Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His PhilosophyPiccoli, Raffaello
Philosophy
Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy
Piccoli, Raffaello
Aesthetics; Croce, Benedetto, 1866-1952
The same definition obviously applies to the will that executes the
law, as distinct from the will that formulates it: the juridical
activity, as Croce names it, is also generically practical or
merely economic, and as such united to and distinct from the moral
activity. As the juridical activity, however, does not partake
of the abstractness of the legislative, but is as concrete and
determined as the economic activity, there is actually no possibility
of distinguishing the one from the other; the juridical activity
is therefore identical with the economic activity. This is Croce's
original solution of the fundamental problem of the philosophy of
law; a solution which is closely connected with his recognition of a
utilitarian practical category, distinct from but not opposed to the
moral category, and with his reduction of all laws to individual laws.
The reader must recall what has been said elsewhere of the relations
between economic and moral values; and he will then understand in what
sense it can be said that Croce's theory of law is an answer to the
secular disputes on the relations between law and morality, between
positive and ideal law, historical law and the Law of Nature. And he
will also be able to perceive the difference between the reduction of
the juridical to the mere economic activity, which, as we know, is
also the form through which only morality realizes itself, and the
theories of law as the pure embodiment of force and of the positive,
established right as the only conceivable right, which are nothing but
the counterpart of moral utilitarianism in the field of law. Croce's
theory of law is, as all the rest of his philosophy is, a purely formal
doctrine; not intended to defend one type of laws and institutions
against any other, but attempting to furnish a conception of law, as an
individual, perpetually new activity of the spirit of man, of which all
laws and institutions, all phases and tendencies of political history,
appear as concrete historical manifestations.
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