Giovanni Gentile

The Italian philosopher and politician Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) was influential in reviving Hegelian idealism in Italy. He made significant contributions to the Italian educational system and participated in the formation of the Fascist corporate state.

On May 30, 1875, Giovanni Gentile was born at Castelvetrano, Sicily. He earned a scholarship to the University of Pisa in 1893. There his interests were turned from literature to philosophy by the influence of Donato Jaja. Enthusiastically responding to this new stimulation, Gentile determined to revive the idealist doctrine of the autonomy of the mind.

After 5 years of teaching in secondary schools, Gentile began his university career in Naples with an inaugural lecture entitled "The Rebirth of Idealism" (1903). Subsequently he taught at Palermo and, after Jaja's death, inherited the chair at Pisa in 1914. The next few years were filled with intense work, culminating in three major volumes: The Theory of Spirit as Pure Act (1916), Foundations of the Philosophy of Law (1916), and the first volume of his Logic (1917). During the years 1903-1922 Gentile and Benedetto Croce collaborated in editing a periodical, La critica.

After the Italian defeat at Caporetto, Gentile became increasingly involved in public life. Together with a group of friends he founded a review, the New Liberal Politics, in order to promote political and educational reforms. After Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922, Gentile became minister of public instruction, with full powers to reform the school system. He now had the authority to begin the second part of his life's dream: the rejuvenation of Italian culture. After the enactment of his plan, Gentile's political influence lessened, although he received appointments to several political positions and cultural organizations. His duties as president of the National Fascist Institute of Culture and director of the new Enciclopedia italiana took most of his energies during the next 15 years, but Gentile continued to teach, now at the University of Rome, and published a major work, The Philosophy of Art.

Gentile supported Mussolini's Ethiopian adventure but became increasingly disaffected with the party after Mussolini allied Italy with Germany in 1940. However, he saw Mussolini as the only man who could rescue Italy from civil war and from the warring foreign armies on Italian soil.

In spite of the turmoil and the constant dangers of his last years, Gentile managed to finish the final aspect of his idealist philosophy: The Genesis and Structure of Society. On April 15, 1944, after interceding on behalf of some students whose loyalty was suspect, Giovanni Gentile was shot by a band of partisans.

Further Reading

The definitive study of Gentile is by H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (1960), a sympathetic account which also provides all the necessary background information. Harris also translated Genesis and Structure of Society (1960), which contains a biographical essay and an exhaustive bibliography of Gentile studies in English. See also Roger W. Holmes, The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile (1937), and Pasquale Romanelli, Gentile: The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (1938).

Additional Sources

Romanell, Patrick, Croce versus Gentil, New York: AMS Press, 1982. □

Gentile, Giovanni (b. 27 May 1875, d. 15 Apr. 1944). Italian idealist philosopher and Fascist Born in Sicily, he graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1897, and subsequently met Croce, with whom he formed a close intellectual partnership. He taught at the University of Naples from 1903 and began to publish for Croce's review, La critica. By 1907 he had begun to formulate his idealist philosophical position which he subsequently elaborated with work on critical philosophy. In 1914, he became professor of theoretical philosophy at Pisa, and in 1917 he moved to the University of Rome. In marked contrast to Croce, he became a careful supporter of Mussolini and joined his first government as Minister of Education (1922–4). There, he carried out an educational reform which introduced religious teaching in primary schools, state examinations for teachers and pupils, as well as separate middle schools for technology and the humanities. He resigned over the murder of Matteotti. In 1925 he became general editor of the Enciclopedia italiana (Italian Encyclopaedia) in which he, rather controversially, sought to give a scholarly and conclusive definition of Fascism. (The article was signed by Mussolini himself, who pretended to be its author.) In 1925 he joined a Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals in support of Mussolini, and subsequently he repeated his public support for him, even following the proclamation of the Republic of Salò. He was executed by partisans on 14 April 1944.

Giovanni Gentile , 1875–1944, Italian philosopher and educator. He taught philosophy in several Italian universities and for many years contributed to the magazine of Benedetto Croce. In 1920 he founded the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana. An early supporter of the Fascist movement, he has been called the philosopher of Fascism. In 1922 he was made a senator and until 1924 was minister of public instruction. While in this office he reformed the structure of public education. He also directed the work of the new Enciclopedia italiana. Gentile's philosophy, called actual idealism, is a form of neo-Hegelian idealism and was developed in Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916, tr. The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 1922).

Bibliography: See studies by H. S. Harris (2d ed. 1966), M. E. Brown (1966), and W. A. Smith (1970).

Gentile, Giovanni (1875–1944), Italian philosopher. An early Fascist, as Minister of Education (1922–4) he reintroduced the teaching of Catholicism in State schools. He developed his Idealist philosophy in conjunction with B. Croce. Reality, which was fundamentally historical, was the idea as realized in the human mind. God was the ‘transcendent pure thinking’; religion was a complete intuition of life, and the Catholic form of it was especially suited to the needs of the Italian people.