Part 6

In April, 1895, his old professor at the University of Rome, Antonio Labriola, sent to Croce an essay on the _Communist Manifesto,_ in which he submitted to a critical examination the materialistic conception of history elaborated during the fifty preceding years by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Labriola had been probably the first professor in a European University to take Historical Materialism as a subject for his academic lectures, his first course on Marxism having been delivered in 1889. But Croce, who had given all his thoughts first to his literary work, and then to his meditations on art and criticism, had not been as yet able to perceive the bearing of the new problems discussed by his master on that problem of the nature of history which had been the subject of his first philosophical essay, and was to be the centre of his later speculations. Labriola's little book came to him at a moment when he had reached an impasse in the course of his research, and it opened to him an entirely new field of investigations, it afforded him an escape towards studies and meditations, at first apparently unrelated to his former ones, but the results of which were destined to react vigorously on them. He plunged with youthful enthusiasm into the literature not of Marxism and historical materialism only, but of Economics in general. In the five following years, while he continued with unremitting energy his literary labours, now more clearly directed towards an understanding of the historical problems of Æsthetics, and a clarification of the concepts of a philosophical science of Æsthetics, he published a series of critical essays on _Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica,_ intended at the same time as a defence and a rectification of Marx's doctrines.

We shall consider this phase of Croce's work from two distinct points of view--as a new individual experience, and as a stage in the development of his philosophy. For the first of them, we shall again leave the word to Croce himself: "That intercourse with the literature of Marxism, and the eagerness with which for some time I followed the socialistic press of Germany and Italy, stirred my whole being, and for the first time awakened in me a feeling of political enthusiasm, yielding a strange taste of newness to me: I was like a man who having fallen in love for the first time when no longer young, should observe in himself the mysterious process of the new passion. At that fire I burnt also my abstract moralism, and I learnt that the course of history has a right to drag and to crush the individual. As I had not been disposed in my family circle to any fanaticism, and not even to a liking for the current and conventional liberalism of Italian politics ... it seemed to me to breathe faith and hope in the vision of the rebirth of mankind redeemed by labour and in labour."[1] This political enthusiasm did not last very long: it disappeared when that which was Croce's true nature, not practical but essentially theoretical, reasserted itself, by reducing this new experience into new conceptual forms; but without it, the whole of his philosophy of the practical activity would forever have been like a theory of vision in the mind of a blind man, or a theory of love in that of a keeper of the harem. Art, thought, mortality, had already appeared to him as aspects of his own life; to these, a new element was added now, not as a mere object of thought, but as a passionate and concrete experience.

The interpretation of the doctrine of historical materialism presented a number of difficulties deriving partly from the form in which the doctrine itself had originally appeared--not as a coherent theory, but as a series of pronouncements and observations scattered in a variety of writings, composed at a distance of years, and the aim of which was rather political and polemical than scientific; and partly from its association with remnants of old metaphysics, both in its originators and in their followers. In Marx and Engels, as well as practically in the whole literature of Marxism, the emphasis being laid on the substantive rather than on the adjective, historical materialism implied the adhesion to that metaphysical materialism which was one of the children of Hegelian metaphysics. What had been the Idea for Hegel, was the Economy of the new metaphysicians: the only reality, working beneath the surface of human consciousness, as an under-structure beneath a merely apparent and illusory superstructure. Given this conception, it is easy to understand why historical materialism appealed so strongly to positivists and evolutionists, who concealed a similar kind of metaphysics under their proclaimed contempt for philosophy. The old philosophies of history had attempted to reduce the sequence of history to a scheme of concepts, starting with God, or Providence, or the Hegelian Idea: the new unconscious metaphysicians substituted for the old concepts that of Economy, or of Matter, or of Development and Evolution, from which all the particular historical determinations could be deduced with not less certainty than from the old metaphysical entities. And from their predecessors they also borrowed those teleological tendencies which are implicit in all metaphysics, attributing a will and an end to their new God, be it called Progress or Matter, and trying to deduce the future course of history from the dialectic of the past. Hence the growth of a vast literature inquiring into the development of abstract sociological schemes or of economic forms reduced to characteristics of economic epochs, forcing the concrete materials of history into rigid conceptual frames; hence the naïve faith in the deduction of social predeterminations, of which the most striking was the asserted necessity of the advent of socialism as the only logical outcome of capitalist society.

Croce, pursuing the analysis initiated by Labriola, began by dissociating what seemed to him to be the vital element in historical materialism, from any intrusion of either Hegelian or positivistic metaphysics. His criticism of historical materialism as a philosophy of history and, generally, of the possibility of constructing any philosophy of history, is the first resolute step towards an anti-metaphysical conception of philosophy. Whether by metaphysics is meant the knowledge of another world of real essences, of things in themselves, beyond the objects of our immediate experience, or the creation of abstract concepts duplicating and falsifying the complex world of life, the whole trend of Croce's thought will henceforward oppose any claim on the part of these spurious philosophies, mythological or pseudo-scientific, to furnish an adequate interpretation of reality. Vico's metaphysics of human ideas, which is no metaphysics at all, because it does not postulate the existence of any reality beyond that of the spirit of man, will more and more become the model of Croce's own philosophy. That immanentism which he considers as one of the spontaneous attitudes of his mind slowly extricates itself from the ruins of his own transcendental logic, and shows itself impervious to the allurements of both Platonism and Positivism, of the ancient and the new myth.

Purged of its unessential philosophical associations, historical materialism (or, more precisely, the economic interpretation of history) appeared to Croce as nothing more than a new canon or criterion of historical interpretation, fixing the attention of the historian on a mass of new data, the importance of which had not been recognized before. It was neither a new philosophy nor a new method: it could not be legitimately employed to draw conclusions on the relations between economic facts and the other facts of history, nor to reduce history itself to the operation of a few abstract laws. It was a tendency of historical thought, coinciding with the manifestation of certain objective conditions of society (the industrial revolution) and their reflexes in political thought, by which the economic element in social facts acquired a stronger relief than it had ever had in the consciousness of man. And it seemed to point, both for the historian and for the philosopher, towards the existence of a fundamental principle or form of human activity--economic activity, about the nature of which, and its relation with æsthetic, logic, and moral activity, very little had been thought and written, besides what is contained in the introductions to all classical manuals of political economy. While still insisting that history is art, that is, the representation of individual happenings, Croce was thus implicitly brought to admit of the importance of philosophy, that is, of the study of the fundamental forms or categories of human activity, for the historian. His conception of history was undergoing a transformation in a direction similar to that towards which his conception of philosophy was moving.

When he passed from the consideration of the general theory to the examination of more technical aspects of Marx's doctrines, the first difficulty which presented itself to him was that of the relations between Marxian economics and pure economics, or general economic science. The society whose economic life Marx had studied in _Das Kapital,_ was neither human society in general, nor any particular historical society, but a purely ideal and formal society deduced from a proposition assumed outside the fields of pure economics: that of the equivalence of value and labour. Starting from this postulate, Marx had proceeded to inquire into those processes of differentiation between the assumed standard and the actual prices of commodities in a capitalist society, by which labour itself acquires a price and becomes a commodity. It was a method of scientific analysis consisting in regarding a phenomenon not as it actually exists, but as it would be if one of its factors were altered, and in comparing the hypothetical with the real phenomenon, conceiving of the first as diverging from the second which is postulated as fundamental, or the second as diverging from the first, which is postulated in the same manner. It is only when the whole of Marxian economics is considered as the application of such a method, that the concepts of labour-value and of surplus-value acquire a definite and precise meaning: the description of economic society as a pure working society (producing no goods which cannot be increased by labour) must then be interpreted as a concept of difference, or an instrument of elliptical comparison, as against the descriptions of actual economic society given by pure economics. Its positive value, not as an abstract hypothesis, but as a means of knowledge, depends on the fact that such a society does actually coincide with certain aspects of historical capitalist society; that the equivalence of labour and value is not a purely imaginary fact, but a fact among other facts, empirically opposed, limited, and distorted by other facts. Having assumed this equivalence as a test for the study of the social problem of labour, Marx's object was to show the special way in which this problem is solved in a capitalist society. And this was the real justification for his employment of the hypothetical method.

It is clear that Croce was infinitely more interested in what Marx had actually accomplished, than in what he had intended to do. In Marx's own mind, the analysis of the conditions of capitalist society led inevitably to the conclusion that a passage from capitalism to socialism was predetermined by the structure of capitalist society itself. It is well known that the prevision assumed what claimed to be a strictly scientific character in the formulation of the law of the fall in the rate of profits: the gradual decrease of surplus-values accompanying the increase in technical improvements, and automatically re-establishing the equivalence of labour and value. Croce offered a very convincing criticism of this law on Marx's own grounds, by showing that it rested on a confusion between technical and economic facts, thus affording a remarkable example of Marx's uncertainty of his own method. It was clear that in this particular case Marx had been carried away by his desire to reduce the metaphysical implications of his economic sociology to the status of an historical law. And Croce's criticism was evidently intended both to deprive Marx's historical determinism of one of its most powerful instruments, and to confirm his own view of the method which gave validity and importance to such economic speculations as Marx's were.

Marxian economics stood thus interpreted as comparative sociological economics, and by the definition Croce also defined the scope of sociological science, and the nature of the logical processes which it could legitimately employ. It was a considerable advance in the study of scientific concepts, as distinct from purely speculative concepts. But he still believed at the time, misled by the economists' discussions on the nature of the economic principle, that pure economics and the philosophy of economics practically coincided; and as he had maintained the legitimacy of Marx's method against the criticisms of the pure, or scientific, economists, he defended pure economics against Marx and his school, as the general science of the economic datum. But he was soon to understand that his own point of view and that of the pure economists were widely divergent, and that the methods of pure economics are in fact scientific and not philosophical. In later years, when he came to regard the science of economics as an empirical and mathematical science, Marxian economics appeared to him merely as a special branch of economic casuistry, employing methods fundamentally identical with those of pure economics: a relationship which could be illustrated by a comparison with the parallel of non-Euclidean and classical geometry. Although he did not reach this final position at the time, there is no doubt that his experience of the actual scientific processes of economics freed him from his allegiance to Herbartian logic, in which science and philosophy were still formally undifferentiated, and led him gradually to the distinction between the scientific and the speculative concept, of which the relation established between Marxian and pure economics is a tentative prefiguration.

But the most essential gain of his economic studies was in the direction of the affirmation of the merely practical, or economic, principle, as one of the irreducible forms of human activity, raising the concept of the Useful to the same level (logically speaking) at which those of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good had been kept by the whole European philosophical tradition since Plato. He was here actually elaborating not a scientific, but a speculative concept, though his approach to it was always by means of the discussion of particular problems, the solution of which implied a definite view of the relations between the economic principle on one side, and respectively on the other side, the intellectual and the moral principle.

As regards the possibility of inferring practical programmes from scientific principles, he objected that neither the desirable nor the practicable are science. Science may be a legitimate means of simplifying problems, making it possible to distinguish in them what can be scientifically ascertained from what can only be partially known; in the case of the Marxian law of the fall in the rate of profits, for instance, if such a law were proved to be scientifically correct, it could be said, under certain conditions that the end of capitalist society was a scientific certainty, though it would remain doubtful what would follow it. But logic is not life, and the appraisement of social programmes is a matter of empirical observations and of practical convictions. The unconquerable indetermination of social facts brings forth that element of dating in the actions of practical men, which is to will what inspiration is to expression, insight to intellect, in the poet and in the scientist.

Socialism could not be called a scientific programme, except in a limited and metaphorical sense, which was not a criticism of socialism itself, but of the bad logic of certain Socialists: the Marxian programme as such, Croce recognized as one of the noblest and boldest, and also one of those which obtain the greatest support from the objective conditions of existing society. Having already denied the dependence of intellectual truth on economic fact, by criticising the metaphysics of historical materialism, he thus asserted now the autonomy of the economic from the logical principle.

On the other hand, he destroyed the legend of the intrinsic immorality of Marxism, which was due to Marx's repeated assertions that the social question is not a moral question, and to his sharp criticisms of class ideals and hypocrisies. He pointed to the moral interest which had guided Marx's political activity, and which could even be said to have prompted the choice of the fundamental hypotheses of his economics. What Marx had called the impotence of morality was the futile attempt at apportioning praise or blame for the natural conditions of the social order. It is only when such conditions are no longer conceived as necessary for the social order in general, but only for a stage in its history, and when new conditions appear that make it possible to destroy them, that moral condemnation is justified and effective: to use another of Marx's phrases, morality condemns what history has already condemned. This is as much as saying that the only real moral problems, as all other problems of human life, are those that present themselves under given historical circumstances, at a given time; concrete, not abstract; and that moral judgments apply not to facts or conditions, but to actions. The passage from such a concrete, or historical, view of morality, to a doctrine of moral relativity is a very easy one, but Marx's own views on this point, which he never deliberately expounded, are irrelevant to the substance of his doctrine. For his own part, Croce reasserted the value of Kantian ethics, and the absoluteness of the moral ideal, as an ideal which is not above and outside the spirit of man, but rather one of its intrinsic forms or categories. And Marx's conclusions in regard to the function of morality in the social movement, and to the method for the education of the proletariat, though clashing with current prejudices, contain no contradiction of general ethical principles. But Marx's interest was not essentially an ethical one: the moralistic criticisms of Marx were similar to the puritanic criticisms of Machiavelli, and resolved themselves into a charge that neither the one nor the other had treated problems totally different from those which they had actually attempted to clarify. While vindicating the importance of Machiavelli in the history of the study of the economic activity of man, Croce called Marx himself the Machiavelli of the labour movement, implicitly suggesting a similarity of both object and method between _Il Principe_ and _Das Kapital,_ which is singularly illuminating.

The last essays of the book on _Materialismo Storico_ are two letters to Professor Pareto "On the Economic Principle," written in 1900; but with these we reach a time when Croce's thought was already organizing itself in the system of the philosophy of mind. In them we find a sketch of the system in the form in which it appeared in the first edition of the _Estetica_: that is, we already decidedly enter into the maturer phase of Croce's thought. We must here pause on the threshold, and looking back on the years of Croce's special interest in economic problems, sum up the new elements that the study of these problems adds to his intellectual physiognomy: a more deliberately anti-metaphysical attitude, a growing consciousness of the complexity of history and of the concreteness of moral life, a realization of the function of the economic activity, a progress in the analysis of scientific concepts, and therefore in the foundations of his logic--but, most important of all, a continued practice of philosophical thought under the shape of historical methodology. Apart from their interest as documents of the growth of his philosophy, Croce's studies have also a place in the history of social and economic thought, side by side with those of Labriola and of Georges Sorel, as a significant episode in that Latin crisis of Marxism, the ultimate outcome of which are the theories of French and Italian Syndicalism.

[Footnote 1: _Contributo,_ p. 36-37.]

PART SECOND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

(1900-1910)

I. THE GROWTH OF THE SYSTEM

The unity of thought--The writing of the Estetica--The method of philosophy--A philosophy of mind--The _Filosofia della Spirito_ and the _Critica_--Other activities.

The salient feature of Croce's mind, fully displaying itself in the maturity of his work, is a power to follow different lines of thought and research, without either confusing the issues or losing sight of the deep underlying connections. For the average scholar, an incursion into alien ground will generally mark the abandonment of his former interests; or, in the best hypothesis, the creation of a new mental personality coexisting with the original one, but neither reacting on it nor being influenced by it. The reason is obvious: the substance of each personality is a cross-section of the body of one discipline, which in its actual history, in its methods, associations and sphere of interest, touches the other one at very few points only, if at any at all. The establishment of new relations between the two requires a new personal elaboration, a complete individual mastery of the materials and methods of each discipline. We are hardly aware of the independence gained by even very closely related fields of research through the specialists treatment of the last century: how each of them has developed, so to speak, a language of its own, which has its foundation in the peculiar, and inevitable, terminology, but extends far beyond it into the logical structure of the specialist mind. We have more or less consciously built up a world (that is, an implicit conception of the world, a naïve philosophy) for the economist, one for the biologist, one for the mathematician, one for the student of literature, and so on. The scholar with the dual personality lives alternatively in separate and self-contained worlds; but to melt the two images into a single one, is far beyond his power. In other cases, he will relate all the experiences legitimately belonging to one special world, to another one, probably to the one with which he was first acquainted; but then we have those awkward hybrids, the economics of the literary man, or the literature of the biologist, or the biology of the economist; and the confusion is so apparent that it generally reflects itself in the very quality of the terminology employed.