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Fabio Fernando Rizi. Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 321.
Fabio Fernando Rizi's rich and detailed study undercuts all sweeping statements about Croce's encounter with Fascism. The Toronto-based scholar has found his way through an extraordinary amount of material in a year-by-year approach. His analysis proceeds chronologically, demanding a good deal of attention from his readers yet allowing them to consider his findings freely and to judge for themselves.
Covering the years 1866 to 1920, the first chapter traces the background and context of Croce's political formation, from the radicalism of his socialist youth (expressed in an unconventional lifestyle that included a 20-year long relationship with feminist Angelina Zampanelli) to a conservative liberalism animated by the intransigent immanentism that made him unavailable to any future mistica fascista. Yet Rizi does not hide the incongruities of Croce's early political writings. Some of Croce's early positions, such as his insistence on the authority of the state and on the necessity of force, and his ill-advised association with the Nationalist periodical Politica, born out of his friendship with one of its founders, the Neapolitan Francesco Coppola, were recalled and used by Fascist intellectuals and politicians, as previously shown by Armando Carlini in Saggio sul pensiero filosofico e religioso del fascismo (1942).
Rizi devotes substantial attention-7 of his 13 chapters-to Croce's political activities during the critical period of 1920 to 1929, one in which the philosopher moved ever closer to Giolitti and substantially revised his own definition of liberalism by abandoning his polemics against the Democrats and downplaying the issue of force. Here, in a historical tour de force, readers are presented with details of Croce's political, cultural, and private life. Rizi remains even-handed in his account of Croce's choices at decisive moments, such as his vote...