Giovanni Gentile: Actual Idealism and Fascism

Giovanni Gentile: who he was

Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, in the province of Trapani, on 29 May 1875, the eighth of ten children, according to Treccani’s Dizionario Biografico. He was a philosopher and Minister of Education. The school reform that bears his name has a Recap of its own: the 1923 Gentile reform and what it changed in Italian schools.

Actual idealism: Gentile’s philosophy of the pure act

According to Treccani, actualism and actual idealism are the same doctrine, and the name comes from the way all reality is traced back to spirit. The reference work is the Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, published in 1916.

Treccani explains that “act” means something being done, unlike Aristotle’s completed act. In actualism, reality exists only as it is being made.

The pure act coincides with self-consciousness, which thinks and acts at once and so grounds itself. According to the English Wikipedia entry, the pure act is the only true reality for Gentile: thinking as it thinks. Subject and object are not distinguished in it. That is where his opposition to dualism comes from.

Practical example: picture a history lesson. If the past were a ready-made thing, the student would receive it the way one receives a parcel. On the actualist reading, the past exists at the moment someone thinks it, and each time a student works out what happened, that is a small act of thought. It is a classroom simplification meant to fix the idea, not a page from Gentile.

Gentile’s philosophy against Hegel and Croce

According to Wikipedia, actualism sets out to reform the dialectic of Hegel and German idealism: in Gentile the dialectic lives entirely inside the act of thinking. He also rejects Hegel’s triad of Idea, Nature and Spirit, because for him everything is Spirit.

Gentile shared a long partnership with Benedetto Croce. According to Treccani it lasted almost thirty years and ended in the break of October 1924. Wikipedia describes Croce as an absolute historicist and sets the two philosophies side by side.

	Benedetto Croce	Giovanni Gentile
Reality is	history	act
Wikipedia’s label	absolute historicist	philosopher of actual idealism
Stance on the triad of Idea, Nature and Spirit	not covered in the source	rejects it: everything is Spirit

Gentile and fascism: from 1923 to the Manifesto

In May 1923, when he was Minister of Education, Gentile joined the National Fascist Party. He announced it in a letter to Mussolini. Christian Raimo, in Il Post, also dates the membership to 1923. Treccani’s Dizionario Biografico calls it a decision that was sudden only in appearance and ties it to the consistency of his philosophy: for the pure act, all reality lives inside the act of thought. That is Treccani’s reading.

In March 1925, at the Bologna conference, Gentile drafted the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, which Mussolini revised. Treccani Magazine recalls the two publications, ten days apart.

Text	Author	Published	Where
Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals	Gentile, revised by Mussolini	21 April 1925	Il Popolo d’Italia and other newspapers
Reply	Croce	1 May 1925	Il Mondo, 41 initial signatures and more than 200 in the days after

Croce refused to put culture at the service of party politics.

Raimo credits Gentile with one more decision: the idea and the wording of the loyalty oath for university professors in 1931.

Between 1925 and 1943 Gentile gave his best energies to the Italian Encyclopedia, according to Treccani. Wikipedia names him as its first editor.

Ethical state and the Doctrine of Fascism

In Treccani’s Croce e Gentile portal, the ethical state is one where the individual cannot be separated from the community and every action carries public moral value. The author of the entry writes that, for Gentile, the ethical state par excellence is the Fascist state. The corporative state is ethical, in Gentile’s view, because it subordinates the economy to the moral ends of the State.

Mussolini also claimed an ethical character for the Fascist state, in his 1929 speech to the Chamber on the Lateran Pacts. The public image of the Duce has a Recap of its own: the Mussolini myth and Fascist propaganda.

The 1932 Doctrine of Fascism sits in the entry “Fascismo” of the Italian Encyclopedia, volume 14. It has two parts: the first, “Le idee fondamentali”, is Gentile’s, and the second, “La dottrina politica e sociale”, is Mussolini’s. Raimo writes that Gentile composed the entry for Mussolini; Wikipedia specifies that it was the first part of the essay credited to Mussolini.

Gentile’s death in 1944

In 1943, in the middle of World War II and in the phase of the Italian Social Republic, Gentile was president of the Academy of Italy, which was moved from Rome to Florence.

He was killed in Florence on 15 April 1944, near the Villa Montalto at Salviatino, by a Communist partisan group, according to Treccani. Wikipedia gives the killers as Bruno Fanciullacci and Antonio Ignesti of the Communist GAP, and reports that the PCI approved the killing and claimed it. On who ordered it and why, Treccani names no established responsibility and awaits new documents.