Abstract

An evaluative study of the philosophy of history as developed by Croce and Gentile. The author agrees with Nietzsche that the idealist's view of history fails, in the last analysis to account for the moral force of the individual; this failure stems from the more basic difficulty of not admitting a sufficiently radical distinction between actuality and potentiality. He suggests that if creative value is to be maintained in history, the syntheses which form history should be regarded as "open" rather than "closed," and irrationality should be admitted as an historical force.--A. R.