ABSTRACT
Italian philosophic thought in the twentieth century has clustered about three major intellectual bastions, each having a distinctive ideological trajectory. Fortunately for the historian of ideas, each philosophic position has firm and clear political correlations, such as, fascism, liberalism, and socialism. Cassirer, in The Myth of the State, shrewdly observed that the potency of Hegelianism could be symbolically gauged by the conflict between the Nazi Wehrmacht and the Red Army. In his analysis of Gentile's early period, Harris is forthright and properly critical. In comparison, the work of Gentile during the Fascist era (1922-1944) is handled with less skill. Gentile's general isolation from the Franco-Italian social science of his own age, from the work of Pareto, Mosca, Michels, and Sorel, marks him apart from both Croce and Gramsci. Some of the personal problems Gentile encountered with the Fascist movement, particularly the intellectual wing that sought a return to Catholic orthodoxy, are anticipated in these early writings.
