La crisi dell’Europa nelle riflessioni di Adriano Tilgher e Guglielmo Ferrero

The essay analyses the reflections of Adriano Tilgher (1887-1941) and Guglielmo Ferrero (18711942) on the crisis of European civilisation. Tilgher accepted and elaborated the theses contained in Spengler’s The Decline of the West within the framework of Italian Neo-idealism, deeply influenced not only by classical German philosophy but also by Bergson. Ferrero came from a positivist background and formulated his own diagnosis of the crisis in Europe by reconstructing the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. The aim of this essay is to show the similarities and differences between these two thinkers: although they present a similar diagnosis of the crisis of European civilisation, which they both trace back to the Industrial Revolution and the construction of the myth of progress as a specific ideology of capitalism, the causes they identify to explain this crisis are different, and therefore the future scenarios they envisage are also different.