Benedetto Croce is a peculiar character in contemporary historiography. Unlike his colleagues, he never taught classes and barely set foot in the University. He was a "self-taught" historian whose enormous wealth allowed him to dedicate himself throughout his life to his passion, history.
Croce was born on February 25, 1866 in Pescasseroli, in the Italian Abruzzo, into a wealthy bourgeois family from the region. At the age of 9 he moved to Naples where he began his studies at the Colegio de los Barbaritas. In his youth he came close to wearing the robes but eventually lost interest in God and religion. His subsequent atheism may have been conditioned by the loss of his family in an earthquake in which he was only slightly injured.
In 1885 he began his studies in Jurisprudence at the University of Rome but he did not show much interest in them either, attending more frequently the classes given by the critical Marxist Antonio Labriola. After this period he returned to his residence in Naples where he will remain for much of the remainder of his life. His income assured thanks to the income from his estate, he devoted himself entirely to study except for the interruptions caused by trips to Spain, France and Germany.
The main vehicle used by Croce to disseminate his works was the magazine “ La Crítica ” (edited by himself). He worked shoulder to shoulder with fellow philosopher Gentile, with whom he maintained a close friendship that was later broken due to the arrival of fascism in the Italian government. The prestige obtained by his works caused him to be appointed senator and actively work on the project of a profound educational reform. Mussolini's arrival in power caused him to leave de facto politics and took refuge again among his books in Naples. The fall of the regime made possible his return to the political arena as one of the main bastions of Italian liberalism. He died on November 20, 1952.
Croce, in addition to being a prominent historian, also made relevant contributions in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics and politics. His literary production was extraordinary and amounts to more than four thousand works, most of them brief essays on historical scholarship, art criticism, and literary and political history.
Within the historical field itself (although in Croce it is difficult to separate history and philosophy) The Neapolitan revolution of 99 stands out (1912), The Theater of Naples (1916), Spain in Italian life during the Renaissance (1917), Historical Curiosities (1919), The history of the kingdom of Naples (1925) and History of Europe in the 19th century (1932). Works that he combined with others closer to historiographical theory such as History as thought and action , Theory and history of historiography and Philosophy and Historiography .
Historiography was always Benedetto Croce's center of interest, linked to his philosophical approaches (he is considered an idealist follower of Hegel) which he condensed into four major works which he called "Philosophy of the spirit". His conception of history has been defined as "absolute historicism." His central thesis is based on identifying or merging the concepts of history and reality. For Croce, historicism means that the very life of the spirit becomes history and evolves, not in the dialectical becoming of an Abstract Idea or Absolute, but in the process of historical reality; it is the universal concept that becomes both concrete and individualized. Therefore, life and all reality are resolved in history. As Croce himself points out, “historicism is the affirmation that life and reality is history and nothing but history ”.
In this perception, two ways of facing reality are opposed:history and the chronicle or historiographic narration of the facts (which he compares to life and his corpse, respectively). For Croce, history lives by the interest that the document currently arouses in the researcher; while the chronicle is a historiography that has not been rethought, a mere collection of data with an exclusively practical purpose. The historical judgment cannot consist of a passive reproduction of the facts, but must go beyond the life of the past to represent it in the form of knowledge. All history is, therefore, contemporary history. In Croce's words:“because, however remote or extremely remote the events that enter into it seem chronologically, it is, in reality, history always referring to the need and the present situation ”. As a result of this transfiguration, the story loses its passion and becomes a necessary vision of reality.
Following in a certain way the Hegelian thought, Croce considers that history is always full rationality and, in this way, progress. The irrational elements that appear in the course of the human being (struggles and wars) are constituted by manifestations of vitality, sometimes unbridled, of men and peoples. Said vitality is necessary for progress and in no case is decadence seen as a setback or an obstacle. On the contrary, it serves as training or preparation for the new life.
Regarding the treatment of the sources and the approach to the facts. Croce's position is also very clear:the historian must evaluate them without issuing opinion judgments or biasing them, since all the facts are "historical" and there is no reason to choose between them ("if the judgment is a subject relationship and predicate, the subject, that is, the fact, whatever it may be, that is judged, is always a historical fact, something that becomes, an ongoing process, because immobile facts are neither found nor conceived in the world of reality ”). While the sources, whether they are documents or remains, have no other mission than to stimulate and form in the historian "states of the soul" that were already in him.