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At the polemical level, fascism has become a generic term applied to virtually any form of real or potential violence, while among Marxist and left-wing scholars discredited interpretations of fascism as a product of late capitalism have been revived. But these formulas disregard the historical and philosophical roots of fascism as it arose in Italy and spread throughout Europe. In Giovanni Gentile, Gregor returns to those roots by examining the thought of Gentile, Italian Fascisms major theorist.
Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) was the major theorist of Italian fascism, supplying its justifi cation and rationale as a developmental form of dictatorship for status-deprived nations languishing on the margins of the Great Powers. Gentile's "actualism" (as his philosophy came to be called) absorbed many intellectual currents of the early twentieth century, including nationalism, syndicalism, and futurism. He called the individual to an idealistic ethic of obedience, work, self-sacrifi ce, and national community in a dynamic rebellion against the perceived impostures of imperialism. This volume makes available some of his more signifi cant writings produced shortly before and after the Fascist accession to power in Italy.
Giovanni Gentile was one of the most important and controversial thinkers of twentieth-century Italy. His philosophy and fascist ideas reflect the defining characteristics of the Italian romantic rebellion against European and English enlightenment thinking. The Ariadne's thread, which runs through and unifies all of Gentile's thought, originates accordingly from his neo-Hegelian reaction to the philosophy of Kant and of Kant's immediate predecessors. The range of Gentile's ideas on pedagogy, logic, metaphysics, political theory, and aesthetics; the original way in which he developed and adapted the thoughts of Hegel, Fichte, and Marx; and finally, his description of himself as the philosopher of fascism all encourage us to revisit and re-evaluate his system. This book reveals how Gentile came to advocate his «actual idealism» and evaluates his systematic philosophy by making explicit inconsistencies that arise from within his system and by questioning his idealist assumptions.
One Hundred Twentieth-Century Philosophers offers biographical information and critical analysis of the life, work and impact of some of the most significant figures in philosophy this century. Taken from the acclaimed Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, the 100 entries are alphabetically organised, from Adorno to Zhang Binglin, and cover individuals from both continental and analytic philosophy. The entries have an identical four-part structure making it easy to compare and contrast information, comprising: * biographical details * a bibliography of major works * a listing of relevant secondary and critical literature * an appraisal of the philosopher's thoughts and achievements. A separate glossary provides an introduction to the origins, development and main features of major philosophical schools and movements and offers select bibliographies to guide the reader to further research.
Publisher description
By developing a long-term supranational perspective, this ambitious, multi-faceted work provides a new understanding of ‘totalitarianism’, the troubling common element linking Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. The book’s original analysis of antecedent ideas on the subject sheds light on the common origins and practices of the regimes. Through this fresh appreciation of their initial frame of mind, Roberts demonstrates how the three political experiments yielded unprecedented collective mobilization but also a characteristic combination of radicalization, myth-making, and failure. Providing deep historical analysis, the book proves that 'totalitarianism' best characterizes the common features in the originating aspirations, the mode of action and even the outcomes of Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. By enhancing our knowledge of what ‘totalitarianism’ was and where it came from, Roberts affords important lessons about the ongoing challenges, possibilities, and dangers of the modern political experiment.
By assessing totalitarianism in a more deeply historical way, this study suggests how we might learn further lessons from this troubling phase of modern political development."--Jacket.
Ugo Spirito's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is the intellectual autobiography of one of the most original and anticonformist contemporary Italian philosophers. In it, Spirito makes an evaluation of his long career (spanning from the decade of the 20's to that of the 70's of the twentieth century) as a thinker who was never satisfied with any theoretical or philosophical system, while constantly aiming at finding a definitive truth: the “incontrovertible” or absolute. The various stages of his search deal with different philosophical and scientific systems - from positivism to actual idealism, from problematicism to omnicentrism, from scientism to neoproblematicism - revealing at the s...
The Italian author Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) occupied a radical position among philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century. He tried in earnest to revolutionize idealist theory, developing a doctrine that retained the idealist conception of the thinking subject as the centre and source of any intelligible reality, while eschewing many of the unwarranted abstractions that had pervaded earlier varieties of idealism and led their adherents astray. Given his great prominence during his lifetime, it is perhaps remarkable that Gentile is so little discussed, and even then so poorly understood, in the English-speaking world. Few of his works have ever been translated into English, an...