Benedetto Croce is a problematic philosopher from the current perspective. He seems to us to be a philosopher kind of like Fichte - he's perenially a stopgap - between Labriola and the other Italian Marxists like Gramsci or alternately between Hegel and Gentile's Fascism. As a result of this he's rarely looked at how he should be - a system philosopher with important contributions to the philosophy of history and aesthetics.
There's a reason why this is the case - he decided, presumably in an attempt to show up the Prussian master, to come up with his own equally long (and extremely boring) exposition of his system. Besides the fact it's quite dry to read through such a system, system philosophers have mostly fallen out of favor (they had already begun falling out of favor when Croce came up with his own system) for various scientific and philosophical reasons. Some system philosophers like Hegel (after Kojeve's lectures) were no longer generally even studied in terms of their systems, but rather parts.
It's a shame, too because Croce has some great ideas on aesthetics and history that aren't studied as often as they should be. In this book, you get the system in a nutshell through Croce's own essays divided into 5 sections- Discourses on Philosophy, Philosophy of Politics, Problems of Ethics and Aesthetics, Philosophy of History, and Various thoughts. This book's essays are literally drenched in ideas and they make for quick reading. It reminds me vaguely of Russell's very cogent explanations of his own works.
It's pretty impressive stuff and Croce is tremendously erudite, so keep reading past the first essay "My Philosophy" which is historically quite interesting, but has something of an off-putting tone. Croce is something of a blowhard in that he makes it seem like it's a burden for him to have to express his ideas at the level of the lay reader.
After that, this book is invaluable at both expositing Croce's system and provides a window into Italian intellectual life at the beginning half of the 20th century. It's one of the few books written about this time without a huge amount of Hegelian and Marxist terminology despite implicitly Hegelian ideas.
Croce effortlessly talks about history and aristocracy, Christianity, Marxism, the nationalization of history, Proust, patriotism & liberty, Catholicism in Italian life, Sexuality and the Spiritual.
Brilliant stuff. Highly recommended for the educated layperson (with some philosophy background, otherwise certain essays may be safely skipped), people involved in history and the arts, and philosophy types.
Honestly, it's too bad more philosophers didn't write introductions like this.
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