Una lotta (impari) contro la ragione? Per una rilettura di Carlo Antoni

This paper deals with Carlo Antoni’s 1942 book «La lotta contro la ragione» (The Fight Against Reason). This book was in line with an anti-Enlightenment re-appraisal of the eighteenth century as it was brought forward, for instance, by Antonello Gerbi. The young Gerbi, back in 1932, in his book «La politica del Romanticismo», Politics of Romanticism, deals with some of the authors (Hamann, Herder, Moser), later on dealt with by Antoni. In the USA, there was a similar «critical» appraisal of the Enlightenment (C.L. Becker). Antoni was a classical-liberal, follower of Croce. This kind of classical-liberal thought re-evaluated quite modern concept as those of «little homeland», religion and nation, private property, and was opposed to the cosmopolitan, universalist liberalism of the men of the Enlightenment. It was especially opposed to that, in as much as this kind of «Enlightened liberalism», in the French spirit of radical rationalism, endorsed absolutism, and centralization, from Louis XIV to Napoleon.