The Italian Reception of Hegel - From Liberal Historicism to Fascist Actualism
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
When Hegel came to Italy, he encountered a nation in the making (on the early history of Hegelianism in Italy, see 12.3). Italy existed until 1861 only as a geographical concept, not as a political state. The Risorgimento movement fought for national unity, against Austrian and papal rule, for a modern constitutional state. In this constellation, Hegel appeared as the philosopher of historical development and rational statehood - but at the same time as a conservative defender of monarchy.
The decisive turn came around 1900 with the anti-positivist reaction. Croce and Gentile led the renaissance of idealism - but an idealism radically different from Vera’s orthodoxy.
The Italian reception developed in two opposing directions, each of which resolved, in its own one-sided way, a systematic problem of Hegelian philosophy: the relation between objectivity and processuality. Benedetto Croce transformed Hegel into liberal historicism - reason in history without metaphysical presuppositions, but at the price of dissolving all objective structures. Giovanni Gentile radicalized Hegel into “actualist” idealism - the pure processuality of the act of thinking, but at the price of subjectivizing it into arbitrariness.
These two developments show exemplarily how the same philosophy could be mobilized for opposing political projects. But they also demonstrate the systematic danger of a Hegel appropriation that fails to preserve the dialectical balance of structure and process.