BENEDETTO CROCE AND LIBERALISM

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21412, 2 March 1935, Page 15

BENEDETTO CROCE AND LIBERALISM

History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Bv B. Croce. Allen and Unwin. 375 pp. (10/6 net.) This is not a history in the ordinary sense, but a study of the significance of certain political movements in the last century. Signor Croce is, as a philosopher, intensely interested in Liberalism as a political creed, and in this volume he traces its rise, decline, and fall up to 1914. Liberalism in the first place overthrew political absolutism in Western Europe. It achieved its victory in alliance with the radicals and other advocates of social democracy. With this latter it later came into conflict. Croce shows great sympathy with the developments of Liberalism in England and France. He judges the influence of Germany very severely, and considers that it was in that country that liberty was betrayed in the nineteenth century. Bismarck not only did not further the political sense of his people, but actually hindered it by not labouring to create a new political class adequate to the changing times. What Germany needed was a class that could be trained for power by means of parliamentary debates, party struggles, and "lively exchanges between the people and its representatives." Instead there grew up in that country a new generation of statesmen with a "peculiar unconsciousness of what constitutes the function of one who governs the destinies of a people or of the responsibility that he assumes towards his fellow-citizens and towards history." This fact played a large part in determining Germany's share in the World War. Croce paints a vivid picture of the condition of Europe since that calamity. "The impatience for liberal institutions has given rise to open or masked dictatorships, and the desire for dictatorships everywhere." Croce, however, does not despair of the cause of liberty, which he identifies with the cause of humanity: "It lives in many noble intellects in all parts of the world." Moreover, it "can be seen principally in the sentiment and the idea that is arousing general solicitude ... of a peace and alliance between the states of Europe" The solution of our social problems will only be possible if "liberty prepares and maintains the intellectual and moral atmosphere necessary for so great a task, and guarantees the juridical order in which the actuation is to be accomplished."