Galvano Della Volpe

Galvano Della Volpe (24 September 1895, in Imola – 13 July 1968, in Rome) was an Italian professor of philosophy and Western Marxist theorist.

After serving in the First World War, della Volpe completed his studies at the University of Bologna. He taught history and philosophy in a liceo in Ravenna and at the University of Bologna from 1925 to 1938, when he became chair of history and philosophy at the University of Messina, a post he held until his retirement in 1965.

Initially, an idealist philosopher in the tradition of Gentile, by the early 1940s, after an engagement with empiricist philosophy, della Volpe turned strongly against idealism. In Italy, his work was seen by many as a 'scientific' alternative to the Gramscian Marxism which the PCI (among others) had claimed as its guide. (He was critical of Gramsci in part because the latter's work was rooted philosophically in the thought of Gentile and Croce). He was also noted for his writings on aesthetics including writings on film theory. He was an atheist.

One key aspect of Della Volpe's mature thought was his attempt to develop a strictly materialist theory of aesthetics: he emphasized the role of structural characteristics and the social process of production of works of art in the formation of aesthetic judgment in opposition to Croce's doctrine of intuition, which he considered a continuation of the romantic and mystical tradition of the nineteenth century. He developed the concept of taste as the primary source of aesthetic judgment itself.

Della Volpe also wrote on issues of political philosophy, particularly the relations between the thought of Rousseau and Marx. This allowed him to explore the relations between what he called the ‘two freedoms’ of Enlightenment thought: the civic liberties of Locke and Kant (which became embodied in bourgeois democracy), and the egalitarian freedoms described in Rousseau’s Social Contract and the Discourse on Inequality. What particularly interested Della Volpe was the contrast of the formal equality of Kantian legal freedoms, indifferent to substantive social inequality between persons, with the ‘proportional inequality’ of Rousseau’s social contract as an egalitarian mediation between persons. He saw Rousseau's thought on these issues as being the precursor of Marx’s famous attacks on bourgeois law in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and other writings.

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