Abstract

This essay situates Gentile in the debate over the meaning and value of 'modernity' as interpreted by post-War commentators such as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Leo Strauss. Coli shows how Gentile drew upon his predecessors as he developed his actual idealist conception of the relation between thinking, the thinker and the world. Gentile's response to themulti-faceted problem of modernity combines reactionary and progressive elements: the central threads of western culture, he believes, can and should be retained, though updated, refined and reconfigured to rid them of the untenable falsehoods inwhich the old traditions, with their 'methods of transcendence', had left them tangled