Croce became minister of education in 1920–21, and Gentile succeeded him
in 1922–1924 under Mussolini. In Italy the halfway house of Idealism corre-
sponded all too well with a Fascist regime imposing an authoritarian synthesis
between clerical conservatives and the secularizing left. As external circum-
stances stagnated, Idealism too hung on longer in Italy than elsewhere.
In Scandinavian philosophy, the timing of Idealism was earlier because the
reforms were carried through earlier. In the Swedish universities, Idealism
accompanied reforms paralleling the German reforms: under the constitutional
monarchy of 1809, government offices formerly monopolized by the higher
nobility were opened to “qualified” applicants through university examina-
tions. The prestige of theology chairs, once the apex of academic careers, now
declined, replaced by philosophical studies, which became high-status Bildung.
Kantianism became prominent in the early 1800s, Hegelianism from the 1830s
and 1840s, along with Boström’s indigenous Swedish version of spiritualist
Idealism (EP, 1967: 7:295–301; Liedman, 1993). In 1852 the Humboldtian
elevation of research above teaching was officially decreed. The end of Idealist
domination came with another wave of reform in 1902; the required general
curriculum in philosophy was downgraded to the secondary school level and
replaced by professional specializations. This reform was rapidly followed in
philosophy by a movement, beginning in 1910 and continuing into the 1930s,
militantly rejecting subjectivism and spiritualism. The Uppsala philosophy of
Hägerstrom and Phalén reduced moral sentences to empirical statements plus
emotions and commands, in a fashion anticipating the logical positivists.
Similarly in Finland, after a century of Idealism, philosophy turned to logical
positivism. These cases add to the list of anti-metaphysical movements in
university systems after Idealist domination ended.
The Japanese sequence paralleled the European secularization struggles.
The contents of traditional religion and the political ideologies of the modern-
izers are peculiar to Japan, but the institutional and intellectual dynamics are
much the same. The Japanese universities set up in the 1870s through the 1890s
were directly modeled on the German—as indeed was the case with the English,
American, Italian, and Scandinavian reforms. The early Meiji generation of
Westernizing pioneers emulated Utilitarianism and materialist science; but as
soon as the universities achieved autonomy under Japanese teachers, philoso-
phy quickly turned to an indigenous version of Idealism led by the Kyoto
school. The halfway house in this case was of course not between secularism
and Christianity, but between the militants of the newly secularized school
system and Buddhism. In the early period of reform, Buddhists were subjected
to atrocities just like Catholics at the hands of European anti-clericals. The
Buddhist religion could not be so easily displaced, just as in Italy the Catholic
teachers could not be so rapidly dispensed with. In the already widespread pri-
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^685