Giovanni Gentile’s Reading of Dante as Prophet of the State in interiore homine

Abstract

It is hard to imagine a case of philosophical and ideological appropriation of Dante in the twentieth century as pervasive and conspicuous as Giovanni Gentile’s. In fact, Dante is a steady point of reference for Gentile’s own philosophy of the act, or actualism, both in the process of its formation and in its mature formulations. This is true at the level of Gentile’s aesthetics, historiography, ontology, philosophy of history, theory of education, and political philosophy, at which level all these aspects of his thought culminate and are integrated. One century after Ugo Foscolo delineated an Italian