of integration and renewal of spiritual life, as Gentile saw embodied by fascism. In view of a reform of ethics and of the national conscience of which Actualism would have constituted the foundations, he motivated his adherence to Fascism by honouring himself as its official philosopher. Reception Actual idealism was successful in that it promoted a theory of regarding thought, that garnered enough attention, to prove a competition to the new waves of positivism, and therefore materialist conceptions of social life that were vying for reformist tendencies in the politics of the time. Its ideas, therefore, were key to helping the National Fascist Party consolidate power in Italy with its own reform, and integral to giving fascism the content of its philosophical sentiment. Despite this, Gentile claimed actual idealism to be the true variety of positivism, and the proper interpretation of the concept of positivism. Criticism Benedetto Croce objected that Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer's will. However Schopenhauer "…came to rest in an Absolute which transcends concrete experience … and for (Schopenhauer) the Critical Philosophy was only a prolegomena or propaedeutic to a speculative or 'transcendent' philosophy of the kind which Gentile and Kant are united in opposing", according to H. S. Harris's book on the basic metaphysics of Giovanni Gentile in contrast to that of Schopenhauer. With actualism, Gentile engages a reform of the Hegelian dialectic based on the spiritualists motives of the ontological tradition Italian, reconciling them with the needs of concrete character coming from the Marxist thought. He thus takes to Spaventa and Marx the reference models to reinterpret Hegel, proceeding to one of his "kantianizations" on the one hand, but avoiding falling into materialism on the other hand. An opponent of all intellectualism, which he considered detached from reality, he succeeded in postulating a theory of speculative thought that would obtain sufficient consensus to compete with the new waves of positivism (and thus of materialist conceptions of social life) that were clashing in the field of reformist political trends of the time. In 1921, Piero Gobetti wrote of Gentile that he "brought philosophy down from the professorial obscurities into the concreteness of life". However, unlike Benedetto Croce, who permeates Italian culture in general, Gentile has an impact on the specifically philosophical milieu of his time. His ideas, historically, are decisive for the consolidation of power of the National Fascist Party in Italy, providing