsci are intertwinedin
a kind of holy-and inextricable trinity.
As director of the Library of Modern Culture Croce was in a
unique position to affect what the literary public read. Edmundo
Cione recalled, for example, during his days at Croce's house the
enormous correspondence of Croce "with the innumerable [young
scholars] that turned to him . . . when they hoped to see [their

44 Gregory, "Biblioteca di cultura moderna," p. 127.

45 Bobbio (n. 6 above), p. 622.
 Hegemony before Gramsci 79
works] published by Laterza. "46 Clearly the doors were not open to
anyone to write in the series nor even to publish at Laterza, unless
of course they had that "determinate point of view." Of the works
which were accepted Croce occasionally found himself forced to
rewrite and edit parts which did not meet the standards he required.
Giovanni Castellano, for example, had come to Croce's house at the
end of the first decade of the new century and at the age of thirty
had developed a zeal, not to say an obsession, with the life and
works of the Neapolitan philosopher. In 1919 he managed to put
together a work, Ragazzate letterarie which was published by Ric-
ciardi, another of Croce's friends. Following this, Castellano wrote a
work on Croce called Introduzione allo studio delle opere de Bene-
detto Croce which was published by Laterza, a work which, as
Croce's biographer put it, included certain "elucidations" and
"short critical notes written or sketched by 'the philosopher.'
Encouraged by his "success" Castellano decided to write a work for
the Library of Modern Culture-a more detailed and philosophical
work on Croce. The manuscript, however, did not please Croce; and
so it "became necessary to entrust that badly elaborated work . . .
to the hand of Enrico Ruta," another frequenter of Croce's house.
But
with his confused mind, . . . and his inclination to exaggerate, to be
paradoxical, to the outrageous, to the complicated, to the theatrical, Ruta
was the man least adaptedto give the appropriateliteraryform to a series of
concepts; [and so it was necessary to] resort to the heroic remedy that
Croce, while makinguse of the name of Castellano and, therefore speaking
of himself in the third person, became critic and historian of himself. This
was done in no more than two weeks and from it came the little masterpiece,
with the title, Giovanni Castellano,Benedetto Croce, ilfilosofo, il critico, lo
storico.47
And indeed so penetrating was the analysis, so Crocean the style,
that Pietro Pancrazi, in reviewing the work for II resto del Carlino,
commented that "the long familiarity of Castellano with Croce has
caused the former to acquire the very same style as the latter."48
Buoyed up by the success of the Library of Modern Culture, Croce
turned to the formation of other and more powerful libraries. In
January of 1905 the plans for the Classics of Modern Philosophy
46
Edmondo Cione, Benedetto Croce ed il pensiero contemporaneo (Milan, 1963),
p. 39.
47 Nicolini (n. 17 above), pp. 202-5; Cionne, pp. 14-15.
48
Pietro Pancrazi, in II resto del Carlino (December30, 1923);and see Nicolini, p.
205. The remarks of Gramsci on the "certainly authorized" works of Castellano,
Francesco Flora, and others are also interesting(see Gramsci,II materialismostorico,
p. 204).
80 Edmund E. Jacobitti
were drawn up. This series was to be directed by Croce and Gentile,
an editorial partnershipwhich lasted until 1925 when the two men
went their separate ways. At the time that the plans for the Classics
were drawn up, it was difficult to obtain a translated edition of a
foreign philosopher, difficult, for that matter, as Croce noted, to
obtain the works of the Italian masters like Bruno and Vico in a
good edition.49The Classics of Modern Philosophy was to fill that
gap, and the impact of the series must be viewed always in light of
that gap as well as in light of the scant knowledge of foreign
languages-especially German-among many Italian students.
The series was, as Croce noted, to be "no ordinarycollection of
translationswithout a principleor an order," but was to aim again at
that new order envisioned by Croce. The Classics "is designed, as is
natural, according to our way of thinking and is informed by the
principles that are propounded in the journal La critica."50 The
series was to contain twenty-five or thirty volumes beginning with
Croce's own edition of the Encyclopedia of Hegel, beginning, more
precisely, with Croce's "Preface" to the Encyclopedia in which the
reader was told-now that the muddied course of Western intellec-
tual development had, at last, been clarified- "that each of the
volumes which follow this one will be assigned, as this one has been
assigned, its place in the history of thought.''51 It was that "a priori
construction of a history of philosophy," noted Eugenio Garin-
speakingfor a generation of Italians- "that then became our history
of modern philosophy."52The Encyclopedia appeared in 1907, side
by side with Croce's What Is Living and What Is Dead in the
Philosophy of Hegel. Other works of Hegel came later. In 1913came
the Philosophy of Right and in 1925 Hegel's Logic. "In accordance
with the 1905 program the Phenomenology did not appear. That
other Hegel came at another time and under different auspices. ...
Thereforethe Hegel that many educated Italians knew and meditated
upon, was for a long time . . . that of the Logic and the Philosophy
of Right: which may, perhaps, explain a number of things."53
Along with Hegel, Italians were now exposed-and in a real sense
exposed for the first time-to the works of Fichte (1910), Kant
(Critique of Judgment, 1906; Critique of Practical Reason, 1909;
Critique of Pure Reason, 1909-10), Leibnitz (1909-12), Schelling
49 As quoted by Eugenio Garin, "I classici della filosofia," Cultura
moderna, no. 13
(March 1953), p. 6.
50
Ibid., p. 5.
51
Ibid., p. 6
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., p. 7.
 Hegemony before Gramsci 81
(1908), Schopenhauer (1914-16), and Spinoza (1915). But of the
Empiricist school of Great Britain there was no Bacon (until 1965),
no Locke (until 1951), no Shaftesbury (until 1962). Berkeley ap-
peared in 1909-but introduced and utilized by those Florentine
"Magical Pragmatists"momentarilyendorsed by Croce, the English
bishop was made to appear as a foil to Charles Saunders Peirce and
the forerunnerof WilliamJames's Will to Believe.54
As to the French thinkers of the eighteenth century with their
natural laws and their antihistorical bias there was nothing at all,
Diderot and D'Alembert appearingonly in 1968 and Voltaire in 1962.
The Left Hegelians with their assault upon Idealism appeared in
1960 and the works of Feuerbach in 1965, which is to say that they
appearedat Laterza only after they had been popularizedelsewhere
and much later by anti-Idealistpresses, and the cat, so to speak, was
out of the bag.
The singular perspective of the Classics was, however, not per-
ceived, and even those hostile to Croce and Gentile welcomed the
opportunityto devour at last and in their own language the editions
which flowed out of Bari. They did not note that their welcome had
been extended to-in Garin'sinimitablewords- "a Trojanhorse": "If
empiricismand the Enlightenmentwere to remainfor decades on the
fringes of Italian philosophical culture; if Kant was to appear as the
author of the three 'Critiques,' that is, as the meeting ground for the
necessary synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, destined to lead
through Fichte and Schelling to the logical crescendo of Hegel's
Encyclopedia-if this was the historical perspective of European
thoughtwhose maturefruit had to be the new idealism [of Croce and
Gentile]- . . . perhaps the major contribution to this vision belongs
to those 'Classics' of Laterza."55
Following the Classics of Modern Philosophy came an entire
series devoted to the works of Croce himself. This series set out in
four early volumes the Crocean conception of the "Philosophy of
Spirit," distinguishing it from other dominant ideologies such as
positivism and Marxismbut also-if less severely-from the thought
of men like Vico, Kant, and Hegel. Croce regarded his philosophy
as a personal triumph,but he also saw it as the logical conclusion to
the great thinkers who had preceded him, a kind of summing up of
54 See, e.g., Gian Falco [GiovanniPapini], "Morte e resurrezionedella filosofia,"

Leonardo (December 20, 1903): 1-7; Giulianoil Sofista [Giuseppe Prezzolini], "Un
compagno di scavi," Leonardo 2 (June 1904): 4-7, and "Risposta a Calderoni"
(whose letter precedes Prezzolini's), ibid. (November 1904): 7-9; The Florence
PragmatistClub, "II pragmatismomesso in ordine," Leonardo 3 (April 1905):45-48.
55 Garin, "I classici," p. 8.
82 Edmund E. Jacobitti
the results of Western thought, a summing up which was to consti-
tute the foundation for-but also the limits of-all future thought. In
all, the works of Croce constituted some seventy volumes, volumes
which placed the great minds and works of the past, as well as the
present, within the "philosophy of Spirit," ordering, like some
twentieth-century Newton, the apparent flux and chaos of Western
history into a rational and coherent cosmos.
Beyond the philosophical works there were as well the works on
aesthetics and criticism, and, of course, the histories. The subtle
"political" nature of those "histories" was often missed, the
Achaeans disembarking unnoticed into the culture, there to shape
and form from within the debate over current political issues. One
need only remember the famous History of Italy (1870-1915)-issued
in 1928 as a blow against fascism, as a glorification of the prefascist
years so as to deflate the myth of the fascist Gallahad-to note the
power of Croce's word. Accused of being indifferent to politics,
Croce responded, candidly, that simply because his work did not
always address the obviously political it did not mean that he was
"above politics." His aim was wider, for he meant not to affect the
outcome of a single issue, but the context, and therefore the general
outcome, of politics as a whole:
Do [my critics] believe that I was not engaged in politics when writing, for
example, my History of the Kingdom of Naples, [a work] which would
never have been born without my political passion for the past and the
present?Do they think I would have behaved more usefully if I had intruded
among the politiciansor [engagedin] the daily political chase? . . . In fact
my book penetrates minds and souls and I see it continuallyrecalled . . . in
the problems that concern Italian life and the conditions of Southern Italy.
And that is . . . [the nature] of my best and most enduring "political
work.' '56

In 1909 the design for the most ambitious of the Laterza libraries
was drawn up. At a summer meeting in the mountains of the
Abruzzo, Laterza and Croce designed the Writers of Italy, a series
which was dedicated to Victor Emmanuel III and was to comprise
some 600 volumes. The aim was, as Gianfranco Folena put it, to
uncover the history of twentieth-century Italian Idealism, "the single
cultural consciousness of modern Italy."57 Thus the opening pro-
gram of the Writers of Italy announced the intention of "assuring at
last for Italy the corpus of writers that gave her a tongue and that

56
Croce, "La politica dei non politici," Cultura e vita morale, p. 292.
57 GianfrancoFolena, "Scrittori d'Italia," in Catologo generale, p. 9.
 Hegemony before Gramsci 83
through the centuries reaffirmed and maintained her racial unity
and glorious civilization.''58
As with the Library of Modern Culture, each Italian writer from
the remote past down to the present would be "assigned his place"
in the historical drama whose crescendo had come in the works of
Croce. Thus appeared the works of Machiavelli, Guicciardini,Vico,
Cuoco, Foscolo, Gioberti, De Sanctis, and scores of others. No
room was found, however, for Galvani, Beccaria, or Volta, the
leading Italians of the Enlightenment. Nor was there space for the
statesman and philosopher Carlo Cattaneo, the so-called father of
Italian positivism. In the newspaper Azione of Milan a certain
professor Arcari wrote, in 1909, of a kind of "closed sectarianism"
in the attitudes of Croce and Gentile and of a "bias" in the series
coming from Bari. Why, he inquired, were men like Cattaneo ex-
cluded? "At the time the catalogue [of proposed authors] was,
somewhat hurriedly compiled," Croce responded, "an edition of
Cattaneo's works was (and still is) in progress at [the publisher] Le
Monnier and I [therefore] thought one could not, with literary
propriety, announce the republication of Cattaneo's works. Was I
deceived? If so I will add [Cattaneo] to the next catalogue."59
Cattaneo's works were, however, not published by Laterza until
1965.
Arcari's awareness of the bias of the Laterza press was, however,
isolated, and Italians devoured with relish the history of their mod-
ern culture without noticing the gaps and empty parentheses which
might have led to other definitions of "modern culture." "The
revolutionary character of the collection and the change that its
realization accomplished in the culture of the country was not
perceived by many at the time."60
The ambitiousness and the very size of the tasks undertakenby
Croce, Gentile, and Laterza meant that these three alone could not
possibly supervise the publication of each of these series. Other
directors had to be found, authors had to be located to write,
introduce, or annotate the volumes, and yet each had to have that
"determinate point of view" which was to give coherence to the
effort as a whole. Croce delegated a good deal of the responsibilities
to other men. The Writersof Italy, for example, after 1912 and until
1927, was directed by Croce's biographer, the great Vico scholar,
Fausto Nicolini, though Croce himself "wrote the programfor [the
58
"Gli 'Scrittori d'Italia,' " Cultura moderna, no. 7 (February 1953), p. 1.
59Benedetto Croce, "Argomenti letterari," Pagine sparse, serie prima (Naples,
1919), pp. 130-31.
60
FerruccioFocher, Profilo del opera di Benedetto Croce (Cremona,1963), p. 254.
84 Edmund E. Jacobitti
series] and supervised it with love, even personally editing several
volumes."61
In assessing the weight of Croce's impact on twentieth-century
Italy one must recall the singularposition of the Laterza press in the
formation of the minds of contemporaryeducated Italians. Laterza
and La critica were in a very real sense the voice of the south, the
voice of a traditionuniquely telescoped and harmonizedthrough the
writings of Croce into a single theme. Gramsci, reflecting, with
envious anger, on the strength of Croce's hegemony, noted that
"in the South there exists only the publishing house of Laterza and
the journal La Critica; there are academies and cultural groups of
great erudition" but there are no small or even medium-sizedjour-
nals, there are no other publishers "around which Southern middle
class intellectuals are gathered." Southerners seeking a voice in the
press therefore were forced to write through Laterza or to seek the
unlikely "hospitality" of a northern publisher.62
Out of Bari over the next decades there flowed the hundreds and
hundreds of volumes inspired by Croce, volumes which flowed into
librariesand private homes and eventually into the universities. The
texts, as Garin put it, "in a little more than ten years, had trans-
formed the libraries of every educated Italian" and succeeded "in
imposing a precise orientationon the culture." Augusto Guzzo who,
secure in his religious faith, did not feel the weight of Croce as did
others of that generation, once suggested that "those who felt the
immense authority of Croce as a dominationhave not always asked
themselves whether the domination should be imputed to the weak-
ness of whoever allowed himself to be dominatedrather than to the
precise will to power and to the deliberateprogramfor an empire of
the dominator."63
Weakness perhaps there was, but also an emptiness, and empti-
ness filled for some, like Guzzo, by religion, but for others by those
books sent out of Bari accordingto "the deliberateprogramfor" not
an empire, but a spiritual hegemony which, as Gramsci noted, has
made Croce for Italians down to the present day "the contemporary
world moment of Classical German philosophy."64
61 Nicolini (n. 17 above), p. 229.
62
"La questione meridionale," Rinascita 2 (February 1945): 41 (published post-
humously).
63
Augusto Guzzo, Dieci anni dopo (1952-1962) (Turin, 1962), pp. 6-7.
64
Materialismo storico, pp. 236-37.