L'«ANTI-CROCE» DI VALENTINO GERRATANA. FILOSOFIA E «ANTIFASCISMO» ALLA FINE DEGLI ANNI TRENTA

In the intellectual journey of the young Valentino Gerratana, the polemic on liberty with the Neapolitan philosopher, Benedetto Croce, was a turning point. There emerges a troubled roothless portrait, critical of Marx's and Rousseau's theories, fascinated by the treatise: Scuola dell'uomo by the Gentilian and antimetaphisical Guido Calogero, predisposed to the line of «cultura-azione» and the duty of «violence» against «despotic» power, that would take him from the lecture halls of the «Università La Sapienza di Roma» to the leadership of the Roman GAP (the paramilitary organisation during the civil war against Fascism). The search for a more just «economic order», for a «personal» moral sense and a «personal» consciousness of the concept of liberty, substantiate the dispute with Benedetto Croce, cataphracted, in the judgement of his young critic, in an «optimistic abstractionism».