Abstract

At the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries, Italy is the theatre of an explosive cultural debate, which took place in the concurrence of two major crises: that of fundamentals of Western metaphysics, ad that of the post-unitary liberal State. In this climate, a new kind of intellectuals arises, whose common characteristics are: the declaration of radical idealism, which calls for the revolt of the spirit against all metaphysics, both materialistic or religious; the aspiration to free human subjectivity from all the false transcendent presuppositions, and to sublimate it into pure and concrete activity; the vocation for public interventionism, in the shape of anti- bourgeois, rebellious and aristocratic libertarismo; the ambition to contribute in making history along the paths of “great politicsµ. The task of this article will be to formulate, also in the light of today’s debate on the specificities of Italian philosophy, a synthetic interpretative framework of this effervescent cultural galaxy, which is here called activism, attempting an overall definition, indicating its key-ideas, and emphasizing its national-revolutionary (geo)political outcomes