The ethical State is the State that claims to educate citizens morally.

Evidence

The idea of the “ethical” State is associated with Croce. For the latter, the two moments of the State were the “ethical” and the “political” (or the “moral” and the “useful”); he saw these as being in perpetual dialectical contradiction— a conflict which he represented symbolically as that between Church and State. The term was also adopted by fascism, see e.g. Mussolini, in “The Doctrine of Fascism ”, 1932: “The fascist State has its own consciousness, its own will, and for that reason is called an ‘ethical’ State. In 1929 … I said ‘For fascism the State is not the night-watchman … it is a spiritual and moral fact… it educates the citizens to civil virtue . . etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2341

Categorization

• DEFINE: Croce’s split between the ethical and political moments of the State is a core piece of vocabulary for theorizing legitimation.
• XREF: Connects to Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses and to later fascism-as-ideology readings in the Islamophobia literature. — connects to: Education’s core mission is civic moral formation, not test scores