As Minister for Public Education, he introduced in 1923 the so-called Gentile Reform, the first major piece of legislation passed by the Fascist government, which would last in some capacity until 1962.

He was inspired by Risorgimento-era Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, "self-construction", but also strongly influenced and mentored by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought – namely Karl Marx, Hegel, and Fichte, with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science), a theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions.

[4][5] He won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities.

In 1898 he graduated in Letters and Philosophy with a dissertation titled Rosmini e Gioberti, that he realized under the supervision of Donato Jaja, a disciple of Bertrando Spaventa.

[7][8] Gentile was largely uninvolved with politics prior to the outbreak of World War One; he saw himself as a conservative liberal in the vein of Cavour, but mostly concerned himself with writing on the matters of education.

[12] By the end of the war in 1918, he was attacking much of the Italian political sphere: the Socialists and the Catholics of the future Popular Party for their opposition to the national state; the Vatican as a hostile independent power opposed to the existence of Italy; and the liberal trasformismo of Giovanni Giolitti and the Italian Parliament, marred by endless squabbling, and now an outdated relic in the face of the "new Italy" birthed by the experience of war.

Not only did it fail to respect the hard-fought gains of the "new Italy", but it encouraged fatalism, liberal back-biting, and the questioning of the ideals of intervention in the first place—that is, of the spiritual invigoration that Gentile saw as the most significant consequence of the war.

[16] Nonetheless, he continued to believe in liberal democracy and praised the new Prime Minister, Francesco Saverio Nitti, for his commitment to national economic recovery.

[17] As the post-war period wore on, Gentile saw no sign of the spiritual revolution within Italian liberal society that he had hoped for, and became increasingly disillusioned; he disengaged with active politics in 1920 and would not return to it until Benito Mussolini's 1922 seizure of power in the March on Rome,[18] by which point fascist doctrine was largely complete.

[20] The cabinet, though strongly right-wing, was broadly non-partisan;[21] Gentile's inclusion, alongside several other notable non-fascists, was taken as a sign of reconciliation and the promised return to law-and-order.

[26] Based on philosophically idealist and conservative elitist ideas, it was designed to help form the new elite of Fascist society[27] and to reduce the number of intellectual graduates saturating the job market.

[31]The reform also mandated that Italian was the only language to be used in public schools, severely impacting the autonomy of non-Italian speaking minorities—known as allogeni—particularly in the regions of Alto-Adige and the Julian March, recently annexed in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye following the First World War.

The technical schools (scuola technica), relied on by the middle class for educational attainment and in which pupil numbers had increased rapidly since 1900, were abolished.

Christopher Seton-Watson suggested it was in protest of the murder of Giacomo Matteotti;[38] Gabriele Turi disputes this, writing instead that the purpose of his resignation was to reinforce the Fascist regime and relieve Mussolini's cabinet of his own unpopular presence.

He lost favour for remarking that fascism was a minority movement and was further sidelined following the Lateran Treaty, with his anti-clericalism no longer appropriate if the regime was to maintain the support of the Catholic Church.

[43] On 30 March 1944, Gentile received death threats blaming him for the execution of the Martyrs of Campo di Marte by Republic of Salò troops and accusing him of promoting fascism.

[44] Only two weeks later on 15 April 1944, Bruno Fanciullacci and Antonio Ignesti, both of whom belonged to the communist partisan organization Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP), approached Gentile in his parked car, hiding pistols behind a book.

Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds were not to be considered as existing independently from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness' as broad interpretations were currently false as imposed by all former kinds of government, including capitalism and communism; and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of corporatism, a fascist state, could defeat these problems which are made from reifying as an external reality that which is in fact, to Gentile, only a reality in thinking.

Observations like this have led some commentators to view Gentile's philosophy as a kind of "absolute solipsism," expressing the idea "that only the spirit or mind is real".

[53] Therefore, Gentile proposed a form of what he called "absolute Immanentism" in which the divine was the present conception of reality in the totality of one's individual thinking as an evolving, growing and dynamic process.

To the neo-Hegelian Gentile, Marx had made the dialectic into an external object and therefore had abstracted it by making it part of a material process of historical development.

Though when viewed externally thus, it followed that Marx could then make claims to the effect of what state or condition the dialectic objectively existed in history, a posteriori of where any individual's opinion was while comporting oneself to the totalized whole of society.