by Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was born into a family of wealthy landowners in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzi region of central Italy. He attended a Catholic boarding school in his youth, then, at age 17, lost his parents and his younger sister, who died in an earthquake in which he himself was injured. Afterward Croce moved to Rome to live with his father’s cousin, the noted thinker and political leader Silvio Spaventa, through whom he met other major thinkers, including the philosopher Antonio Labriola. Croce briefly studied law, then abandoned it to dabble in literature and local history. But by 1893 he was ready to address the current philosophical controversies concerning the status of history as a form of knowledge. He gained European renown in 1902 for his Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (Estetica come scienza...