The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views ed. by J. D'Amico, D.A. Trafton, M. Verdicchio (review)

humanities 447 reader steeped in Yeats may not believe that a transcribed word is accurate, but he would be challenged to offer a better transcription from Yeats's often illegible hand. (RONALD SCHUCHARD) J. D'Amico, D.A. Trafton, and M. Verdicchio, editors. The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views University of Toronto Press. 244. $60.00 Benedetto Croce (1866B1952) is one of the most influential Italian philosophers of the twentieth century. From the early 1900s to the years after the Second World War, his fundamental belief in poetic thought and intuition, and his rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, positivism, empiricism, and, in short, scientific mentality, gave new directions to philosophy, historiography, literary criticism, aesthetics, and even Marxism. Moreover, his opposition to Fascism was an inspiring force for many Italian intellectuals who remained faithful to liberal ideals. In the 1950s and early 1960s Croce's monumental writings began to lose popular appeal and saw some sharp criticism from critics who were embracing new theoretical approaches to art, language, interpretation, and literature in general. Umberto Eco's The Open Work (1962) was certainly in line with the growing criticism of Crocean idealism. Today we are witnessing a revival of Croce's ideas almost in accordance with the renewed interest in the work of another great Italian thinker whose views on history and the science of cognition deeply influenced some of his writings, Giambattista Vico. The recent publication of The Legacy of Benedetto Croce is an excellent sign of this trend, and the book offers some refreshing views on several of Croce's writings. This text is a collection of essays written by experts in various academic disciplines, teaching in American, Canadian, and Italian universities. Three of the authors, Edmund Jacobitti, David Roberts, and Myra Moss, have written well-received full-length books on Croce. Maurice Finocchiaro and Giuseppe Mazzotta, more recently, have published respectively their studies on Gaetano Mosca and Giambattista Vico B both authors closely related to Croce's political and philosophical theories that we see discussed in this text. The eleven essays cover several aspects of Croce's cultural activities, from aesthetics to historicism, from popular culture to poetry, and from his views on the Commedia dell'arte to political theories. Clearly written and well documented, the articles complement each other and contribute to a better understanding of Croce's wisdom and his role in today's studies in modern philosophy, aesthetics, and historicism. As Jacobitti has rightly pointed out (in full agreement with E. Garin), we cannot minimize the impact of Croce's Estetica (1902) on Italian authors. Some of the pages from Aesthetics were quite revolutionary in stressing the liberating function of art and in identifying imagination and intuition as elements that provide 448 letters in canada 1999 knowledge of the particular. In the first half of the book (see especially the articles by M. Verdicchio, J. D'Amico, T. Willette, and D.A. Trafton), we find a wide range of views on Croce's lifelong attraction and dedication to Neapolitan history and culture. Croce's love for Naples and Neapolitan cultural tradition comes across very well, whether the authors discuss the symbolic figure (and mask) of `Pulcinella' or the writer's historical work in Napoli nobilissima. The other essays focus on the Italian thinker's relations with Vico and with his contemporaries Gentile, Mosca, and Robert Collingwood. The last essay deals with Croce's diaries, confirming the author's discipline and dedication which allowed him to produce a veritable mountain of books. G. Mazzotta's `Croce on Vico' should be of interest to students who would like to pursue both the strong anxieties of influence of Vico on Croce as well as the thinker's criticism of The New Science B especially the pages on poetry, history, philosophy, and language. Also, Jacobitti's `The Impact of Croce's Aesthetics of 1902' and D. Roberts's `History as Thought and Action' provide plenty of material for a better appreciation of the relevance of the Italian thinker to contemporary thought. In these pages we find references to Croce's relationships not just with Vico and Hegel but also with more recent authors concerned with knowledge and cognition such...