The journal as vector for political intervention

In an article published in February 1945 in La città libera and shortly afterwards republished in the first issue of I quaderni della Critica, Croce spurned the many recent journals displaying an unorthodox mixture of cultural themes with politics. The deriving confusion, arising from improper contamination, was mostly observed in periodicals aligned with ‘lay or religiously confessional parties, thus with scarce or no liberal spirit whatsoever, which should leave poetry, philosophy, and history aside, and therefore respect these as universal values for undivided humanity’ (Croce Reference Croce1945, 112).

Croce’s position was not new. While he attributed a civic mission to the intellectual and saw a political value which transcended political antagonism in the pursuit of knowledge, Croce had also maintained that culture should not be subordinated to politics. La Critica (1903–1944) was initially born to serve as a mouthpiece for Croce’s aesthetics and his cultivated sense of distinction. During the Fascist regime, it became the only authoritative non-aligned voice in the field of culture due to Croce’s international fame, and his role as interpreter of an uncompromising vision of cultural communication, both intrinsically elitist and radically opposed to the totalitarian infiltration of politics in matters of art.Footnote ⁶

The powerful sense of agency felt by intellectuals and writers in the aftermath of the fall of the regime and the ensuing war of liberation tapped into the many dissenting sentiments that had been diligently dissimulated during the dictatorship. This agency initially fuelled a series of journals and gazettes linked to the ongoing experience of resistance. After 1944, this highly fragmented periodical landscape quickly generated cultural outlets that engaged with the radical rethinking taking place in the intellectual field directed at the culture produced during the ventennio, and the institutions that presided over cultural production and interpretation during Fascism. This landscape contributed to the formation of a public performative space, where intellectuals of different generations, characterised by different interpretations of anti-fascism and different political allegiances, came together to express their personal shame and regret towards the Fascist past, their will to contribute to the reconstruction of the country, and their desire to communicate a radical re-adjustment of their political ideas after the life-defining experience of war and resistance.

In September 1945, from the pages of one such journal, Luigi Salvatorelli’s La nuova Europa, Liberal historian Guido De Ruggiero (1888–1948), himself linked to the broad network revolving around Benedetto Croce, defined this vibrancy as ‘the most important and visible document of the re-emerging Italian democracy’ (De Ruggiero Reference De Ruggiero1994, 61). The result of ‘the collaboration between the awakening ancient forces and the emerging new’ (ibid., 60), the flourishing and dynamic publishing market across the country quickly arranged itself into two camps. One was a highly organised and belligerent Marxist network of journals, while the other consisted of a more fragmented periodical syndicate revolving around various Liberal-inspired salons.

Croce had criticised the ‘openly tendentious judgements on art, philosophy and history, either purposely or ignorantly unintelligent, available in Marxist journals’ (Croce Reference Croce1945, 112). However, Liberal-inspired journals were also ready to experiment with the hybrid format combining political intervention and cultural commentary, thus tapping into a widely felt dissatisfaction – in Liberal intellectual circles – with the ‘intrinsic limitations of Croce’s historicism […] bringing to an end one epoch without opening a new one’ (De Ruggiero Reference De Ruggiero1945). One such journal was Luigi Russo’s Belfagor.Footnote ⁷ In an exchange of letters discussing its imminent launch in March-April 1945, Croce had warned Russo about the wisdom of mixing genres. Russo defended his proposal to devote a section of his journal to politics, in order to meet a need for a discussion of modifications of the concept of liberty and the co-dependent changes in political institutions and communities (Cutinelli-Rendina 2012, II, 578–582). Russo was acutely aware that his journal, initially published by the Florence-based Vallecchi and connected to the academic networks located in Pisa and Florence, would share the marketplace with the Liberal-Reformist Ponte and the Marxist Società, also based in Florence and unapologetic in their engagement with the field of politics. The first issues of Belfagor, especially the ‘Noterelle e schermaglie’ section, would be tinged with a political struggle aimed at countering, at least initially, the Marxist bloc. Increasingly the journal revealed an anti-Crocean disposition in its interpretation of the role of cultural communication. Eventually, from the very pages of Belfagor (Russo Reference Russo1946d), Russo announced his candidature in the 1946 elections in the Movement for Republican Democracy, led by Ferruccio Parri and Ugo La Malfa, a party which had emerged from the break-up in February of that year of the Action Party. Furthermore, the debate on the limits of Crocean idealism, and specifically of Croce’s interpretation of cultural politics, which Russo facilitated in his journal from 1947, led Russo himself to embrace Gramsci’s positions and to support Gramsci’s model of intellectual inquiry.Footnote ⁸

The political context of the reconstruction had forced a paradigm shift in the forms of cultural communication that impacted also on Croce’s own behaviour. Croce’s name was associated with many journals that fit the paradigm of contamination between cultural engagement, political propaganda and intervention that was embodied, exempli gratia, by the Communist Rinascita: rivista di cultura e politica. Deeply connected to Francesco Flora’s Aretusa, welcomed as author in the pages of Alba De Cespedes’s Mercurio, his work and influence the object of several articles published in Giovanni Battista Angioletti’s La fiera letteraria, Salvatorelli’s La nuova Europa, frequent contributor to Pannunzio’s Risorgimento Liberale, subsequently linked to Francesco Flora’s Rassegna d’Italia, senior editor – together with Ettore Paratore and Luigi Einaudi – of La città libera, Croce did not disseminate his cultural politics only through the conduit of I quaderni della Critica.

Croce’s aesthetic positions, seen as legitimising – with their advocacy for the autonomous role of art – the conservative bourgeoisie’s distrust of the popular masses, would be subjected to increasing critical scrutiny in the pages of Marxist journals such as La Rinascita, Società, Risorgimento, and Politecnico, where they would be criticised not only as the manifestation of an intrinsically elitist outlook but also as falsely universalist and implicitly illiberal in their political vision. In these journals, Croce’s attitude had been dismissed as ‘Olympian’, and constantly pitched against the dynamic political action of the party that led the emancipatory struggle of the working class and the concurrent effort to present Gramsci’s life and works as a model for active and uncompromising anti-fascism. However, even a cursory glance at the periodical press connected to the Liberal bloc can testify to Croce’s far from Olympian stance against his detractors and political adversaries.

In his speeches to the Liberal Party, and in response to the Marxist cultural discourse that presented the PCI as the only truly anti-Fascist party, Croce was unapologetic both in presenting the Liberal Party as the natural political conduit for the bourgeoisie and in elevating the bourgeoisie to the status of a universal class. This position was limpidly enunciated in his inaugural speech to the 30 September 1945 meeting of the Liberal Party and refracted in numerous interviews and articles published in the journals and newspapers connected to the Liberal bloc: ‘The middle class or bourgeoisie is not an economic class, and even less so is the now abhorred capitalist class, but it is the overcoming [superamento] of the economic classes in an ideal sphere the impartial sphere of thought and culture.’ (Croce Reference Croce1963, 241). Against a party promoting aggressively the interests of the proletariat, Croce promoted instead the ‘hard-working bourgeoisie […] mental and moral treasure of the Italian people […] the representative of a superior and eternal exigency for a mental and moral life, and therefore the natural custodian of everybody’s freedom’ (Croce Reference Croce1963, 243). For Croce, the PCI vulgarly pitched ‘workers of the arm, to combat another order of workers, the workers of the mind’ (ibid.). This highly charged interpretation of the potential class conflict ensuing from the rubble of the devastation brought about by war projected the political battle on two intersecting planes: the political field that was concerned with the new state structure, and the intellectual field, where old and new intellectual forces openly saw themselves as the cultural conduits of historically determined social groups. Even though Croce delivered it in a political gathering, this speech had the clear feature of a cultural programme that was being actualised in the practice and critical discourse of many intellectuals who recognised Croce as their source of legitimation.

Despite the political momentum gained by Democrazia Cristiana, and the catalyst role played by this party for the reformist and reactionary forces, the domestic cultural discussion did not revolve around the Catholic question, and was not animated by easily distinguishable Catholic public intellectuals. Instead it still pivoted around the figure of Benedetto Croce, and it was against this lay intellectual of international fame, one who ostensibly laid the foundations for a lay culture in Italy, that Rinascita would organise a sustained campaign of delegitimisation that – between 1944 and 1952, the year in which the philosopher died – would have different peaks of intensity, and was inextricably linked, from the journal’s first issue, to the campaign to promote Antonio Gramsci as a model for inquiry and resistance.

Cultural polemics, political crossfire

Palmiro Togliatti introduced Rinascita’s programme on the front page of the first issue in 1944. Rinascita’s mission was first and foremost pedagogical, with the stated aim to bring ‘indispensable theoretical notions’ and a ‘solid Marxist foundation’ to the many militants and new supporters of the PCI. The journal, however, would also provide a space for discussion for those ‘elements deriving from the middle class, especially intellectuals’, who were increasingly attracted to the Communist Party because of its ‘moral and political prestige, both national and international’, even if they did not adhere to the Communist Party from ‘deep convictions’ (Togliatti Reference Togliatti1984, 43). Questions of political orthodoxy, of what kind of Marxist education these recruits acquired and how they acquired it, had clear implications for political strategy. Togliatti wanted these new militants to see the extent to which idealist culture had been partly responsible for Fascism. Only by recognising how wrong it was to postulate a watertight distinction between cultural practices on the one hand and the structures of power that gave birth to them on the other, would the new militants be capable of acknowledging the ‘historical necessity’ of the Communist cultural agenda, characterised by its refusal to separate ‘culture from politics, individuals from society, art from real life’.

These general propositions led to a specific accusation: ‘the first blow to open the road, in the field of thought and culture, to fascist barbarism and degeneration, was struck by the writer who had proclaimed that Marxism had died’ (Togliatti Reference Togliatti1984, 45). The veiled allusion was of course to Croce who had moved – from the 1890s to the early 1900s – from a position of dialogue with Marxist thought to one that increasingly saw in Marxism a faulty ideology unable to explain the complexities of economic and social life. Croce’s stance culminated in the article Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia (1895–1900), originally published in 1937 and then strategically reissued in a 1942 collection edited by Croce’s former mentor Antonio Labriola and published by Laterza. Togliatti’s allusion to this article was therefore timely, as its recent re-release, together with other anti-Communist and anti-Marxist writings by Croce and his associates, had made it once again topical. Croce’s anti-Communist pamphlets confirmed in Togliatti’s eyes an old but still contemporary polemical standpoint against the intelligentsia’s failure to oppose the advance of Fascism, which he powerfully articulated in his 1923 ‘La “intelligenza” italiana’ (now in Togliatti Reference Togliatti1967, 489–494).Footnote ⁹

During his Neapolitan sojourn, and as noted by Ajello (Reference Ajello1979, 45–49), Togliatti had experienced first-hand the need of the young local intellectual forces for an alternative to Crocean values and cultural practices. He also recognised the prestige that Croce and his salon enjoyed with the American forces. The polemical thrust of the offensive against Croce launched by Rinascita in 1944 stemmed from Togliatti’s initial relationship with the Neapolitan intellectual community and the pressure of local political debate on one side and, on the other, by the political skirmishes within the governments of National Unity that welcomed both Togliatti and Croce as members. It is precisely this alternation of focuses (from local to national and vice versa) that coloured the content of the 1944 issues and influenced a pattern of adversarial discourse on Croce that was also replicated in subsequent issues and at least until 1947, when the Liberal Party saw its electoral base slashed and the PCI achieve a watershed result. The pattern alternated between outright vitriolic criticism of Croce’s role as an intellectual, including his associates and connected cultural enterprises, and a series of articles aimed at engaging with Croce’s proposals at a political level when these would be expedient to secure the PCI a more visible role in the government of national unity.

With regard to the cultural prong of the campaign, Rinascita’s first issue in 1944 inaugurated a complex strategy that included the promotion of Antonio Gramsci’s work and critique of the traditional cultural establishment revolving around Croce as well as a subtle political recasting of figures, topics, and tropes specific to Croce’s own cultural influence, inquiry, and practice. Rinascita’s first issue published an editorial anthology of ‘Giudizi di Antonio Gramsci su Benedetto Croce’ deriving from letters to Tatiana Sucht written in May 1932. These concerned Gramsci’s reading of Croce’s Storia d’Europa and contained an insightful scrutiny of the political function of Croce’s reformist intellectual programme and an analysis of Croce’s reactionary cultural politics. The anthology was followed by a portrait of Antonio Gramsci penned by Piero Gobetti, the anti-Fascist Liberal thinker, publisher, and martyr who had collaborated with Gramsci and covered, in his La Rivoluzione liberale, the workers’ unrest in Turin. This piece was aimed not only at amplifying Gramsci’s appeal across the political spectrum but also at facilitating the identification of young intellectuals, still entrenched in Crocean idealism, with the discourse of emancipation and pluralism promoted by the review. The expedient patronising of Liberal martyrs would have a lasting impact on the forms of the anti-Crocean polemic, and in subsequent issues the martyrdom and sacrifice of both Gobetti and Giaime Pintor would be culturally appropriated. This operation did not leave Croce untouched. He responded with a similar claim in his 1947 review of Gramsci’s Lettere dal Carcere, where he defined the Sardinian ‘one of ours’.Footnote ¹⁰

The strategy of delegitimisation of the Crocean bloc would not be limited to the promotion of Gramsci’s work and to strategies of cultural appropriation, but it would also entail frontal attacks against Liberal figures. Togliatti’s vitriolic criticism against historian and prominent Action Party exponent Guido Dorso, as well as against literary critic and Liberal intellectual Francesco Flora, was exemplary of a tactic that confronted both the political praxis and cultural politics of the Liberal bloc. Both Dorso and Flora were involved in the journal Aretusa. In this respect, Rinascita’s polemic with Aretusa had an immediate localised and polarising effect in the Neapolitan cultural field, while also laying the ground for a larger offensive against Croce’s influence in the years to come. In the section entitled ‘La battaglia delle idee’, Togliatti’s damning reviews of Croce’s Per la storia del comunismo in quanto realtà politica (published by Laterza in 1943), and of Francesco Flora’s Ritratto di un ventennio (published in Naples by Macchiaroli in 1944) exposed how Croce and Flora purposely ignored ‘the ferocious class struggle led by Fascists against workers and peasants, where one finds the roots of all future degeneration’ (Togliatti 1944b, 31). Croce and Flora fought against Socialism because it was the only antidote to the ‘decaying liberalism leading into Fascism’ (Togliatti 1944a, 30).

Both the cultural alignment and the political undertones of Flora’s Aretusa continued to be the object of a scathing attack featuring prominently in the third and fourth issues of 1944, ranging from detailed rejections of the journal’s content to personal attacks on its director, Francesco Flora, and the journal’s source of symbolic legitimation, Croce. In the section ‘La fiera dei bugiardi’, Flora was, for instance, lambasted for ‘Scrittori e la dittatura’ (Flora 1944) where he discussed alleged patterns of continuity between Mussolini’s totalitarianism and Soviet communism. Grossi’s ‘Responsabilità dello scrittore’ dissected the inherent conservatism of Aretusa’s positions and accused Flora’s journal of belonging to a ‘long-gone era’ and of displaying a ‘continuation with a critical system both tendentious and dishonest’ (Grossi Reference Grossi1944, 25). Grossi’s article ignited a polemic with the Liberal journal La Città libera (a publication that was closely linked to Croce) and conversely it found a great deal of support among Marxist intellectuals. In the fourth and final 1944 issue of Rinascita, the article entitled ‘Arte popolare e non popolare’ with the byline G. B. continued the discussion around the historical failure of idealist aesthetic practices (persistently associated with Aretusa) whereas Giovanni Pischedda’s ‘Letteratura fatto umano’ polemicised with Aretusa’s lack of understanding of the cultural demands of the time.

The onslaught against Croce’s intellectual leadership would receive further ammunition with the republication, in the February issue of Rinascita’s 1945 edition, of Gramsci’s ‘La questione meridionale’ (originally published in 1930 in Stato Operaio), and of other important excerpts of his oeuvre previewed in Rinascita. Gramsci stated that Croce’s national function, and the greatest achievement of his intellectual reform, was to have detached ‘the Southern Italian radical intellectuals from the peasants, by making them participate in national and European culture, and through this culture become absorbed into the national bourgeoisie and therefore the agrarian bloc’ (Gramsci Reference Gramsci1945, 41). This view would not only provide the backbone of the PCI’s adversarial discourse against Croce, but would also inform Togliatti’s concerns with the inherent dangers of cultural internationalisation within the question of the role of intellectuals in society. In particular, as we shall see later on, Togliatti exploited Gramsci’s view that the intellectuals’ engagement with international culture could have a weakening effect on the pedagogical role of intellectuals with regard to the masses of the nation. The relationship between intellectuals and international culture would be the defining topic in Togliatti and Mario Alicata’s 1946–1947 debate with Elio Vittorini’s Politecnico on the pages of Rinascita. Politecnico would be accused of failing in its national cultural mission and would be indicted for Americanism on the one side and on the other for a too diffuse cosmopolitan outlook. But Gramsci’s analysis of the pre-Fascist intellectual bloc would not only emerge in Togliatti’s polemical discourse but also inflect other Rinascita-affiliated intellectuals’ pronouncements against Croce and his network.

Generational narratives

In the course of 1945–1947, many commentators and contributors would give support to Togliatti’s authoritative interventions published in Rinascita on the failures of idealist philosophy and the responsibilities of Benedetto Croce. Amongst these, Felice Platone (1896–1962) and Natalino Sapegno (1901–1990) on one side, and Lucio Lombardo Radice (1916–1982) and Mario Alicata (1918–1966) on the other, would acquire a distinctive physiognomy, with each group embodying a different affective stance towards the Liberal philosopher. Each of these voices adopted a specific relationship to Croce and each developed a distinct adversarial narrative that contributed to shape their own intellectual identity within the cultural field.

In this respect, Felice Platone’s position, similarly to Togliatti’s, embodied the stance of Communist militants in the early days, defined by the experience of detention, exile, and participation in the armed Resistance. A close collaborator of Gramsci’s ever since the days of Ordine nuovo, Platone’s anti-Crocean contributions can be grouped into two parallel polemical strands. As editor of the thematic edition of Gramsci’s writings conceived by Togliatti, he focused one strand on the strategic amplification of any Gramscian reference to and criticism of Croce’s intellectual role in Italian culture. His second strand was instead eminently political, and characterised by an expedient engagement with and criticism of the Liberal Party’s political proposals, whenever party strategy felt the need for it. Platone alternated with Togliatti in the presentation of previews from the ongoing publication of Gramsci’s work in Rinascita and in this guise he penned noteworthy editorials that were nourished by his ongoing editorial work, such as ‘Relazione sui Quaderni dal Carcere. Per una storia degli intellettuali italiani’. In this 1946 article, Platone emphasised Gramsci’s analysis of Croce’s function on the cultural front during Fascism. In so doing, Platone also brought up to date Gramsci’s criticism of Croce’s cultural practice by drawing parallels with contemporary political debate. This strategy was intended to confirm Gramsci’s perceptive reading of the political project behind Croce’s idealism and to alert the reader about the real aims of the Liberal bloc’s strategy in limiting the PCI’s historical role in the reconstruction (Platone Reference Platone1946, 86–87).

Platone’s ‘Come muore uno stato liberale’ (published in the November 1945 issue of Rinascita) reflected concerns with patterns of damning continuity within the Liberal Party’s discourse in the early years of Fascist rule, as well as the party’s opposition to a democratisation of political engagement between the masses and the state in the post-war period. Taking issue with a series of articles published by Croce in Risorgimento liberale in April and May 1945, Platone questioned how truly encompassing and universal was the liberty being promoted by the Liberal party: ‘freedom is, prejudicially, freedom for gentlemen […] that is the well-to-do, the landowners, and their clients’ (Platone Reference Platone1945, 227). Furthermore, Platone identified a not always premeditated but no less dangerous association between ‘Liberal intellectuals, the liberal politicians who work to keep the workers out of cultural and political life in order to confine them to the circle of merely economic interests, and the thugs of the landowners and of the plutocrats who have the task of destroying the [workers’] movement with violence’ (ibid).

The fear of the PCI organising a mass revolutionary movement was particularly tangible amongst the ranks of the Liberal Party. The Liberal weekly La città libera had launched in 1945 a referendum open to all free-thinking intellectuals across the political spectrum, in which the leading question was whether ‘it [was] possible to adopt restrictive laws against political parties or groups that aim to destroy the Liberal state’. The question itself took for granted that liberalism was intrinsic to the state. La città libera published various contributions, ranging from those of the belligerent Guido Gonella and Manlio Brosio, advocating the elimination of the ‘forze liberticide’ of Socialist inspiration, to those of Mario Scelba, positing the higher ethical call of the Liberal state, and of Ignazio Silone and Leone Cattani, who maintained instead that the very question revealed the unfinished work of liberalism within Italian society, a point made more explicit by Togliatti’s contribution to the debate.

If Platone’s relationship to Croce was unequivocally adversarial, Natalino Sapegno’s intellectual engagement with Croce’s aesthetics was instead characterised by a growing critical distance. Unlike Platone, Sapegno had adhered to a more conventional anti-fascism. For academics of his generation, Croce had represented the only conduit for criticism of the Fascist system of oppression, a sign of group distinction, and a demonstrable but safe evidence of non-conformity. As for many, Sapegno’s progressive attraction towards the PCI was prompted by his support for the Resistance groups in which many of his pupils were involved. Sapegno’s own contribution to the anti-Croce campaign was, however, distinctly cultural and acquired an exemplary generational value because of its precise biographical references. Published in Rinascita in August 1945, Sapegno’s ‘Marxismo, cultura, poesia’ triggered a polemic that would rebound in the pages of Mercurio and Belfagor. Sapegno took on the task of seeing ‘in what terms the historical consideration of cultural and aesthetic facts takes shape for a Marxist and in general for the modern man’ (Sapegno Reference Sapegno1945, 183). By condemning Croce’s approach to history as ahistorical, and by declaring Marxism to be ‘integral historicism’, Sapegno outlined the agenda of the Marxist literary historian who, advancing in the opposite direction from the one indicated by Crocean aesthetics, should link works of art to their historical context and to the agents that contributed to artistic production.

However, despite the well-argued refutation of Croce’s aesthetics and of the limits of his critical method, the polemical value of Sapegno’s articles did not reside in the concurrent and equally cogent positive evaluation of the application of historical materialism to the realm of cultural production. It lay instead in the biographical closing paragraph to the piece, where Sapegno justified his adherence to Marxist literary criticism not as a result of an ‘ex-post adaptation of my activity of literary historian to my Marxist faith, but rather of a long and tormented reflection on the insufficiencies and unsatisfied exigencies revealed through the application of the Crocean method, on which – like all the men of my generation – I had formed myself’ (Sapegno Reference Sapegno1945, 184). Indeed, it would be precisely this concomitance of a personal conversion, the realisation of the theoretical failure of Crocean aesthetics, and a veiled hope for a generational awakening that would attract Luigi Russo’s piqued and sarcastic riposte, published first in Mercurio in 1945 and then in the ‘Noterelle e schermaglie’ section of the first issue of Belfagor (Russo Reference Russo1946b). An extraordinary polemical essay, fuelled by personal acrimony and professional rivalry, Russo’s piece exploited the value of paradox to great effect, by establishing an equivalence between the aims of Crocean historicism and the aims of historical materialism. Russo’s sarcastic piece hinted that Sapegno had adhered to Fascist groups and had praised cultural collaboration with Nazism. This infamous reference led to an incendiary diatribe that reverberated across the cultural arena. Lucio Lombardo Radice, Pietro Ingrao, Mario Alicata and Carlo Salinari, who had either served as assistants to Sapegno (Alicata and Salinari) or had developed a mentoring relationship during the last years of the Fascist regime (Ingrao and Lombardo Radice) published a letter of protest in Mercurio, which was republished with a reply by Russo (Reference Russo1946c) in Belfagor. The letter defended Sapegno’s anti-fascist credentials, while alluding to Russo’s lack of engagement with the Resistance during the Nazi occupation.

The unceremonious, petty, and in some instances outright sordid tones of this quarrel, however unpalatable, were symptomatic of a clash between different interpretations of Croce’s influence, as well as a demonstration of personal uneasiness in dealing with contradictions arising out of past affiliations and present conversions. Sapegno’s contribution to the anti-Croce polemic developed a critical reflection on the Crocean method and Marxist literary historiography and an interest in generational conversions from idealism to Marxism. In this respect, Sapegno’s ‘L’insegnamento di Piero Gobetti’ is emblematic of the author’s desire to reflect on the philosophical and political conditions that led several of his generation to turn their backs on Croce after the fall of Fascism. Sapegno identified themes that showed Gobetti’s revolutionary and agonistic liberalism as intrinsically at odds with Croce’s liberalism. In this respect, Gobetti’s original reading of the limitations of Croce’s negation of the revolutionary agency of the working class came most vividly to the fore when Sapegno’s analysis drew parallels between Gobetti’s insightful criticism and the contemporaneous political circumstances in which the Liberal Party, under Croce’s presidency, was espousing the most reactionary stances against instances of widening participation in the political process (Sapegno Reference Sapegno1946, 161).

The youth question

The influx of anti-fascist militants with a non-Marxist cursus honorum into the Communist Party posed with urgency the question of political pedagogy, as duly noted by Togliatti in Rinascita’s programme and by Lucio Lombardo Radice in his ‘Comunismo e cultura’:

In 1945, a debate ensued in the pages of Rinascita, which contributed to a wider discursive context in which the youth question and intellectual leadership were perceived as inextricably linked. Celeste Negarville’s ‘Una generazione influenzata dal fascismo’ focussed on the undercover propaganda activities of those young intellectuals who had infiltrated the ‘Fascist mass organisation, utilising Trojan horse tactics’ (Negarville Reference Negarville1945, 23). Crucially, Negarville also wrote of the political opposition that emerged in the Littoriali della cultura ‘where anti-fascism was fully manifest, notwithstanding the vigilance of those professors aligned with fascism’ (ibid., 23–24). This statement from the L’Unità editor not only confirmed a broadly endorsed widening access policy, but also a realistic reconsideration of the complex factors shaping intellectual identity in this crucial period of Italian history. Furthermore, while ready to exalt the tradition of organised dissent that stretched back to the dark years of the Regime, with the aim of showing the associative and affective power of Communist propaganda, Negarville was equally keen to highlight the need to awaken from their indifference those young people who regarded their new experience of democratic life with scepticism and distance.

‘Giovinezza’ had indeed been a key word for Fascist political discourse, and the Fascist regime had invested considerable resources in the creation of structures, institutions, and indoctrination programmes aimed at the young (Koon Reference Koon2012). The historical memory of this organised programme of intellectual influence produced cautious attempts, especially in the Liberal bloc, to approach the youth question and the impact of Fascist education (La Rovere Reference La Rovere2008, 29–133). In this respect, Guido De Ruggiero’s ‘I giovani’– originally published in Nuova Europa in 1944 (now in Ruggiero 1994, 53–54) – can be considered emblematic of the Liberal-Socialist political debate. Weary of the exaltation of ‘“giovanilità” as a self-standing value’, De Ruggiero was keen to establish the effects of ‘Fascist mis-education’ on the youth but also ready to classify behavioural distinctions amongst the 1920s generation. He proceeded to identify three groups, ‘the lost youth’, ‘the disoriented youth’ and the ‘minority of egregious youth’, which ‘albeit restricted, is by far the most steadfast that Italy has ever had’ and for which De Ruggiero feared the risk of isolation and segregation from ‘the mass of the less worthy and able, whereas their place must be amongst the mass to facilitate its internal struggle and elevation to their heights’ (De Ruggiero Reference De Ruggiero1994, 54). Also in De Ruggiero the youth question displayed numerous symmetries with the intellectual question (articulated in his ‘Questo popolo. Gli intellettuali’ published in Nuova Europa on 1 April 1945). Indeed, his systematisation of the youth question and the identification of an elite group with potential leadership qualities reflects his analysis of the intellectual field after the fall of the Regime, equally characterised by an elite group that needed to channel the ‘the mediated influx of cultural renewal operating in the elites’ (De Ruggiero Reference De Ruggiero1994, 61) towards the less equipped strata of the population.

De Ruggiero’s systematisation both rang true and raised problems for the many young intellectuals who had internalised Croce’s interpretation of the intellectual’s civic mission in the context of the Fascist discourse of domination but who were also deeply attracted by the Marxist agenda and the cultural politics of the PCI. For these recruits the main problem was how to convert their intellectual habitus invested in processes legitimising distinction and elitist dispositions, and how to put into action the lessons that they were taking from Gramsci’s analysis of new intellectual class: how to break free from an inherently elitist model of intellectual leadership? How best to interpret the role of the intellectual within the emancipatory struggle of the working class? How to make high culture relevant to workers and how to communicate the values of working-class culture to a diversified audience? In this sense, the realisation of Gramsci’s vision depended on an effective programme of cleaning out the Crocean principles that still inhabited the hearts and minds of many young militants who had joined the PCI.

As Lombardo Radice had noted in his ‘Comunismo e cultura’, allegiance to the PCI did not ‘require the acceptance of Marxist-Leninist ideology’ (Lombardo Radice 1945, 217), since Marxism was neither a formulaic ‘catechism’ nor ‘anti-historicism’, and so adhesion meant neither ‘total refusal of other intellectual experiences, nor a neat break with the past taken as a whole’ (ibid., 218). This acknowledgement of the idealistic roots of so many militants led Radice to discuss in greater detail the type of anti-fascism that idealism had engendered, in order to mobilise further the consciences of the new recruits and show them a different paradigm of political commitment. Radice’s ‘L’anticomunismo liberale’ constitutes the most lucid analysis of the function played by Crocean idealism in the reactionary politics seized upon by the Fascist regime: published in Rinascita in the period under scrutiny (1944–1947). By drawing attention to and praising the function of ‘orientation […] and attraction’ (Lombardo Radice Reference Lombardo Radice1946, 237) played by La critica for young intellectuals of the period, Radice also clearly highlighted how the concept of liberty heralded by Croce was used by the Regime to give intellectual gravitas to its anti-Socialist resolve, while at the same time undermining the efficacy of Liberal anti-fascism. The Crocean ‘moral and cultural’ interpretation of anti-fascism had translated into a purely intellectual stance, a ‘static anti-fascism’ whose ‘weak and uncertain position’ led to an ossified statement of allegiance to the ‘religion of liberty’ which produced neither pragmatic alternatives nor a much-needed ‘anti-fascist activation’ (238). According to Radice ‘Liberals “prepared themselves” and invited others to do the same: they did not prepare, they did not build a new situation themselves’ (Lombardo Radice Reference Lombardo Radice1946, 238). This analysis resonated with Russo’s ‘I giovani del venticinquennio fascista (1919–44)’, published in the first issue of Belfagor, where Russo (1946a) reiterated an interpretation of anti-fascism that coincided with the practice and the defence of high culture.

A lucid portrait of the relationship between ‘I giovanissimi e la cultura negli ultimi anni del Fascismo’ was published by classicist Antonio La Penna (b. 1925), and issued in two instalments in Società (1946 and 1947), in a period when this journal was heavily engaged in spreading Gramsci’s thought. La Penna’s piece displayed many points of contact with Sapegno’s own identity narrative, and with Russo’s description of the role played by literary culture as a conduit for mediated criticism of the regime, but it also contained significant differences. La Penna clearly indicated in his reading of Gramsci’s works a transformative experience leading to a progressive understanding of Marxism that, for many of his generation, had been mediated by Croce’s distorting prism (La Penna Reference La Penna1947, 395, 398–400). The dissolution of idealism therefore, in La Penna’s view, was linked to a ‘pedagogical’ failure on the part of the heralds of Crocean idealism and to the inefficacy of ‘ethical intellectualism’ propagated by Croce’s philosophical system (La Penna Reference La Penna1946, 686). Furthermore, the distinctively literary character of the intellectual experience described by La Penna concealed a number of polemical strands that converged in the reception of idealist culture in a field increasingly colonised by Marxist agents upholding a Gramscian view of intellectual engagement. Following Radice, La Penna (Reference La Penna1946, 682) acknowledged the persistence of a Crocean intellectual habitus in the sense of ‘the substance of our mental formation, nesting in the folds of those who more acutely feel the insufficiency of recent idealist culture’ and, contrary to Sapegno, admitted that for many people Marxist political practice was entwined with a still unresolved Crocean literary disposition.

This disposition translated into a vision that still assigned a higher role to culture than to politics. La Penna found the embodiment of this impasse in Vittorini’s Politecnico, and his critique imputed naivety to the enthusiastic reception of American literary culture (La Penna Reference La Penna1947, 390–391) and superficiality to the incisiveness of vision embodied in Vittorini’s short-lived journal. ‘[T]he generic encyclopaedism, the empty affirmation of renewal without a critical identification of new content’ characterising Politecnico represented, in his view, both the substance of the culture inherited by the young intellectuals and its limits (ibid, 401–402). La Penna was here deploying the main criticism levelled at Vittorini by Mario Alicata in his 1946 Rinascita article ‘La corrente Politecnico’, giving rise to the polemic between Togliatti and Vittorini, which reverberated in the pages of PCI-aligned journals such as Società. In this article Alicata criticised Politecnico for failing to ‘establish a productive contact between our culture and the concrete interests and problems of the Italian popular masses’ and to ‘build a bridge’ between the intellectual class and ‘the democratic front’ (Alicata 1946). This failure was exemplified in Politecnico’s enthusiastic support of American authors, and in his attack on Politecnico’s international outlook, Alicata adapted Gramsci’s vision for the national role of the intellectual class to Cold War cultural politics. Furthermore, Alicata’s criticism resonated with Gramsci’s analysis of the dangers inherent in the internationalisation of culture explicated in the role played by Croce’s cosmopolitism in Southern culture and discussed in La questione meridionale.

But was Alicata right? Like many of his generation, Vittorini bade farewell to Croce’s philosophical system and to his view of the consolatory function of high culture; but when he engaged in the intellectual struggle to defend Politecnico’s programme, his language resounded with the semantics and vocabulary of a typically Crocean defence of culture. In the attempt to formulate a relationship of equality between ‘Politica e cultura’, published in Politecnico in July-August 1946, Vittorini stated that while culture ‘cannot but operate beyond a […] strategy, on the […] plane of history,’ in its search for ‘truth’ it cannot be limited by politics, because politics would ‘attempt to contain it within the truth already revealed’ (Vittorini Reference Vittorini2008, 305). This synthesising vision of politics and culture, however, revealed the impossibility of a perfectly balanced fusion between them. In ‘Lettera a Togliatti’ published in the January-March 1947 issue of Politecnico, Vittorini denied that ‘politics and culture are perfectly distinct’ but maintained that the two spheres regulated two distinct areas of action, with their own defining ‘dynamism’. Vittorini ultimately acknowledged that to advocate culture as ancillary to politics would be tantamount to creating ‘a void in history’ (Vittorini Reference Vittorini2008, 398–399). While it was Marxism that showed Vittorini the need for an anti-bourgeois literary practice, and while in his ‘Lettera’ he had referred to Croce’s influence as the embodiment of ‘anti-culture’, it was nevertheless Crocean semantics and habitus that helped codify the language he used to defend the distinction between politics and culture. In this debate, as Luigi Russo polemically noted in his 1947 ‘Politica e cultura’ (now in Russo Reference Russo1949, 298–306), not only did Vittorini interpret the role of the ‘Crocean’ agent, interested in the free circulation of ideas, but the Rinascita group, in endorsing a regimented organisation of culture, seemed to hold a view not dissimilar from the cultural politics promoted by Giovanni Gentile, Croce’s former pupil, first high-profile dissenter, and the foremost Fascist intellectual.

Despite a deeply felt antagonism towards Croce’s cultural politics that stretched back to his collaboration on Fascist journals such as Primato and La Ruota, Alicata acknowledged Croce’s anti-fascist credentials and his role in the foundation of a culture that disdained metaphysical explanations and pursued the establishment of a civic religion as a precondition for the completion of the national project.Footnote ¹¹ While profoundly dissenting over the aims, modalities, and strategies of such a project, Alicata’s respect for Croce’s tireless intellectual action was tangible in the pieces he wrote after Croce’s death in 1952. Amongst the contributions dedicated to the philosopher in the last Rinascita 1952 issue, Alicata’s ‘Benedetto Croce e il Mezzogiorno’ (now in Alicata Reference Alicata1968, 301–304) distinguished itself for moving beyond Gramsci’s analysis of Croce’s cultural function, for displaying admiration for Croce’s organisational role in the Southern intellectual bloc, and expressed the wish that the ‘immense inheritance’ embodied in Croce’s scholarship focusing on the history of Naples and Southern Italy should lead to further research in connected disciplinary fields. In his 1950 Rinascita essay ‘La cultura del mezzogiorno’, Alicata had already noted the crumbling influence of what he called the Crocean ‘monarchy’ and had despaired at the realisation that despite very small and encouraging changes in the post-war intellectual landscape of Southern Italy, Croce still appeared to be the most authoritative voice in an otherwise silent desert. Nothing much had changed in the subsequent two years, Alicata noted: Croce’s erudition and hegemony was so extraordinary it was difficult to find or name an obvious heir, concluding with the wish that Croce’s Marxist adversaries could act as custodians of the ‘lay and anti-fascist message that Croce had left to Neapolitan and Southern intellectuals’ (Alicata Reference Alicata1968, 304). This wish could be considered surprising, if not paradoxical, only if it were extrapolated from a cultural context where, as demonstrated by the analysis so far carried out, appropriation of Crocean tropes, the polemical dismantlement of Croce’s role during Fascism, and the absorption of Crocean intellectuals had been the main strategies carried out by the PCI to infiltrate and then dominate the post-war intellectual field.

Notes on contributor

Daniela La Penna is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Reading and Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘Mapping Literary Space: Literary Journals, Publishing Firms and Intellectuals in Italy, 1940–1960’ (2012–2015). She is Senior Co-Editor of the academic journal The Italianist. She is the author of ‘La promessa d’un semplice linguaggio’: Lingua e stile nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli (Carocci, 2013), and the editor of Meneghello: Fiction, Scholarship, Passione civile (The Italianist, 2012). With Daniela Caselli, she has co-edited Twentieth-century Poetic Translations: Literary Cultures in English and in Italian (Continuum, 2008). Daniela La Penna’s work has appeared in The Italianist, Italian Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Testo, and Stilistica e Metrica Italiana.