Benjamin Constant’s Liberalism and Italian Anti-Fascism (1925-1945): Between Croce and the Partito d’Azione

During the period of the fascist dictatorship and the Resistance, the different interpretations of Benjamin Constant’s thought acquired a certain political value based on the different conceptions of freedom proposed by the various currents of Italian anti-fascism. Constant’s success among liberal-inspired Italian antifascists is mainly due to the peculiar portrait Benedetto Croce drew of him in Storia d’Europa and in his famous article Constant e Jellinek: that of the theorist of a freedom that was not economicistic but ethical. Adolfo Omodeo starts from here to outline the traits of a liberal-democratic Constant that in fact refutes the reactionary interpretation previously proposed by Guido De Ruggiero in Storia del liberalismo europeo. Croce and Omodeo thus paved the way for the interpretations of Partito d’Azione intellectuals such as Dionisotti, Venturi and Calogero. Especially the last two, in the peculiar context of the Resistance, make Constant a champion of progressivism. But to propose a liberal-revolutionary Constant or in favour of forms of democracy that also include the pursuit of social justice is to misrepresent his ideas, to no longer place oneself on the plane of the simple interpretation of his thought, but to use it instrumentally to pursue political ends.