This chapter investigates how ideological and political motivations prompted Italian Hegelians in the second half of the nineteenth century to posit a contrived identification between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento, recognising in them a common revolutionary character. By focussing on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Giordano Bruno’s philosophy and Tommaso Campannella’s work, this chapter deals with ideas of modernity, interpretations of the Renaissance in nineteenth century Europe, and anticlericalism in the Risorgimento.

This Epilogue outlines the influence and legacy of nineteenth-century Italian Hegelianism by investigating how Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, and Antonio Gramsci re-elaborated this tradition in order to develop their own philosophical systems. The recasting of Hegelian political thought by nineteenth-century Italian Hegelians had a huge influence on the way in which these thinkers interpreted Hegel, Marx, and the relationship between politics and ethics, as well as their understanding of Italian history and of the role of intellectuals in the formation of the Italian state. This Epilogue argues that these thinkers were in constant dialogue with the Italian tradition of political thought identified in this book: an intellectual history by virtue of which a specific recasting of the themes presented by Hegel’s philosophy forged an understanding of history as the realm in which philosophy acquires its political relevance, and ideas their practical dimension.

This chapter investigates the political leadership of Italian Hegelians who participated in the post unification governments and contributed to the institutional organisation of the new State. It highlightes how their interpretation of Hegelian ideas was applied in their political practices and explores the legacy of this tradition at the end of the nineteenth century with a particular focus on the work of Antonio Labriola. His engagement with Marxism was recognised by the author himself as a direct consequence of the critical Hegelianism he had learned at the school of the Neapolitan Hegelians as a young student and with which he was in constant dialogue throughout his life. This chapter uncovers and reshapes the context of Italian readings of Hegel’s philosophy in the nineteenth century, exploring the creative and critical adaptation of Hegel’s political thought to Italian intellectual and political milieux.