[2] He had a long career in the Italian Parliament, joining the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy in 1910, serving through Fascism and the Second World War before being elected to the Constituent Assembly as a Liberal.

Around the age of 16, he quit Catholicism and developed a personal philosophy of spiritual life, in which religion cannot be anything but a historical institution where the creative strength of mankind can be expressed.

In 1883, an earthquake occurred in the village of Casamicciola on the island of Ischia near Naples, where he was on holiday with his family, destroying the home they lived in.

After the earthquake, he inherited his family's fortune and—much like Schopenhauer—was able to live the rest of his life in relative leisure, devoting a great deal of time to philosophy as an independent intellectual writing from his palazzo in Naples (Ryn, 2000:xi[11]).

Croce was well acquainted with and sympathetic to the developments in European socialist philosophy exemplified by August Bebel, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Paul Lafargue, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Filippo Turati.

In 1919, he supported the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti while also expressing his admiration for the nascent Weimar Republic and the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Gentile remained minister for only a year but managed to begin a comprehensive reform of Italian education that was based partly on Croce's earlier suggestions.

[14] The assassination by the National Fascist Party and Blackshirts of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924 shook Croce's support for Mussolini.

He later explained that he had hoped that the support for Mussolini in parliament would weaken the more extreme Fascists who, he believed, were responsible for Matteotti's murder.

[16] Croce frequently provided financial assistance to anti-fascist writers and dissidents, such as Giorgio Amendola, Ivanoe Bonomi, and Meuccio Ruini, as well as those who wanted to maintain intellectual and political independence from the regime, and covertly helped them get published.

After the war, Amendola, along with communists like Eugenio Reale reflected that Croce offered aid and encouragement to both liberal and Marxist resistance members during the crucial years.

Croce later coined the term onagrocrazia (literally "government by asses") to emphasize the anti-intellectual and boorish tendencies of parts of the Fascist regime.

Croce voted for the Monarchy in the 1946 Italian constitutional referendum, after having persuaded his Liberal Party to adopt a neutral stance.

Croce's most interesting philosophical ideas are expounded in three works: Aesthetic (1902), Logic (1908), and Philosophy of the Practical (1908), but his complete work is spread over 80 books and 40 years worth of publications in his own bi-monthly literary magazine, La Critica (Ryn, 2000:xi[11]) Croce was philosophically a pantheist, but, from a religious point of view, an agnostic;[24] however, he published an essay entitled "Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves Christians".

Croce's work can be seen as a second attempt (contra Kant) to resolve the problems and conflicts between empiricism and rationalism (or sensationalism and transcendentalism, respectively).

While aesthetics are driven by beauty, logic is subject to truth, economics is concerned with what is useful, and the moral, or ethics, is bound to the good.

This schema is descriptive in that it attempts to elucidate the logic of human thought; however, it is prescriptive as well, in that these ideas form the basis for epistemological claims and confidence.

)[25] Croce's theory was later debated by such contemporary Italian philosophers as Umberto Eco, who locates the aesthetic within a semiotic construction.

In short, his variety of liberalism is aristocratic, as he views society as being led by the few who can create the goodness of truth, civilization, and beauty, with the great mass of citizens, simply benefiting from them but unable to fully comprehend their creations (Ryn, 2000:xii).

[11] In Etica e politica (1931), Croce defines liberalism as an ethical conception of life that rejects dogmatism and favours diversity, and in the name of liberty and free choice of the individual, is hostile to the authoritarianism of fascism, communism, and the Catholic Church.