Giovanni Gentile 1875 – 1944

Giovanni Gentile was an Italian philosopher and the principal theorist of the official idealism of Italian Fascism, which he called actual idealism. After a long collaboration with Benedetto Croce that ended in a public break, he served as minister of public education in Mussolini's first government and carried through a far-reaching reform of Italian schools and universities. He directed the Italian Encyclopedia and wrote its entry on Fascism. His political commitments, which he never repudiated, drew on a philosophical system, set out in The General Theory of Spirit as Pure Act, in which the thinking act is the only ultimate reality.

Giovanni Gentile was born at Castelvetrano in Sicily in May 1875, the son of a pharmacist. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa under Donato Jaja, took his doctorate in 1897, and held chairs at Naples, Palermo, Pisa, and from 1917 Rome. With Benedetto Croce, with whom he co-edited La Critica from 1903, he led the Italian neo-Hegelian revival until they broke decisively in 1924 over the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, of which Gentile was the principal author.

He served as Mussolini's first Minister of Public Instruction from 1922 to 1924 and carried out the comprehensive 'Gentile reform' of the Italian school system; he edited the Enciclopedia Italiana from 1925 and wrote, with Mussolini, the doctrinal article on Fascism for its 1932 volume. His philosophical works include La filosofia di Marx (1899), the Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916), the Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (1917–22), L'attualismo (1933), and the posthumous Genesi e struttura della società.

Gentile's actual idealism, or attualismo, identified all reality with the pure act of self-thinking thought and treated history, art, religion, and the state as moments of that single concrete subject; he extended this monism into the doctrine of the ethical state that justified his fascism. He continued to defend the Salò Republic after 1943 and was assassinated by partisans in Florence in April 1944.