Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was a Hegelian idealist who applied this view to aesthetics, history, politics, and ethics. His philosophy of art has had the most influence outside his native Italy, although he makes important contributions to both historical understanding and the political and ethical. Croce distinguishes four aspects, or distinct moments, of human understanding: the True, the Beautiful, the Useful, and the Good. These moments are analogous to the Hegelian idea of Spirit and like Hegel's Spirit, they are manifest in history. They are also pure concepts in that they have no content independently of human history, thought, and actions. We read their content and arrive at understanding by attending to our present and past circumstances.

Croce's aesthetics begins with the idea that the aesthetic experience is cognitive. Its form of cognition is intuition, which Croce understands in the Kantian sense of preconceptual perception. Art, particularly poetry, aims at eliciting emotion, and our appreciation of art consists in our intuitive understanding and comprehension of these emotions. What is important for Croce is not to intellectualize the aesthetic experience and not to reduce it to mere sensations. "Cosmic intuitions" are the awareness of the universal character of art (the Beautiful), provoked by a particular manifestation of it. Finally, for Croce, art aims only at the Beautiful, and so art properly understood is never concerned with the True, the Useful, or the Good. Work that aims to be instructive, pleasurable, or moralistic is not art.

Croce's work on history, politics and ethics is contained in a number of works beginning early in his career with work on Marx (Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx) and Hegel (What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel) and moving through publications on history (Theory and History of Historiography) and Vico (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico) and the ethicopolitical text, History as the Story of Liberty, which was published toward the end of his life. Croce's political philosophy was heavily influenced early in his career by his friend and collaborator Giovanni Gentile and later by the advent of fascism in Italy. Following his Hegelian inclinations, Croce makes no distinction between philosophy and history and between theory and practice, arguing that the philosophical comes to us through our encounters with the historical. This identification of the normative with the actual allowed Croce's views to oscillate between a form of historical inevitability and, later, during and after fascism, an account allowing for liberal forms of political agency. This tension in Croce's work is also apparent in his discussions of the relations between the political and the ethical. Here, Croce wants to keep distinct the pure concepts of the Useful and the Good, assigning the political to the former and the ethical to the later. It is on this basis that he criticizes utilitarianism for confusing and mixing these concepts. However, if politics is merely the art of the Useful, then the political and its institutions are beyond the call of the ethical. The rise of fascism encouraged Croce to make clear the need for an ethical dimension within the political. Whether this is, in the end, compatible with the starting point of his project is the subject of debate.

Croce was born in Pescasseroli in southern Italy to a wealthy family. Orphaned as a child, he spent much of his life in the Italian city of Naples. He became a life member of the Italian senate in 1910 and was deeply involved in liberal politics following the defeat of fascism in World War II. He died at the age of 86.

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