Giovanni Gentile

Italian politician and philosopher

• Born: May 30, 1875
• Birthplace: Castelvetrano, Italy
• Died: April 15, 1944
• Place of death: Florence, Italy

Gentile was the most prominent Italian intellectual associated with the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. As a government official, Gentile helped shape fascist educational policies and define the government’s role in Italian culture. His neoidealism and theories on political authoritarianism provided structure for fascist ideology and philosophical justification for the fascist state.

Early Life

Giovanni Gentile (joh-VAHN-nee zhayn-TEE-lay) was born in a small Sicilian village in the province of Trapani. He studied classics and received a degree in philosophy at the University of Pisa. His doctoral thesis on two nineteenth century Roman Catholic philosophers reflected his interest in Italy’s conservative intellectual heritage. He began his teaching at Campobasso in southern Italy in 1898. His distinguished academic career would eventually lead to positions at the Universities of Naples, Palermo, Pisa, and Rome. During his first years of lecturing and writing on philosophy, he became interested in educational reform. He defended religious instruction in the public schools and advocated more emphasis on philosophy at the secondary school level. As a young scholar and teacher, Gentile won recognition as a perceptive interpreter of the Italian philosophical tradition; in subsequent years, he published a four-volume study of Italian philosophy. Early in his intellectual life, he expanded his research and writing to include German philosophy. Like many of the scholars of his generation, Gentile was intrigued by the ideas of Karl Marx, but his investigation of Marxist theories only reinforced his political conservatism and his aversion to materialistic and scientific philosophies.

Life’s Work

Gentile’s intellectual standing increased markedly in 1903, when he received an appointment to the University of Naples and began his collaboration with Italy’s foremost philosopher-historian, Benedetto Croce. For almost twenty years, Gentile assisted Croce in editing the highly regarded journal of Italian culture La Critica. Intense philosophical and personal differences during the fascist period eventually brought an end to their association. Croce and Gentile shared responsibility for the revival of neoidealism in Italy. They joined in the intellectual “revolt against positivism” the rejection of science and scientific methodology in the study of human activity. In their critique of positivism, they both looked to an earlier generation of German philosophers, most notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to recover and reinterpret idealism. Applying Hegel’s idea of the dialectic to the process of human thought, Gentile fashioned a creative synthesis, “actual idealism,” a method for reconciling the dichotomy between theory and practice.

Gentile supported Italian intervention on the side of England and France in World War I. He believed the war presented a test for the Italian people and an opportunity to reaffirm the qualities of sacrifice, discipline, and patriotism that the previous generation had so ably demonstrated during the Risorgimento the Italian national unification movement. At the same time, he sought to mitigate the effects of popular anti-German hysteria, especially in Italian academic life. Through the war years, Gentile refined his political philosophy and developed the idea of the “ethical state.” He defined the state as the embodiment of moral will and moral law in a society, and he asserted that human freedom could be achieved only through total integration of the individual into society. This concept of the “ethical state” would later provide a sophisticated rationale for authoritarian and totalitarian government.

In the postwar period, Gentile became disillusioned with Italian parliamentary politics. He had always been a political conservative. His political heroes were the selfless, principled statesmen who had led Italy through the Risorgimento. The present generation of conservatives, he believed, had forsaken their own traditions and ideals. When Benito Mussolini seized power in 1922, Gentile welcomed the change. He saw in Mussolini a true conservative who could end the postwar political crisis, thwart any threat from the Socialist and Communist parties, and revitalize the nation. Mussolini immediately offered Gentile a cabinet position, minister of public instruction, in his coalition government. Gentile, recognizing the opportunity to implement his program of educational reform, accepted the post, although he did not officially join the Fascist Party until June, 1923. During his two years in office, Gentile instituted a series of radical reforms for an educational system that had remained virtually unchanged since 1859. He created separate technical and classical schools at the middle levels and instituted a series of rigorous entrance examinations for university study. With these and other changes, he hoped to realize his idea of the university’s proper function creating a classically educated elite to lead the nation. Gentile’s educational reform was touted by Mussolini as “the most Fascist reform.” Actually the reform owed less to fascist ideology than to Gentile’s own conservative-elitist philosophy of education, which emphasized intellectual freedom, university autonomy, and the traditional humanities curriculum at the expense of applied sciences.

Gentile left the education ministry in June, 1924, but remained part of the fascist hierarchy as a member of the Fascist Grand Council (the supreme governing body of the Fascist Party and the Italian state) and as a senator in the Italian parliament. Through the 1920’s, his role as an official interpreter of Italian fascism also remained undiminished. He described fascism as “a religious spirit” and “the highest form of democracy.” He justified fascist violence by asserting the moral efficacy of both “the sermon and the blackjack.” He wrote several essays on the subject, including Che cosa è il fascismo (1924; what is Fascism?), Fascismo e cultura (1928; fascism and culture), and Origini e dottrini del fascismo (1929; origins and doctrines of fascism). In these writings, Gentile sought to define fascism as a conservative, traditional, elitist political movement with the goal of establishing an authoritarian state. His interpretation contrasted markedly with other fascist intellectuals who viewed their movement as radical, popular, and antiestablishment. In 1925, Gentile attempted to mobilize the scholarly community in support of the government with his Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals. This manifesto provoked a defiant response from his former colleague, Croce, who published the Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. The “battle of the manifestos” and the falling-out between these two former colleagues symbolized the struggle between government and antifascists over the cultural life of the nation.

Gentile’s first public dispute with government policies came in 1929, when the government and the Roman Catholic Church signed the Lateran Pacts. Gentile opposed the agreement because it made special concessions to the Church in matters of education and religious organizations. He also argued that according a privileged position to the Catholic Church would detract from the authoritarian character of the government. Gentile’s criticism of the Church contributed to the decline in his political standing in the 1930’s, but he remained a major influence in Italian cultural life. He edited the journal Educazione fascista (fascist education) and founded the Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura (National Fascist Institute of Culture). He supervised one of the major cultural achievements of the fascist period, the compilation and publication of the Enciclopedia italiana (Italian encyclopedia), completed in 1936. Ignoring pressure by fascist officials, he depoliticized the project. He drew on the expertise of noted scholars in Italy and abroad, even avowed antifascists, to make the Enciclopedia italiana a landmark in modern scholarship. Gentile’s belief in the universal character of Italian culture also made him averse to the racist tendencies in the fascist ideology. He openly criticized the government in 1938, when it inaugurated a series of anti-Semitic decrees laws intended to deny Italian Jews the rights of citizenship.

Gentile withdrew from public life in the last years of the fascist regime. He came forward, however, on the eve of the Allied invasion of Sicily in June, 1943, and delivered his emotional Discorso agli Italiani (address to the Italians), in which he appealed to Italians to set aside their political differences and rally to the defense of the nation. After the fall of Mussolini in July, 1943, Gentile expressed his support for the new provisional government. However, he could not escape his past association with the fascist regime. The popular press vilified him and questioned his political sincerity. He became a target of antifascist partisans fighting against the German occupation forces and the remnants of fascist militia. He was assassinated by a partisan band while driving near his home outside Florence. Even many antifascists were shocked by the senseless brutality of his death.

Significance

Gentile’s philosophy represents a continuation of the idealist philosophical tradition in European intellectual history. He contributed to the “antipositivist revolt.” He fashioned a neoidealist synthesis of “actual idealism” and developed the concept of the “ethical state” two ideas that later served as philosophical justification for the fascist dictatorship of Mussolini. Gentile’s controversial political career has hindered a balanced assessment of his thought. Much of his early intellectual contributions have gone unheralded, because he labored in the shadow of Italy’s leading philosopher, Croce. In his writings after 1923, scholars have found it difficult to distinguish his philosophy from his political rhetoric. After World War II, his work was thoroughly discredited because of his defense of fascist ideology and his close ties with the fascist dictatorship. Gentile distanced himself from many of the oppressive policies of the fascist regime and publicly defended the basic right of intellectual freedom. However, his critics have not forgotten his highly visible role in a regime of political violence and terror, his personal loyalty to a notorious dictator, and his responsibility for “the philosophy of the blackjack.”

Bibliography

Cannistraro, Philip V., ed. Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. This reference work, the best available for the fascist period in Italy, contains a brief biography of Gentile as well as useful, related entries on fascist ideology, culture, and educational policies, and the Enciclopedia italiana.

Gentile, Giovanni. Genesis and Structure of Society. Translated by H. S. Harris. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960. This work, first published in Italian in 1946, provides the best single source on Gentile’s philosophy. The editor supplements his translation with a helpful introduction and a bibliography of studies on Gentile in English.

Gregor, A. James. Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001. Gregor explains how fascism emerged in Italy and other nations as a reaction to their perceived domination by advanced industrial democracies.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Ideology of Fascism. New York: Free Press, 1969. In this solid, general study of the ideological origins and nature of fascism, the author emphasizes the revival of nationalist-conservative thought exemplified by Gentile in the years just preceding World War I.

Harris, Henry S. The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960. This study attempts a reassessment of Gentile’s philosophy by separating his ideas before World War I from his intellectual activity during the fascist era.

Holmes, Roger W. The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile. New York: Macmillan, 1937. This somewhat dated work contains some helpful biographical information in addition to a general explanation of Gentile’s neoidealism and philosophical justification of fascism.

Moss, M. E. Mussolini’s Fascist Philosopher: Giovanni Gentile Reconsidered. New York: P. Lang, 2004. An evaluation of Gentile’s philosophy, explaining how he developed his concept of actualism.