Croce on the Great Divide

Bennedetto Croce was perhaps the major avowedly liberal historian of the first half of the twentieth century. In his History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Storia d'Europa nel secolo decimonono - lectures delivered in 1931), Croce argued that 'communism' emerged in the 1830s amongst intellectuals, as a reaction to the strains and horrors of early industrialisation. 'Socialists' and 'Social Democrats' favoured universal suffrage as a means of promoting the interests of the proletariat. This, however, only served to infect democracy with communistic tendencies. Thus, fatefully, liberalism and democracy were driven apart.

"The terms had changed. It was no longer a struggle between liberalism and absolutism, but one between liberalism and democracy, from its moderate to extreme and socialist form.  This struggle … was the truly present and progressive struggle in the nineteenth century." [Croce, Nineteenth Century, trans Henry Furst, London, 1934].