Italy before Croce — The Early Hegelian Right and the Risorgimento
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Italian Hegel reception developed alongside the Risorgimento movement — the struggle for national unity against Austrian and papal rule. Hegel appeared as the philosopher of nation-statehood and historical development — both central themes for an Italy that did not yet exist as a political state.
The Beginnings in Naples — Spaventa as Pioneer (from 1843)
Bertrando Spaventa (1817–1883) was the central figure of early Italian Hegel reception. Already from 1843, an intensive engagement with Hegel began in Naples among young philosophers. Spaventa himself reports:
“In Naples, since 1843, the Hegelian idea had penetrated the minds of young scholars who, as if moved by sacred love, banded together and preached it in word and writing. Neither the already-aroused suspicions of the police nor threats and persecutions could weaken the faith of these bold defenders of the independence of thought.”[1]
This early phase was interrupted in 1848, when Spaventa had to flee after Ferdinand II abolished the constitution. He went first to Florence, then to Turin (1848–1859), where he worked as a journalist and developed his philosophical position.
The Turin Transformation (1848–1859):
Only in his Turin exile did Spaventa approach Hegelian thought systematically. During this time he published essays in Piedmontese journals (Il Progresso, Il Cimento, Il Piemonte, Rivista Contemporanea), in which he polemicized against the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica and rejected the idea of religion as a necessary stage of human development.
Spaventa shared with other Neapolitan exiles the patriotic and liberal aspirations that found their philosophical foundation in Hegelian idealism.
Academic Establishment (1859–1883)
In 1859 Spaventa received the chair of Philosophy of Right in Modena, in 1860 the chair of History of Philosophy in Bologna, and in 1861 — after Italian unification — the chair of Philosophy in Naples.
The “Circulation of European Thought” — Spaventa’s central thesis:
In his famous Neapolitan lectures of November/December 1861, Spaventa developed his theory of “Filosofia italiana nel suo rapporto con la filosofia europea” (Italian Philosophy in Its Relation to European Philosophy). The thesis had two components:
- Modern philosophy, characterized by naturalism and immanence, originated in Italian Renaissance philosophy and, through Spinoza, reached the German idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel).
- This philosophy returned to Italy — through Rosmini and Gioberti, who (unconsciously) received the spiritualist currents of Europe.
“To take up again the sacred thread of our philosophical tradition, to revive the consciousness of our free thought through the study of our greatest philosophers, to investigate in the philosophies of other nations the seeds that they received from the first fathers of our philosophy and that then returned to us in a new and more developed systematic form […] in short: to grasp this circulation of Italian thought […] to know what we were, what we are, and what we must be within the movement of modern philosophy, not as isolated members separated from the universal life of peoples, […] but as a free and equal nation within the community of nations: that has always been the wish and the occupation of my life.”[2]
This nationalist appropriation of Hegel was philosophically-historically questionable — the continuity from Bruno to Hegel via Spinoza is a construction. But it was politically effective: it legitimized Hegel reception as a return to genuinely Italian traditions and made German idealism culturally acceptable.
Spaventa’s Philosophical Position — The “Kantianization” of Hegel
Spaventa belonged to the Hegelian Right in his political philosophy — he defended constitutional monarchy and the integration of religion and philosophy. In the context of the Risorgimento this meant: support for unification under the Piedmontese royal house, rejection of republican currents (Mazzini) and of the Papal States.
But philosophically Spaventa was not orthodox. He developed a critical transformation of Hegel based on three elements:
1. The Reform of Dialectic — Against Trendelenburg:
Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg had criticized the claim that from Hegel’s initial “pure being” (indeterminate, empty) the dialectical becoming of thought could not emerge without something being added from outside.
Spaventa’s answer: Hegelian logic must be “mentalized” or “kantianized.” It must be united with the Phenomenology — with the path of cognition of individual human consciousness, which progressively becomes self-conscious and recognizes that it carries within itself, in its own spirit, the whole logically articulated absolute reality.
2. The Primacy of Subjective Spirit:
Spaventa reformed Hegelian dialectic in the spirit of Kant and Fichte: the subjective act of transcendental consciousness takes precedence over any objectivist presupposition. Spirit is privileged over Logic and Nature — these are situated outside self-consciousness. Spirit is the protagonist of all original production.
Similarly to Kuno Fischer, Spaventa understood the Hegelian deduction (that becoming arises from the opposition of being and nothing) in a Kantian-Fichtean sense: thought, in its eternal flowing, produces being, which is originally indeterminate and therefore unthinkable, and reveals itself as non-being because it is posited within thought itself.
This primacy of the act of thinking made Spaventa a pathbreaker for Gentile’s Attualismo (actualism, see Chapter 27).
3. The Practical Dimension — Against Positivism:
To counter the positivism that emerged after unification, Spaventa emphasized the practical and historical dimension of philosophy. From Vico he adopted a practical and historical conception of the metaphysics of the Absolute. He interpreted the Hegelian self-consciousness (as desire, as “appetition”) as humanity — as an impetus operating within the human subject.
Thus Spaventa could claim, in his account of the spiritual history of Italy, that the human subject gives the historical process concreteness and self-consciousness.
The Political-Ethical Dimension
The ethical state:
Spaventa developed a Hegelian conception of the ethical state. He saw idealism as the synthesis of two extremes:
- The post-Enlightenment current, based on individual will and a purely contractualist conception of the state
- Liberal Catholicism, which relied on divine arbitrariness and dogmatic-confessional submission to the principle of authority
Spaventa’s liberalism rejected individualism, which privileges the interest of the individual and, in doing so, abuses the universal organism for its own ends, thereby destroying society. It is the state’s “pedagogical” function to foster the interests of all while protecting both the family (in which the individual is formed) and civil society.
“The family and civil society have their truth in the state. Where the state is nothing other than family (patriarchal state) or an institution of public security (police), not only does the state not exist as a true state, but neither do family nor civil society exist in their true form. The state is the unity of the principle of the family and the principle of civil society (of human naturalness and free will, of right and morality). […] It is the absolute ethical subjectivity of individuals. Absolute, because it is substance; subjectivity, because it is freely known and willed by individuals as their own (ethical) essence and their universality.”[3]
Since state power can be misused by individuals or classes for particular interests, Spaventa accepted the constitutional model, in which “the personality of the state is elevated above social conflicts.” The state, as the immanence of God, as the universality of spirit, is concretized in the “nationality” of peoples — all equal as “brothers of the human family.”
Against abstract cosmopolitanism:
Spaventa rejected abstract cosmopolitanism. For him, the nation was the concrete form in which the universal spirit manifests itself — a position that went beyond Hegel’s philosophy of history of successively dominant peoples.
The Impact — Preparing Italian Idealism
The limitations of the early reception:
This early Italian reception remained limited in scope. It concentrated on the philosophy of right and the state, neglected systematic penetration of the Logic, and often remained at the level of commentary. The productive transformation of Hegel — as it would later occur through Croce and Gentile — was still to come.
The students:
Spaventa’s school included important philosophers: Francesco Fiorentino (1834–1884), Sebastiano Maturi (1843–1917), Donato Jaja (1839–1914), Filippo Masci (1844–1922), Felice Tocco (1845–1911), Antonio Labriola (1843–1904), Nicolò d’Alfonso (1853–1933).
The significance for the Risorgimento:
As Eugenio Garin wrote: “With Spaventa, philosophy in Italy ceases to be an academic exercise and empty speculation; it becomes an organic worldview from which a morality emerges and follows; it becomes a secular religion and initiates the broad movement of intellectuals distancing themselves from the Catholic Church.”
Spaventa and Francesco De Sanctis gave the Risorgimento movement its philosophical stamp. Unlike in England and France, Hegelianism in Italy became not merely an academic movement but an element of the civic life of the nation at the height of its Risorgimento.
The mediation to Croce and Gentile:
Spaventa’s work, through the mediation of Donato Jaja, profoundly influenced Italian idealism of the twentieth century. Giovanni Gentile completed Spaventa’s project of “kantianizing” or “mentalizing” Hegel and transformed it into a complete “Attualismo” — a philosophy of the act, based on the permanent dynamism of the act of thought.
In 1908 Gentile edited Spaventa’s Prolusione e introduzione alle lezioni di filosofia nella Università di Napoli under the significant title La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea — not as a purely historiographical work, but as a phenomenological one, in which the spirit of Italian thought expresses its rediscovered self-consciousness and its relations to European history.
Benedetto Croce, too, who lived with Silvio Spaventa (Bertrando’s brother) after the death of his parents, attended Bertrando’s lectures and valued above all his deeply liberal spirit.
Spaventa prepared the ground, but the harvest of Italian Hegel reception came only in the twentieth century.
Bertrando Spaventa, quoted from his autobiographical sketch, in: Opere, ed. Giovanni Gentile, Florence: Sansoni, 1972, vol. 1. ↩︎
Bertrando Spaventa: La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea, ed. G. Gentile, Bari: Laterza, 1909 ↩︎
Bertrando Spaventa: Studi sull’etica hegeliana, Naples: Stamperia della R. Università, 1869, p. 427. ↩︎