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Hegel in Italy
| Article
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19999 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
5,929 Words |
| Author
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H.S. Harris
H.S. Harris is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy
at Glendon College of York University in Toronto. |
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Hegel and revolution arrived in Italy together. The year 1848 was a year of hope for liberal "patriots" everywhere. Autocratic sovereigns granted constitutions in many places--and one of them was Naples. In Naples there had been for several years a group of intellectual rebels deeply interested in the new German idealism. One of them, Silvio Spaventa, became an opposition leader in the short-lived parliament. Soon, with the failure of the revolution he was in prison; and there he was destined to remain until the "making of Italy" in the national revolution of 1859-60.
Silvio was the younger brother of Bertrando Spaventa, the first real Hegelian in Italy. Although he too was a fervent nationalist, Bertrando was a scholar rather than a political activist. In the aftermath of the abortive revolution he went, perforce, into "exile" in Turin.
Italy was then a linguistic entity but not a political (or even a cultural) unity. The peninsula and its two great islands were divided between two kingdoms (Naples and Piedmont) and several independent duchies--with the Papal States sprawled across the middle. The history of Hegel in Italy is inextricably bound up with the making of Italy as one nation, for even the great quarrel between Croce and Gentile in 1925 was in essence a disagreement about the proper fulfillment or completion of the Risorgimento. Only since 1945 has Hegel become just a topic for scholars--though we should remember that through Labriola and Gramsci, the heritage of the Spaventa brothers became part of the fabric of Italian socialist thought, and of what made the Italian Communist Party different from all the others.
The Philosophy Of History
When Bertrando Spaventa published his first "studies upon the philosophy of Hegel" in Turin in 1851, only Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and his Philosophy of Right had been translated into Italian. Hegel always emphasized, of course, that philosophy was not concerned with the future; and this was not a restriction that Europe's national "patriots' could take literally--the first to protest against it was probably the Pole Adam Cieszkowski. But the Philosophy of History contains both an active (future-oriented) and a passive (eternal-contemplative) thesis. The active thesis is the one that Croce turned into a book title a hundred years later: that "history is the story of liberty." The passive thesis is that there is "Reason in history" and that history, when philosophically comprehended, is a theodicy.
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