Benedetto Croce: “All History is Contemporary History”

Benedetto Croce was one of the most famous Italian philosophers of the first half of the 20^th century. The important contributions of Croce are: (i) the liberation of history from the control of philosophy (ii) emancipation of history from the clutches of science (iii) he exalted history over science and philosophy – defined philosophy as the methodology of history and regards history as the pre-condition of science (iv) he regards all history as contemporary history (v) gave his own meaning to the term historicism, which according to him is the science of history. His important works are:

• The Philosophy of Spirit
• History as the Story of Liberty
• History of the Europe in the Nineteenth Century
• History of Italy from 1871-1915
• History of Naples

History, Croce thought, becomes a reality only in the mind of the historian. Thus he defined “all history is contemporary history”. It means that the past (history) has existed only in the minds of contemporaries. It consists essentially of seeing through the eyes of the present and in the light of its problems. He was also a protagonist of Historical Relativism, which argued that history is present knowledge, which must and does spring from current interests. To him ‘history is contemporary thoughts about the past’. The propagators of this philosophy held the view that there is no one truth about the past but innumerable truths as many as there are perspectives. Their belief was ‘we see different pasts at different times, and what we see depends on our present situation. R.G. Collingwood, the author of The Idea of History, following the footsteps of B. Croce, asserted that “all history is the history of thought”. He goes to the extent of saying that “Of everything other than thought, there can be no history”.