ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the humanistic autobiographers. It focuses on the protoprofessional and classical intellectual was still active at the period between the wars, as Alain Besancon acknowledged in his own memoir. Benedetto Croce was a polyvalent intellectual and politician who wrote extensively on historical, literary, aesthetic, poetic and philosophical topics. He argues, however, that Giambattista Vico's Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself is the first substantial contribution to historians' autobiography, and, more specifically, it functions as an archetypical model for humanistic autobiography. The English version of Croce's autobiography was published by Oxford University Press in 1927. Robin Collingwood and Eric Voegelin, the other historians analyzed in this chapter, echo Vico's speculative approach, according to which recounting one's own life becomes a philosophical and historiographical exercise, in contrast to the more detailed, descriptive, systematic and comprehensive accounts by Gibbon and Adams.
