Un messaggero di salvezza: Benedetto Croce. Presentazione di un inedito di Carlo Antoni

Upon his death in 1959, Carlo Antoni left an unpublished manuscript on Benedetto Croce’s thought, which is today kept by the Archivio Giovanni Gentile – Fondazione Roma La Sapienza. The undated and untitled manuscript could have been written between 1950 and 1955, most likely after Croce’s death, which happened on the 20th of November 1952. The text aims indeed at understanding the redeeming role of the Neapolitan philosopher in the twentieth-century history, starting from the irrationalistic European crisis arisen as a result of the discovery of the practical nature of scientific ideas, up to the historicist and new humanistic notion formulated by Croce himself of nexus of the concrete distincts, which regulates irrational powers, bringing them both in the aesthetic and in the economic degree, so that the theoretical value of truth could be preserved alongside ethical good. The aforementioned manuscript, which is now published for the first time, is also supplied with a brief overview note by the editor to verify – inter alia – the hypothesis on dating. To this end, it was required to collate two Antonian’s similar texts, Il pensiero del ’900, appeared in the Il Mondo on 10 June 1950, and Il problema del Novecento, the second chapter of the Commento a Croce (1955).