unification, universities were incorporated into the centralized state system,
and the German model of higher research faculties was imposed on them. In
the secularized regions of the north, the universities quickly became integrated
into international networks of science; positivism was strong, and the leading
philosophers were hybrid mathematician-logicians such as Peano and his pupil
Vailati.
Since priests had been a large proportion of schoolteachers, staffing the
secularized system, especially in the south, was a long struggle over the de-
gree of accommodation necessary with the church. The philosophers of Italian
Idealism were a network in the south. Standing between the camps, the move-
ment promoted education as a new spirituality shorn of otherworldly transcen-
dence, while opposing as well the positivism and materialism of the northern
liberals. The founder was Spaventa, an old Naples revolutionist, who returned
from exile in the 1860s and formulated a pan-Italian intellectual alliance
using Hegelian Idealism as a vehicle. The famous Idealists were Spaventa’s
pupils and grandpupils: Labriola, Gentile, and Croce (who was also Spaventa’s
nephew).
The Idealist group came together in the 1890s, discussing Marxism in a
journal funded by Croce. The Italian labor movement was becoming organized;
Labriola made contact with the leftist network by corresponding with Friedrich
Engels and Georges Sorel. Labriola’s Marxism downplayed the laws of histori-
cal sequence as inapplicable to the peculiar political circumstances of Italy,
instead making a place for national consciousness. Italian Idealism emerged as
Marxism shorn of its materialism, oriented toward social struggle and dis-
avowing transcendence of historical process—in short, Marxism turned back
to its Hegelian roots. Croce, who had begun as an antiquarian researcher, now
declared history the master discipline. Neither religion nor science can tran-
scend history; all thought is contained in particular historical circumstances.
And history is action and strife; judgments are only pauses to assess obstacles
to action. If one withdrew from action, there would be no thought. History is
no positivist science of fact gathering; since the past is dead, all that can be
recovered is its spirit. Gentile’s Actual Idealism, promulgated in 1916, takes to
an extreme the identification of reality with action and the denial of any
transcendent values. Mind is the only reality; there is no separation of thought
from an external world nor separation of thought from practice. “The true is
what is in the making” (Gentile, [1916] 1922: 10); there is no outside criterion
by which to judge.
Labriola had sought a compromise in educational reform: independence of
schools from the church, but with respect for the inner spirit of religious
sentiment (Kolakowski, 1978: 2:185). Gentile polemicized against modernists
over the curriculum, and favored religious instruction in elementary schools.684 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths