Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Benedetto Croce was one of the last of the third wave of Hegelians who struggled to develop a renewed approach to history and practice in the face of Marx’s hijacking of the dialectical enterprise. He is not often read these days since his writings were pre-Gramscian and pre-Eco Italian philosophy, often disrespected by Northern European Zeitblomian writing. Even Eco wrote that Croce’s views were “hollow” and superseded in 1970 (Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1).

Perhaps it’s time to return to the gentle and courageous approaches of the Italian aestheticians of the early 20th century. Before the impulses of Marinetti and the Futurists, before the grim violence of the Fascists, before the Red Brigade and Communist collaboration, before the politics-shunning structuralist academics, Croce and other modest thinkers tried to construct an approach to history and practice which is hardly known today.

Would it be too much to ask for today’s bien-pensants to re-examine such a philosopher as Croce? What have they got to lose?

Read more about him here!