Gentile, Giovanni

Legal philosophy in early twentieth-century Italy forms a composite landscape of markedly different streams of thought, ranging from natural law theory, in Giorgio Del Vecchio’s neo-Kantian rendition of it, to Santi Romano’s institutionalism, and including Francesco Carnelutti’s general theory of law and the antiphilosophical defense of Roman law that Pietro Bonfante made in a famous and controversial academic keynote address delivered in Rome in 1917. And yet, in the interwar period, this overall picture was further complicated by two new developments, both pushing Hegelian dialectics in a neoidealist direction: one was Benedetto Croce’s historicism, the other the actualism put forward by Giovanni Gentile