Croce's appreciation of Hegel was always as ambivalent as the title of his famous study suggests. Indeed, although related to two of the major 19th century exponents of Italian Hegelianism – Bertrando and Silvio Spaventa his first encounter with Hegel had been one of almost total rejection. As he wrote to the philosopher Donato Jaja in 1892, ‘I believe that the fundamental principles, and especially the method, of that system are entirely erroneous; and the damaging consequences of this error will become plain when applied to particular disciplines’. The study of Marx and the influence of Gentile and Labriola, however, led him to review his earlier position and in 1906 to translate the Encyclopedia and to write the accompanying book What is living and what is dead in the Philosophy of Hegel. Thereafter Croce, who had already completed his Aesthetic (1902) and the first edition of the Logic (1905), was increasingly to present his own philosophy as a sustained commentary on, and development of, Hegel's philosophy. An examination of his classic study of Hegel thus provides an important insight into salient features of Croce's own philosophical system as it later developed.
