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Liberty, Law and Totalitarianism. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński as an Interpreter of Benedetto Croce
Abstract
This article aims to highlight the intellectual synergy between Benedetto Croce and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, particularly in the field of the philosophy of law. Croce’s influence on Herling-Grudziński’s journalistic, literary, and philosophical work is reflected in the profound conviction that the religion of liberty will survive catastrophes and disasters, despite humanity’s incessant attempts to suppress it. Throughout their lives, both Croce and Herling-Grudziński committed themselves to denouncing any order that, even if legally constituted, employed coercive means harmful to human dignity. As a signatory of the Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, Croce vehemently condemned all forms of totalitarian power whose legislative activity degenerated into ‘unbridled egoism or severity of command,’ thereby assaulting the very idea of liberty as the insurmountable mode of individual existence. Following Croce’s example, Herling-Grudziński proceeded to demonstrate the ‘twinship’ between the Nazi concentration camps (lager) and the Soviet forced labor camps (gulag). In the gulag, the horror was intolerably legalized, and the individual, deprived of his conatus essendi and every shred of dignity, became simply an “anonymous unit of energy”. In that ‘world apart,’ where humanity is detached from history, civilization meets its end, marked by the advent of the Antichrist theorized by Croce: a vital and obscure dimension of action that is never ethicalized. Consequently, this article will delve into Croce’s critique of nihilist philosophy, described as a tendentious philosophy, since it reaches its climax in the complete approval of “evil with the interfering consciousness that it is evil”. In a similar interpretive synthesis, Herling-Grudziński identified the common nihilistic matrix underlying the totalitarianisms that ravaged the 20th century.
Keywords:
Un mondo a parte, Croce, Herling-Grudziński, libertà, diritto, totalitarismoDetails
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