Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci [1 ed.] 3030725588, 9783030725587

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci

Marcello Mustè

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812

Marcello Mustè

Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci

Marcello Mustè Department of Philosophy Sapienza Università di Roma Rome, Italy Translated by Mattia Bilardello

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-72558-7 ISBN 978-3-030-72559-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Planet Flem/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Image This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Foreword

Titles Published 1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.

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11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. 12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30 th Anniversary Edition.

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30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century. 31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy. 33. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism. 34. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century. 35. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World. 36. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. 37. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism. 38. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics.

Titles Forthcoming Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisations Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives

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Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital after Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Note” V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity

SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

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Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Mid-Century Italy Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class: Three Essays on Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives

Preface

This work was originally published in Italy in 2018 with the title Marxismo e filosofia della praxis. Following its presentation at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, it sparked numerous discussions both in Italy and abroad, as was largely to be expected on account of its subject matter and contentions. We are now able to present it to the public of English-speaking readers in a suitably revised form. The book gives a comprehensive introduction to an interpretation of theoretical Marxism that has come to be known as the philosophy of praxis; the main contributions to this tradition were produced within a span of forty years (1895– 1935) by five intellectuals who, for different reasons and in very distinctive ways, were remarkable for representing, among other things, a radical alternative to the currents that were dominant under the Second and Third International. The year of the original publication of this work was also the year of the bicentenary celebration of the birth of Karl Marx: the occasion seemed propitious for an assessment of the currency of Marxist categories, especially after the upheavals that have troubled our world since 1989. In an age of globalized capitalism that still needs to come to terms with the financial crisis which inaugurated the twenty-first century, and, most recently, with the social effects of a pandemic, it would seem imperative to seek the means for a critical approach to current historical conditions, beyond the optimistic forecasts of the neoliberal paradigm, and against all hasty diagnoses of the obsolescence of Marx and Marxism. This need

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to review and, if necessary, transform the categories of Marxism has been for decades a matter of particular importance in Italy, where the philosophy of praxis had originally developed in parallel with (and as a critical counterpoint to) the history of a national communist party that fought the war against fascism and was then among the principal actors in the reconstruction of the nation as a modern democracy. Over several years, we investigated an Italian intellectual tradition with the aim of tracing its history over the long period and documenting its intersections with international theoretical Marxism; this has enabled us to identify a distinctive strand nestled within European philosophy which was the unique outcome of the work of authors whose intellectual roots were in Italy but were highly responsive to the international debate. Pursuing such a line of inquiry would scarcely have been possible without access to the specialized collections held at the Department of Philosophy at Sapienza (University of Rome) and at the Fondazione Gramsci (also in Rome). The novelty of this work also largely owes to the philological and hermeneutical resources recently elaborated as the National Edition of the writings of Antonio Gramsci was being prepared. Lastly, it offers a comprehensive account of the work of Rodolfo Mondolfo, Benedetto Croce, and Giovanni Gentile for which there is almost no precedent, as all three authors have formerly been largely regarded as entirely marginal to the history of Marxism. It is from this perspective that a wholly original, and yet previously barely acknowledged, conception has emerged to which we refer throughout as the philosophy of praxis and which stands as an independent development of Marx’s original conception. The author wishes to express his deepest gratitude to everyone who had the patience to discuss this work from its earliest stages and has suggested ways to improve and integrate his work. To the friends at the Fondazione Gramsci and those working on the National Edition of the writings of Antonio Gramsci I owe special gratitude for their encouragement to pursue this challenging and rewarding research. Rome, Italy January 2021

Marcello Mustè

Introduction

When one surveys the field of theoretical Marxism between 1895 and 1935 (which was the year of Antonio Gramsci’s final entries in his Prison Notebooks ), the Italian contribution to the history of the European working-class movement quite obviously stands out as a distinct chapter. The question of Marxism as a philosophy was first elaborated by Friedrich Engels in a series of works published after Marx’s death (most notably the Anti-Dühring and the posthumous Dialektik der Natur), in terms that would reflect on all subsequent research. The authors here examined are notable for the place they gave to the question of a Marxist philosophy within the system of their speculation, and the main object of our survey are their different responses to the question and the different conclusions to which they came. Following the death of Engels (on August 5, 1895), a rift occurred among the leading theorists of German social democracy, with the revisionist current of Eduard Bernstein on the one side (which prepared the ground for the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg school, eminently represented in the writings of Karl Vorländer and Max Adler), and the orthodox positions of Karl Kautsky on the other. The interpretation Engels had proposed ignited some kind of a diatribe, that is; though for all its conflictual nature, all of the actors involved in the diatribe ultimately remained firmly placed within the theoretical bounds of the Second International. As the Great War would soon make dramatically evident, there was an intrinsic limit to a debate essentially revolving

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around the (necessity of the) fall of capitalism and the normative function of ethics, and that proved incapable of rising above the national dimension of Socialism. Nor did the Soviet experience significantly alter Engel’s paradigm, some of the fundamental flaws of which it incorporated, in fact: with the exasperation of the materialist and objectivist character of the dialectic conception of reality, a substantial continuity of thought may be seen to run through Lenin’s first philosophical work,Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), Bukharin’s Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology (1921), and the philosophical sections of Stalin’s History of the Communist Party (1939), political, theoretical, and temperamental differences notwithstanding. The only authentic innovations in those years came from Western Marxists (György Lukács and Karl Korsch, signally, who both produced their chief works in 1923), but while their positions bore some analogies with those of Italian Marxists, they differed from Italian theorists for the emphasis placed on the concept of totality (a theoretical element both authors later re-examined and eventually rejected). In the context of the main currents of Marxist thought, that is, Italian Marxism stood as a valuable exception which opened an original critical perspective, centered on the elaboration of a Marxist philosophy (of a ‘Lebens- und Weltanschauung,’ as Labriola was to write). Published in 1895, 1896, and 1898 respectively, Labriola’s three essays on historical materialism reflected his unease with contemporary trends in Italian and European socialism; with an alleged crisis of Marxism looming, Labriola developed a serious critique of the dominant positions of Kautsky and Bernstein and did not refrain from close critical scrutiny of the legacy of Engels himself. In the final stage of his production, represented by the fourth, unfinished, essay and the fragments of his final years, Labriola initiated a wholly innovative analysis of the links between the national dimension and the global sphere; that was a unique perspective, for its time, which led into a new domain of criticism. While close to Engels at a personal level and constantly in dialogue with the leading figures of German socialism, Labriola remained an isolated thinker, even a heretic, on account of the very merits of his own theorization. The same (though under changed historical circumstances) could be said for Gramsci, whose theoretical efforts went in the direction of defining a new conception of orthodoxy. Gramsci’s was, in effect, an attempt to rebuild theoretical Marxism from the foundations and deflect from the direction Stalin had impressed on international communism, to which all of the organizations under the Komintern adhered, including

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the Italian. It is only from our current perspective that we are, in fact, in a position to understand and appreciate the radicalness of his intellectual endeavor, the depth, and scope of which was in his lifetime a cause of personal and theoretical isolation. The peculiar and highly original line of research that went from Labriola to Gramsci came to be encapsulated in the phrase philosophy of praxis, which has to be taken as the umbrella term for the several lines along which Italian Marxists sought to develop the teachings of Marx. Appearing for the first time in Labriola’s third essay on historical materialism (Socialism and Philosophy), the phrase was variously taken up; first, by Gentile and Mondolfo, and then by Gramsci, who systematically employed it when he began drafting the first of his ‘special’ Notebooks in May 1932 to replace the traditional and formerly habitual dictions historical materialism and Marxism. As we shall see, his decision did not depend (not exclusively and substantially, at any rate) on the strictures of prison censorship (as Felice Platone, who was the first editor of the Prison Notebooks, had originally speculated), but answered Gramsci’s need for ‘an entirely new term’ to designate ‘something new’ (as he wrote in Notebook 4), and that was the theoretical framework that was taking shape from his prison meditations. This is the light in which to interpret Gramsci’s re-discovery of the work of Labriola, whose lesson, he found, needed to be brought ‘back into circulation [so as] to make his way of posing the philosophical question predominant.’ The Gramsci—Labriola relation is a crucial junction in this story: it was the mediation of Labriola’s essays that prompted Gramsci to re-think the works of Marx and produce a distinctly different reading from that of his pre-prison period. What Labriola had termed philosophy of praxis in his third essay was the outcome of the fundamental inspiration which had run through his critical communism ever since 1895; his was an anti-teleological Marxism which eschewed the concept of Endziel and aimed to define the domain of the political struggle by taking a historical approach to the genesis of ideologies and of social structures. It was a critical Marxism, and precisely for this reason stood well apart from the prevalent notions of the ‘crisis of Marxism’ abroad in his time. The formula was also the soul of Labriola’s fourth essay (Da un secolo all’altro) and later fragments, in which he developed the chief conceptual headings of his theory and broadened its scope to the analysis of questions of interdependence and global history. All of the crucial themes with which European Marxism had failed to engage,

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and were eventually to lead to the breakdown of social democracy, were instead central to his analysis. In this perspective, the studies devoted to historical materialism by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile represent a special chapter in the history of Marxism. Beyond marking a crucial passage in the intellectual development of two of the greatest exponents of Italian idealism, those studies furthered the examination of Labriola’s theoretical framework, both in the sense of developing the analytical resources it made available and of sounding its limits, and thus became the inevitable terms of reference in all subsequent developments of the philosophy of praxis. As Gramsci returned to meditate the work of Labriola, that is, he was forced to measure himself against Croce and Gentile’ interpretations of Marxism, as well as the further outcomes of their speculation. On the one hand, Croce had given a reading of historical materialism (which he further applied to questions of economic theory) which, in spite of his reservations and reluctance to acknowledge them, owed something to Labriola and the most distinctive of his critical categories. On the other, the philosophy of praxis had been the object of Gentile’s destructive critique in the second of his Marxist writings; but his inquiry also had its remarkably insightful and innovative aspects, which thereafter made it mandatory reading on the subject. Gentile, furthermore, shifted the axis of the debate by making explicit two of Labriola’s unstated intellectual debts: the first was toward the reform of the dialectic operated by Bertrando Spaventa, and the second toward the Thesen über Feuerbach of the early Marx (of which Gentile gave the first Italian translation and a minute theoretical analysis). Gentile, however, was essentially driven to bring out the irremediable contradictions in the philosophy of praxis, and seemingly succeeded in his purpose of making it wholly unworkable to the ends of theoretical Marxism. These problems were addressed by Rodolfo Mondolfo’s criticopractical conception, who returned to Labriola’s conception of the philosophy of praxis and made a crucial emendation to Gentile’s understanding of Marx’s relation to Feuerbach. With two articles published in La cultura filosofica in 1909, then with his 1912 book on Engels, Mondolfo broke away from the traditional interpretation of Feuerbach as a materialist philosopher; while Gentile had based his analysis on that reading (and so had Marx, if truth be said), Feuerbach emerged from Mondolfo’s reading as a philosopher who had taken up the challenge posed by Hegel and developed the chain of dialectical reasoning (perfecting it, in

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fact, in several regards). Where Gentile had seen an insoluble contradiction between materialism and idealism, sense data and praxis, Mondolfo presented the Hegel-Feuerbach-Marx succession as a theoretical process which culminated in the early work of Marx. In this way, Mondolfo was in a position to acknowledge the influence of Labriola without forgoing the crucial points in Gentile’s analysis. Still, his general conception also reflected aspects of the doctrine of the Second International which badly fitted with the subjectivist principle of praxis. That was the cause of his first dispute with Gramsci in 1918, and later inspired the judgments he was to formulate about the Prison Notebooks. The umwälzende Praxis (which he too translated as praxis that overturns itself ) did not contemplate, for Mondolfo, the intervention of political subjectivity, but resulted from an automatic, linear process governed by the regular and gradual unfolding of history. In many ways, Gramsci was the terminal point of the Italian debate and its culmination. This is not to say there are neither flaws nor unresolved problems in his analysis, but over the course of his prison meditations Gramsci explored all of the dimensions of the philosophy of praxis and conferred upon it the seal of a new problem—one which arose from his own experience as citizen and was related, in the first instance, to the constitution of the political subject and to the role it was to have in a modern democracy. Starting with the 1926 essay on the southern question, focus on the status and function of the intellectuals began to complicate the dichotomy underlying former class conceptions with a radicalism unknown to coeval Marxist theories. From this framing of the question sprang the cardinal concept of hegemony, which came to represent a fundamental analytical category (the passive revolutions), a means to re-think the idea of revolution (the war of position and moral and intellectual reform) beyond the Soviet paradigm (the war of maneuver), and the grounds for a reflection on the state of modern democracy and the roots of its current crisis. Philosophically speaking, the theory of hegemony involved a new reading of Marx’ third thesis on Feuerbach, whereby umwälzende Praxis (which Gramsci translated, in Notebook 7, overturning of praxis ) required the mediation of subjectivity as a fulcrum between the ‘Umstände’ (objective ‘circumstances’) and ‘menschliche Tätigkeit’ (human action). The key that unlocked the workings of Marx’ third thesis was thus the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and resided in the problematic mediation of the structure in the superstructures and the ideological forms, which was

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the point at which, in Marx’ words, men ‘become aware’ of the conflict and ‘resolve it.’ By identifying Labriola as the only thinker to have upheld the autonomy of Marxism as a conception of the world, Gramsci was launching a radical critique of the Marxism of the Second and Third International, with Bukharin’s manual singled out as the ultimate synthesis of the degenerative process whereby a materialist, and thus a determinist and fatalist conception had been propounded of the philosophy of praxis. But rethinking the entire sphere of social dynamics meant not only recovering the effort that Labriola, in his last writings, had made to enucleate the interdependence that governed the modern world, but taking a decisive step forward, positing a newly framed understanding of the connection between the national and global dimension to stand at the center of the hegemonic function. It was here, in the search for a different understanding of the world, that Gramsci’s program diverged most radically from the dominant line of orthodoxy (which rested on the old categories of imperialism and of the war of maneuver) and acquired new content. Starting from the reflections on Americanism, which ran the full span between Notebook 1 (1929–1930) and Notebook 22 (1934), an alternative reading of the world situation began to take shape. Ever ahead of his contemporaries, Gramsci also understood that the crisis of democratic nations sprang from the contradiction posed by the cosmopolitanism of the economic sphere and the structure of the European nation-states; retracing its inception as far back as 1870, he accounted for its development through to the Great war and the 1929–1932 Depression. That reading brought into relief the way in which the national-international nexus constituted the inner core of the theory of hegemony: ‘To be sure,’ we read in a famous passage in Notebook 14, ‘the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is “national”—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin. Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise.’ ‘Civil hegemony,’ as he eventually qualified it (in Notebook 8 and in Notebook 13), indicated the synthesis of the two moments, the capacity of a subject, in the act of its constitution, to grasp the ‘“basically identical” cultural and philosophical expression’ inherent in ‘a given stage of civilization.’ While conjuring a new set of speculative issues (practical activity, i.e., labor, as the ‘elementary “historical” cell,’ as Gramsci defined it), the philosophy of praxis arose from two closely related concerns. On the one hand there was the drive to go back to Marx, as against the prevailing

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trends in theoretical Marxism. For Labriola and his successors, going back to Marx meant arguing for the autonomy, independence, and even the self-sufficiency of Marxism as a philosophy and as a general conception of the world. This quest for a philosophy never made the acceptance of the positions of European Marxism, from Engels onwards, a viable option. The philosophy was sought, rather, within Marx’ texts, as the implicit underpinning for all of his political and historical understanding. What was distinctive of the philosophy of praxis was the attempt to make explicit the philosophical grounding which was largely unexpressed and lay at the bottom of the Marxian edifice. From the outset, the drive for a return to Marx went together with the endeavor, also perceived as fundamental, to seek a mediation of Marxism with the Italian tradition. In the fourth letter to Georges Sorel from the third essay on historical materialism (Socialism and Philosophy), Labriola squarely addressed this issue when he denounced the inability of the southern Italian Hegelians to engage with the local tradition; instead, they ‘held mental converse with their German comrades,’ disputing ‘among themselves, as though they were living in Berlin, or in Utopia, instead of Naples,’ and so failed in their ostensible aims. Italian Marxism, in its early stages, was not to make the same mistake. From Labriola to Gramsci, then, it was felt incumbent to keep the Italian tradition in sight. This meant the Renaissance, of course, and notably Giordano Bruno; but other authors and periods became standard terms of reference in the work of translation of historical materialism into the philosophy of praxis. As tutelary deities of the new course of Italian Marxism, the august figures of Vico and Machiavelli also epitomized a difference of mindset and conception, in Mondolfo and Gramsci, respectively, and that translated fairly directly into a fundamental disagreement over the role of political subjectivity in the overturning of praxis. A decisive part in this story was played by one of its most immediate forerunners. Bertrando Spaventa was a Hegelian philosopher and was also one of Labriola’s influences. There was a moment in which Spaventa and a few other authors (such as Francesco De Sanctis) gave a very distinctive turn to the understanding of Hegel in Italy, with an interpretation that varied considerably from the line taken in German and other European nations. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the philosophy of Hegel found an especially receptive audience among Italian liberal thinkers, combining with their ideals and with their efforts, political and intellectual, toward the unification of the country; toward

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the end of the century, it then merged with the liveliest currents of the realist school. Spaventa was at the center of this development of Italian Hegelianism, which acquired great resonance in Naples, particularly, and the South of the country more at large. In his philosophical writings he had affirmed the practical nature of the intellect and of knowledge, in terms that would recur in the thought of Labriola. Two of the elements in Spaventa’s philosophy penetrated deeply into Italian Marxism, and notably in Labriola and Gramsci. First, Spaventa had operated a reform of the dialectic; developed in an 1864 essay in response to the objections of Trendelenburg and others, Spaventa’s reform addressed the first triad of Hegel’s logic with particular clarity, configuring the dialectical movement as an act of thought and of subjectivity. Secondly, in 1861 Spaventa had presented a paper in Naples on the theory of the circulation of European thought, arguing for the universal, global, and cosmopolitan nature of philosophy against all merely national or nationalistic tendencies. Both theses fed into nineteenth-century Italian intellectual history, and, through the lens of Marxism, contributed to the theories of labor, subjectivity, interdependence, and translatability that inspired the formulation of the philosophy of praxis. With this history in mind, one may better understand why Italian Marxists were dissatisfied with the denomination of the theory as historical materialism, that had prevailed after Marx, and were particularly concerned with finding a new definition. From Labriola’s critical communism to Mondolfo’s critico-practical conception, down to Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, a concerted effort was made to steer clear of the ambiguities embedded in the tradition. The search for an apt terminology reflected the terms of the dual critique which constituted the distinctive and unifying feature of Italian Marxism: on the one hand, these authors rejected and refuted the interpretation of Marxism as a philosophy founded on materialism; on the other hand, they rejected the interpretation of idealism as a speculative form, as the unfolding of an ideal order that was independent of the historical genesis of concepts. Going back to Hegel and insisting on his theses of the ideality of the finite and of the identity of thought and being, their elaborations converged on the point that the philosophy of praxis inaugurated a historical conception of reality: a conception that had a significant connection with idealism (both German and Italian) and yet sought to bring about ‘the absolute secularization and earthliness of thought’ of which Gramsci spoke in the notebooks.

Contents

Part I

From Labriola to Mondolfo

1

Antonio Labriola 1 Prehistory of the Third Essay 2 Philosophy of Praxis and the Genesis of Ideas 3 Critical Communism 4 The Rhythm of History 5 Labriola’s Later Writings

3 4 7 23 25 34

2

Benedetto Croce 1 Croce and Labriola 2 Historical Materialism As ‘Canon’ And The ‘Elliptical Comparison’ 3 Utility and Praxis

47 48

Giovanni Gentile 1 Between Labriola and Croce 2 The Critique of Historical Materialism and ‘Praxis Overturned’ 3 Autopraxis 4 ‘Feeling’ as Praxis

89 90 94 111 114

Rodolfo Mondolfo 1 Marx and Feuerbach 2 Friedrich Engels and Historical Materialism

123 124 136

3

4

60 73

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CONTENTS

3 4 Part II 5

Lenin and the Russian Revolution Mondolfo and Gramsci

146 153

Antonio Gramsci 165 166 170 175 180 187

The Philosophy Notes 1 Preliminary Considerations 2 Gramsci’s Return to Labriola 3 The Overturning of Praxis (Gramsci and Marx) 4 From Marx to Hegel 5 The ‘Historical Bloc’ 6 Materialism and Idealism: The Reality of the Outside World 7 Common Sense 8 The Provisional Nature of the Philosophy of Praxis 9 Translatability

192 199 203 208

6

The Notes on Dante 1 The Cavalcante Code 2 The Eleven Notes on Dante 3 Poetry and Structure 4 Aesthetics and Catharsis

213 214 226 235 239

7

The Anti-Croce 1 Preliminary Remarks on the ‘Special’ Notebooks 2 Early Considerations on the History of Europe, the Origins of the Anti-Croce 3 Hegemony of Croce? 4 The ‘Dialectic of the Distinct’ 5 The Speculative ‘Residue’ and Fate of Philosophy

247 248 251 263 266 269

Praxis 1 Hegemony and Criticism 2 Intellectuals 3 The Modern Prince

279 280 290 299

8

Index

315

Translator’s Note

Throughout this work, quotations from the primary sources have been given from existing English translations where possible. These include the translations of Labriola’s first three essays (but not of the fourth essay, later works, and correspondence, for instance), of five of Croce’s writings, and two different editions of Gramsci’s Notebooks. The reader who cannot access Italian editions will find that bibliographical references to these are followed in the notes by an accompanying reference to an English edition where one was available. These references to English editions are given in abbreviated form with an acronym for the title in English followed by a page reference to the text in that particular edition. Below are listed the Italian sources for which an English edition was used, paired with the acronym by which the latter is identified in the notes. Where no reference to a translation is given, and there is only a reference to the Italian source, the translation of the cited passage is to be understood as our own. In some places, earlier translations of Gramsci have been ‘silently’ revised in the light of later critical work and consistently with the discussion here developed, particularly where the source text in its turn incorporated a translation (typically from German) that needed to be accounted for. In particular, the different takes on the phrase and concept of umwälzende Praxis have been here represented as varying constructions based on the verb ‘to overturn.’ The German phrase crucially occurs as Engels’ rewording of Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach and was the only known version of the text at the time in which our authors were working on

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Marxian texts and categories; it seemed important that their translations and interpretation (in which the verb ‘rovesciare’ is consistently used but differently inflected) should be rendered by comparable renditions into English, and have thus revised previous translations accordingly, where necessary. We regret, finally, that it was not possible to draw on Derek Boothman’s Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, Lawrence, and Wishart, 1995) but wish to point out that edition to our reader as a valuable resource, particularly for texts falling outside the scope of the J. A. Buttigieg edition of Notebooks 1–8 (out of Gramsci’s 33 Notebooks).

List of Abbreviations Used in References for the Writings of Labriola, Croce, and Gramsci

Antonio Labriola MCM

HM

SP

In memoria del Manifesto dei comunisti, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici, Vol. 2, edited by F. Sbarberi, Einaudi, Torino 1976. In Memory of the Communist Manifesto, inId., Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, trans. Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904. Del materialismo storico. Dilucidazione preliminare, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici, Vol. 2, edited by F. Sbarberi, Einaudi, Torino 1976. Historical Materialism, in Id., Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, trans. Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904. Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici, Vol. 2, edited by F. Sbarberi, Einaudi, Torino 1976. Socialism and Philosophy, trans. Ernest Untermann, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1912.

Benedetto Croce HMEKM

Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, Laterza, Bari 1978.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN REFERENCES FOR THE WRITINGS …

Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, trans. C. M. Meredith, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1914. Per la storia della filosofia politica. Noterelle, in Id., Etica e politica, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1981. Politics and Morals, trans. Salvatore J. Castiglione, New York, Philosophical Library, 1945. Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia, edited by G. Galasso, Adelphi, Milano, 2005. Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainslie, London: Macmillan and Co., 1922 Filosofia della Pratica. Economica ed etica, a cura di M. Tarantino, Bibliopolis, Napoli 1996. Philosophy of the Practical—Economic and Ethic, trans. Douglas Ainslie, London, Macmillan and Co., 1913. Logica come scienza del concetto puro, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1981. Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, trans. Douglas Ainslie, London, Macmillan and Co., 1917.

PM

ASE

PPEE

LSPC

Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks 1–8 PN Vol. 1

PN Vol. 2 PN Vol. 3

Prison Notebooks Vol. 1 (1992), edited and trans. by J. A. Buttigieg (with the assistance of A. Callari), New York, Columbia University Press. Prison Notebooks Vol. 2 (1996), edited and trans. by J. A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press. Prison Notebooks Vol. 3 (2007), edited and trans. by J. A. Buttigieg, New York, Columbia University Press.

Other Selections from the Prison Notebooks in: SPN

Selections from the Prison Writings, edited and trans. by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN REFERENCES FOR THE WRITINGS …

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Other Selections from Journals and Other Writings in: SPW 1910–1920

SPW 1921–1926

Selected Political Writings 1910–1920, edited by Q. Hoare and trans. by J. Mathews, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. Selected Political Writings 1921–1926, edited and trans. by Q. Hoare, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.

PART I

From Labriola to Mondolfo

CHAPTER 1

Antonio Labriola

The phrase philosophy of praxis first appears at the close of the fourth letter to Georges Sorel in Antonio Labriola’s third essay on Marxism, where it is said to constitute ‘the pith of historical materialism.’ While there are grounds for seeking to trace its origins back to the Hegelian left (signally to August von Cieszkowski and Moses Hess), only with Labriola did it take on a specific designation, both in terms of his attempt to establish the autonomy of Marxism as a philosophy (devoid, in particular, of positivist and neo-Kantian influences), and of his attempt to measure and shape the theory against the Italian philosophical tradition. These two aspects (Marxism as philosophy; its relation to the Italian tradition) marked a debate that was to continue at least through to Gramsci. Intended by Labriola as the core of a novel system of understanding and as a way out of the contradictions of materialism and idealism alike, the philosophy of praxis came to identify the distinctive form in which, at a particular moment in time, Italian intellectuals negotiated their relationship with the works of Marx.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4_1

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Prehistory of the Third Essay

Socialism and Philosophy (Discorrendo di socialismo e filosofia), the third of Antonio Labriola’s essays on historical materialism, was conceived between 1896 and 1898, at a decisive and rather complicated point in his later intellectual life. Following the death of Friedrich Engels on August 5, 1895, who had been to him a valuable and authoritative interlocutor,1 Labriola finished drafting his own second essay, Historical Materialism (Del materialismo storico. Dilucidazione preliminare), the proofs of which he finished revising with Croce over the last week of May 1896, and which was then published in June that year.2 That work being concluded, he began attending to the translation and commentary of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party and was entrusted with delivering the inaugural speech for that academic year on the subject of scientific freedom within the university (L’Università e la libertà della scienza)3 : delivered on November 14, his speech gave rise to a spate of controversies among the academic community and in print. In January 1896, Georges Sorel had made the first contact, enjoining him to become a collaborator of Le Devenir social (though receiving small consideration in return).4 In July that year the Parisian publishers Giard and Brière suggested a French edition of his two essays on historical materialism with a préface by Sorel.5 1 See the letters wrtten on August 7 agosto to Friedrich Lessner and August 16 to Victor Adler, in A. Labriola, Epistolario 1890–1895, edited by V. Gerratana and A. A. Santucci, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1983, pp. 608–610. Labriola’s correspondence with Engels had begun in 1890. Labriola gave a speech to commemorate Engels on January 19, 1896 at an event promoted by the Socialist federation of Rome: see A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, edited by V. Gerratana and A.A. Santucci, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1983, p. 635, and the account in Id., Scritti politici (1886–1904), edited by V. Gerratana, Laterza, Bari 1970, pp. 371–376. 2 Cf. A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 668; B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, Laterza, Bari 1978, p. 263. 3 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 653; B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., pp. 277–278. The text of the inaugural speech appears, with variants and appendices, in A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, edited by S. Miccolis and A. Savorelli, Bibliopolis, Napoli 2012, pp. 7–46, with a study of its genesis and of the ensuing debate at pp. 284–289. 4 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 632 e p. 653. Sorel had praised Labriola’s essays in his review to G. R enard, ‘Critique de combat ’ (Dentu, Paris 1894), in Le Devenir social, 1896, pp. 275–276. 5 A. Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire, avec une préface de G. Sorel, Giard e Brière, Paris 1897.

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5

Work on this new edition ran smoothly; Labriola received the proofs in December,6 and the first copy on March 20, 1897.7 In spite of attempts to have the first two essays on historical materialism translated into Polish and other languages, their publishing history effectively ended with the French edition. In the early months of 1897, Sorel published his writings on Vico in Le Devenir social ,8 whereas Labriola’s diatribe with Benedetto Croce around the notion of a ‘pure economy’ had been continuing since December’96. As it was, then, by the time Labriola received the French edition in March 1897, he felt no inclination to produce a third essay to follow the first two, and said as much in his correspondence with Croce.9 Still, in the same letter to Croce he claimed to have struck upon a wholly new theme, namely, that of the genesis and psychology of labor—or, in other words, a synthesis of Marx and Darwin which promised to be a most difficult enterprise, but one that could also be his most significant contribution to date. In spite of his misgivings, however, the idea of a third essay stuck with him over the subsequent months, even as he considered republishing two of his early essays, the one Contro il ‘ritorno a Kant ’ (the position championed by Eduard Zeller)10 and the other on the passions in Spinoza’s Ethics,11 both of which he had written as a pupil of Bertrando Spaventa, and for some reason now seemed to him to have gained new relevance.12 In a letter to Croce of April 12, 1897, he mentioned the idea (which never came to anything) of writing ‘a third essay “on the future society and the predictability of history,”’ though he was also considering ‘a couple of open letters, concerning the issues he [Sorel] raised in the préface, just to make clear that true though it may be that Marxism has revolutionized our understanding of history and represents the culmination of socialist 6 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 737. 7 Idem, p. 777. 8 Cf. G. Sorel, ‘Étude sur Vico’, in Le Devenir social, 1896, pp. 785–817, pp. 906–941, pp. 1013–1046, pp. 1059–1065. 9 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 777. 10 A. Labriola, Contro il «ritorno a Kant» propugnato da Eduardo Zeller, in Id.,

Scritti varii editi e inediti di filosofia e politica, edited by B. Croce, Laterza, Bari 1906, pp. 1–33. 11 A. Labriola, Origine e natura delle passioni secondo l’Etica di Spinoza, in Id., Scritti varii editi e inediti di filosofia e politica, cit., pp. 35–87. 12 Cf. A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 704.

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thought, that doesn’t mean the laws of chemistry, or psychology, or the known universe are any different from before’13 ; but on June 13 he was still describing himself as ‘quite doubtful’ as to the subject he would next approach in his writings.14 It was only in September 1897 that a clear outline of the third essay began to emerge in the form of a series of letters to Sorel, whom he would address by name, he wrote, only as ‘a mere pretext’15 for unraveling the thoughts that occupied his mind in a somewhat free and unsystematic manner. Following a suggestion by Sorel himself, he at first considered awaiting the publication of a review by Émile Durkheim to the French edition of his writings,16 although this received no special attention in the actual drafting of the essay, and was only acknowledged, alongside others, in a footnote.17 He soon set to work, however, and wrote without interruption between mid-September and the first ten days in October (later deciding to include an excerpt from Engels’ Anti-Dühring, which he had ready to send to Croce in December).18 The ten letters that make up the main body of the third essay were thus conceived and composed in the very short span of about one month, though as the French edition was being prepared in the early months of 1898 (to appear in print the following year with the title Socialisme et philosophie),19 Labriola made several corrections and added a set of appendices, including, in particular, the extensive Postscriptum in which he asserted his position regarding the philosophical conceptions Croce had gone on to elaborate in the meantime. 13 Idem, p. 785. 14 Idem, p. 790. 15 Idem, p. 808. 16 Idem, p. 805 and p. 831. The review of Durkheim appeared in the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 1897, pp. 645–651. 17 A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici, Vol. 2, edited by F. Sbarberi, Einaudi, Torino 1976, p. 768, nota 1 (SP, p. 147, footnote). 18 Cf. A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., pp. 807–830, in which the letters to Croce document the elaboration of the manuscript. The excerpt from Engels’AntiDühring (Dialektik. Negation der Negation, in F. Engels, Herrn Eugen Duhring’s Umwalzung der Wissenschaft, Dietz, Stuttgart 18943 , pp. 137–146) now appears (in German and Italian) in A. Labriola, Tutti gli scritti filosofici e di teoria dell’educazione, edited by L. Basile and L. Steardo, Bompiani, Milano 2014, pp. 1538–1553. 19 A. Labriola, Socialisme et philosophie (Lettres à G. Sorel), Giard et Brière, Paris 1899.

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7

Philosophy of Praxis and the Genesis of Ideas

Labriola’s third essay is essentially devoted to the problem of a distinctively Marxist ‘philosophy’ (a ‘Lebens- und Weltanschauung, a conception of life and the universe,’ he also phrased).20 The fact that there was no ‘complete theory’ of Marxism amounted to a ‘disease’ for which Labriola offered, as starting point, his ‘diagnosis’21 : ‘historical materialism [had] made … little headway from its first general enunciation’ and produced nothing comparable with the ‘intensive and extensive development’ of Darwinism22 ; hence the tendency to complement Marxism ‘now by the help of Spencer, now with positivism in general, now with Darwin’23 —a ‘tinkering’ that only served to contaminate the original theory.24 What was instead needed was a study of the ‘common foundation’25 of the doctrine of historical materialism across the writings of Marx and Engels, within which was implicit the distinctly Marxian ‘philosophical method for the general understanding of life and the universe.’26 The problem partly originated from the fact that the writings of Marx and Engels only gave the germs of the doctrine as ‘fragments,’27 since neither author had written ‘any more on questions of philosophy in the strict meaning of the term’ besides a few early writings,28 following which Marx had taken the approach of the ‘prosaic man of science’ and preferred the method of the ‘midwife,’ in an age of ‘prophets’ and ‘literary men.’29 Still, the texts rendered an outline of historical materialism as a threefold theory, dealing with the ‘interpretation of politics,’ the ‘critique of political economy,’ and finally, we have seen, outlined the ‘philosophical method for the general understanding of life and the universe.’30 The 20 A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, cit., p. 667 (SP, p. 14). 21 Idem, p. 666 (SP, pp. 13–14). 22 Idem, p. 666 and p. 710 (SP, p. 13 and pp. 71–72). 23 Idem, p. 679 (SP, p. 30). 24 Idem, p. 712 (SP, p. 74). 25 Idem, p. 673 (SP, p. 22). 26 Ibidem (SP, p. 23). 27 Ibidem (SP, p. 23). 28 Idem, p. 716 (SP, p. 80). 29 Idem, p. 780 (SP, pp. 161–162). 30 Idem, p. 673 (SP, p. 23).

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issue being, however, that while these aspects of the theory ‘combined into one in the mind of Marx,’31 they were at no point fully integrated, save for a partial attempt in the first book of Das Kapital,32 whereas in the subsequent history of theoretical Marxism they had come to be further fragmented and disjoined. Now, it was precisely the integration of political philosophy and history that constituted the common foundation of Marxism, but such a unitarian conception, which was ‘inherent and immanent in its fundamental facts and premises,’ still needed to be developed into a full philosophical conception.33 The framing Labriola had given to the question of a general theory of Marxism thus rested on an assumption and bore one major implication. On the one hand, that is, there was the assumption that theoretical knowledge had to come before ‘the practical question of Socialism.’ ‘The … practical question,’ Labriola wrote, ‘is guided by the intellectual facts of an enlightened consciousness based on theoretical knowledge.’34 However, the relation between philosophy and scientific knowledge, to which the fifth and sixth letter were chiefly devoted (in a discussion informed by the influence of Herbart, alongside Marx), proved to be one of the most intractable problems in the third essay. In the fifth letter, commenting on the use of scientific discourse made by Marx in Das Kapital, Labriola noted that the aspects that made up the theory of Marxism were there so perfectly combined that the philosophy could be seen to be ‘so much in the things themselves, and so permeated with them, that the reader of that work feels the effect, as though philosophizing were a natural function itself of the scientific method.’35 But while this observation went in the direction of reducing philosophy to a ‘function’ of scientific discourse, it was then followed by the reasoning that although ‘a perfect science is a perfect philosophy,’ and therefore, with Herbart, ‘such a philosophy signifies but the highest degree of elaboration of concepts,’ one could not, thereby, altogether do away with philosophy in its ‘strict sense,’ with its autonomy and specificity; because, he explained, if ‘(empirical) science is in a process of continual growth,’ it is still incumbent on philosophy to 31 Idem, p. 713 (SP, p. 76). 32 Idem, p. 714 (SP, p. 77). 33 Idem, p. 703 (SP, p. 62). 34 Idem, p. 664 (SP, p. 11). 35 Idem, p. 714 (SP, pp. 76–77).

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assess ‘the mass of its methodical and formal knowledge,’ as only philosophy may constitute the stage of scientific self-consciousness and, indeed, of its ‘self-critique.’36 Returning to the subject in the context of a discussion, in the sixth letter, of the ‘tendency towards monism,’ to which we shall return, he devoted a note expressly to criticize the claim that philosophy had ‘reached its end’ professed in a book by Richard Wahle,37 and countered that in concrete thought philosophy at once ‘is and is not,’ in the sense that ‘For any one who has not arrived at this understanding, it is something beyond science,’ whereas ‘for any one who has arrived there, it is science brought to perfection.’38 The problem of the autonomy of philosophical discourse appeared crucial to Labriola because it followed logically from the assessment that the absence of a distinctive Marxist philosophy was a ‘disease’ requiring a remedy. In the face of it, his attitude wavered between regarding philosophy as a mere ‘function’ of scientific knowledge (and, ultimately, of praxis), as Marx and Marxism seemed to entail, and his reluctance to accept such a conclusion, against which he reaffirmed (in a seemingly provisional move) the value of philosophy in its ‘strict meaning.’ The framing of Marxism as a philosophy had also, as mentioned, a major implication for the further development of the debate. When historical materialism was reduced to its theoretical ‘kernel’ and was rendered into the essential terms of the philosophy of praxis, it became possible, and in fact necessary, to elaborate the implications of the philosophy as the circumstances of individual nations dictated, operating the mediation between the principle as such (praxis) and the historically determined peculiarities of a given country (Italy, as the case was with Labriola). The more rigorously the philosophical significance of Marxism came to be identified as a rigorously defined, fundamental problem (the ‘kernel’ of the theory), that is, the more necessary it became to analyze the historical and political reality of individual nations—a larger project than the third essay would admit and to be taken up in ‘another essay,’ to be devoted to ‘the remote causes and immediate reasons of the present conditions of our

36 Idem, pp. 714–715 (SP, pp. 77–78). 37 Idem, p. 722, note 1 (SP, p. 87, footnote). Cf. R. Wahle, Der Ganze der Philosophie

und ihr Ende, Braumuller, Wien und Leipzig 1896 (Labriola is referring to pp. xxiii and 539). 38 A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, cit., p. 722 (SP, p. 87).

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country.’39 But, in its general terms, the question of the local determinations of the philosophy of praxis cut across the theoretical architecture of the third essay, beginning with Labriola’s assessment in the second letter that Marx and Engels, as intellectuals, were ‘the fruit and outcome of German culture,’40 and so deserved to be translated into all European languages; not only materially, with editions in all languages, but also ideally, to the extent that (and here Labriola had in mind Achille Loria and exponents of Italian Marxism) ‘unfortunately every nation has too many Dührings’41 ; and so came his conclusion, in a decisive passage of the fourth letter, that historical materialism ‘may vary in coloring and outline from country to country. But this will do no great harm, so long as it preserves that kernel which is, so to say, its whole philosophy.’42 At one end of the theoretical spectrum of historical materialism thus stood, as the basis for all further developments, the ‘kernel ’ that was ‘its whole philosophy,’ and at the other end were the diverse ‘coloring’ and ‘outline’ the philosophy would assume ‘from country to country’ as it gained definition within the history of individual nations. Illustrations of this critical approach are given in the third essay by reference to the Hegelians of southern Italy, and to Bertrando Spaventa especially. Providing what is perhaps the clearest outline of the philosophy of praxis in the fourth letter, Labriola recounted ‘the fate of those Hegelians who came to the fore in Italy from 1840 to 1880, especially in the South, for instance in Naples,’43 a few of whom ‘were strong thinkers’ and had ‘represented a revolutionary current of great importance,’ and attempted to explain the fact that ‘every trace, and even the memory, of this movement [had] passed away … after the lapse of but a few years.’ Reflecting on his own past experience, recounted in a long quotation from one of his letters to Engels, Labriola could account for the swift demise of the Hegelians (whose ranks he had joined in his youth) and send out a warning to those Italian Marxists who were now in danger of repeating that same fundamental mistake. The Hegelians had failed to connect with their own nation, holding instead ‘mental converse with their German 39 Idem, p. 773 (SP, p. 153, footnote). 40 Idem, p. 672 (SP, p. 21). 41 Idem, p. 697 (SP, p. 54). 42 Idem, p. 689 (SP, p. 43). 43 Idem, p. 698 (SP, p. 54).

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Comrades ’: writing, teaching, and holding ‘disputations among themselves as thought they were living in Berlin, or in Utopia, instead of Naples.’44 Italian Marxists were now exposed to a similar danger, should they give in to the inclination to engage in a private conversation with Marx and the German social democrats instead of bringing the essential principle of historical materialism (the philosophy of praxis) to bear on Italian affairs. The issue was taken up again in the tenth and final letter of the essay. Echoing Spaventa’s theory of the ‘circulation’ of European thought (though without expressly naming Spaventa), Labriola sought to provide a Marxist reworking of the theory that would also reflect a historical phase in which the Italian nation was no longer rising, but declining. Italy, he explained, had been ‘the common cradle of all civilization’ and deserved ‘the homage of all’ European peoples ‘as the forerunner of that which they now are.’45 While openly returning to the theme of the rhythm of modernity, with its origins in Italy and later migration to France, Germany, and the Northern European nations, as outlined by Spaventa in his inaugural address,46 Labriola was now able to address the question of the ‘successive decadence’ of Italy through the lens of Marxism as a shift of ‘the capitalist era’ away from ‘the Mediterranean countries,’ and as the early manifestation of a crisis in the relationship between a frail bourgeoisie and the nation, which also negatively impacted on the lower classes, whose ‘commotions,’ in turn, seemed rather ‘like revolts of elementary forces ’47 than progressive class struggle, in a nation that had become ‘the promised land of decadents, self-glorifiers, shallow critics, fastidious and posing sceptics.’48 In a country characterized by an immature economy and social forces, the rhythm of the circulation had resulted in a generalized decadence which could only be remedied by acting upon the historical course of events in Italy in accordance with that kernel of historical materialism which was the philosophy of praxis.

44 Idem, p. 698 (SP, pp. 54–55). 45 Idem, p. 772 (SP, p. 152). 46 B. Spaventa, La filosofia italiana nelle relazioni con la filosofia europea, edited by A.

Savorelli, Edizioni di storia e letteratura, Roma 2003. 47 A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, cit., p. 775 (SP, pp. 153–156). 48 Idem, p. 776 (SP, p. 157).

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It stands to reason, then, that the most incisive definitions of the philosophy of praxis are to be found where Labriola’s historical analysis deals more directly with the problem of national decadence. The expression appears, almost abruptly, in the third and fourth of the letters to Sorel. We have seen that in the third letter Labriola envisaged historical materialism as specializing and ‘having its own history … from country to country,’ which he deemed desirable so long as ‘it preserves that kernel which is, so to say, its whole philosophy.’49 So, as he reached the end of his argument, he concluded with a brief statement of one of the fundamental theses of the philosophy of praxis, namely, that ‘the nature of man, his historical making, is a practical process.’ Within this definition of human ‘nature,’ Labriola attempted to reconcile the two qualifying terms of his reflection, though did not quite manage to unify them: human beings had a ‘practical’ nature (to the extent that it involved the ‘elimination of the vulgar distinction between’ theory and practice), which became realized as a ‘process’ of ‘historical making’ (to the extent that history was the domain within which praxis, in its mutable forms, manifested itself). But Labriola was not yet prepared to identify theory with practical process (and, in fact, maintained the distinction, assuming that under the aspect of totality their mutual ‘opposition,’ and not their distinction, was overcome). More significantly still, he failed to frame praxis as the constitutive principle of history, and kept them distinct, so that practical activity was something that occurred within historical development, as the element which gave to progress its impulse and determinations. That there was still a residue of objectivism at the bottom of his reasoning was made clearer in the concluding lines, in which praxis as such was identified with ‘labor,’ which as such ‘implies and includes the … development of both mental and manual activities’ (and to this extent incorporated ‘theory’), and only assumed its authentic form when regarded as ‘a history of labor,’ i.e., as ‘the social form of labor and its variations’ in which practical activity manifested itself. In Labriola’s conception, that is, labor did rise above the vulgar distinction of theory and practice; but only when regarded in the flux of becoming, as ‘history of labor,’ did fully rise to the level of a ‘social form.’ In the closing pages of the fourth letter, Labriola returned to the matter, though again in a concise form and somewhat stilted style. He

49 Idem, p. 689 (SP, p. 43).

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specified that, alongside the production of material goods (such as by the factory worker), the meaning of the word labor which in the previous letter he had used to define the philosophy of praxis could be extended to include every ‘act of thinking’ in so far as thinking involved effort and therefore also constituted new labor. The practical nature of the act of thinking emerged from the consideration that ‘finished thought,’ which is to say the objectivation of intellectual labor within the fabric of a civilization, was not in itself a sufficient condition for the conceptual advancement that constitutes ‘new thought’ in the absence of an ‘adequate effort’ in which ‘we exert our will-power.’ For thought to occur and be endowed with originality, that is, and so build upon past intellective achievements, it was necessary for volition to intervene. In a move that clearly pointed back to the philosophy of Bertrando Spaventa, the dialectic of the ‘act of thinking’ and ‘finished thought’ justified Labriola’s claim that the thought process is practical in nature; its progressive component, in turn, (which is to say its spontaneity and capacity to break the pattern of an ‘accomplished task’) was granted and mediated by Labriola’s identification of volition as enabling freely creative action and providing the basis for logical endeavor. It was from this elaboration on the interplay of intellect and volition, and of thought and labor, that the philosophy of praxis now derived a more rigorous, and definitely more radical definition than it had been given at the close of the third letter. Further down in the letter, Labriola outlined the further complication that the kind of ‘brain work’ that was sustained by volition occurred ‘in each one of us only in so far as we are beings living in a certain environment which is socially, and therefore historically, developed.’ Again, this called into question the notions of ‘finished thought’ and of ‘practical interrelations’ involving a ‘whole’ (collectively addressed as ‘we’) which human societies expressed as a ‘mode of life, custom, institution, church, country, historical tradition, and so forth.’ In his analysis, it was at the level of ‘practical interrelations’ that the concrete order of reality and history in its actual meaning resided, against the ‘objects of speculation of those sociologists and psychologists who belong to the bad school of metaphysics.’ With ‘individual thought’ deriving its ‘character of a true social function’ from ‘these practical interrelations,’ the act of thinking came about through volition operating on ‘those secondary, derived, and complex habits’ which connect ‘individual with individual,’ and which

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therefore also constituted the necessary condition and premise for ‘new labor’ to be an act of innovation.50 ‘So here we have arrived once more at the philosophy of praxis, which is the pith of historical materialism,’51 he explained at the close of the fourth letter, where two more aspects of the theory are given which, taken together, further complicate the analysis made so far. First of all, he described the philosophy of praxis as ‘the immanent philosophy of things about which people philosophize’52 ; and this, on a strong reading, entailed a conception of philosophy as the mere reflection of ‘the rhythmic movements of real things,’ in plain conflict with the principle of the ‘act of thinking’ which had been at the core of his previous reasoning: the emphasis on thought and volition he had derived from Spaventa, that is, now seemed irrevocably at odds with this Marxist (and signally Engelsian) conception. On the one hand, Labriola had identified the ‘act of thinking’ as the source of historical innovation, which meant that the communal effort toward progress proceeded from philosophy; on the other hand, though, by declaring philosophy to be ‘immanent’ to the ‘rhythmic movements of real things,’ Labriola appeared to fall back on the view that the objectiveness of historical process, and not subjective philosophical ‘labor,’ was the engine of becoming. The ambiguity of this dual conception, which in part continued the previous line of reasoning and in part aimed to rectify it, also affected his second consideration in this same paragraph, from which emerged one of the underlying themes of the philosophy of praxis, which is to say the concept of genesis. For at this stage in the argument, Labriola expanded on the notion of ‘practical interrelations’ he had previously given in terms of the idea of ‘realistic process’ and, more specifically, of ‘life’: if metaphysics had regarded intellectual development as ‘the rhythmic movement of The Idea Itself ,’ of ‘the spontaneous generation of thought,’ the ‘realistic process’ Labriola now described followed the opposite course ‘from life to thought, not from though to life.’ Inverting thus the perspective, and accounting for thought as a product which had its ultimate foundation in life, Labriola 50 The question of a plural subject ‘we,’ and of the relation between the social structure and the individual was re-examined in the posthumous fragment on Storia, filosofia della storia, sociologia e materialismo storico, in A. Labriola, Scritti filosofici e politici, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 813–819, to which we will return in the closing paragraph of this chapter. 51 A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, cit., p. 702 (SP, p. 60). 52 Ibidem (SP, p. 60).

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also believed he could explain the ‘secret of a phrase’ which had been ‘the cause of much racking of some brains’ with Marx’ successors: when Marx had spoken of turning ‘the dialectics of Hegel right side up,’ what he had meant was, in Labriola’s analysis, that it came to stand right side up along the vertical axis of genesis, meaning that ‘understanding as an abstract theory’ came about from ‘the labor of cognition,’ and thus from ‘work,’ and, ultimately, from ‘life.’ The teachings of Spaventa, a lasting influence on Labriola, may be detected whenever the theme of the dialectics is raised. In this sense, the philosophy of praxis was an attempt to revise the dialectics along the lines indicated by Marx and then by Engels, while retaining the spirit of Spaventa’s reform of the dialectic. But what made his attempt to reform the reform most problematic were the conflicting claims of thought (which in the philosophy of Spaventa featured as a prevailing force, endowed with an energy of its own) and of materialism, which, in turn, emphasized the objective workings of history. The uncertainty between these positions resurfaced every time Labriola, seeking to finalize his theoretical position, reflected on the meaning of the dialectical method, which he continued to regard as Hegel’s greatest bequeath to Marx— who in turn, to his mind, in the face of the degeneration of idealism into abstract and vacuous scholasticism had recovered and realized its fullest significance. Between the alternatives of ‘a new scholasticism’ and ‘a new and more ponderous criticism,’53 Marxism alone had brought concreteness to the dialectical method, developing its ‘immanent critical character,’ through ‘the process of that negation’ which, instead of setting concept against concept and opinion against opinion as a skeptic would do, ‘verifies the thing which it denies, because that which is made negative by it either contains the material conditions or the intellectual premise for the continuation of the process.’54 Such phrasing could have come straight out of Spaventa, to the extent that the dialectic Labriola conceived to be at work in the philosophy of praxis rested on the negation operated by the act of thinking on the order of being, which, once prevailed upon by the act of thinking, was converted into a condition and premise for progress. While this was the signature pattern of Spaventa’s reform, another aspect intervened (derived not from Spaventa, but

53 Idem, p. 695 (SP, p. 51). 54 Idem, pp. 695–696 (SP, pp. 51–52).

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from historical materialism) which inspired Labriola to reproduce the chapter out of Engels’ Antidühring on The Negation of the Negation, and received, in the tenth and final letter to Sorel, what is perhaps its most distinctive formulation. Returning to the question of explaining ‘in what consists that dialectics which is so often invoked for the elucidation of the gist of historical materialism,’55 Labriola answered that ‘by the dialectics we mean that rhythmic movement of understanding, which tries to reproduce the general outline of reality in the making.’56 The ‘act of thinking’ no longer ‘prevailed’ on being, as in his former reasoning, and had its role limited to ‘reproduce’ the objective workings of reality. In the successive paragraphs, however, the matter ran into a far more radical complication as Labriola sought to reinterpret the dialectical process in the light of his own distinctive leitmotiv, that of genetic development. ‘We cannot give ourselves an adequate account of thought unless it be by an act of thinking,’57 he wrote: in the context of his current analysis, ‘an act of thinking’ involved rejecting the fetishism of any formula, of any definition, of any finished thought whatsoever, even, and especially, when such ‘scholasticism’ were ‘presented in the name of Marx.’ The ‘act of thinking’ alone had therefore any concreteness, leading ‘by gradual and well weighted steps through a chosen department of reality,’ instead of placing a ‘definition … at the beginning,’ which was ‘meaningless,’ to the extent that definitions ‘take on meaning only when genetically developed.’ To illustrate the underlying method of the dialectical process, Labriola borrowed from his much earlier work on The Doctrine of Socrates (1871), still believing the Socratic method (‘the accomplished talent of generating ideas’) to be an unequalled paradigm of logic. The dialectics fundamentally coincided with the question tì esti (‘What is it?’) which initiated the Socratic inquiry into concepts. At each turn of the inquiry, Labriola found it was necessary to regain ‘the primitive state of human consciousness,’ ‘the primitive and unreasoning mind,’58 and so proceed inductively and not deductively, which is to say to proceed genetically from ‘life’ to ‘thought,’ as the philosophy of praxis prescribed, re-examining finished thought and reformulating concepts in an ongoing

55 Idem, p. 769 (SP, p. 148). 56 Ibidem (SP, p. 148). 57 Idem, p. 770 (SP, p. 149). 58 A. Labriola, La dottrina di Socrate, Napoli 1871, p. 59.

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process. Quite patently, different conceptions of the dialectics coexisted in the restlessness mind of Labriola: on one level, the dialectics appears to be framed as the ‘immanent philosophy of things’ and confined to the representation of ‘the rhythmic movements of real things’; on a different level, however, consistently with Spaventa’s reform, Labriola saw the ‘act of thinking’ as capable of prevailing on real things and thus as giving rise to progress, and further identified the process whereby the act of thinking could prevail with the Socratic breaking down of ‘finished thought’ and abstractions by means of an ‘inductive’ logical process (as it was defined in the work on Socrates) which led to derive the meaning of concepts from the examination of ‘life.’ Critical analysis of the abstract and its subsequent synthesis in a genetic process of development were the points of convergence of the fundamental dialectics of the philosophy of praxis. In the work of translating historical materialism into the philosophy of praxis, then, Labriola was drawing on several sources from different phases of his intellectual development, but managed to reconcile these sources only in part. On the one hand, there was the influence of Spaventa and the southern-Italian Hegelians, who had initiated the reformation of the dialectic; thence came Labriola’s conception of the act of thinking as labor, in which the interaction of thought and volition (along the lines of Spaventa’s reformation) constituted a move forwards from the notion of the objectivity of being as finished thought. On the other hand, philosophical practice as viewed by Herbart inspired Labriola to seek rigorous categorial distinctions in the elaboration of concepts. Lastly, from the Marxist angle of Engels and the German social democrats, philosophical discourse was to be interpreted as ‘the immanent philosophy of things,’ a wholly objective process the dialectical rhythm of which was independent of the spontaneous logical and practical capabilities of the subject. These several strands of his thought could not be fully reconciled, but did go in the prevailing, if not unique, direction which ultimately culminated in the vertical conception represented by the genesis of ideas (which coincided with neither the ‘rhythmic movements of real things’ in themselves, nor merely with ‘effort’ and ‘new labor’) and in his viewing all ‘finished thought,’ including ‘all forms of idealism’ as well as (and more significantly) naturalistic materialism, as ‘a product of history.’ The radical historicization of nature and the physical world, of ideas, and of finished thought in general, marks Labriola’s final accomplishment and principal claim for the philosophy of praxis; borrowing once again his terminology from Spaventa, he closed the fourth letter with the statement that nature

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could no longer be ‘a fact which was never in the making, an event which had no causes, an eternal entity which does not change, and still less the creature of one sole act. It is rather a process of creation in perpetuity.’59 What he meant by ‘creation in perpetuity’ was, indeed, what unfolded in history as a permanent capacity to generate ideas and concepts, to determine and objectify itself through the works of the spirit by means of the endeavor of ‘beings living together.’ Still, as we have noted, the nature of the rhythm of the dialectics remained indeterminate to the extent that the ‘act of thinking’ was provisionally left to coincide with ‘the rhythmic movements of real things,’ neither term being granted real priority over the other, nor their fundamental identity being established by theoretical argument. These issues were clarified in the letters (fifth, sixth, and ninth) in which Labriola, with Engels in mind, specified what was to be meant by metaphysics and formulated his critique of the use of the term. The term metaphysics as used by Sorel, whom the letters address, should be understood to mean the ‘general theory,’ or ‘theory of cognition,’ or even, ‘the general theory of the fundamental forms of thought.’60 Metaphysics, that is, was to be understood as the doctrine of ‘general concepts (categories) recurring in particular acts of thought’61 which no one ‘can fail to admit’; while for Engels their analysis fell within the scope of ‘formal logic and dialectics,’ Labriola ascribed them, with Herbart, to a specific domain of inquiry to be termed ‘elaboration of concepts.’ This was not to deny the legitimacy of speculative inquiry into the categories of thought— far from it: the object of Labriola’s critique was, rather, the fallacy of regarding conceptual categories as absolutes, independent of the act of thinking by which they came to be realized, and wholly divorced from historical process. That same metaphysical fallacy, as he saw it, was to be seen in the idealist conception, with its eternal categories insulated from the flux of becoming, in the Kantian and neo-Kantian a priori forms, and, more relevantly, in the work of the ‘vulgarizers’ of ‘Marxian sociology,’ who ‘render conditions, relations, interconnections of common economic life, into a certain fantastic something which dominates us.’62 Typically,

59 A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, cit., p. 703 (SP, p. 61). 60 Idem, pp. 703–704 (SP, p. 62). 61 Idem, p. 705 (SP, p. 64). 62 Idem, p. 711 (SP, p. 64 and p.72).

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that is, ‘the metaphysical way of thinking’ casts an ‘illusory projection’ whereby ‘relations become things, and by cogitating farther upon them these things become operative subjects,’63 in a manner that ‘has some things in common with the origin of myths.’64 With Marx’s critique of the ‘fetishism of capital’ as model, Labriola brought under the description of metaphysics, negatively understood, all abstract notions on the same grounds as Hegel, to whom he expressly refers, had distinguished the work of the ‘understanding, which defines opposites as such,’ from ‘reason, which arranges these opposites in ascending series’—a process not dissimilar, he also noted, from what Bruno had termed ‘The divine art of reconciling opposites,’ and Spinoza had captured in the formula ‘Every determination is a negation.’65 The critique of metaphysics, thus framed, gave rise to the further problems of accounting for its origin and of revising the way in which thought categories and the epistemic process are understood. The first problem received its most comprehensive treatment in the ninth letter, which is ostensibly devoted to early Christianity and the formation of its priesthood and ecclesiastical structure, but was so conceived as to explain the genesis of ideologies and the role of myths in holding an ideology in place. Interestingly, the description of the crucial passage at which ‘ideas arise out of material conditions of life’ was modeled more closely on Vico than Marx, as a transformation of ‘experienced facts of nature and social life,’ passing through ‘the crucible of some particular fantasy’ to become ‘persons, gods, angels, demons, and then … attributes, emanations, and ornaments of these same personifications, and finally into such abstract and metaphysical entities as The Logos, infinite Goodness, supreme Justice, etc.’66 The origin of ideologies, that is, resided in the poetic work of a creative fantasy quickened by primal needs, by fear, by an atavistic sense of vulnerability (encapsulated in Petronius’ ‘Primus in orbe deus fecit timor’),67 and by powerful impressions on the senses, but was equally an event taking place ‘in historical times.’ As with the instance of the origin of Christianity, its repertoire of myths and supporting theology, 63 Idem, p. 709 (SP, pp. 68–70). 64 Ibidem (SP, p. 69). 65 Ibidem (SP, p. 69). 66 Idem, p. 755 (SP, pp. 130–131). 67 Idem, p. 766 (SP, p. 144).

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had come about from the ‘transformation’ of the ‘elements of former periods,’ which under new material conditions were elaborated by the poetic imagination into new images, first, and finally into dogmas. Such is, he concluded, ‘the outline of the ideological development’68 : the general and perpetual process through which new fetishes and abstractions have come about over the course of history, to become the ‘data’ on which metaphysics feeds. It was to Vico, then, more than Marx or Engels, that Labriola turned at the point of his analysis in which, having defined the character of metaphysics, he went on to account for its genesis in history. But the influence of Vico (and of Spaventa, who had elaborated the fundamental Vicovian concepts before him) is also manifest in Labriola’s account of the operations of thought categories in the cognitive process, and not as metaphysical entities. This latter analysis represented the theoretical core of praxis philosophy as expounded in the fifth and sixth letter, and falls under three main headings. In the first place, he argued that the elements of our thought processes should be regarded as ‘functions ’ which ‘are valuable only in so far as … we are actively engaged in proceeding with new thought,’ and did not constitute fixed entities.69 Expressing himself in terms of functions, Labriola intended to emphasize the immanence of thought elements to the thought process, which, after Herbart, could only be separated from actual thinking by means of self-conscious abstraction, as elaboration of the attendant concept. His second heading, concerning the experimental nature of knowledge, which he identified as an essential aspect of the philosophy of praxis, was, however, more labored. The shift from a naive metaphysics (‘ingenuousness’) to ‘critical analysis’ could not be accomplished on the strength of ‘methodical observation’ alone (along the lines of a critique of reason in the Kantian sense, and mere inquiry into the genesis of concepts), but further required careful and technically accurate experiment,’70 in order to ‘produce artificially’ things which nature, and history too, appear to generate of their own mysterious accord. In a clearly Vicovian move, addressing the questions of ‘the thing itself’ and of the unknowable, he

68 Idem, p. 758 (SP, pp. 133–134). 69 Idem, p. 708 (SP, p. 69). 70 Idem, p. 705 (SP, pp. 64–65).

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observed that ‘we cannot think anything except things which we ourselves experience.’71 The domain of the thinkable, that is, was to be determined experimentally as knowledge of what is done, and not of that which is outwardly given. In the experimental character of knowledge, besides, resided the spring which had differentiated modern philosophy from ancient, finally leading to Marxism as its end result: ‘from this point of view, likewise, historical materialism is the outcome of a long development.’72 In the light of this principle, his claims that the philosophy of praxis was ‘the immanent philosophy of things about which people philosophize,’ and that ‘by dialectics we mean that rhythmic movement of understanding, which tries to reproduce the general outline of reality in the making,’ may also be taken to express the further meaning that ‘things,’ which the rhythm of thought mirrors and reproduces, are in fact the artificial product of thought itself, as the outcome of experimental practice. As Labriola wrote: Through the art of experiment things cease to be mere rigid objects of vision, because they are generated under our guidance. And thought ceases to be a hypothesis, or a puzzling forerunner of things, and becomes a concrete thing, because it grows with the things, and keeps on growing with them to the extent that we learn to understand them.73

This emphasis on the relation of knowledge to experience and experiment, whereby knowledge ‘grows’ with the production of things, lent a more distinctive definition to the philosophy of praxis, to the extent that thought, in reproducing the dialectical rhythm of being, made itself manifest in its own production: its work was not merely to reveal the genesis of ideologies, but to generate them anew so, as he wrote, as to ‘bring the past once more to life,’74 as illustrated by the case of early Christianity, which could not be fully understood without a complete examination of the process of its constitution. Finally, in the sixth letter, Labriola defined the philosophy ‘which historical materialism implies’ as the ‘tendency,’ and more specifically a

71 Idem, p. 707 (SP, pp. 65–67). 72 Idem, p. 706 (SP, p. 65). 73 Idem, p. 705 (SP, p. 60 and p. 65). 74 Idem, p. 757 (SP, p. 132).

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‘formal and critical tendency,’ ‘toward monism,’75 and carefully expanded on the meaning of the key terms of this third heading. ‘The word tendency,’ he stressed, indicated the genesis of the ‘thinkable,’ which is to say praxis, signifying that things are accomplished ‘by experiment,’ which leads to the ‘realization of the fact that things themselves are in the making.’76 ‘The word tendency,’ he explained, ‘expresses precisely that our mind has adapted itself to the conviction that everything can be conceived as in the making, that even the conceivable is but in the making, and that the process of growth is similar in character to continuity.’77 This was, in synthesis, the speculative core of the theory: the thinkable, which is to say being, had to be conceived as ‘genesis,’ which is to say praxis; as the experiment through which things are divested of their exterior appearance and reveal themselves as being in the making, as production. But Labriola coupled the word ‘tendency’ with ‘monism,’ toward which it was oriented; by which he meant, in the context of his argument, that science and philosophy, factual historical knowledge and the specific analysis of the abstract forms of thought, tended toward unity: ‘this tendency towards monism,’ he wrote, ‘is a tendency to combine science and philosophy, but at the same time also a continual scrutiny of the concrete thought used by us, and of its bearing.’ This concrete thought can be very well detached from its concrete object, as happens in logic, and in the general theory of cognition, which you call metaphysics.78 In this way, Labriola was carving out an area of legitimacy for philosophy, for the ‘elaboration of concepts,’ while at once emptying it of any pretension to concreteness, and ultimately regarding it as a provisional reflection on thought categories (on functions), destined to arrive at the awareness of its genesis, of the subsequent, and strictly speaking unreal, emergence of the constitutive act of praxis. The philosophy of praxis was, in effect condensed in what he called ‘experiment,’ in the act of production of the thinkable, in the practical labor of the thought process. Following in the footsteps of Spaventa, Labriola was not suggesting that the primary energy of praxis constituted, in some sense or other, the creation of being, but rather that thought had the ability to institute ever

75 Idem, p. 719 (SP, p. 84). 76 Idem, p. 720 (SP, pp. 84–87). 77 Idem, p. 719 (SP, p. 84). 78 Idem, pp. 721–722 (SP, p. 87).

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new objective forms in historical reality, thus enabling progress to spring from becoming, determination to emerge from being: the philosophy of praxis, the ‘kernel’ implicit in historical materialism, culminated in the notion that the thinkable is instituted, grows and becomes a concrete thing in the act of thinking, in the same way that ‘experiment’ produces ‘artificially’ the ‘things which nature produces out of itself.’

3

Critical Communism

The philosophy of praxis received its most thorough formulation in the third of Labriola’s essays on socialism, in which some of his early sources, notably Herbart and Spaventa, with his reform of the dialectics, were reworked and given accomplished form. But it is also true that the principles of the later theory had been anticipated in the two essays on historical materialism that had preceded the ten letters to Sorel, in 1895 and 1896, respectively. The first of them, In Memory of the Communist Manifesto (In memoria del manifesto dei comunisti), outlined the theory of critical communism (‘that is its true name, and there is none more exact for this doctrine’)79 in a denunciation of both natural right, with its rationalist cult of ‘the two goddesses of philosophic mythology, Justice and Equality,’80 and of economic determinism. And here, in a crucial passage of the essay, Labriola initiated the critique of the theoretical status of ‘historic factors’81 which was to become central to the two essays that followed. Historical materialism was defined in outline as an ‘organic conception of history,’ aiming not to interpret the past in terms of the economic factor, but, conversely, ‘to form an historic conception of

79 A. Labriola, In memoria del Manifesto dei comunisti, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici, Vol. 2, cit., p. 474 (MCM , p. 13). The search for a denomination that updated and overcame the shortcomings of ‘scientific socialism’ was noted and correctly emphasized (against the renewed use of it made by Bernstein) by Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, ed. F. Halliday, Monthly Review Press, New York, p. 106. Korsch’s interest in the work of Labriola is also attested in his notes (1934–1935) to the volume on Marx in the Modern Sociologists series published by Morris Ginsberg and Alexander Farquharson: see K. Korsch, Karl Marx, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1977, p. 253 and p. 269. Besides Giambattista Vico and Benito Mussolini, Labriola was the only Italian author to feature in these notes. 80 A. Labriola, In memoria del Manifesto dei comunisti, cit., p. 474 (MCM , p. 14). 81 Idem, p. 518 (MCM , p. 75).

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economics.’82 It was strictly in this sense that he presented Marx’s Manifesto as ‘a model philosophy of history’83 (then fully developed in Das Kapital ), though his use of the expression would later be the focus of debate and controversy. The pars destruens of the first essay put forth a clear critique of rationalism and determinism. It was equally clear about the timeframe within which critical work on Marxism was to be attempted, indicating, as the chief limit of Marx’s main work, that it was to be regarded ‘the last great book of the bourgeois economics,’ and ‘not the first book of critical communism.’84 A vast, uncharted space for theoretical elaboration therefore opened up, which Labriola viewed as setting an urgent task for the workers’ movement, both theoretical and practical. In the first essay, however, this work of elaboration was limited to a few points, some given in rather compressed form, which nonetheless made clear the lines of the overall argument. In the first place, he insisted on the point that critical communism, contrary to rationalism in all its forms, ‘is neither moralizer, nor preacher, nor herald, nor utopian,’ but ‘already holds the thing itself in its hands, and into the thing itself it has put its ethics and its idealism.’85 By saying Marxism ‘holds the thing itself in its hands,’ Labriola was pointing, first of all, to the conditions of historical necessity out of which the proletariat had been born, whether it was aware of the fact or not. But he also meant that it was the specific task of critical communism to bring that necessity into the order of consciousness, ‘that is to say, in the consciousness of the manner of its genesis.’86 ‘It was not enough,’ he explained, ‘to say that socialism was a result of history. It was also necessary to understand the intrinsic causes of this outcome,’87 through the critical work of investigating the stages of this necessary historical process, and illustrate its internal genesis. At the bottom of Labriola’s reasoning there was, therefore, a circular relation of necessity and understanding, of res and history, of the order of facts and their reconstruction. What remained uncertain was how the second term 82 Idem, p. 526 (MCM , pp. 85–86). 83 Idem, p. 490 and footnote on the same page (MCM , p. 35). 84 Idem, p. 526 (MCM , p. 86). 85 Idem, p. 517 (MCM , p. 73). 86 Idem, p. 483 (MCM , p. 27). 87 Idem, p. 484 (MCM , p. 27).

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in these relations came to act upon the first, and whether understanding (genesis) was to be regarded a constituent part of necessity itself or not; it remained uncertain, above all, whether or not political subjectivity was to be regarded an active force, capable of steering historical process in one direction or another. To the extent that critical communism indicated a ‘forecast,’ it bore no similarity to ‘the apocalypses’: it was not ‘chronological, it was not a prophecy nor a promise, but a morphological prevision’ capable of indicating the form (but not the content) society would assume through the liberation of the proletariat.88 In principle, the demands on ‘critical communism’ seemed to be satisfied by the explication of the circular relation of historical necessity and its genesis, where the latter term indicated an adequate understanding of the process that had led to the most mature phase of bourgeois society, and thereby also to its possible resolution. But this description of the theoretical task of Marxism opened to further lines of inquiry, which were to be elaborated in the second essay, beginning with the idea that ‘Man has made his own history … by creating his own conditions, that is to say, creating through his labor an artificial environment, by developing successively his technical aptitudes and by accumulating and transforming the products of his activity in this new environment.’89 Offering this account as the bottom line of the formation of society, Labriola had hit upon an essential point, in which historical necessity came to curve into the ulterior and more complex circle of technical creation, from which progress truly began, and the material conditions set by man upon himself, thereby also revealing himself at once as the maker of history and as an agent conditioned by his own freedom.

4

The Rhythm of History

In his second essay, Historical Materialism (Del materialismo storico. Dilucidazione preliminare), Labriola came to deal with theoretical issues much more problematic than in the previous, bringing him to the threshold of the system of understanding he would then consolidate as the philosophy of praxis. The essay opens with a denunciation of the ‘verbalism’ that appeared to be distinctive of Marxist scholasticism;

88 Idem, p. 497 (MCM , pp. 44–45). 89 Idem, p. 520 (MCM , p. 77).

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summing up the conclusions of the previous essay, he claimed, against such verbalism, that ‘the materialism of historical interpretation is nothing else than an attempt to reconstruct by thought with method the genesis and the complexity of the social life which develops through the ages.’90 He also restated the point, in a further section of the essay, that historical materialism so understood, ‘is no longer subjective criticism applied to things but the discovery of the self-criticism which is in the things themselves,’91 from which he concluded that ‘the solution of the existing antitheses is the proletariat, which the proletarians themselves know or do not know.’92 In this regard, the second essay confirmed the circular relation of necessity and understanding that was at the center of the theory of genesis to the extent of ruling out a possible scope for ‘subjective criticism,’ and, a fortiori, for a role of political agency in the institution of historical necessity—a dimension which, in the new perspective, was to be wholly regarded in its objectivity. From the consideration of the role of the state ‘as the presumed author of society,’ there emerged instead the ‘many relations [which] arise and develop by a necessary compact, by a tacit consent, or by violence endured and tolerated’; such that ‘as the art of acting in a desired direction,’ politics ‘is a comparatively small part of the general movement of history.’ This was rather to be understood as ‘the reign of the unconscious,’93 by which was meant ‘a succession of habits, customs, compacts, etc.,’ far outweighing the exercise of reason and the will. In this frame of things, he concluded, ‘politics, which has been taken as an explanation, has itself become something to explain.’94 The analysis of the question of genesis was, however, now complicated by an added dimension of epistemological critique, with a focus on historical narratives, which, in Marxist terms, ultimately meant the critique of ideologies and, in general, of thought categories. The problem, as it began to take shape in his mind, was that there seemed to be no ‘consciousness’ of ‘historic events’ except ‘through some ideological envelope,’ and that ignorance even among ‘the very actors and workers of the

90 A. Labriola, Del materialismo storico. Dilucidazione preliminare, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici, Vol. 2, cit., p. 535 (HM , p. 99). 91 Idem, p. 583 (HM , p. 169). 92 Idem, p. 584 (HM , p. 170). 93 Idem, p. 593 (HM , pp. 183–184). 94 Idem, p. 594 (HM , p. 184).

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historic events’ was due to ‘history itself … put[ting] on these veils.’95 In the face of this problem, and consistently with the method of his investigation, ‘economic categories’ could only represent ‘a guiding thread,’96 capable of explaining ‘all the complex manifestations of history’97 only ‘in the last analysis,’ as Engels had written. Whether fully consistent or not with the letter of Engels’ writings, this reading inspired Labriola to conceive the problem of ‘genesis’ in the terms of ‘an altogether unitary principle of historic interpretation’ vis-à-vis the complex of spiritual forms represented by ‘laws, customs, thoughts, sentiments, ideologies’: this was a task that could in no way be viewed as the work of ‘a simple mechanism,’ for the reason that ‘the process of derivation and mediation [from the substructure to all the rest] is very complicated, often subtle, tortuous and not always legible.’98 With the critique of ‘verbalism’ as its starting point, that is, Labriola came to conceive the scope of historical interpretation as extending to the entire ideological process: not just (and, upon consideration, not so much) in the terms of the relation between the ideology, broadly understood, and the economic substructure, as of the part the ideologies concretely played in ‘the complicated gearing of society.’ Emphasis on the overall process of mediation taking place in the undivided unity of history is the most significant contribution Labriola made to the theory of historical materialism. Throughout the essay Labriola insisted on the importance of not ‘separating the accident from the substance, the appearance from the reality, the phenomenon from the intrinsic kernel,’ because the work is ‘to understand the interlacings and the complexus in its inner connection and its outer manifestations; to descend from the surface to the foundation, and then to return from the foundation to the surface.’99 Against the suggestion that spiritual forms could be reduced to the economic substructure, which would have made ‘men appear … like so many puppets,’100 he made the case for ‘understanding’ the historical process in its totality, in a process that involved 95 Idem, p. 539 (HM , p. 105). 96 Idem, p. 560 (HM , p. 135). 97 Idem, p. 543 (HM , p. 111). 98 Idem, p. 571 (HM , pp. 151–152). 99 Idem, p. 624 (HM , pp. 228–230). 100 Ibidem (HM , p. 228).

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working from the structure to the superstructure and back from the superstructure to the structure. At the core of this reflection there was not, therefore, the economic order in itself, nor was Labriola particularly concerned with the more specific problems of political economy: there was, rather, the problem of ideologies and their origin and function, or, more generally, the problem of abstraction, which in his language was identical with that of the historical factors which had been evoked in the first essay and would shortly reappear in the third essay. In the second essay, in a move rather characteristic of Labriola’s way of thinking, the problem of abstraction emerged from the ‘need for graphic narration’101 in historical accounts, which is to say from the aesthetic and artistic dimension of historiography, in which the historian is inevitably and necessarily moved to substantiate the diverse constituents of his narrative and transform them into autonomous faculties, categories, and entities. Such ‘empirical concepts’102 were a ‘point of departure in the confused spectacle which human events present to him who wishes to narrate them,’103 and, as such, not just legitimate but indispensable. As long as they were employed to serve as ‘title, category or index,’104 they could be regarded as ‘something which is much less than the truth, but much more than simple error’105 : intermediate notions that were at once expedient for practical purposes, but liable to mislead if due attention to their genesis as historical products was not paid (‘these factors themselves arise at a given moment’) and the complex relations of ‘reciprocal action’ holding between them in reality were ignored.106 In the sixth chapter of the essay, ‘historic factors’ were seen to result not so much from the economic structure, but to qualify as interferences in the narrative work of the historian, as artistic and aesthetic side effects. Granted, ‘the only permanent and sure fact, that is to say, the only datum’ resided in the ‘determined social form,’ out of which ‘the different analytical disciplines’ arise by abstraction.107 But the shift was to the epistemic 101 Idem, p. 565 (HM , p. 144). 102 Idem, p. 566 (HM , p. 145). 103 Idem, p. 570 (HM , p. 151). 104 Ibidem (HM , p. 151). 105 Ibidem (HM , p. 151). 106 Idem, p. 568 (HM , p. 147). 107 Idem, p. 569 (HM , p. 149).

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import of the interaction between those abstractions and the historian’s narrative, as they operated on him in his efforts to make narrative sense of the total mediation of the superstructure. The crucial development in the theory of factors came in the eighth chapter of the second essay, where Labriola distinguished two levels of abstraction: on the one hand, politics, law, and morality (which is to say the practical domain of the activity of the spirit) were determined ‘in the first place and directly’ by ‘the economic structure of society,’ as ‘first stage’ products; on the other hand, ‘the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, religion and science’ came to be determined ‘in the second place’ and ‘in an indirect fashion’ as ‘second degree’ products.108 Once the social structure has gained definition, he explained, ‘there, always and necessarily, appear premeditated designs, political views, plans of conduct, systems of law and finally maxims and general and abstract principles,’ and only afterwards ‘the sciences and arts, philosophy and learning, and history as a literary fashion of production.’109 The sequence was staged in three moments: first, the concrete moment of the social structure, then the practical, and finally the theoretical, which reached its endpoint and fulfillment with philosophy and historiography. But the main implication of this sequential process was that the further removed were the spiritual forms from their socio-economic origin, the more irreducible they were to it, gaining in autonomy and independence, and feeding on their own intrinsic dynamics of mediation. When it came to second-degree products, in short, the interdiction against reducing factors to their structural foundation, as was the wont of scholastic determinism, was all the more valid: while ‘the facts of the legal-political order,’ he explained, ‘are a true and proper projection of economic conditions,’ with products of the second degree ‘the mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated.’110 The cursory treatment Labriola gave of the social products of the first and second degree was consistent, we might say, with the general drift of his argument. Not only were politics and law lowered in rank to almost immediate reflections of the economic structure and class antagonism;

108 Idem, p. 605 (HM , p. 201). 109 Idem, p. 552 (HM , p. 125). 110 Idem, p. 616 (HM , p. 217).

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morality too was seen to spring from common custom and to reflect volitions determined by needs, conditioned by social and economic states of affairs, with no active part to be played by ‘free will,’—in its turn the invention of ‘catechists’ and ‘preachers of morality.’111 A more complex picture emerged from the analysis of the arts, science, and philosophy, with regard to which the mediation was ‘very complicated,’112 to the extent that philosophy could be regarded in the dual function of ‘a generic anticipation of the problems which science has still to elaborate specifically,’ or, on the other hand, of ‘a summary and a conceptual elaboration of the results at which the sciences have already arrived.’113 There was, in this understanding of philosophy, the persistent influence of Herbart, leading him to seek the autonomy of philosophy from the empirical sciences in the elaboration of concepts, and in the anticipation or elaboration of scientific findings. But the distinction between social structure and products of the first and second degree could already be regarded, if not as a system, certainly as the germ of a full-blown critique of understanding, of an appraisal of spiritual categories and forms as resulting from the complex dialectics of the concrete and abstract, of the unity of history and the emergence of historical factors, of titles and indices the status of which was suspended between truth and error, at once as necessary as they were epistemically dubious. At the basis of the distinction of factors of the first degree (politics, law, and morality) from factors of the second degree (art, religion, science, and thus philosophy and historiography) in a sequence of practice followed by theory, there remained the concrete fact of social structure as root and foundation of those abstractions. In accordance with the method of his research, Labriola returned to the issue of the beginning of human history in order to illustrate the character of the social structure. This discussion supplied the context for his most decisive critique of Darwinism, which he interpreted as a form of anti-humanism founded on the general thesis of a continuity between natural history and human history, between becoming and progress, with no leaps and bounds. While the merit of Darwinism had been to bring down ‘the last citadel of the metaphysical fixity of

111 Idem, pp. 609–612 (HM , pp. 206–211). 112 Idem, p. 616 (HM , p. 217). 113 Idem, p. 615 (HM , p. 216).

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things,’ seeking to interpret human history, in all its peculiarity, as evolutionary struggle, and so reducing the artifice to the natural background out of which it had arisen was an ‘abuse of analogy.’114 And while the influence of Herbart could be plainly noted in the articulation of spiritual forms into orders of abstraction, here the influence came from Spaventa, elements of whose teachings, combined with Marx (and Morgan), were laying the foundations of the philosophy of praxis. As a matter of fact, he explained, ‘the specialization of human life’ which marks the beginning of history, coincided with ‘the use of many … artificial means,’115 which is to say the emergence of the ‘artificial basis,’ provided by technology as a response to natural needs. Technology was the foundation of labor, and labor of all social and economic structure—with all of the inequality and struggles that go with it from the start. He thus concluded: Historical science has, then, as its first and principal object the determination and the investigation of this artificial foundation, its origin, its composition, its changes and its transformations. To say that all this is only a part and a prolongation of nature, is to say a thing which by its too abstract and too generic character has no longer any meaning.116

In his critique of Darwinism Labriola identified the truly distinctive trait of human history in the nexus of artifice and nature, which, in the terms of his categories, was the relation of progress and becoming or, otherwise (in the terms that characterized Spaventa’s reflections), of thought and being. Man became detached from his purely animal nature when, in response to his own needs, he applied his labor onto matter and, instead of replicating the natural order of things, he prevailed upon it and give it its own form: the natural order of becoming was transcended with the onset of progress, as an essential aspect of human history. This was, ultimately, the principle of praxis, as it was to emerge in full in the third essay. But the relation of technique and nature, initially merely regarded as marking the beginning of history, took on a more radical aspect in the tenth chapter, where it came to encapsulate the eternal dialectic of life, of man’s constant engagement in overcoming nature, never fully banished

114 Idem, p. 545 (HM , pp. 114–115). 115 Idem, p. 547 (HM , p. 116). 116 Idem, p. 548 (HM , pp. 118–119).

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and always resurgent in the human spirit. Here is where Labriola’s philosophical reflection hit upon the fundamental point. Human beings, he explained, even though they be social beings, ‘do not cease to live also in nature,’ because ‘nature is always the immediate subsoil of the artificial groundwork, and it is the environment which contains us.’117 And given that all humans are bound to die, are born ‘men or women,’ are ‘dominated by the instinct of generation,’ and bear in their temperament ‘certain special conditions’ which ‘constitute what is called the race,’ which are all things that ‘education in the broad sense of the word, or social compact, can modify, it is true, within certain limits, but which they can never suppress,’ he concluded that nature ‘continues in our social life’ and its effects ‘never fail to reflect themselves in the products of art and of religion,’ so as to add ‘to the difficulties of a realistic and complete interpretation of both.’ Technique (‘the industrial arts’), he concluded, has ‘put between us social animals, and nature, certain intermediaries which modify, set aside or remove the natural influences; but it has not for all that destroyed the efficacy of these, and we continually feel their effects.’118 In the age of technique, no different than in the early stages of history, the fundamental dialectic was still at work that saw human beings involved in shaping nature through the primary act of labor, which is to say praxis, without being able to depart from it. That act (the form of which was labor, praxis, thought) captured in essence the historical nature of man, as only humans were possessed of the faculty to convert being (which is to say nature and the natural process of becoming) into the progress of civilization. The rhythm of progress, then, became manifest in this objective process—one determined by neither ‘critical choice’ nor ‘reasoning desire,’ but ‘through necessity,’119 as nature and material needs dictated. The process was also unconscious, in the sense that it obeyed no voluntary and rational ‘design’ (as political art and moral preaching might have it). Progress resided in man’s faculty to respond through labor to the challenges posed by nature—labor being the only instrument essentially belonging to him. This also explains Labriola’s constant criticism of all forms of historic finalism; and therefore also of any philosophy of

117 Idem, pp. 618–619 (HM , pp. 220–221). 118 Idem, p. 619 (HM , p. 221). 119 Idem, p. 551 (HM , p. 123).

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history, if it was understood as ‘a new philosophy of systematic history, that is to say, history conceived as schemes or tendencies and designs.’120 Human progress was guaranteed by praxis as the means for rising above the natural order, not by any rational aim nor by some common essence in which its lines of development were inscribed (man ‘has no privileges of origin’).121 And this explains, further, Labriola’s distinctive and problematic framing of progress, to the extent that, as he wrote, the idea ‘always implies judgments of estimation’122 ; and while it may serve ‘as a guiding thread and a measure to give a meaning to the historical processus,’123 it is not inherent in the objective order of historical development, and is equally accompanied by more or less significant forms of ‘retrogression.’ In a novel adaptation of Spaventa’s theory of the circulation of European thought,124 Labriola indicated as evidence of ‘partial and relative retrogression’ the variable course of nations (something that ‘has been produced several times in history, as Italy has exemplified for centuries’). But retrogression also assumed a distinctive form in the persistence of social antagonism as the internal law of bourgeois society and of all societies divided into classes. Labriola, in short, did not see conflict as a factor of progress but of retrogression, in the specific sense that the cosmopolitan tendency of capitalism, inasmuch as it rested on competition, nationalism, and warfare, proved incapable of realizing itself in full and of unifying the human family.125 For these reasons, he concluded, ‘the movement of history, taken in general, appears to us as it were oscillating … unfolding on a line often interrupted, and at certain moments it seems to return upon itself, sometimes it stretches out, removing itself far from the point of departure:in an actual zigzag.’126 Between the unifying cosmopolitanism of modern capitalism, which was deeply rooted in modernity, and the conflicts among nations there emerged an oscillatory movement, in which progressive and regressive tendencies coexisted, almost canceling each other out, without reaching a point of equilibrium. 120 Idem, p. 554 (HM , p. 121 Idem, p. 546 (HM , p. 122 Idem, p. 628 (HM , p. 123 Idem, p. 631 (HM , p.

127). 115). 235). 239).

124 Idem, p. 630 (HM , p. 239). 125 Idem, pp. 632–633 (HM , p. 235). 126 Idem, p. 634 (HM , p. 243).

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5

Labriola’s Later Writings

As we have seen, Labriola had completed the third essay in the early days of December 1897, when he sent Croce the translation of the excerpts from Engels that formed the appendix.127 Further additions to the French edition (the Postscriptum against Croce and the Preface against Sorel) were composed between September and December 1898, as a response to the explosion, in April, of the so-called ‘crisis of Marxism,’ followed shortly afterwards (in November) by Kautsky’s violent attack on Bernstein. Labriola responded to these events with great animus, not only to prevent his own critical stance from being mixed up with the purported crisis, and mainly as a response to the clear perception that the European socialist movement as a whole had now come to a standstill and was entering a phase of decline.128 So it was that Labriola became concerned with the themes of the crisis and decline of the present period (not of Marxism), and was driven to develop his former intuitions regarding the philosophy of praxis and re-examine the theory as well as the interpretation of historical matters. His state of disquiet is documented by the fervent, even angry style of his later letters and by the flurry of new work projects, which accompanied the rapid succession of events as much as the downward turn in his outlook, toward the gloomy and pessimistic. Chief among his projects remained the idea of a fourth essay, though none was ever written. The piece of writing which comes closest to such intent is the fragment Da un secolo all’altro (From one century to the next ), which is representative of only one facet, however relevant, of Labriola’s later reflections. The fragment reworks materials from the first five lessons of a course Labriola held between November 1900 and May 1901—a work he carried out in the summer of 1901, further drawing on previous lesson materials dating back to the years 1894–1897. What came of it is a forty-sheet manuscript, which Labriola himself, in a frontispiece prepared for Loescher, his publisher, indicated with the Roman numeral ‘IV.’ Both Croce, who had it published for the first time in 1906,129 and Luigi Dal

127 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 830. 128 Idem, p. 882 (to Kautsky) and p. 890 (to Bernstein). 129 A. Labriola, Scritti varii editi e inediti di filosofia e politica, cit., p. ix.

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Pane, who reissued it in 1925130 regarded this fragment as constituting, to all intents and purposes, his fourth essay. Truth is, as we shall see, there never was a fourth essay in the proper sense, so that it would be more appropriate to interpret as final opus his whole late legacy of letters, articles, and lectures, which span the five or six last years of his output. To a fourth essay on historical materialism Labriola began to refer as early as December 1897 in his correspondence with Croce: ‘I will write to you later,’ he noted, ‘[…] of my future fourth essay.’131 To Croce’s inquiries, he responded over the two following months that he was working on the relationship between ‘historical narrative and historical materialism,’132 a perspective he condensed in the title ‘Sociology, the philosophy of history, and historical inquiry.’133 In March, however, he came to doubt the merits of the work, partly due to the understandable difficulty (one he had always experienced) of merging his lesson notes into running discourse as befitted a book: ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘whether or not I am fit to collect my thoughts, ideas, and such things into a new volume.’134 As Sorel sparked off the debate on the crisis of Marxism with the article in La Critica Sociale,135 the controversy heightened inside the German social democratic movement, and his pessimism in political outlook deepened, Labriola got further distracted from the task; still, he did inform Kautsky and Bernstein, between October and November, that he had ‘roughly finished drafting’ his fourth essay, to be published as ‘Historical narrative and historical materialism,’ and that it was, in fact, ‘practically finished.’136 Such had been, then, his first plan for a fourth essay, which we may speculate drew on materials from his lessons on the philosophy of history

130 A. Labriola, Saggi intorno alla concezione materialistica della storia. 4. Da un secolo all’altro. Considerazioni retrospettive e presagi, ricostruzione di L. Dal Pane, Cappelli, Bologna 1925, ricostruzione di L. Dal Pane, Cappelli, Bologna 1925. 131 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 840. 132 Idem, p. 845. 133 Idem, p. 849. 134 Idem, p. 857. 135 G. Sorel, ‘La crisi del socialismo scientifico’, in La Critica sociale, 1 May 1898,

pp. 134–141. 136 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 883 and p. 891.

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held in 1896–1897 and in previous years.137 But a few months later, on November 27, 1900, he made an oblique hint at Croce of a further ‘publication’ on a different topic: ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘of writing to you about a publication of mine, but I won’t for the time being. It is something I still need to think about.’138 As a matter of fact, this project dovetailed with the course that was about to begin on November 30, on the subject of the new century in relation to the old. In September 1901, having finished teaching, he set down to write the forty pages of the fragment Da un secolo all’altro; but soon found himself ‘stranded,’ as he confessed to Croce, and gave up on the enterprise: ‘I had come here [to Castel Gandolfo] with the intention of producing a book out of last year’s course (features of the nineteenth century). I wrote about forty pages, but then got stranded due to intellectual fatigue. In effect, I should reverse the perspective and write: the world at the start of the new century.’139 And a few months later, as his illness worsened, he again wrote he had given up on the attempt: ‘In September I started writing a book based on my course on the nineteenth century. I wrote about 40 pages. But I was soon taken with such grapho- and biblio-phobia that I could no longer bear the thought.’140 Although his draft title page for Loescher announced a fourth essay,141 his confidence in the idea died off in just a few days of starting to write. So it was that approximately one year later, in October 1902, Labriola announced ‘an entirely new fourth booklet ’ to his friend Giuseppe Rossi. This was to be published by Loescher in December as Polemica socialista or Appunti polemici and was advertised in the October 25 issue of La Tribuna and on the back cover of the second edition of the Saggi which also came out that year. We may surmise this was a new project dealing with the crisis of socialism and the recent controversies on Marxism, but no trace of it survives; it is quite possible Labriola never went beyond a first attempt, if ever he wrote any of it. All that we know is the idea of the fourth essay changed at least three

137 See the transcripts in A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., pp. 213–

239. 138 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 960. 139 Idem, p. 969. See also the letter of August 14 to Carlo Fiorilli in A. Labriola,

Carteggio. v. 1899–1904, edited by S. Miccolis, Bibliopolis, Napoli 2006, p. 222. 140 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 970. 141 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., p. 297.

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times in five years, but was never realized, from which follows there never was a fourth essay in the sense of a finished, cogent text along the lines of the three that preceded it. But again, we might argue the fourth essay is in fact made up of all of the fragments produced around that time, and that these, taken together, enable us to appreciate that there were decisive developments in the philosophy of praxis Labriola had originally devised and presented as representing the ‘kernel’ or ‘pith’ of historical materialism. The actual phrase itself, philosophy of praxis, was not again enunciated by Labriola, although it did, in essence, resurface in discourse whenever the discussion touched upon the fundamental principles of historical materialism; as in the instance of a January 1901 lecture, when, prompted by the audience, Labriola went over the fundamentals of his theory, and underlined that the distinction between Marxism and the Darwinian ‘struggle for existence’ hinged on labor, i.e., on praxis, the importance of which had been recognized by Vico well before Marx: ‘labor as a discriminant,’ he explained, ‘but not individual labor. Rather, the labor of associates—from blood relatives to locals.’142 So while praxis still represented the ‘pith’ of historical materialism, and was realized historically as labor, the phrase as such was as good as banned from his lessons and writings, and sometimes replaced by complex turns of phrase or proximal categories. It is possible that Giovanni Gentile’s critique of praxis, expounded in an essay he sent to Labriola on August 30, 1899,143 weighed somewhat on Labriola’s later use of terminology, although he never responded to Gentile on the subject, whether publicly or in private correspondence. Even when, between 1903 and 1904, it was Gentile who in turn came under his fire, Labriola still refrained from addressing that particular essay, although he and his third essay were its principal subject matter. Yet it is hard to suppose he had not read it, nor then pondered it carefully. It is instead likely that it provoked much self-doubt in him and at least inspired him to revise his theory, even if he was never again granted the ease of mind to embark on such a project. Most of his remaining energies, besides, were being spent on his teaching, where the subtleties of that particular discussion would have been out of place. The discussion did, nevertheless, take place, somewhat disguised across the range

142 Idem, p. 154. 143 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 939.

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of his meditations on history. There are elements of the discussion, for instance, in his lecture of March 28, 1903—a defense of the denomination of historical materialism particularly targeted against Alfonso Asturaro, whose inaugural lecture for the course in general sociology at the University of Genoa had just been published.144 Without explicitly citing his source, Labriola went over the argument expressed by Marx in the Thesen über Feuerbach and restated, with great philological accuracy, its substantial critique Feuerbach’s old-style materialism, which could as well apply to Italian positivism (a degenerate school, he found, ‘but for one exception, and that is Angiulli’).145 It is very likely that this clarification was really aimed at Gentile, for whose benefit he underlined that the philosophy of praxis, in the light of Marx’s Thesen, in no way implied the rejection of the materialistic conception of history, but the construction of a radically new materialism, as distinct both from Feuerbach’s and from the ‘biological materialism’ of the previous centuries. Labriola, however, never openly confronted Gentile, nor did he address the more specific problems that his younger critic had raised regarding the philosophy of praxis. His debate with Croce, instead, was a different matter, and continued (beyond the critical remarks of the Postscriptum) on issues of history and historiography, on the subjects of which Labriola further developed his analysis, refining the argument of the three essays and covering new ground. The initial project of a fourth essay, which in October–November 1898 he had deemed ‘roughly finished,’ came to definition several years later in the form of his February-May 1903 lectures and of the fragment (Storia, filosofia della storia, sociologia e materialismo storico) that resulted from it. Taking Croce’s dissertation on art and science for the Accademia Pontaniana (1893) as his point of departure, Labriola closely examined the constituent terms of the label philosophy of history, which not only had got him into a controversy with Croce but had also stirred a parallel dispute between Croce and Gentile, and redefined it. First of all, he discriminated two senses of the word history; which was, on the one hand, ‘the domain of occurrences’ (res gestae), and on the other ‘the domain of literary means employed in 144 A. Asturaro, Il materialismo storico e la sociologia generale: prelezione al corso di sociologia generale dell’anno 1902–1903 nell’Università di Genova, Libreria moderna, Genova 1903. 145 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., pp. 255–257; Id., Storia, filosofia della storia, sociologia e materialismo storico, cit., pp. 807–808.

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seeking to account for them’ (historia rerum).146 From such premise (which had served as introduction to the 1902–1903 course),147 he drew two conclusions. To begin with, the distinction substantiated the claim that historical materialism, as he conceived it, left untouched the epistemological level of historia rerum, ‘the philosophy of inquiry and the art of narration,’ and concerned itself with only ‘the notion of fact and occurrence,’148 i.e., with the configuration of historical res (with the social structure, that is; with the action of ‘collective forces’). ‘But the way we understand history a parte objecti,’ he wrote, ‘has changed, because our fundamental notion of man has changed, because we have paved the way for reconnecting history with prehistory and prehistory with theology, because we have replaced the concept of individual genius with the plain notion of collective forces, and, in other words, we have identified the formation and development of societies as the true seat of agency in history.’149 To this extent, Croce’s distinction between art and science (and Pasquale Villari’s discussion of the distinction) was, so to speak, relativized, because both terms came under the domain of historia rerum (as the ‘philosophy of inquiry’ and the ‘art of narration’) and therefore presupposed historical becoming (res gestae), as their objective basis, which in turn they could anticipate, as forerunners, or follow as subsequent abstractions: ‘and now that we have acquired,’ he concluded ‘an understanding of the multiform process that is history in the objective sense, it is absurd to wonder whether it is art or science, because indeed it is the basis of all art and all science. The arts and sciences are but moments, aspects, etc. of the development of man.’150 But the crucial element in the 1903 course was the new definition given to the philosophy of history, as Croce duly noted upon publishing the fragments in 1906.151 Instead of defining Marxism as the ‘ultimate 146 A. Labriola, Storia, filosofia della storia, sociologia e materialismo storico, cit., p. 794. 147 See A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., pp. 245 ff . 148 A. Labriola, Storia, filosofia della storia, sociologia e materialismo storico, cit.,

pp. 794–795. 149 Idem, p. 797. 150 Idem, p. 796. 151 According to Croce, Labriola’s new considerations altered ‘the view given in the

introductory lecture, in which the philosophy of history included the question of method, which is to say historiography, i.e., history seen a parte subiecti [from the angle of the

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and definitive philosophy of history’ (a formulation Croce found inconsistent with the theoretical structure of the essays), a new framing of the philosophy of history came out of the critique of the historian’s pretense at ‘impartiality’ and delusion of being able to stand ‘outside of any particular viewpoint.’152 True though it was that historical materialism sharply emphasized the domain of historical res, this objective slant could not have been asserted without the prior ‘qualification’ of facts on the strength of subjective ‘values’153 which, collectively regarded, ‘may be inscribed within the general, complex idea of progress.’154 The view that the historical object was predicated on ‘value’ and that the task of a philosophy of history could be narrowed down to the determination of the object entailed, at least in part, a rethinking of the idea of philosophy as ‘the self-criticism which is in the things themselves’ set down in his previous essays. By value (exemplified, most radically, in the idea of ‘progress’) Labriola meant neither the insight of an individual nor a principle of the faculty of reason. Value captured, rather, the overarching significance of a historical period, a global meaning, that ‘active’ element of which, as we shall see, he had spoken in the 1901 fragment Da un secolo all’altro. This is where the threads of Labriola’s later period tie in together and his considerations on the status of history converge with those about the ‘century’ and the decline of the ‘bourgeois era.’ With this in mind, the fragment Da un secolo all’altro reads not just as an elegant writing on history, but a decisive philosophical contribution. The long work of deconstruction of calendar time, of the chronological conception of history, aiming to redefine the notion of ‘century’ as an ‘interiorized date’155 ranging between the French Revolution and the ‘historical sub-period’ beginning in 1870,156 was at once a ‘liberation from a nightmare,’ from the ‘inherited prejudices […] which have stood

subject],’ (ibid., p. 800). But the issue was in fact more complex still, and touched on the meaning attributed to the philosophy of history in the three essays on historical materialism. 152 Idem, p. 798. 153 Idem, p. 801. 154 Idem, p. 806. 155 Idem, p. 823. 156 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., p. 192, p. 194 and p. 211.

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in the way of a frank and realistic appraisal of human history,’157 as well as a more profound investigation into the ‘concept of time’158 ; on how the modern age had at last come to ‘transfigure’ chronology into an idea of its own, which ultimately signified ‘a belief in the right to progress.’159 With the chronological view set aside, the long process of acquisition of the ‘subjectivity, or relativity, of time’ which went from Bruno to Galilei, from Newton to Kant, and had climaxed with the Revolutionary calendar of 1792 became fully clear.160 Likewise with the attempt, abandoned in 1806, to take possession of historical time, to reclaim the ‘belief in progress’ not as a physical or cosmological process, but as a concerted effort toward the liberation of man: ‘from life as merely experienced,’ he explained in the concluding paragraph, we have come to the understanding of life, and to some extent to planning it in our minds, and so informing it in some measure through our will. From a process we only traversed or proceeded along, we have come to a process that is evaluated, foreseen, desired, coveted, etc., which is to say to the belief in progress. Who will now want to regard as superfluous my reference to the common saying; or who will deny [that] the sum of these ideas constitutes the philosophy of socialism?161

Value, to which he had pointed as the root of the philosophy of history in the lessons of 1903, was already contained in the modern conception of time as ‘belief in progress.’ Still, the Revolutionary calendar had not lasted, which proved that modernity did not follow a linear process; instead, it involved advancements and obstructions, which had to be accounted for. The problem of decline was, in fact, the most intractable: ‘decline?,’ he asked in a fragment from 1894, ‘So does it occur? the illusion of progress. Formation of the Modern World.’162 The question he had posed at least as early as 1894 became most pressing as the crisis of Marxism exploded and hopes of a rapid advance of the socialist movement declined, provoking a much more pessimistic turn in his analysis. 157 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro, cit., p. 849. 158 Idem, p. 830. 159 Ibidem. 160 Idem, p. 846. 161 Idem, p. 851. 162 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., p. 222.

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If ‘revolution’ meant the affirmation of progress, it was then necessary to account for the ‘obstructions,’ explain the recurrent and (at last) prevailing defeats. Not only in the lessons he presented to his students as his ‘inventive course,’163 but far into his latter meditation, the century as object of speculation (neither ‘receptacle,’ nor ‘content,’ nor ‘frame,’164 but spirit of an era) became the theme of an inquiry into the dynamics of progress and decline. Alone among European socialist thinkers, Labriola peered into the heart of the crisis, into the causes of the decline of the movement, and sought to get into focus the meaning of the ‘crisis of Marxism’ that was now stirring the theoretical debate. The ‘liberal era’ (which he identified as the period between the French Revolution and the ‘sub-period’ that had begun in 1870) struck him, first of all, as the era of a civilization that was ‘no longer national or Mediterranean, but international; interoceanic and pan-oceanic, in fact.’165 Its most outstanding achievement, in fact, had been interdependence on a global level, and it was at this new level that the germ had developed that now needed to be examined. As the ‘final’ and ‘farthest reaching’ ‘phase of the bourgeois era,’166 interdependence heralded decline, not progress. Raising competition to a global scale,167 electing ‘the politics of conquest, supremacy, and subjection’168 as system of international rule, the ‘capitalistic-bourgeois expansion’ had favored war over ‘peaceful competition,’ reneged on its early promises of progress and democracy, and come to the ‘negation of itself.’ As the crisis set in, so did the germ of ‘mysticism,’ which already infected the culture169 and portended dark times to come: the liberal era first announced itself with poetic impetus, and its proud ideology often inspired multiform utopias. Hence the singular attraction and embarrassment for anyone who studies the French Revolution: because its ideology, which was so short-lived and ended in the negation of itself,

163 Idem, p. 133. 164 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro, cit., p. 823. 165 Idem, p. 825. 166 Idem, p. 841. 167 Idem, p. 825. 168 Idem, p. 827. 169 Idem, p. 830.

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makes us mistrustful of judging the importance of historical facts, from the views, opinions and theories of those who appointed themselves authors of those facts. To communicate to the whole human race the same ideas (I am reminded of Condorcet) – to raise all nations to the rank of free political entities – to replace war among them with peaceful competition – to make citizens of all men and erase within them all trace of subjection; – but where would I finish, if I started repeating all of the traditional catechism of democracy? And where has democracy succeeded, albeit roughly, outside of tiny Switzerland, so secluded from the great intrigue of history?170

The ‘great intrigue of history’ consisted in the prevalence of ‘obstructions’ over the impetus which the bourgeoisie had brought to modernity at the start of its most mature phase: ‘imperialism,’ he said, ‘is the watchword.’171 The ‘crisis of Marxism’ coincided, thus, with the crisis of an era, and that was the ‘intrigue’ into which European socialism had also fallen. Seeking to account for the fact, Labriola introduced the complex distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ elements, which eventually served to explain the general causes of the decline. On one level, the two categories applied to differences between peoples and nations within the new framework of interdependence: ‘in the rapid cycle of its techno-capitalist expansion,’172 the bourgeoisie had created large areas of backwardness, replicating worldwide the paradigm of the age of conquest. But the ‘passive’ element of nations also set the strongest obstacle against the ‘poetic impetus’ of its original ideology, which was the realization, on a global scale, of the democratic liberation from ‘all trace of subjection.’ The distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ soon acquired a more general sense, indicating not only the persistent division among world nations, but the confines within European civilization (Western and Eastern) and, above all, the hierarchies within the civil order, separating town and country,173 the ‘proletariat and the bourgeoisie,’ ‘science and religion,’ ‘church and state,’ and so on.174 More generally, the ‘passive’ element could be identified with the ‘vestiges of the past’175 surviving into ‘our 170 Idem, p. 826. 171 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., p. 177. 172 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro, cit., p. 826. 173 Idem, p. 828. 174 Idem, p. 850. 175 Idem, p. 832.

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societies’ as the ‘prime obstruction.’ The ‘active’ element, conversely, with its capacity to give rise to the ‘modern features of a society,’176 constituted ‘the raison d’être of socialism in its broadest meaning.’ Socialism, he explained, ‘is presently an active reality in so far as it is a sign of the current struggle; but every time it assumes a vision of the future as criterion and measure of the present, then again it becomes utopia.’177 In this analysis, interdependence was the central concept and middle term, being the terminal point of the past ‘century’ from which the open problems of the new descended. In this key, his most fervent remarks on the history of Marxism were devoted to the International and to its failure, partly blamed on the ‘evil genius of Bakunin,’178 partly on the shallow capacity for insight among the socialists. This was the point of convergence of the different lines of his research, which on the theoretical level had come to address historical process, progress, and decline. Going over the themes of the third essay, Labriola now collocated the Italian question on this plane, resuming once again Spaventa’s theory of the circulation of European thought and of precursory understanding,179 and yet accentuating the global perspective he had since embraced. He made it clear at once that he did not intend to abandon ‘the universal point of view to which I now squarely adhere,’ and which had enabled him ‘to cross the boundaries and limits of national conscience without preparatory reasoning and without transitions.’180 All of the analysis was consistent in its aim to capture the new global dimension that was the achievement of the ‘century.’ Still, in their state of interdependence, all nations, and among them Italy, individually constituted ‘a definite and specific point of observation’ oriented ‘in a given way with respect to the economic and political chain of events in the civilized world.’181 The issue was that of defining the place of Italy ‘in the international arena,’182 of determining its position on the global scale, and understanding the

176 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., p. 149. 177 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro, cit., pp. 832–833. 178 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., p. 204. 179 Idem, pp. 222–223 and p. 226. 180 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro, cit., p. 854. 181 Idem, p. 853. 182 Idem, p. 855.

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genesis of its peculiar situation in terms of its history and of the specific reasons for its decline. Labriola’s analysis thus went into the causes of the Italian situation, and, to the extent that it went against the most common interpretations, must have appeared overtly provocative. In the first place, applying the categories he had devised, he said the Risorgimento had taken place ‘more along the lines of passive history than of active history’183 ; and that, indeed, it was only from 1870, at the end of the Risorgimento, that Italy had taken an active part in the history of the world: ‘the effectively active begins in 1870.’ Such a view stood at the opposite of the ‘literary tradition,’ which regarded Italian affairs after unification as ‘below expectations.’184 The terms of the question had to be reversed: the position held by Italy had to be measured with respect to the interdependence of nations. The Risorgimento had been a ‘passive’ revolution, in the specific sense that Labriola had assigned to the term. It was ‘passive’ because the bourgeoisie had not at all gained ‘dominion over society’: ‘the revolution was surely directed by the bourgeois spirit; but the Italian bourgeoisie had existed for centuries, and had had not only its moments of glory, but also suffered a terrible fall at the end of the sixteenth century, and then gone into protracted decline until the French Revolution.’185 As he explained in better detail in his lessons, united Italy ‘had been Jacobin without going through the democratic revolution,’ so that ‘when the democrats appeal to the people, they now bring onto the political scene the retrograde elements of society.’186

183 Idem, p. 854. 184 Idem, p. 855. 185 Idem, p. 856. 186 A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, cit., p. 147.

CHAPTER 2

Benedetto Croce

In Labriola’s third essay, the formula philosophy of praxis was introduced to designate the theoretical ‘pith’ (or ‘kernel’) of Marxism and of Labriola’s own conception. Labriola’s conception was, in fact, the outcome of his elaboration of several strands of thought, many of which had been largely consolidated before his encounter with the works of Marx and Engels. The attempt to balance such diverse inspirations into a single perspective, however, was not entirely successful, as the different perspectives could not be easily reconciled and his emphasis tended to shift from one to another. Benedetto Croce, who had financed and encouraged the publication of Labriola’s essays, seemed not, for his own part, to lend particular importance to the phrase, and, in a famous footnote, merely commented on it as an interesting but secondary development of the ‘doctrine of knowledge according to Marx.’1 Croce’s remark misled Labriola into understanding Croce had altogether dismissed the interpretation (an incident which in itself calls for commentary), but praxis was in fact an influence on Croce’s philosophy, from his writings on historical materialism through to his late meditations on the origin of the dialectics.

1 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, Laterza, Bari 1978, p. 101, nota 1 (HMEKM , p. 114).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4_2

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Croce and Labriola

Labriola and Benedetto Croce first met as teacher and student, respectively, at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, between January and February 1884.2 Following the earthquake which on July 28, 1883, had razed the small town of Casamicciola on the island of Ischia and in which his father, mother, and sister all died, Croce spent three years in Rome under the guardianship of his uncle Silvio Spaventa. Croce was eighteen at that time and a law student, and it was initially on the strength of his uncle’s recommendation that he attended Labriola’s lectures in moral philosophy,3 though was in fact greatly impressed by them. Those lectures were Croce’s first introduction to the philosophy of Herbart, but also awoke his theoretical interest in the problems of history and art— a subject on which he would publish a decade later, on March 5, 1893, when he was twenty-eight.4 It is also indicative of Croce’s personality that Labriola’s lectures should have compounded his ‘scarce sympathy’ for the writings of Bertrando Spaventa (the elder brother of his guardian, Silvio) which struck him as the product of an abstract, ‘theologico-philosophical’ mindset, far removed from his own aspiration to treat ‘the problems of art, moral life, law, and, later, […] of historical methodology,’ as domains of concrete knowledge.5 Having lost all of his near family in the earthquake, Croce was understandably going through a spell of ‘bewilderment’ and ‘despair’ which even led him to contemplate ‘the idea of suicide’6 ; it stands to reason that he should have found a deputy father figure in Labriola, with whom he developed a strong intellectual and personal bond and who was able to give him the encouragement and motivation which his uncle, instead, fully absorbed by political life in the recently established capital city of Rome, seemed incapable or unable to give him. The

2 F. Nicolini, Croce, Utet, Torino 1976, pp. 75–76. 3 B. Croce, Memorie della mia vita, Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, Napoli 1992,

p. 13; Id., Contributo alla critica di me stesso, in Id., Etica e politica, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1981, p. 327. 4 B. Croce, La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte, in Id., Primi saggi, Laterza, Bari 1919, pp. 1–41. 5 B. Croce, Contributo alla critica di me stesso, in Id., Etica e politica, cit., pp. 342– 343. 6 B. Croce, Memorie della mia vita, cit., p. 17.

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main tenets of their future dialogue are already to be found in Labriola’s first letter to Croce, written during a short stay in Rieti, not far from Rome, and dated September 18, 1885. Labriola congratulated Croce on his three scholarly essays (devoted to Ranuccio Farnese, to the fifteenthcentury Latin poet Dante III Alighieri, and to Niccolò Pesce) but urged him not to lose himself in the kind of philological research he dismissively labeled ‘Imbriani minutiae.’7 This contempt of ‘minutiae’ is revealing of how, long before their disputes on Marxism, Labriola had recognized in his young friend and disciple the traits of the ‘man of letters’8 who is almost by nature incapable of applying himself to issues that are serious and useful (‘manly,’ as he specified in a harshly worded letter of July 16, 1888).9 As a matter of fact, Croce didn’t hold back in the face of Labriola’s accusations of ‘frivolity’ and in his letters between July and August 188810 retorted that Labriola seemed to be grappling with an unsettled ‘conflict’ between ideas and words, between intelligence and practical behavior. This theme was to recur, albeit in different terms, in Croce’s later accounts of his former mentor.11 The contrast was largely a reflection of Croce’s uneasy frame of mind, especially in the face of Labriola’s paternal attempts to spur him to take on more serious commitments, but occasioned a stall in their relations between 1889 and 1890. They timidly resumed corresponding, however, between September and October 1891, at a time in which Labriola had adhered to socialism, initiated his exchange with Engels, and appeared wholeheartedly devoted to historical materialism and the study of its fundamental texts. We may then 7 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1861–1890, edited by D. Dugini and R. Martinelli, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1983, pp. 210–211. Labriola was giving Vittorio Imbriani, a philologist whose studies at the time focused on folk songs and the seventeenth-century Italian pastoral, as a representative of sterile scholarship. 8 Cf. the letter dated December 10, 1887: ‘it is to be expected that such literati as you should produce a wealth of letters’ (idem, p. 252). 9 Idem, pp. 265–266. 10 A. Labriola, Carteggio, Vol. 2, 1881–1889, edited by S. Miccolis, Bibliopolis,

Napoli 2002, pp. 454–456 and 457. 11 Idem, p. 455: ‘so I formed the impression there was some kind of conflict in you.’ See also B. Croce, Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia (1895–1900). Da lettere e ricordi personali, in Id., Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., pp. 289–290: ‘two souls coexisted in him [Labriola]: that of the critic and philosopher, who wanted to fix and correct Marxism […], and that of the revolutionary.’.

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suppose Labriola conceived the first essay around 189212 and independently of Croce, whose offer to finance and curate the Italian edition only came in 189413 (and was then acted upon in May 1895).14 This squares with Croce’s own autobiographical accounts, in which the main phase of his own Marxist studies is dated exactly ‘from the spring of 1895 to that of 1896,’ when he then moved on ‘from the theory of Marx to study the various forms of economic science.’15 It was in May 1895 that Croce began to source Marxist writings16 and published the essay Intorno al comunismo di Tommaso Campanella in the ‘Archivio storico per le province napoletane,’ which Labriola appreciated, though not without observing that he had found in it ‘not the least trace of socialist materialism.’17 The same criticism was extended only a few days later, in exacerbated form, to all of Croce’s scholarly writings. Labriola openly spoke of ‘disappointment’ at the fact his young friend gave no sign of either a ‘conversion to socialism,’ of ‘a different mental attitude,’ or of ‘a personal crisis,’ and ‘therefore did not have this revolution.’18 His criticism of the ‘man of letters’ came up in all the crucial passages of their conversation, though not so much because Croce took no part in the political life of Italian socialism (he had, in fact, subsidized publication of L’Avanti, the socialist newspaper, and protested against General Bava Beccaris’ repression of the Milan food riots)19 but because none of the practical impulse and proclivity for ‘doing’ which Labriola would have liked to share with him was displayed anywhere in his writings. Still, the value of Croce’s erudition did not escape Labriola. He encouraged Croce to write an essay about Achille Loria (against Loria, in fact) for Le Devenir social, which struck him as ‘a small masterpiece’ upon

12 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1890–1895, edited by V. Gerratana and A. A. Santucci, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1983, p. 377. 13 Idem, p. 544. 14 Idem, pp. 583–585. 15 B. Croce, Memorie della mia vita, cit., p. 20. 16 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1890–1895, cit., pp. 588–590. 17 Idem, p. 625. 18 Idem, pp. 633–634. 19 On the ‘political infatuation’ that characterized this period of his studies, see B. Croce, Contributo alla critica di me stesso, in Id., Etica e politica, cit., pp. 329–330.

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first reading it,20 and also praised (or only mildly criticized) his other publications that year (1896), which among works on Vincenzio Russo, Francesco De Sanctis, and literary criticism, also included the dissertation Sulla concezione materialistica della storia. Their first significant contrast on Marxism was occasioned, instead, by the footnote in the essay on Loria in which Croce first came out in favor of ‘pure economics’ and the theory of value of the ‘Austrian school,’ as recently reformulated by Maffeo Pantaleoni. Labriola immediately grasped the philosophical import of this position, and in his letters on the subject compared the instances of economics and aesthetics and proposed a ‘genesis of forms’ as against the ‘theory of pure utility.’21 They were clearly at odds on the matter and Labriola distinctly perceived the contrast, although quite unaccountably he then declined in November 1897 to debate Croce at the Accademia Pontaniana where the latter presented his memoir Per l’interpretazione e la critica di alcuni concetti del marxismo.22 At this early stage of his contrast with Labriola, Croce’s other interlocutor on historical materialism was Giovanni Gentile, with whom he had started corresponding in June 1896. Over the course of 1897, as Gentile worked on, and then published, his first dissertation on historical materialism,23 their dialogue gradually took a turn that cannot but appear paradoxical. As of January 13, Gentile began emphasizing the ‘divergences’ between Croce and Labriola as to the ‘value of historical materialism,’24 first seeking to make the distance between them as clear as possible, then actively encouraging that they break their relations. Gentile then returned on the point in December, with greater force, after meeting Labriola in Rome: in his estimation, Croce had meanwhile come to represent ‘a most grave encumbrance’ to his elderly mentor25 ; in June 1899 20 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, edited by V. Gerratana and A. A. Santucci,

Editori Riuniti, Roma 1983, p. 739. 21 Idem, p. 763. See idem, pp. 757–758 and pp. 761–763. 22 See idem, pp. 826–828. 23 B. Croce-G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 1, 1896–1900, edited by C. Castellani and

C. Cassani, Aragno, Torino 2014, p. 61: ‘In the coming week,’ he wrote to Croce on October 22, 1897, ‘I will have the pleasure of sending you an excerpt from that work of mine that we have talked about together, and which I have titled Una critica del materialismo storico; and I hope that you will not find it entirely worthless.’ 24 Idem, p. 17. 25 Idem, p. 77.

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he termed Labriola ‘his most formidable adversary’26 ; and in June 1900 finally invited Croce to cease all dealings with him, as he was ‘one of the most confused and, nonetheless, proudest minds about.’27 The paradox lay in the fact that Gentile in fact shared the analytical premises from which Labriola moved (though not his conclusions), whereas Croce did not; unlike Croce, Gentile accepted that historical materialism rested on a philosophy of praxis—and, however, mistaken and inconsistent in its fundamental premises, it was nonetheless a philosophy, and one that was essential to Marxism. While wanting to divide Croce from Labriola, in short, Gentile also had a quarrel with the way Croce understood Marxism, the outcome of which had been, by and by, the category of utility and an early outline, in his aesthetics, of a philosophy of the spirit. In a long letter dated January 17, 1897, Gentile clarified his view and said there were two closely related points of contrast between Labriola and Croce: firstly, Labriola regarded historical materialism as a philosophy of history, which Croce denied; secondly, while Labriola subscribed to the traditional Marxist view that the philosophy had immediate implications in terms of socialist and communist doctrine, Croce wished to keep the analytical method separate from the politics.28 In April, he again wrote that the question came down to whether ‘the nature of historical materialism is philosophical, in which case socialism descends from it; or it has no such nature.’29 Croce made a brief reply to these objections, and a sharp one. He remarked that Labriola, for one thing, had ‘not a very systematic mindset,’ so that ‘you have to read him between the lines,’30 because an inbuilt aversion to formal and theoretical elaboration made him inclined to statements that went in a different direction from that ostensibly declared. ‘His manner is not didactic,’ he wrote elsewhere, ‘not orderly, and does not proceed in the form of detailed, analytical discussion,’ to the point that one may doubt that ‘he really intends historical materialism as a philosophy of history.’31 His position, he added,

26 Idem, p. 248. 27 Idem, p. 415. 28 See idem, pp. 20–28. 29 Idem, p. 40. 30 Idem, p. 19. See, to the same effect 90 and 284. 31 Idem, p. 32.

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‘oscillates’ to the extent that his writings involved the critique of determinism as much as its acceptance, the steadfast rejection of economic reductionism alongside the conviction that communism should proceed out of historical necessity, out of the ‘self-criticism which is in the things themselves.’ Croce had, in fact, gone straight to the heart of Labriola’s theoretical difficulty, and proposed to resolve such difficulty by way of the distinction between historical materialism as a method and socialism as possible outcome—one to which the method could lead but which was not entailed by necessity. Far from being utopia, politics entertained a firm connection with historical structure, but also demanded that subjectivity be shaped by factors of a moral and ideal order too.32 In their reflections on Marxism, Croce and Gentile both maintained a tie with the ideas of Labriola, each of them independently seeking to develop aspects of the theory and to find solutions to problems Labriola’s first two essays left unsettled. One such problem was the incompatibility of Labriola’s critique of determinism with his belief in a necessary order underpinning historical reality, leaving no real room for subjective political agency; but beyond that, Croce and Gentile both regarded the theoretical and historical angles of Labriola’s analysis as separate domains, and proposed different interpretations of the way the one might relate to the other. It is from there that they came to independent conclusions about Marxism, from which the central ideas of independent philosophical systems would soon also emerge. Such differences became all the more clear when Labriola’s third essay introduced the truly novel conception of the philosophy of praxis. Gentile received the essay from Croce in February 1898 and immediately grasped the importance of the new formulation—of the idea that ‘within historical materialism is enfolded an authentic philosophy, the philosophy of praxis.’33 He immediately conceived the project of a new dissertation on the ‘concept recently put out by Labriola, of a philosophy of praxis,’34 and about a month later, quite significantly and for the first time, began a systematic study of the works of Bertrando Spaventa, clearly grasping the connection between Labriola’s new framing of historical materialism and his early Hegelian formation. Croce, instead, gave no sign of regarding the

32 See idem, p. 38. 33 Idem, p. 85. 34 Idem, p. 86.

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matter of praxis as significant and abstained from giving it his considered thought, as though wishing to avoid debating Labriola on this particular issue. He was, however, compelled to return to the matter in 1899, when Gentile sought his opinion on the essay he had finished writing in February.35 Croce dismissed praxis as ‘a curious chapter in the history of philosophy,’36 and confirmed his own non-philosophical, ‘restrictive and empirical interpretation’ of Marxism, as he defined it on that occasion. As he was to repeat several times, the philosophy of praxis struck him as a juvenile exercise on the part of Marx,37 ‘a condiment, and not […] a good condiment, to his thought.’38 This quip won him a curt answer from Gentile, who retorted that Marx, throughout his life and not only in his youth, had been ‘firmly convinced that his conceptions, historical and political, were upheld by philosophical principles.’39 On the new interpretation of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis, Croce and Gentile not only diverged from Labriola, but also diverged from each other, although they had meanwhile come to differ also on questions of aesthetics and on the status of economic volition. Labriola’s third essay, in short, introduced an issue that came to be distinctive of Italian philosophical reflection for the slant it impressed not just on Marxism, but also on the emergent current that went under the name of Idealism. Over the course of 1898, meanwhile, a new strain was put on the relations of Labriola with Croce by the emergence of the so-called ‘crisis in Marxism,’40 which in a short time spread from Germany (and France) to Italy, so as to involve, among other prominent socialists, the chief interlocutors of Labriola, Croce and Sorel. It distressed Labriola, excessively at times, to think that his ‘critical’41 re-examination of historical materialism, which only aimed to propose due revisions and corrections, might get confused with this new trend. So utterly destructive did the rift in German and European social democracy appear to him, as it divided between Kautsky’s orthodoxy and Bernstein’s revisionism, as to make him even 35 Idem, p. 221. 36 Idem, p. 268. 37 See idem, p. 241. 38 Idem, p. 274. 39 Idem, p. 279. 40 See A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 845. 41 Idem, pp. 907–908.

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speculate whether there might not be a ‘conspiracy’42 at work. Prompted by the unintended turn the revision he had himself advocated was taking, Labriola felt compelled to articulate the points of his disagreement with Croce (in the Postscript to the French edition of his own writings) and Sorel (in the preface to the same French edition): the ‘holiest of trinities,’ he humorously wrote to Croce, ‘has gone up in smoke.’43 In March 1899 he then also conceived the idea for a pamphlet ‘über die sogennante Crisis des Marxismus’44 but never wrote it, publishing instead in the Rivista italiana di sociologia a shorter essay on a book by Masaryk.45 In November 1898, before Labriola’s Postscript against him came out and before Gentile set to work on La filosofia della prassi, Croce made public his wish to attend to new subjects, having ‘obtained what he needed’46 from historical materialism, and announced new studies in philosophy in general and aesthetics in particular. The phase of his Marxist studies came to a close, to all intents and purposes, with his reply to Labriola’s Postscript 47 and with two further articles published in May and October 1899 (one on the falling rate of profit and one on Marxismo ed economia pura; to which be added his preface to Marx’s Revolution and Counter-Revolution),48 as he became absorbed by his commitment to a philosophy of spirit. Labriola’s reception of the latter Marxist writings of Croce’s was quite distinctive, and may partly be explained against the background of the crisis in Marxism. Refraining from a point-forpoint discussion of Croce’s attempted refutation of the law of the falling rate of profit, of the tenets of his letter to Pareto,49 and the finer points 42 Idem, pp. 914–916. 43 Idem, p. 884. 44 Idem, p. 912. 45 A. Labriola, ‘A proposito della crisi del marxismo’, in Rivista italiana di sociologia,

1899, fasc. 3, pp. 317–331. On subsequent editions, see A. Labriola, Da un secolo all’altro 1897–1903, edited by S. Miccolis and A. Savorelli, Bibliopolis, Napoli 2012, pp. 289–291. 46 B. Croce-G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 1, 1896–1900, cit., p. 176. 47 B. Croce, Recenti interpretazioni della teoria marxistica del valore e polemiche

intorno a esse, in Id., Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., pp. 121–137 (HMEKM , pp. 120–131). 48 B. Croce, Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione, o il 1848 in Germania, Mongini, Roma 1899 (reprinted in B. Croce, Pagine sparse, Vol. 1, Laterza, Bari 1960, pp. 308–313). 49 See A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 953.

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of the theory of value, Labriola went straight to the philosophical issues at stake. More than the particular terms of Croce’s critique of Marxism and of Marxist economic doctrines, what interested him was the perspective his younger friend was in the process of forming, partly on the strength of those critiques. The concept of utility, with which Croce took his leave of historical materialism (although we shall see elements of that framework were to stay with him), struck Labriola as contradicting the historical approach to economics and thus as a retreat into ideology. As of September 1899, Labriola chose to level his critique solely against Croce’s aesthetics, out of which, he hoped, ‘a theory of the Beautiful’ would not issue—the Beautiful being, he explained, ‘as much of a myth as the Good and the True.’50 When eventually he was able to read Croce’s first publication in that line of research,51 his attitude turned from anticipative doubtfulness to expostulation about what struck him as a ‘sublunar world.’52 An even angrier response followed the publication of the Aesthetic, which appeared to him a collection of ‘mere analytical judgments,’53 the work of a ‘Wolfius redivivus’54 : ‘an endless idem per idem of analytical judgements, producing definitions without genesis.’55 The concepts were all well lined up, he said, but their genesis was not given; and it seemed to him this was entirely the opposite of a dialectical approach, a forsaking of Spaventa’s bequest to Italian philosophers.56 But of the dialectic, Labriola wrote to Plechanov, Croce continued to speak ‘as of something difficult to recover amidst the antiquities, in spite of having it so close at hand,’ which is to say, ‘amidst the papers of the Hegelian [philosopher] Spaventa,’ who was his uncle.57 It was hardly imaginable that they could redress this mutual misunderstanding. What

50 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 941. 51 B. Croce, Tesi fondamentali di un’Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica

generale, in Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana, 30, 1900, pp. i–iv, 1–88 (anastatic reprint, with a valuable critical apparatus by Felicita Audisio: Bibliopolis, Napoli 2002). See A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 949. 52 Idem, p. 951. 53 Idem, p. 1002. 54 Idem, p. 949. 55 Idem, p. 950. 56 Idem, p. 1003. 57 Idem, p. 923.

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Croce had missed in Labriola’s reflection was probably its most essential aspect, namely, the mediation of Marxism with the Hegelianism of the Southern Italian philosophers, and signally of Spaventa, operated by means of the philosophy of praxis (which was not to say Labriola had not, all along, regarded Spaventa a theological or even ecclesiastical thinker, and one far removed from his own practical concerns)58 ; but by branding Croce at the outset as an idealist and metaphysician, and by placing such a limiting and simplified reading on his work, Labriola had been unable to gauge the extent to which Croce’s Marxist studies, and indeed the teachings Labriola had imparted to him, had contributed to his current philosophy. In this vein, most critics were subsequently to read Labriola through Croce and, vice versa, Croce through Labriola—in both cases being drawn into the same misunderstanding and so prevented from understanding either philosopher. As of 1903, toward the end of Labriola’s life,59 his relations with Croce became more and more difficult. Labriola was unfavorably impressed by the first issues of Croce’s journal La Critica, which heralded a renaissance of idealism, and remarked that to his mind the word ‘idealism’ plainly spelled the ‘arrest of the scientific spirit’ and stood for ‘regression.’60 Further strain on their relationship was then added by Labriola’s growing hostility toward Gentile, who was one of the chief contributors to La Critica. Gentile had come into contact with Labriola through Croce in 1897,61 and his exchanges with him had remained altogether cordial, if not mutually sincere, until 1903. Gentile, that is, had reserved his most critical observations against Labriola to his private correspondence with Croce. Labriola, on the other hand, had in fact been appreciative of Gentile’s first essay,62 had helped promote it, and had encouraged him to work on Spaventa, then receiving with interest, in August 1899, the volume on La filosofia di Marx, which included the new essay on La filosofia della prassi.63

58 See B. Croce, Contributo alla critica di me stesso, cit., p. 342. 59 Labriola died on February 2, 1904. 60 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 989. 61 Idem, p. 816. 62 Idem, p. 818: ‘that little book is written with great precision and seriousness—and contains some valuable thoughts.’. 63 Idem, p. 939.

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Relations among all three of them went from difficult to irrecuperable, however, after October 1903. The previous year, Labriola (whose health was rapidly declining) had taken the chair of Theoretical Philosophy at La Sapienza, in Rome, and in that capacity was appointed to the board of examiners whose task it would be to select a candidate for the chair of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Palermo. Gentile, who was then teaching at a high school in Naples and had recently obtained the qualification (‘libera docenza’) to lecture in Pedagogy within the university system, was among the candidates. It appears from the correspondence of the several actors involved that Donato Jaja, who had the chair of Theoretical Philosophy in Pisa, had taken an interest in Gentile’s candidature for Palermo and asked Gentile to inform him of the proceedings.64 Gentile reported that his own prospects appeared dim as there were two strong candidates (Cosmo Guastella, then teaching Theoretical Philosophy at Palermo, and Bernardino Varisco) and one of the likely examiners, Filippo Masci, had no sympathy for him (though that could even have played to his advantage).65 In the event, there turned out to be eleven candidates66 and the procedure required the seven full professors teaching the subject (at the universities of Rome, Naples, Pisa, Bologna, Bologna, Turin, Pavia, and Padua; while nine further chairs were at the time vacant) to submit a report on the candidates to the Ministry. Gentile effectively ended up disqualifying himself, since the regulations prescribed that each candidate send sixteen copies of each of their publications; but all he did, or could do, was to send five copies of his recent book Dal Genovesi al Galluppi and perhaps fewer still of his other works.67 When the committee of five was then nominated, it turned out neither Jaja nor D’Ovidio were part of it; out of the five examiners (professors Cantoni, Masci, Ragnisco, Tocco, and Labriola) two were likely to be against him (Masci and Tocco) and Labriola, partly through the good offices of Croce, was the only examiner on whom Gentile might count.

64 Carteggio Gentile-Jaja, Vol. 2, edited by M. Sandirocco, Sansoni, Firenze 1969, p. 215. 65 Idem, pp. 218–219. 66 Idem, p. 227. 67 Idem, p. 224.

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Gentile had good grounds for being pessimistic. Following the first committee meeting, Felice Tocco informed68 him that he had been declared ineligible by unanimous vote and not admitted to the orals. It is a reflection on Gentile’s temperament that although there had been every reason to expect such an outcome as justified, he in fact resented the exclusion enormously, which he and Jaja chose to interpret as a settling of scores within the school of Spaventa69 orchestrated by Tocco (whom they regarded, rightly or wrongly, the chief culprit). A further attempt to appeal to the Higher Council of Public Education also met with majority opposition and was turned down.70 Labriola’s part in the affair had been ultimately modest (Croce’s solicitations notwithstanding), partly on account of his very poor state of health. Croce and Gentile had agreed it would be on the whole better if Labriola didn’t step down as committee member, even if there was a chance either Jaja or D’Ovidio might be appointed in his place,71 and Croce, accordingly, had urged Labriola not to do so. But animosity over the affair spiraled, lending substance to the negative opinion Labriola had formed of Gentile. Jaja first raised doubts about Labriola’s conduct when, on November 5, 1903, he opined Labriola should have abstained from voting: ‘he should not have voted that shortlist, but did.’72 Jaja and Labriola had already been at odds when they had met in Rome the previous May; Labriola had responded coldly to Jaja’s pamphlet on L’insegnamento filosofico Universitario,73 which hurt Jaja, and then had further provoked Jaja by asking him whether he was really convinced Gentile appreciated the philosophy of Spaventa. To this insinuation, Jaja had promptly replied that Gentile was ‘without doubt … convinced’ of a philosophy which alone deserved ‘to be called scientific, in the broadest, 68 Idem, p. 238. 69 See idem, pp. 244–245. 70 Idem, p. 248. Nitti and Mazzoni’s appeal against the ruling was turned down by a

majority led by Francesco D’Ovidio. 71 B. Croce-G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 2, 1901–1906, edited by C. Castellani and C.

Cassani, Aragno, Torino 2016, pp. 242 and 244: ‘in general,’ Croce wrote, ‘it is always risky to have an examiner replaced, because that is always due to the pressure of one or another candidate. Labriola is independent, thinks independently, and is therefore a guarantee.’. 72 Carteggio Gentile-Jaja, Vol. 2, cit., p. 252. 73 Idem, p. 210.

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deepest, and fullest meaning of the word.’74 The import of this conversation, which Jaja referred to Gentile, went rather beyond the question of Gentile’s present eligibility for a position at the university, and sanctioned, rather, that what little was left of the school of Spaventa had broken down. Labriola (who rated Jaja’s philosophical work very poorly) had effectively insinuated that Gentile had but slight or misdirected understanding of Spaventa. At first, Labriola simply reassured Croce there had been ‘no animosity or prevention’ against Gentile on the part of Masci and Tocco in the examination procedure,75 but in his final letters of January 1904 gave vent to his frustration. Gentile was a ‘crazed’ and ‘self-infatuated’ individual, and merely ‘arrogant’ in his opinions on Tocco and the school of Spaventa: ‘now if D. Bertrando (who was a very good person, in the main!) could tolerate that I, who was his friend and intimate for about 24 years, should not be his acolyte—whatever gives this presumptuous youth the grounds for taking issue with the disloyal pupils of Spaventa, of which, if truth be said, there were none?’76 It is impossible to decide from this letter whether Labriola intended that Spaventa had had no ‘pupils,’ or none who were ‘disloyal.’ Certainly, though, his mind again turned to Spaventa and what would remain of his legacy, as it became clear to him that in spite of the efforts he had made in his own studies, Gentile would impress an entirely different slant on the interpretation of that tradition.

2

Historical Materialism As ‘Canon’ And The ‘Elliptical Comparison’

Croce’s first essay on historical materialism was devoted to the communism of Tommaso Campanella. It was written in October 1895 and published in the Archivio storico per le province napoletane in December that year, which is to say it was conceived around the time Croce was working on the Italian edition of Labriola’s first essay and the French edition was being published. The essay on Campanella contained an extremely harsh, and even destructive, critique not only of the two chapters by Paul Lafargue on Campanella and the experience of the Jesuits in Paraguay, but of the book in which they were included, and thus of 74 Idem, p. 237. 75 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., pp. 996–997. 76 Idem, pp. 1001–1003. And see Carteggio Gentile-Jaja, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 271–272.

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its authoritative editor, Karl Kautsky and his collaborator Eduard Bernstein.77 The critique was so outspoken it must have alarmed Sorel too, who had published French translations of Lafargue in Le Devenir social, and was actually seeking the collaboration of Croce for the journal. Sorel voiced his concerns to Labriola, who was also not enthused by this supposedly Marxist feat of Croce’s. He had waited for its publication in anxious expectation,78 and was so confident of the outcome he had recommended it to Luise Kautsky and other friends before even reading it.79 He was disappointed, however (‘I see no trace of socialist materialism in it’),80 and in January 1896 expressed his criticism in a letter to Croce,81 lamenting his failed conversion to socialism, his bookishness, and excessive display of erudition. In actual fact, as well as being an elegant and minutely detailed piece of scholarship, the article on Campanella (like the one on Vincenzio Russo that shortly followed it) also bore on some of the essential tenets of Labriola’s first essay on the work of Campanella and of his interpreters. Dismissing the grounds for a general history of socialism (one in which Plato, Campanella, and the modern utopians might be cast as precursors), Croce set against that notion Labriola’s conception of genesis; ‘history,’ he wrote, ‘involves connection between facts, genesis, and development.’82 The import of historical materialism, then, rested not on any notion of continuity through those (alleged) precedents into the present, but on the rejection of all forms of utopian thinking and on establishing the historical and political significance of events so as to identify the concrete ‘connections between the ideal and reality.’83 ‘The work of Campanella,’ he concluded, ‘is of the class of those fantastical constructions, to which modern socialism has looked only in order to refute their premises. To have contributed to discredit utopias is the only claim that can be made for Campanella and the other utopians.’84 Although at no 77 K. Kautsky, Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus, Vol. 3, Dietz, Stuttgart 1895. 78 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1890–1895, cit., p. 622. 79 Idem, p. 612. 80 Idem, p. 625. 81 Idem, pp. 633–634. 82 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 175. 83 Idem, p. 192. 84 Idem, p. 198.

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point in the essay did Croce signal the ‘conversion to socialism’ Labriola had hoped for, Labriola ought to have discerned in it those traits of antiutopian realism he himself had impressed upon Marxism. In the learned discussion of Campanella’s interpreters Labriola might also have picked up on references and themes that were dear to him, such as for instance to the discussion of Campanella by Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco De Sanctis, which Croce contrasted with the thorough monograph on Campanella by Luigi Amabile and the works by his friend Giovanni Sante Felici, which he only found partly convincing.85 Crucial questions, in short, underlay the essay on Campanella, which was Croce’s debut study in Marxism. These had to do with the realist nature of historical materialism as compared with the interpretative tradition, and were distinctive themes of Labriola’s conception, but did not stand out with enough clarity against the other elements, at turns polemical and at turns erudite, of the piece. It was, rather, in the dissertation Croce delivered on May 3, 1896, at the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples (On the scientific form of historical materialism, then published in the transactions of the academy) that Croce openly addressed Labriola’s first essay. Here Croce took an unequivocal stance, as Gentile immediately understood, which pointed toward a revision of Labriola’s framing of historical materialism. It is somewhat striking that, in his letters, Labriola (by then fully at work on his second essay, however) should not have gone into specifics and instead confined himself to thanking his young friend,86 and only made some remarks about the form, which he found obscure, toward the end of the letter: ‘I reread your dissertation today,’ he wrote May 25, ‘and your remarks now appear to me to carry greater weight than they did yesterday. There’s no discernible order to them, however, and it will take longer and repeated consideration to come to some conclusion.’87 A few days later he was manifestly pleased to write to him that ‘your dissertation has made an excellent impression on several people,’88 and went so far as to suggest (prompted by Sorel) that Croce’s text be

85 See idem, pp. 184–186. 86 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 661. 87 Idem, p. 669. 88 Idem, p. 675.

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appended to the French edition of his own second essay.89 The documentation is too scant for a satisfactory assessment, but Labriola appears not at all scandalized by Croce’s treatment of his first essay (though he would soon be scandalized by the appeal to pure economics), in which he presumably found suggestions worth pondering. By and large, the 1896 dissertation touched upon all of the themes of Labriola’s first essay and moved in the same direction, but at the same time sharply cut through its theoretical ambiguities and cleared the framework of critical communism of all intimations of necessity and determinism. In some regards, Croce incorporated salient and innovative features of Labriola’s conception—taking issue with Loria,90 suggesting to rename historical materialism so as to steer clear of the doubtful associations that went with ‘materialism’ (proposing ‘realistic view of history’ for ‘critical communism’),91 and continuing the controversy with such critics as Plekhanov, author of a ‘bad little book’ that was ‘symptomatic’ of the ‘metaphysical materialism’ they both contested.92 However, Croce also proposed, seemingly against Labriola, that ‘better homage would be rendered to the materialistic view of history, not by calling it the final and definite philosophy of history but rather by declaring that properly speaking it is not a philosophy of history.’93 While this could appear a dramatic point of discord, Croce was in fact proposing to read beyond the wording of Labriola to a more essential truth, namely, that although Labriola had not explicitly denied that historical materialism should constitute a philosophy of history (and ‘it may even be granted that, in words, he sometimes says exactly the opposite’), the denial was ‘contained implicitly in the restrictions which he places on the meaning of the theory’94 —a position which

89 Idem, p. 682. 90 Croce at the outset denounces Loria (the ‘ingenious professor of economics’) for

divulging a ‘spurious’ conception of historical materialism and even ‘pretend[ing] to be its inventor.’ B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 2 (HMEKM , p. 2). 91 Idem, p. 9: ‘But it must appear, even to him, that the name might have been more happily chosen, and that the confusion lies, so to speak, inherent in it’ (HMEKM , p. 9). Then p. 26 for the phrase ‘realistic view of history.’ (HMEKM , p. 26). 92 Idem, p. 8 (HMEKM , p. 8). The reference is to G.V. Plekhanov, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Materialismus. Holbach, Helvetius, Marx, Dietz, Stuttgart 1896. 93 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 11 (HMEKM , p. 11). 94 Idem, p. 2 (HMEKM , p. 3).

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needed to be regarded as the most conspicuous result of Labriola’s meditation. Rather than against Labriola, Croce was on this crucial point with Labriola, when it was made clear that Labriola’s wording was at odds with the actual import of the theory. What mattered was to put an end to the ambiguity and establish the point that Marx’s writings were, in spite of appearances, entirely unrelated to the current of thinking that had come to be described as the philosophy of history. As for the latter, Croce condemned it as standing for determinism, materialism, historical necessity, misguided conceptions of progress—essentially, as everything which Marxism needed to be rid of in order to come to represent a ‘realistic view of history.’ This critique of the philosophies of history was the prosecution of the studies Croce had consolidated in the 1893 dissertation La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte, which he revisited in the light of Labriola’s essay. As for the latter, he found it to contain distinctly innovative elements alongside the residues of a superseded conception of materialism. Croce’s piercing observations hit upon all of the sensitive spots in the first essay, starting from the theory of factors; as he phrased it, it involved going ‘beyond the notion that the sequence of history is the result of a number of forces, known as physical conditions, social organizations, political institutions, personal influences … to investigate the interaction of these factors.’95 While these elaborations by Croce must have had some part in prompting Labriola to revise the theory in the course of his second essay, Croce had, however, already come to the starkest negation of determinism and economism, and of all attempts to seek, in the abstract, the ‘foundations of history’ in the ‘methods of production’ and ‘economic conditions.’96 This interpretation shifted relations to a substantial extent, leading Croce to assign absolute primacy to history alone understood as a ‘sequence’ irreducible ‘to general concepts’ and to be regarded as ‘the concrete fact ’ (or ‘the single complex whole formed by these factors’),97 which was neither founded 95 Idem, p. 9 (HMEKM , p. 13). Starting from the Lineamenti di una logica come

scienza del concetto puro, 1904–1905, Croce completely revised his ‘theory of historical factors’: historical factors, he wrote, ‘are not facts, but factors, that is, producers of facts, soul and essence of them’ (B. Croce, La prima forma della ‘Estetica’ e della ‘Logica’, edited by A. Attisani, Principato, Messina-Roma 1925, pp. 194–195). 96 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 10 (HMEKM , p. 14). 97 Idem, p. 3 (HMEKM , p. 4).

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nor had its ultimate rationale in the economic structure. Quite crucially to the interpretation of Labriola, at the end of this line of reasoning there came Croce’s analysis of Marx’s relation to Hegel. Croce spoke of the Hegelian dialectic as the ‘early inspiration of the youthful Marx,’98 from which Marx was soon emancipated. Far from turning the dialectic ‘right side up,’ Marx had in effect taken his leave of it as a distant and foreign conception; he had not, that is, placed idealism back ‘on its feet’ in the sense ‘so often repeated’ that ‘the materialistic view of history is the negation or antithesis of the idealistic.’99 The path undertaken by Marx, Croce argued, preserved no substantial relationship with Hegel. And here, at this junction, Croce was in effect departing from the spirit as much as the letter of Labriola’s work, drawing a boundary not just between Marx and Hegel but, by that token, also between history and dialectics and, thereby, between history and philosophy. Under this new interpretation, Marxism was not ‘a new philosophy of history or a new method,’ but rather ‘a mass of new data, of new experiences, of which the historian becomes conscious’100 ; it resolved itself ‘into a warning to keep its observations in mind as a new aid to the understanding of history,’101 with economic conditions (he cited from Engels) providing ‘the red thread which runs through the whole of history.’102 Accordingly, Labriola’s concept of genesis survived in a thoroughly revised form: granted that the inquiry into the genesis of ideas be taken as distinctive of Marxist analysis, ideas were generated in the mutual interrelation of factors; genesis was ‘the concrete fact ’ and ‘the single complex whole’ formed by the elements at play. Croce’s contention with Gentile, first, and then Labriola stemmed chiefly, however, from his denial that the work of Marx qualified as either a theory or a philosophy, which closed the door on the philosophy of praxis as its theoretical development. But for the present the main disagreement with Labriola concerned socialism and political action at large and had to do with Croce’s radical critique of determinism. Labriola, Croce explained, ‘is

98 Idem, p. 5 (HMEKM , p. 6). 99 Idem, p. 6 (HMEKM , p. 6). 100 Idem, p. 9 (HMEKM , p. 12). 101 Idem, p. 14 (HMEKM , p. 20). 102 Idem, p. 13 (HMEKM , p. 18).

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inclined to connect closely and almost to identify the two things,’103 when it was rather a case of acknowledging the link, to the extent that political action does not come about in a vacuum, but also recognizing their distinct nature. While political action (praxis) should be guided by the observations and analyses afforded by historical materialism, praxis belongs to an autonomous domain and is founded on ‘moral conviction’ and ‘the force of sentiment.’104 Leaning toward Kant, Herbart, and Simmel, Croce lay the stress, provisionally, on the moral standpoint, but his position clearly descended from his critique of all conceptions purporting to be philosophies of history: if the ‘realistic view of history’ was to be exempt from materialist and determinist underpinnings, there was no alternative but to hold praxis as a distinct domain to be located at the superstructural level, in Marxist terms; only at such level could it draw from within itself the kind of momentum needed to set in train its own dialectics. A realistic view of history was therefore to be matched by a rigorously realistic view of politics—a position which, as well as setting Croce radically apart from Labriola, also marked a significant turn in the peculiar history of Italian Marxism. We have noted that Labriola did not meditate on Croce’s dissertation sufficiently, but it must have struck him as a sound and even original piece of writing if it inspired him to encourage Croce to write an article against Achille Loria105 for Sorel’s Le Devenir social. It is in itself noteworthy that Labriola should have entrusted Croce with a task that was, politically, so delicate and important, especially when we think of the place occupied by the theories of Loria in the field of Italian socialism, and of Labriola’s particular aversion toward them. Engels himself, even in his old age, had taken position against Loria in the preface to the third volume of Das Kapital and in some writings, posthumously collected, which had appeared in the Neue Zeit,106 and the controversy raged in

103 Idem, p. 15 (HMEKM , p. 21). 104 Idem, p. 16 (HMEKM , p. 22). 105 Labriola first mentioned the idea to Croce in February 1896 and Croce’s article

appeared in the November issue of the journal. A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 640. 106 Fr. Engels’ letzte Arbeit: Ergänzung und Nachtrag zum dritten Buch des Kapital, in Neue Zeit, 14 (1895–1896), 1, pp. 4–11 and 37–44. See K. Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, translated by David Fernbach, Penguin Books, London 1991, pp. 1027–1047.

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Italy and elsewhere, prompting writings by Carlo Francesco Ferraris and Paul Barth, for instance, who are among Croce’s references in the article. As soon as the article came out, Labriola immediately judged it ‘a small masterpiece,’107 praising it and commending its reading, only to drastically change opinion in December when his attention fell on the note about the theory of value and pure economics.108 We may suppose that on a first reading Labriola only dwelt on the main body of the article, reserving the notes for a later time. As much as Croce hinted, in the main discussion, at the theory of value and the Austrian school,109 the remarks he made in the note are more explicit and were probably written when the article was in its final draft. Still, while not developing the elliptical comparison in its main body, the article explicitly restated the chief tenets of his 1895 dissertation. Firstly, he denied that the work of Marx and Engels could be read as a ‘rigorous and thoroughly systematized theory,’ and claimed that, instead of a philosophy, they had deliberately offered ‘general aphorisms and particular applications ’ serving ‘as a warning and stimulus to the interpreters of history.’110 Secondly, taking the argument of his dissertation a stage further, he presented the notion of value as an ‘abstraction,’ as one of those ‘general concepts, types, or ideals’ which ‘abound in all sciences.’111 Even leaving aside the note on the elliptical comparison, in short, the ‘small masterpiece’ was largely consistent with the views expressed by Croce in the dissertation of the previous year, except that it possibly took them a stage further. But Labriola evidently was not perturbed by those observations, and for the present (before he went on to write the third essay) may well have taken them on board as a legitimate development of his critical communism, or at least as spelling out problems that needed to be taken into account. The note on the elliptical comparison, however, was quite a different matter and appeared to him quite an unacceptable proposition. In that footnote, and in the following one on Loria’s article La scuola austriaca

107 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 739. 108 Idem, p. 757 ff . See also Maffeo Pantaleoni’s article, which also addressed Croce,

and Croce’s reply in April 1897 (ibid., pp. 780 and 787). 109 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 31. 110 Idem, p. 26. 111 Idem, p. 32.

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dell’economia politica,112 Croce had not maintained the superiority of Böhm-Bawerk’s marginalism over Marxism; but he had observed that, in terms of economic theory, the theory of value of the Austrian school had greater validity because it factored in capital as well as labor in the determination of price. Engels had already argued in the preface to the third volume of Das Kapital that the marginalist critique left the core of the doctrine unscathed, as its purpose was not to determine production or sales prices, but to illustrate the way in which in the capitalist system profit is generated at the expense of laborers in the form of surplus value subtracted from their work. Croce brought out this ethico-political dimension of the Marxian theory by means of the metaphor of the elliptical comparison. According to Croce, Marx’s theory of value made sense when interpreted as the ‘comparison between two particular values.’ It was the ‘determination of that particular formation of value that occurs in a given society (capitalist) inasmuch as it diverges from the formation of value that would have occurred in a hypothetical and typical society.’113 The nature and measure of such divergence was, ultimately of the political order and rooted in social organization, rather than rooted in stricto sensu economic doctrine. As such, the theory fully emerged as a political critique of bourgeois society, ‘as a dart shot into the side of bourgeois society, [that] no one has so far been able to extract from it.’ Thus framed, furthermore, the theory was immune from the criticism leveled against it by the marginalists on the level of pure economics. In short, there was nothing in the footnote to the essay on Loria that foreshadowed Croce’s later sympathy for the Austrian school. The footnote was also couched in a language that was distinctive of Labriola’s own writings (e.g., ‘typical,’ or ‘hypothetical society’), as was the notion that the theory of value had ethical and political bearings. Labriola, however, could sense something else was at work in the mind of his pupil.114 Leaving the theory of value aside (on the validity of which he would not have sworn either), Labriola read a profession of idealism into Croce’s words in the form of a negation of the historical character of the economic sphere; and he intuited that Croce had reached such a position out of some kind of an analogy

112 Nuova Antologia, 110, 1890, 7, pp. 492–509. See Croce’s note in B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 33, nota 1. 113 Ibid. 114 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., pp. 761 ff .

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with aesthetics, and was beginning to outline his own system of thought. Labriola realized the importance of the ‘theoretical question’115 underpinning Croce’s reasoning before it became a matter of debate between Croce and Gentile; more than the particulars of Croce’s interpretation of Marx, what concerned Labriola were its philosophical premises. The philosophical premises were soon made explicit by Croce when in November 1897 he published Per l’interpretazione e la critica di alcuni concetti del marxismo, a more systematic essay.116 Here, without using Lafargue or Loria as a screen, Croce gave a clear statement of his position. At the same time, this essay too underwent a subsequent process of revision and correction, and, we shall see, is not wholly devoid of uncertainties: for instance, instead of persisting in qualifying the importance of Hegel to Marx merely as an ‘early inspiration,’ Croce instead came out with the more cautious statement that no ‘logical relation held between the two philosophical theories,’ although ‘to deny Marx’s Hegelian inspiration would be to contradict the evidence.’117 He also devoted an entire section to revise the view given in his previous essay that Marx’s theory of value descended from ethical categories, and now stated it was in fact of a different order altogether, as indeed a moral theory was completely lacking in Marx. Implicitly responding to both Labriola’s third essay and Gentile’s essay on La filosofia della prassi, Croce drew an extended comparison with Machiavelli, concluding that Marx was in fact the ‘Machiavelli of the proletariat’118 : a political genius whose approach to the problems of economic science was animated by revolutionary intent and was practical in nature. At the same time, unlike the theorists of pure economy, Marx had laid bare the roots of ideologies with frank realism and revealed ‘the social origin of profit,’ exposing the belief held by lofty-minded liberals that profit was born ‘of miraculous virtue, inherent in capital’ and actually dripped with ‘blood and tears.’119 While not a scientific truth, Marx’s analysis couldn’t either be dismissed as ‘error,’ as more than in the realm of science it belonged in the realm

115 Idem, p. 761. 116 Proceedings of the Accademia Pontaniana, November 1897 (in HMEKM , ch. 3). 117 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 78, footnote 1

(HMEKM , p. 82, footnote 1). 118 Idem, p. 104 (HMEKM , p. 118). 119 Idem, p. 153.

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of the struggle. In answer to Labriola and Gentile, who in different ways but with equal forcefulness had both underlined the core of philosophical speculation in Marx’s writings and Marxism, Croce noted that Marx ‘did not insist ’ on his early ‘metaphysical notions’120 and that any ‘philosophical conception’ was ‘merely a digression’ in relation to historical materialism.121 There were also sufficient elements, he added, to support the notion of a ‘theory of knowledge according to Marx,’ and thereby to ‘talk, as Labriola does,’ of ‘historical materialism as a philosophy of practice, i.e., as a particular way of conceiving and solving, or rather of over-coming, the problem of thought and existence.’122 The philosophy of praxis fell therefore not wholly outside the scope of historical materialism, but remained peripheral, as a nonessential feature, to Croce’s mind. Beyond that, both in this 1896 essay and his reply to the Postscript one year later, Croce threw the charge of metaphysical thinking back at Labriola,123 pointing out that it was one thing to frame historical materialism as ‘a simple, albeit a fruitful, canon of historical interpretation,’ as he had done, and quite another to go down Labriola’s route of seeking to convert this useful canon into a philosophy of history: therein, Croce argued, lay the ‘metaphysical danger.’124 The 1896 essay also represents an interesting stage in the genesis of Croce’s later philosophy. It signals a clear advancement on the 1893 memoir on art and science, but at the same time displays Croce’s theoretical uncertainty on matters that were more fully clarified in his work on aesthetics of around 1899–1900. The uncertainty is particularly conspicuous in his approach to science, where Croce still wavers between the idea of science as elaboration of abstract notions, after Herbart, and the alternative of categorial structures, at once concrete and immanent to reality, as partly exemplified, though not fully realized, by the marginalist notion of value (as a notion of pure economics, of utility). Within the framework of abstract notions, the work of Marx ought to qualify fully as science— being the author of an abstract inquiry whose understanding of historical

120 Idem, p. 77, footnote 1 (HMEKM , p. 81, footnote 1). 121 Idem, p. 85 (HMEKM , p. 93). 122 In the second part of this work we will discuss Gramsci’s response to this

observation of Croce’s on the philosophy of praxis (HMEKM , p. 115, footnote 1). 123 Idem, pp. 81 and 122. 124 Idem, p. 81 (HMEKM , p. 86).

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reality is typological; but in the perspective Croce was beginning to make his own, the typological element is to be measured against the economic category, which is concrete and not abstract, and immanent to history and reality. The crucial passages in the essay occur where the ‘economic’ is distinguished from the ‘egoistic’125 (and utility from morality),126 and read as an intimation of the later logic of the degrees of Spirit, although their epistemological status, so to speak, remained as yet indeterminate. At this stage of unaccomplished maturity it is only natural that in reading Marx Croce should have sought outright the ‘proper nature,’ ‘method,’ and ‘scope’ of the works.127 Having identified Das Kapital as the center of Marx’s investigation and the theory of labor-value as its core, Croce understood the overarching analytical effort of Marx as ‘abstract investigation.’128 Abstract in its determination of capitalist society, as an ‘ideal and formal society, deduced from certain hypotheses, which could indeed never have occurred as actual facts in the course of history.’129 On the one hand, then, the notion of capitalism itself, the laws of which were the object of inquiry, came out as an unreal contrivance obtained by abstraction, and in itself as ‘a fact, but a fact which exists in the midst of other facts’130 and has been insulated from concrete historical development. On the other hand, Marx had given as immutable the ideal of a pure ‘working economic society,’ of an economic society ‘regarded only in so far as it produces commodities capable of being increased by labor,’131 which was the kind of ‘typical premise without which all the rest of the work is unthinkable,’ as Labriola had described the theory of value in his second study on historical materialism. One and the other, both the capitalist society and the working society, were therefore construed by Croce as fictitious constructs, intellectual abstractions: out of the elliptical comparison between these two situations emerged the equally unreal notions of surplus labor and surplus value—unreal in the sense of determining the value of goods in such a way as could never coincide with 125 Idem, p. 72 (HMEKM , p. 74). 126 Idem, pp. 97–98. 127 Idem, pp. 53–54 (HMEKM , p. 50). 128 Idem, p. 54 (HMEKM , p. 50). 129 Ibidem (HMEKM , p. 50). 130 Idem, p. 63 (HMEKM , p. 62). 131 Idem, p. 63 (HMEKM , p. 62).

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actual prices. All of Marx’s research, in short, hovered over the unstable terrain of abstractions but was linked with reality by practical motive and by the aspiration to give rise to a social movement which could feed on those abstractions as a formidable instrument of battle. More precisely, Croce assigned Marx’s abstract research to a logical middle ground, situated in between the concrete, individual, and strictly unpredictable events of historical reality, at one end, and, at the opposite end, the ‘economic nature … of man’132 as informed by utility (or, in the provisional terminology of Pareto, ofelimità). In economic terms, actual prices could only be determined by the interplay of historical factors, whereas value, as a concept, was an emanation of an immutable categorial form—that of homo oeconomicus. Marx’s mistake (or, in other regards, his merit) had been to leave these two concrete domains of reality suspended and to project above them a belabored abstract construct. What retained its validity, in such an outsized and disorderly effort (one which Croce compared with Vico’s133 The New Science), was what Croce called the ‘canon,’ as a call to encompass within historical understanding its hitherto neglected aspects—not just political and military history (histoire événementielle, as it would later be called), then, but also the groundlevel economics of human societies. From such a ‘canon’ it was evidently impossible to derive a political agenda, be it socialist or liberal, but one must not take this to mean that Croce was thereby doing away with historical materialism. On the contrary, Croce assigned the ‘canon’ a constitutive function in the realistic view of history, meaning that, in the manner of Labriola, its function was to unveil the illusions of ideology and seek their genesis in the meanders of human history. While outwardly almost unrecognizable in its new formulation, this aspect of Labriola’s teaching remained a far from secondary constituent of Croce’s understanding. The question is whether Labriola’s other tenet, concerning the philosophy of praxis, had instead been completely dismissed or survived, in some guise, in the nascent philosophy of Croce.

132 Idem, p. 72 (HMEKM , p. 74). 133 Idem, p. 53.

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Utility and Praxis

In a letter to Gentile of November 23, 1898, Croce had made known his desire to be done with historical materialism, writing: ‘In the coming year I intend to collect my various essays on Marxism, to which I will add a few new articles on certain problematic points of Marxist economics; I will revise them all, write a preface, and arrange them into a volume… though it were a coffin. I have drawn from Marxism all that was needed to me.’134 Eleven months later, in October 1899, he made a further statement to the same effect in an article critiquing Vittorio Racca135 (where he also announced the volume Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, to be published by Sandron). His involvement with Marxism had been a ‘parenthesis,’ and he again produced the ‘coffin’ metaphor; though he also claimed to have been personally ‘pleased to have devoted [his] work to that doctrine,’ and that the ‘parenthesis’ had been neither in vain nor negative since Marx was an author to be ‘digested,’ not rejected. To Marxism, wrote Croce, he owed the essential lesson that had led him to frame utility as the fourth domain of the spirit, alongside beauty, truth, and the good. While the new category did in fact owe to his reflections on Marx as well as his critics, the theorists of pure economics, Marx and Marxism had, on the other hand, strengthened his stance of historical and political realism, the main sources of which had been Machiavelli and Vico (and this he owed at least in part to Labriola). As he worked on the aesthetics (publishing his Tesi in 1900 and the first edition of the aesthetics in 1902), Croce soon realized how utility (to his mind the core notion to be derived from Marxism) was in fact pivotal to his whole system. Both of his chief interlocutors of the time, Labriola and Gentile, challenged this discovery of his and indeed rejected it, albeit on different grounds. To Labriola it plainly spelled outmoded idealism, to the extent that regarding economics as the category (and thus the form) of a generalized human function meant cutting it off from history and depriving it of a genesis—which was merely a relapse into ideology. In December 1896 Labriola had already mocked Croce’s idealist leanings, relating to him the anecdote of a high school teacher he had known who portrayed Platonic ideas as ‘tante caciacavall’appise’—caciocavallo cheeses hung up 134 B. Croce- G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 1, 1896–1900, cit., p. 176. 135 B. Croce, ‘Marxismo ed economia pura’, in Rivista italiana di sociologia, nov.-dic.

1899, fasc. 4, pp. 738–748.

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to mature.136 At the time of writing this letter, Labriola had finished his second essay and started on the third; most likely, then, the actual object of this discussion with Croce was some early outline of the philosophy of praxis, which to Labriola must have appeared as running counter to Croce’s interest in pure economics. Of a different nature, but no less drastic, was Gentile’s criticism, who in November 1898 was himself at work on an essay on La filosofia della prassi. Clearly stating his point, he noted that economic activity ‘is not a fundamental activity of the spirit, and on the one hand falls on the side of the theoretical, and on the other of ethics.’137 This contention of his with Croce over utility was effectively a continuation of their recent disagreement over the form and content of art, and foreshadowed their more serious dispute, soon to come, over the unity and the domains of the spirit: patently, though, at the time of his engagement with the philosophy of practice, Gentile objected to Croce’s discovery just as strongly as Labriola, neither of them allowing that utility could be granted the dignity of a categorial form. Croce’s theory of utility thus struck both of the chief interpreters of the philosophy of praxis as being at odds with, and indeed the antithesis of, the principle of practice, which is to say that it appeared to them an objective given, ahistorical, impermeable to analysis in terms of genesis. For a correct framing of the question we need to go back to the founding moments of Croce’s theory of utility, which began to emerge in his two letters to Vilfredo Pareto in May and October 1900; these letters addressed not only the two volumes of the Cours d’économie politique,138 published in 1896 and 1897, respectively, but also more specific writings which Pareto had devoted to pure economics and, later, to his debate with Croce.139 Croce took his cue from an article in which Pareto defined homo oeconomicus in these terms: ‘comme la mécanique rationelle considère des points matériels, l’économie pure considère l’homo oeconomicus. C’est un être abstrait, sans passions ni sentiments, recherchant 136 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1896–1904, cit., p. 758. 137 B. Croce- G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 1, 1896–1900, cit., p. 169. 138 V. Pareto, Cours d’économie politique, 2 vols, F. Rouge, Lausanne 1896–1897. 139 V. Pareto, Comment se pose le problème de l’économie pure, Mémoire presenté en décembre 1898 à la société Stella, Lausanne 1898. Pareto’s replies to Croce were printed in Giornale degli economisti, Aug. 1900, pp. 139–162 and Feb. 1901, pp. 131–138. For a comprehensive view of these writings, see V. Pareto, Écrits d’économie politique pure, edited by G. Busino, Droz, Geneva 1982.

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en toute chose le maximum de plaisir ne s’occupant d’autre chose que de transformer les uns en les autres le biens économiques.’140 Not only did Croce not subscribe to this approach and, in general, to the cardinal points of the purist doctrine, but produced a frankly destructive critique in response. He flatly denied the validity of the analogy with mechanics and, thereby, the quantitative axiom in economics (commensurability of values), and finally rejected the concept of ‘non-logical actions,’ on which Pareto built his edifice.141 His critique further extended to Maffeo Pantaleoni’s Principi d’economia pura,142 in which the economic dimension was identified with selfishness, and so with immoral action.143 In the second letter his critique was even more sweeping and forceful, pinning on Pareto the damning label of ‘monist metaphysics,’ for having maintained that ‘the facts of human activity are of the same nature as physical facts.’144 This critique was later refined in the Filosofia della pratica, in two chapters about ‘so-called economic science’ and the ‘confusion’ between economics and philosophy, where Croce convened with Pareto that economics stricto sensu was naturalistic and mathematical, but insisted on a distinct sense of economics philosophically regarded.145 In essence, Croce had relied on pure economics in his critique of the Marxian theory of value only to then dismiss its axioms and attempt to found economics on completely different grounds. In his later search for a model for homo oeconomicus, the works of the marginalist school would be indeed supplanted by Machiavelli and Shakespeare. In his letters to Pareto, Croce emphasized (as against the tenets of pure economics) the volitional nature of the economic fact, which in essence is action determined by the will; and, on the one hand, being determined by the will it presupposes conscious deliberation (which alone may be logical or illogical, whereas the ensuing action is not, strictly speaking), 140 V. Pareto, Comment se pose le problème de l’économie pure, cit., p. 8. 141 ‘The principle of my sociology resides precisely in separating logical actions from

non-logical ones and in showing that for most men the second category is far greater than the first’ (V. Pareto, Lettere a Maffeo Pantaleoni, Vol. 2, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Roma 1960, p. 73. Letter of May 17, 1897). 142 Barbèra, Firenze 1889. 143 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 218. 144 Idem, p. 223 (HMEKM , p. 174). 145 B. Croce, Filosofia della Pratica. Economica ed etica, edited by M. Tarantino, Bibliopolis, Napoli 1996, pp. 242–268 (PPEE, pp. 374–410).

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whereas, on the other hand, ‘the economic action, taken by itself, is neither moral nor immoral.’ Utility, as the ‘economic action itself, in so far as it is rightly managed,’ was thus achieved by mere volition, presupposing thought and independent of ethical considerations. Regarded through the lens of Labriola’s categories, the facts of economics were certainly devoid of a genesis: ‘Of value as of activity,’ Croce wrote to Pareto ‘you cannot demand a so-called genetic definition. The simple and the original is genetically indefinable.’146 Conversely, however, from the genetically indefinable sprang all further genesis, as the origin of all economic facts of an empirical nature. Utility was activity generally regarded, though, in the terms of the theory of degrees governing Croce’s system, utility was a generator of empirical products but not also of the ulterior, and distinct forms: his later works were to illustrate better how utility presided over the genesis of empirical notions, of errors, of art, of legal institutions, and of several other things, but not of the domains of the spirit, as neither truth nor the good originated in economic practice. Within these bounds (whereby the economic principle was genesis without being, in turn, the result of a genetic process; and, on the other hand, the other spiritual categories were independent of its generative power), utility could be regarded as a philosophy of praxis, to the extent that Croce made the entire empirical domain to depend on the activity of the will, which is to say on action. Labriola turned out not to be receptive to this implication; misled by the idealistic leaning of Croce’s conception, he failed to see that it found its counterpart in actual determinations produced by means of action. Croce’s framing of utility was, however, beset with a fundamental ambiguity which would accompany him in his reflections for the next half century. The main source of ambiguity regarded the notion of value and emerged in the second letter to Pareto. While in the first letter he believed to have established that the economic principle was something else from the actual value of goods in a transaction and that considerations on the latter class of values needed to be deferred to further empirical research,147 in what way value had to be regarded in its philosophical sense remained less clear. And Pareto, surely enough, raised the

146 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, cit., p. 224 (HKEKM , p. 179). 147 See idem, p. 220 (HKEKM , pp. 173–174).

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issue in his reply. Croce replied that value, philosophically regarded, stood for ‘the fact of the very activity of man,’ because, he added, ‘Activity is value.’148 In the same way that, according to Kant ‘there was nothing in the universe that could be called good except the good will; so, if we generalize, it may be said that there is nothing in the universe that is valuable, except the value of human activity. Of value as of activity you cannot demand a so-called genetic definition. The simple and the original is genetically indefinable.’149 From there he went on to observe that ‘mental activity’ constitutes the ‘summum genus,’ which ‘gives place to irreducible forms’: to theoretical activity and to practical activity, ‘everything that is the work of contemplation’ and ‘everything that is the work of the will.’ Value, which is to say human activity considered as such, was qualified as ‘simple’ and ‘original.’ And while such activity was in itself ‘genetically indefinable,’ it also emerged as the energy ‘giving place’ to the ‘irreducible forms’ that are the distinct domains of the spirit. This is where the nodes of the earliest outline of Croce’s system assumed an uncertain configuration. On the one hand, the summum genus was to be identified with utility, and so with practice: which is to say that it coincided with one only of its subdivisions, and that producer and product came to be identified as value. The summum genus was not, in fact, contemplation but will and action. On the other hand, the two domains were so little ‘irreducible’ (as was claimed) that both descended from a single source; they both originated in practice, which generated as well as feeding them. Both the theoretical and the practical were, in fact, activities: and while they could be distinguished on the grounds of the secondary qualities they possessed, with respect to their essential feature, the activity which generated both, they were indistinguishable. In point of fact, Croce’s difficulties became apparent at the point where he sought to overstep the bounds of a philosophy of praxis. Labriola could sense the problem, but was unable to bring it into focus: for his own part, he failed to realize Croce was aiming to understand the underlying conditions that could account for genesis, the root of all praxis (which Labriola had identified with ‘labor’), and mistook Croce’s attempt for a canonical profession of idealism. The issue was bound to become more complicated still as Croce turned to the consideration of aesthetics. Here too the

148 Idem, p. 223 (HKEKM , p. 179). 149 Idem, p. 224 (HKEKM , p. 179).

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question was that of uncovering the characterizing nature of the activity that aesthetics implied, which at one point came to assume the forms of intuition, which he derived from Kant. In the Tesi, Croce outlined the nature of aesthetic expressions as a complex dialectic in which the activity of the spirit was brought to bear on natural impressions: true though it is that, in at least a couple of passages, he suggested overcoming the distinction between spirit and nature,150 at that stage his argument still hinged on that very distinction, which he modeled on that of ‘form’ and ‘content.’151 ‘Content’ stood to indicate ‘matter,’ a natural datum which preceded expression; expression, in turn, was the activity of shaping formless matter, the act that determined the form of impressions (such as anger) that were indeterminate on the level of expression. Thus, aesthetics was theoretically outlined as, at once, the perception and contemplation of a given reality and as ‘expressive elaboration of impressions,’152 and so as an activity. The process of elaboration (the activity) coincided with aesthetic vision, which could not, however, be affirmed independently of the subjective note of energy that animated it. In the places where utility was invoked, it too was represented as that same energy, but in the form of a ‘productive will,’153 to be understood as the volition of an end that could be attained ‘by a given means.’154 There was therefore a constant risk of lapsing into regarding the ‘expressive elaboration of impressions’ as practice, as activity or action, and several times Croce interrupted his exposition in order to clarify and specify that the general activity of the spirit (the summum genus ) was one thing, and the specific activity of the will, giving rise to actions and not knowledge, was quite another. This he did, for example, in the chapter of the great Aesthetic devoted to The theoretic activity and the practical activity, in which he stated that by will was meant the ‘practical form or activity’; it was not, ‘in the sense of some philosophical systems, … the foundation of the universe, the ground of things, and the true reality,’ nor ‘in the wide sense of other systems, … the energy of the spirit, spirit or activity in general, making of every act

150 B. Croce, Tesi fondamentali di un’estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, in Id., La prima forma della “Estetica” e della “Logica”, cit., pp. 66 and 117. 151 Idem, pp. 11–12. 152 Idem, p. 27. 153 Idem, p. 24. 154 Idem, p. 25.

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of the human spirit an act of will.’ These representations of the will qualified, respectively, as ‘metaphysical’ and ‘metaphorical,’ and ‘neither … meaning is ours.’155 The fact remained, however, that the summum genus, the spirit in its totality, was connoted by ‘activity’ of some description—as the transformation of the materials of impressions or as the volition of an end. It was, that is to say, primal energy and progress; which is to say praxis, capable of transforming being into the always determinate forms of a world of some description. The Lineamenti di logica (Outlines of Logic) of 1905 and the subsequent Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept added further evidence to what Croce regarded to be the prerogatives of utility within his system. In the Logic, Croce started with the refutation of the particular brand of skepticism he called practical. This was the position of those who denied that ‘universal or conceptual knowledge’ existed ‘beyond simple representation,’ thus ‘negating neither knowledge nor intuition, but logical knowledge itself’ and so reducing necessity and universality to empirical notions; and ironically invited them to consider ‘whether their theory of the concepts as fiction, is in its turn fiction.’156 At stake was, precisely, the notion that the seat of truth was ultimately theoretical; a claim Croce was finally able to make in the central section of the volume with the doctrine of individual judgment, namely, a form of a priori logical synthesis as supreme accomplishment of theoretical knowledge and proof of the coincidence of philosophy and history. To deny the truth was, of course, to affirm it, and so incur the fate of the sceptic, who affirms in denying. Still, having secured logical truth from the insinuations of the sceptic (including those who deemed it immanent to praxis), logical truth was merely a part, and not the whole, of a system which was founded on the distinction between the theoretical the practical and had been derived, as a system, not from pure contemplation but from ‘activity.’ Granted that individual judgment crowned the theoretical domain, that was not the whole of reality. In order to judge and understand, individual judgment required movement, dialectic, a primal form of energy that set all forms, including logical and theoretical forms, into motion and pulled them into the circle of becoming. 155 B. Croce, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia, edited by G. Galasso, Adelphi, Milano 2005, p. 61 (ASE, p. 77). 156 B. Croce, Logica come scienza del concetto puro, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1981, p. 12 (LSPC, p. 16).

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While logic formed a part and not the whole of reality, the economic component, being one of the forms of the act of volition, came to gain unforeseen scope and weight in the systematization of the aesthetic and logic. In the aesthetic field, the theoretical principle of intuition found expression (in verbal communication, for example, and in works of art) only by means of economic volition. In the logical field, from economic volition descended the endless array of empirical notions (pseudo-concepts); and while these were secondary to the pure concept and devoid of truth-value, the sciences, religions, law, and so on were founded on them; finally, error too could only come about as a practical act of the will, so that all error was voluntary and not theoretical, and came about as improper combinations of forms. In short, the prerogatives of pure intuition and of the pure concept were substantial but limited, in the sense that the order of the world was populated by issues of the will and, more specifically, of economic and utilitarian volition. Praxis persisted as a foundational concept in Croce’s speculation both because the nature of the summum genus, as we have seen, was in fact activity, and because the fourth domain of the spirit, which Croce had elaborated through the study of Marx and Marxism, played a fundamental role in the philosophical understanding of reality. These two meanings of praxis—activity as a universal force and the economic activity of individual volition—tended to overlap and be confused with each other in Croce’s analysis because, despite every statement to the contrary, the one (utility) came to appear as source of the primal movement of the spirit. These difficulties came to a head in the Philosophy of the Practical, which issued from Croce’s work on Hegel between 1906 and 1907 and was published in 1909. In a decisive passage (in the third section on the Unity of the Theoretical and the Practical on which he closed the first section), he defined his philosophy as ‘a pragmatism of a new sort,’ in which thought is always conditioned by life and philosophy ‘can solve only those problems presented by Life.’157 Jointly with the theory of individual judgment presented in the Logic, this conception paved the way for the absolute historicism which would lead Croce to regard philosophy as the ‘methodology’ of history. But historicism (which he had previously criticized from the angle of the doctrines of pure economics) indeed emerged at this junction, in this new conception of the circle of

157 B. Croce, Filosofia della Pratica. Economica ed etica, cit., p. 214 (PPEE, p. 304).

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theory and praxis, whereby not only the practical presupposes the theoretical, but the converse is also true, and no form of knowledge, whether aesthetic or logical, may arise in the absence of ‘the material’ supplied by praxis.158 Croce here overstepped the naturalistic bounds of impressions and, at the same time, assigned a new place to practical and economic volition as initial moment. The conditions were thus in place for a mature elaboration of historicism. Here Croce came to a crucial transition in his philosophical biography, the importance of which should be immediately apparent. The new conceptions emerged at two points in the Philosophy of the Practical. In chapter six of the second section, entitled Two Explanations relating to Historic and Aesthetic, Croce returned to the concept of ‘existentiality,’ which in the Logic he had situated in individual and perceptual judgment, or rather in the totality of ‘all possible predicates,’ which identify the substratum ‘as existence’ by determining it ‘in a particular way.’159 But in the light of his analysis of practical volition, Croce could now add that ‘the origin of that predicate of reality or existentiality on which all the others lean’ lies in ‘the first reflection of the spirit upon the practical activity itself,’ leading to a distinction between ‘desire’ and ‘action,’ possibility and actuality of the will: ‘for the determination of the relation between desire and action, and only for that, the criterion of existence is not necessary, because that relation is itself that criterion. To say ‘this is a desire’ means, ‘this does not exist’; to say ‘this is an action’ means, ‘this exists.’ The desires are possibility; the resolutive and volitional act or action, is actuality.’160 The criterion of existence therefore descended from the ‘first reflection’ on practical activity, and so from a theoretical act, a judgment, which upon regarding the process of volition was able to distinguish action, as real, from simple desires, and so discriminate between historical consideration and artistic imagination. But if it had been possible to reach this conclusion, that was because, in the dialectic of practical activity, existence had risen (being a real act, an action) above possible volitions, above ‘passions or desires.’161 In the circular terms of his logic, in short, will and action (practice) were constitutive of reality by means

158 Idem, p. 211 (PPEE, p. 300). 159 B. Croce, Logica come scienza del concetto puro, cit., p. 107 (LSPC, p. 177). 160 B. Croce, Filosofia della Pratica. Economica ed etica, cit., p. 188 (PPEE, p. 265). 161 Idem, p. 156 (PPEE, p. 288).

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of the dialectic that enabled the energy of freedom to overcome its opposite, non-liberty, which coincided with the unreality of the will (desire). Practice thus came to hold the function of a starting point, in a sense taking over from the function once attributed to theoretical intuition, at least when (before Hegel and the metaphor of the circle) theoretical intuition had been conceived as the form of the impressions. The impressions, which in the first outline of the system had been presented as the opaque background from which spiritual activity emerged (like matter), had now been resolved in the spirit itself, wherein they could manifest themselves as practice, under the distinct headings of feeling, passions, and desires. Within the ‘spark’162 of volition, capable of deflecting from the order of historical necessity and of generating progress and incrementing reality, the miracle of existence occurred, bearing the signs of the restless vicissitudes of freedom, of its economic and earthly origin. At a different place in the Philosophy of the Practical the function of volition as starting point emerged clearly. It is a fact that the philosophy of the spirit issued from a critique of Hegel’s dialectic, of the unwarranted interpretations that had arisen from the undue extension of the logic of opposites to what Croce termed the nexus of the distinct: as against Hegel, Croce argued that the dialectic of opposites could only hold as regarded the distinct concept (wherein the positive prevailed over the negative, the beautiful over the ugly, the true over the false, good over evil), but not also in the reciprocal relation of categorial forms, which are distinct but not opposite. Dialectical opposition remained essential to the system, in the sense that each form was constituted and determined dialectically (without opposition, the forms would have deflagrated into indistinctness) and in the sense of ensuring the transitions from one to the other, setting the whole structure of the spirit in motion. Croce’s philosophy therefore remained dialectical (and Hegelian), because only opposition could make accountable the nature of activity and becoming that was the essential nature of the spirit. But in the Philosophy of the Practical the relation of opposition was significantly qualified. Having reduced feeling to its elementary practical form, which is to say to economic volition,163 Croce went on to claim that pleasure and pain were the ‘pure

162 Idem, p. 45 (PPEE, p. 40). 163 Idem, pp. 34–40 (PPEE, pp. 21–32).

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states,’ the ‘terms that are truly opposed.’164 And only in the light of the ‘synonymity [of feeling] with practical activity’ did the polarization appear ‘immediately’ and ‘no longer mediately’: oppositions arising in the theoretical sphere and the ethical domain only came about ‘mediately,’ that is, as an effect of the interference of practical activity, which continues to act within them as a concomitant factor.165 ‘The pure theoretical activity considered in itself, cannot be polarized … it will always attain to the beautiful, always to the true,’ and will enter into the dialectical logic of opposition only ‘by the law of the unity of the spirit,’ which enables ‘feeling,’ which is to say economic volition, to enter it. This step in the analysis was of great importance and further clarified his remarks on the predicate of existence: not only was reality constituted in the act of economic volition, but only with regard to economic volition could one speak of opposition, and therefore of activity and becoming. Without utility as starting point, the entire edifice of the spirit would have collapsed—or, rather, would have stood motionless in the sphere of being, ceasing to represent a world. By way of an elaborate synthesis of his individual line of inquiry and the distinctive themes of a philosophy of praxis, Croce too was maintaining there could be no other origin to reality but in practice. In the forty years and more that followed the publication of the Philosophy of the Practical, Croce never ceased to revise the category which had been the discovery of his youth and which remained the most unsettled of the categories, though he never abandoned the notion of its centrality in the system of the spirit. The historical turn of events affected his later reflections, giving an increasingly intense and dramatic form to his meditations on what he himself defined as ‘finis Europae.’166 By finis, Croce meant the decline, and possibly the collapse, of the standards of freedom and prosperity that European civilization had cultivated over the centuries; the word also called into question the premises of a philosophy that, without ever indulging in optimism, had celebrated those ideas and woven them into a history of progress. Against this background, the structural ambiguity of the economic form, of utility, began

164 Idem, p. 149 (PPEE, p. 205). 165 See pp. 149–150 and p. 248 (PPEE, pp. 205–206). 166 B. Croce, Scritti e discorsi politici, Vol. 1, edited by A. Carella, Bibliopolis, Napoli

1993, p. 259.

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to emerge, opening to the evocation, in place of elementary volition, of the disturbing notion of Vitality, ‘which erupts when it pleases to tear the fabric of Virtue,’ constantly endangering ‘the course of moral life.’167 The theme that, in the Storia d’Europa, had served to account for Romanticism as ‘pathological and shameful,’ and then for the ‘moral malaise’ and ‘evil of the century’ (his own century), erupted with surprising vigor to bring to light the unstable nature of economic practice, which on the one hand was the engine of the civilized world (in the domains of politics, law, economics, and science) but could act upon those same domains with equally destructive force. A dark undercurrent, deriving from the same root as progress, could sink all human production into negativity—everything that, in the language that enjoys much currency in contemporary philosophy, would be labeled technology. Croce thus acknowledged and upheld the interpretation that utility was intrinsically ambiguous and that vitality, being in itself impermeable to moral and universal ends, was the driving force of the crisis and decline. It needs further be added that in the face of several attempts to take the facets of that ambiguity as separate, so as to consider, for instance, economic enterprise as distinct from primitive vitality, and the latter as a dark matter that was possibly not even rooted in the spirit, Croce refused in every way to separate utility from vitality, the positive from the negative of life, not out of idealistic optimism (as was suggested and then repeated), but quite for the opposite reason. That opposition had to acknowledged as operating even at the core of the principle out of which the human world originated; it was a constitutive trait of practice, and the nature itself of the economic principle, being manifested on the one hand as the face of progress (technology) and on the other hand, but at the very same time, as the violation of all positivity which destroys what is being built. Neither out of optimism, therefore, nor out of mere inconsistency, but because of a sense of the tragic component of existence (more acute, in this respect, than Leopardi’s), Croce continued to answer his critics (Enzo Paci, Ernesto De Martino, and many others) that the link between utility and vitality had to be maintained, and that the one was necessarily reflected in the other—the negative in the positive, and vice versa. It was not out of abstract speculative reflection, but an ardent wish to engage with the tragedy of his own time (voiced in the raw, driven 167 B. Croce, Filosofia e storiografia, edited by S. Maschietti, Bibliopolis, Napoli 2005, p. 288.

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language of the ‘finis Europae’), that in the latter years of his life Croce went on to rethink the problem of dialectics, giving more and more weight and significance to the component that is life, which for him meant praxis, utility, and economic volition. The starting moment for this revision may be detected in the emphasis Croce began to give to moral form first in La storia come pensiero e come azione (1938) and then in some of the essays that went into the collection Filosofia e storiografia (1949). The development was consistent and in close relation with his liberalism and with his conception of absolute historicism and involved the revisiting of the figure of universal volition which had been introduced in three short chapters of the Philosophy of the Practical but never received thorough analysis. In the essay La storia come pensiero e come azione, moral activity assumed, among the categories of the spirit, almost a regulatory function, intervening to moderate the exuberance of other forms. Left to its own devices, each of the driving forces of the spirit would probably tend to ‘destroy the unity of the spirit and itself’; morality, then, served to bring each back to its respective confines and ensure a balance was maintained in life: morality, he explained, ‘in one respect does not carry out any particular task,’ while in another is in charge of ‘all of them,’ supporting and correcting ‘the occupations of the artist and philosopher no less than those of the farmer, industrialist, family man, politician, or soldier; respecting the autonomy of each, it also grants them autonomy by keeping each one within its bounds.’168 In the 1945 essay Intorno al mio lavoro filosofico, he further specified that morality is ‘the unifying power of the spirit,’ in that ‘it stands among the others as equal, as moderator and governor, exercising among them imperium and not tyrannidem, which is to say that it respects their autonomy.’169 While respecting the autonomy of the other forms of the spirit, as their ‘moderator and governor’ morality regulated their mutual relations and could hold in check the exuberance that each brings to the specific activity to which it presides. Presented in the light of this all-encompassing office, morality now also gave evidence of the fundamental instability of the edifice of the spirit, given that each of its domains, having within itself a polarized energy could be drawn toward its own negative, exceed its own prerogatives, and revert from

168 B. Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1966, pp. 45–

46. 169 B. Croce, Filosofia e storiografia, cit., p. 65.

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truth to error. Although able, as of 1938, to give clear indication of the remedies, his later writings just as clearly spelled out the nature of the danger. The danger lay in the dialectic itself, which Hegel had regarded as the engine of progress, as the trigger of rationality in history, but had been proven by the events of the century to be capable of showing the tragic face of death and destruction. In the terms of the dialectic, whereby each form prevails over its negative (over ugliness, falsity, uselessness, or evil), there were also, even on the positive side of such ‘prevailing,’ the dangers that attended such ‘exuberance,’ which at every pass needed to be held in check and harmonized into a superior universal pursuit—something above and immune from the incessant movement of the spiritual succession. Rethinking morality in these new terms involved a rethinking of dialectics, and particularly of the moment from which the dialectical process supposedly initiated, as his Philosophy of the Practical, at any rate, would have it. Vitality, as we have seen, was where the polar opposite feelings, pleasure and pain, were present in their immediate form, and could then interfere with the other categories, onto which they were mediately reflected. Plain economic volition was the place where the conflict between being and non-being first arose, thence to be mediated in the theoretical spheres and give rise to the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false. The crux of Croce’s reflection came to be the relationship between vitality and morality; vitality gave origin to the exuberance of all expressions of the spirit, while morality constituted its remedy— that which the Hegelian vulgate, termed synthesis and overcoming. But in contrast with Hegel’s logic, the world currently offered a spectacle of destruction for synthesis, instead of the reassurance of progress. Looking back, in a late article (Hegel e l’origine della dialettica, 1952), on the critique of Hegelian dialectics he had conducted in the Saggio sullo Hegel and in the Logic, he found it an insufficient answer to the present moment,170 which instead required that the question of the origin of becoming and of the dialectical movement be answered. These were foreign questions to Hegel’s philosophy (where dialectics meant adequate exposition of the logical content), but not to the philosophies that, after Hegel, had sought to continue in that line of speculation. Foremost among these was the work of Bertrando Spaventa, to which Croce

170 B. Croce, Indagini su Hegel e schiarimenti filosofici, Laterza, Bari 1952, p. 40.

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returned, and its antecedents (Karl Werder and Kuno Fischer) and successors (Giovanni Gentile). Likewise, the question was prominent in the studies of his one-time mentor, Antonio Labriola, who had gone on to answer the question in the terms of the philosophy of praxis. Croce regarded the problem of the origin of the dialectic with exclusive reference to Spaventa (never mentioning Labriola or Gentile),171 but reversed the solution: not in the primitive energy of thought (‘as Spaventa had affirmed’) but ‘in the vital sphere of the spirit’ lay the origin of becoming and of the dialectical rhythm which then went on to affect the full succession of human enterprises, manifesting them as ‘activities.’ ‘That restlessness of the spirit,’ he wrote, ‘moves from it, because Vitality is restlessness and is never sated’172 ; and further: ‘Vitality is a necessary integration of the various forms of the spirit, which otherwise would have no voice, nor means nor force, if, absurdly, they were to be severed from it; unless they belonged not to men but to angelic creatures, which however are unknown to us in experience.’173 Being was not informed by thought, as Spaventa had believed; a more primitive force had to be the source of the energy of thought, and that force was life, from which the restlessness of becoming and of dialectics was transmitted to thought itself. Logos, Croce concluded, was not the generator; it received, as ‘necessary integration,’ the impulse of motion from the inaugural rhythm of economic volition, from the mere element of utility in life, from the first state of feeling, polarized in the immediate forms of pleasure and pain.

171 Idem, p. 51. 172 Idem, p. 39. 173 Idem, p. 38.

CHAPTER 3

Giovanni Gentile

In January 1898 Giovanni Gentile received a copy of Labriola’s third Marxist essay as a gift from Croce. In 1897, in order to qualify for a lectureship at the university, Gentile had submitted a dissertation on historical materialism and could thus fully appreciate Labriola’s reference to the philosophy of praxis, which inspired a new study. One strand of the study was to investigate Labriola’s insight regarding the Thesen über Feuerbach, which Marx had written in the spring of 1845 and Engels published in 1888, of which Gentile gave the first (problematic and much discussed) Italian translation. The other strand instead clarified the relationship of praxis with the philosophy of Bertrando Spaventa, whose works Gentile began to study systematically around March 1898 as he prepared the edition of his own Scritti filosofici. In spite of Gentile’s destructive intent vis-à-vis Marx’s philosophy, this relatively early investigation nonetheless marked an important stage toward the definition of the fundamental problems of the philosophy of praxis. Its influence would still be discernible in Gentile’s actualism (or Actual idealism), although that transition was far from seamless.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4_3

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Between Labriola and Croce

Labriola had initiated a significant revision of the philosophical foundations of historical materialism because of the ambiguities and contradictions engendered by the residual influences of determinism and materialism in the work of Marx and his immediate successors. But Labriola had also impressed a distinct character on his conception of socialism. His elaboration implied an intimate relation between the theory (issuing from the mediation of Marx with Vico and Spaventa) and the party as the subjective entity which operated in society and embodied the principles of the theory in its agency. These two sides of his speculation, the analytical and the practical, proved difficult to join together; when Labriola tried to bring the political subject into definition by extrapolating a philosophy of praxis out of historical materialism, he too soon fell back onto a conception of the philosophy of history that resembled very closely the one he had set out to refute. So it was that, at the culmination of his reflection, Labriola’s Marxism deflected from praxis and reverted to the ‘the self-criticism which is in the things themselves.’ Croce had put his finger on the ambiguity and had gone so far as to deny (against Labriola’s overt wording) that historical materialism as formulated by Labriola could represent a philosophy of history. To remove the ambiguity, Croce severed the connection between theory and political agency to which Labriola held himself honor-bound; to Croce, political outcomes lay in the realm of historical possibility—perhaps an ethical or sentimental commitment, but by no means a logical necessity. In a passage in his 1896 paper, he made it clear that, If historical materialism is stripped of every survival of finality and of the benignities of providence, it can afford no apology of either socialism or any other practical guidance for life. On the other hand, in its special historical application, in the assertion which can be made by its means, its real and close connection with socialism is to be found. This assertion is as follows: society is now so constituted that socialism is the only possible solution which it contains within itself. An assertion and forecast of this kind moreover will need to be filled out before it can be a basis for practical action. It must be completed by motives of interest, or by ethical and sentimental motives, moral judgements and enthusiasms of faith.1 1 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, Laterza, Bari 1978, pp. 15–16 (HMEKM , p. 22).

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The logic of Croce’s argument was rigorous. If historical materialism was not a philosophy of history but a canon for a broader understanding of reality, it followed that political subjectivity could not descend from it directly and that the constitution of the subject represented a separate moment and task; to be sure, it would bear a relation to ‘the analysis that can be made by [the] means’ of historical materialism, but would also involve ‘certain integrations,’ such as ‘factors of economic interest’ or ‘moral opinions and even matters of faith.’ If in May 1896 Croce had first pointed to Labriola’s unresolved problem (which was, basically, the problem of all late nineteenth-century theoretical Marxism), Gentile was equally quick to go to the core of the theoretical question, which he treated in his dissertation in the summer of 1897.2 Gentile espoused some aspects of Croce’s analysis, but others he rejected. He rejected, first of all, Croce’s idea that Marxism was not fundamentally a philosophy and that the philosophy was only a ‘condiment’ to political practice. This search for the speculative foundation of historical materialism created an odd consonance with Labriola’s approach, so that, in the third chapter of the essay, after a long quotation from Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he reported Labriola’s outline of Marxism in his own words and went on to highlight the analogies with Vico and Spaventa and ‘the idealist origins of critical communism.’3 Whenever he discussed historical materialism and formulated its critique, Gentile had in fact Labriola in mind and was testing the validity of Croce’s interpretation. Although based on a philosophy, Marxism possessed no real speculative principle of its own, according to Gentile. Marx had derived his philosophy from Hegel and Feuerbach but had also corrupted their philosophy, introducing errors Gentile proposed to identify and emend. He also challenged Croce’s assertion that Hegel had only represented an early inspiration for Marx: to the contrary, Marx was formally a Hegelian who

2 Carteggio Gentile-Jaja, Vol. 2, edited by M. Sandirocco, Sansoni, Firenze 1969, p. 44. The dissertation was then published in October, as recorded in Gentile’s correspondence with Croce (B. Croce-G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 1, 1896–1900, edited by C. Castellani and C. Cassani, Aragno, Torino 2014, p. 11) and was reprinted in 1899 in the volume La filosofia di Marx. 3 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, Sansoni, Firenze 1959, p. 28.

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had replaced Hegel’s content because influenced by Feuerbach.4 The relationship between Marx and Hegel, he noted, was one of antithesis in content and analogy in form.5 But if form clearly stood for the dialectics, what was the content ? As Gentile then understood it, the content Marx had elaborated in dialectical form was that of economic realities,6 which did not constitute an artificial domain (as Labriola would have it)7 but was to be regarded as matter, which is to say a fully empirical and accidental element. Marx had, then, replaced the appropriate content of Hegel’s philosophy (the hypostasis of form itself) with an empirical content that was entirely alien to the dialectical process—with content that was originally in a separate domain. In place of the ‘essence of reality,’8 which derives from the form and is descended from it, Marx, that is, had placed the empirical and the accidental, which had nothing at all to do with form. Gentile remained committed to this analysis throughout the entire phase of the construction of his actualist philosophy. In one regard, this development signaled his most radical divergence from Croce, because it framed the economic principle not as a category of the spirit (utility) but as an accident, and thus neither a speculative nor a philosophical matter; in a different regard, all of Gentile’s critique of Marx was dualistic and posited the separation of form (as speculative) from content (as empirical). At bottom, where Marx had attempted a synthesis of form and content, Gentile, who regarded the conflation of these two planes as a fundamental error, reaffirmed an analytical distinction between that which is the idea and that which occurs in space and time. There was, in Gentile’s argument an element that prevented his idealism from reaching full maturity and which he himself would come to question and overcome in the system of thought he later called actualism. But that wasn’t, really, the most relevant passage of his writing. From the distinction of form and content, which he accused Marx of confusing and contaminating, Gentile derived his philosophy of history, which he formulated in the terms of a morphological prediction, analogous to Labriola’s solution in the first essay. Strictly speaking, ‘morphological’ was to qualify 4 Idem, p. 18. 5 Idem, p. 19. 6 Idem, p. 41. 7 Idem, pp. 30–31. 8 Idem, p. 55.

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a prediction that only applied to form, and therefore was not really a prediction but rather a vision9 —a vision of that which may be foreseen in so far as it is neither subject to accidents of change nor is affected by time and place, and therefore remains identical in its ideal structure. But Marx had not confined himself to morphological prediction; he had claimed to foresee the development of economic and empirical content and affirmed the necessity of communism. Pace Croce, Marx’s was a philosophy of history, and had come about out of his aspiration to yoke together political practice and historical analysis. Like Labriola, Gentile too regarded historical materialism as a philosophy of history; but instead of seeing it as a merit of Marx’s, he saw it as a flaw originating from his confusion of form with content. While therefore refuting Croce’s thesis on hermeneutical grounds, Gentile accepted it from the theoretical point of view to the extent that both regarded the philosophy of history a degeneration of sound speculative procedure. In the conclusion of his essay, Gentile wrote that, for him too, historical materialism amounted simply to ‘a methodological view, for the use of the historian’10 (Croce had said a ‘canon’). For him too, as for Croce, the ‘methodological view’ could not directly imply any such consciousness as that of critical communism’11 ; but further added that, ‘regarded in its philosophical aspect,’ Marxism ‘appears to us one of the most unfortunate perversions of Hegelian thought, as it institutes a metaphysics (the science of necessity and the absolute) of the real, understood as an object in the guise of pre-Kantian philosophy; and, what is worse, it leads to the conception of an a priori dialectic of the relative.’12 This last point summed up the destructive outcome of the inquiry, which Gentile was convinced revealed the essence of Marx’s error and added to Croce’s critique.

9 Idem, pp. 42–43. 10 Idem, p. 58. 11 Ibidem. 12 Ibidem.

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2 The Critique of Historical Materialism and ‘Praxis Overturned’ On April 3, 1890, Antonio Labriola had written a mostly personal letter13 to Friedrich Engels in which he thanked him for sending him his small book on Ludwig Feuerbach.14 The book contained the eleven Thesen Marx had composed in the spring of 1845. Writing in German (to make some show of his ‘acquired familiarity with German culture’), he also reminisced about his early intellectual background, starting with the ‘Neapolitan resurgence of Hegelianism.’ Although not explicitly stated in the letter, it stands to reason that Marx’s Thesen should have triggered memories of the philosophical discussions Labriola had witnessed or had taken part in at the school of Bertrando Spaventa. But the terse aphorisms of Marx never gained any clear prominence in Labriola’s later writings on historical materialism—not even when, with the third essay, he began to think in the terms of a philosophy of praxis (which certainly could have conjured something of the 1845 Thesen, alongside the Holy Family and the first book of Das Kapital ). The Thesen were equally disregarded by Benedetto Croce, who eventually dismissed them (with the rest of Marx’s early writings) as immature and an irrelevant ‘condiment’ to the historical and political doctrines of his maturity. But when Giovanni Gentile received Labriola’s third essay as a gift from Croce in January 1898,15 he immediately acknowledged the novelty of the suggestion that ‘historical materialism enfolds a real philosophy, the philosophy of praxis.’16 Gentile thus planned to return to an intended essay which now seemed all the less ‘untimely,’ and added: ‘I think it most necessary to delve into Labriola’s concept of a philosophy of praxis, which conceals a misapprehension I believe continues to escape Labriola.’17 Only a month later, on March 3, he wrote to Croce about his intention

13 A. Labriola, Epistolario 1890–1895, edited by V. Gerratana and A. A. Santucci, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1983, pp. 287–289. 14 F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, Dietz, Stuttgart 1888. 15 B. Croce-G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 1, 1896–1900, edited by C. Castellani and C. Cassani, Aragno, Torino 2014, p. 83 and pp. 84–89. 16 Idem, p. 85. 17 Idem, pp. 86–87.

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‘to go into a methodical and diligent study of the thought of Spaventa,’18 and began to collate Spaventa’s writings for the edition of the Scritti Filosofici, published by Morano in 1900 (with a weighty introduction by Gentile). Among other things, in his outline of Spaventa’s conception of the practical nature of the intellect, Gentile drew a precise analogy with Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach: ‘this concept [of the practical intellect], clearly illustrated by Spaventa, is, in our opinion, the golden key to unlock gnoseology after Kant; credit should be given to our philosopher for identifying it in Hegel’s Phenomenology and giving it due relevance. It was also one of the profoundest intuitions of one of Hegel’s most celebrated successors, Karl Marx, who was certainly unknown to Spaventa.’19 Through reading Labriola, Gentile immediately envisioned the outline of his second Marxist essay. On the one hand, he traced the philosophy of praxis back to the Thesen über Feuerbach; that is, to a text to which Labriola had not directly referred and Gentile identified as the core of all Marxist philosophy. On the other hand, he brought out the parallels between Marx’s early writings and the thought of Spaventa (and, through Spaventa, also Bruno, Galileo, and Vico), establishing not only the relationship of the philosophy of praxis with Kant and Hegel, but with a specific constituent of the Italian tradition within which Labriola himself had been formed.20 It may be said that a distinctive brand of theoretical Marxism, with its own peculiar (and lasting) traits, emerged in Italy through Gentile and Croce’s exchange of letters in February– March 1898. While Croce, stung by Labriola’s rebukes,21 directed his interests away from historical materialism,22 Gentile began to plan his second essay (while preparing his Rosmini e Gioberti for publication and immersing himself in the study of Spaventa) but postponed writing it till after he could read the Postscript to the French edition of Socialism and Philosophy with Labriola’s replies to Croce. He therefore waited until the 18 Idem, p. 96. 19 G. Gentile, Bertrando Spaventa, edited by V.A. Bellezza, Le Lettere, Firenze 2001,

pp. 126–127. 20 Gentile’s polemical intent towards Labriola for either forgetting or distorting Spaventa’s teachings (as Gentile would have it) emerged from his letters with Donato Jaja: see Carteggio Gentile-Jaja, Vol. 1, edited by M. Sandirocco, Sansoni, Firenze 1969, p. 333 and p. 335. 21 B. Croce-G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 1, 1896–1900, cit., p. 177. 22 Idem, p. 176.

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end of 1898 to resume the manuscript, which was practically ready the following February23 and actually published, together with the first essay, in the volume La filosofia di Marx, which came out in Pisa in August 1899 with the publisher Spoerri.24 With regard to the chief interlocutors in the Italian debate on Marxism, Gentile’s study was, to say the least, highly critical of everyone involved. He made contemptuous remarks about Georges Sorel (especially for accepting many of Croce’s theses in his later writings)25 and mentioned only in passing, and at times ironically and complacently, such authors as Alessandro Chiappelli and Francesco Saverio Merlino. Gentile essentially was interested in marking the differences between his own position and that of his major interlocutors, Labriola and Croce. Against Croce, who recommended caution in attributing any given philosophical stance to Marx, Gentile declared that he was ‘fully in agreement with Labriola’26 and that there was no question of doubting ‘the philosophical import that from the start its original authors attributed to historical materialism.’27 The publication of the Thesen, in fact, clarified the origin and nature of historical materialism as a deliberate philosophy upon which a historical and political doctrine had been founded. Labriola, therefore, was right to affirm that Marx had produced a philosophy, whereas Croce was wrong. But in the long eighth chapter of his study, following the translation and commentary of Marx’s words, Gentile limited the extent of his agreement with Labriola by means of a few critical observations. The main criticism concerned Labriola’s reliance on Engels for the interpretation of Hegel, from which sprang, to his mind, an incorrect reading of Marx’s ‘overturning.’ According to Engels, and then Labriola, Hegel’s dialectic was purely ideal, not immanent but detached from the flow of reality—a kind of Platonism which Marx had, Aristotle-wise, steered back toward the phenomenal world, in this sense ‘overturning’ its import. But Gentile also noted it must have been known to Marx that Hegel’s dialectic was not transcendent. Being immanent, just as the dialectic Marxism

23 Idem, p. 221. 24 Idem, p. 278 (Gentile received copies of the volume on August 26, 1899). 25 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., pp. 110 ff . 26 Idem, p. 64. 27 Idem, p. 63.

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now proposed, the ‘overturning’ had to lie elsewhere, in the ‘substitution’ which Marx, following Feuerbach, had made of matter for the idea, leading to a kind of metaphysical monism that was just as absolute. Gentile, that is, criticized Labriola for interiorizing Engels’ mistake in spite of Spaventa’s teachings, which would have suggested an alternative framing of the issue. Gentile quoted extensively from Spaventa precisely in the chapter devoted to Labriola, in which he discusses what Labriola phrased as the ‘formal tendency to monism’ (or, after the French edition, ‘tendance (formelle et critique) au monisme’) and Labriola’s conception of the categories as functions. Here, Gentile referred to Spaventa’s position on the link between metaphysics and experience and to his own writing Rosmini and Gioberti, stressing the distinction between ‘category as such’ and ‘category as concept’ and the definition he had formulated of the content of philosophy as the ‘transcendental hypostasis of form.’28 In short, by following Engels in regarding Hegel as a Platonic philosopher, Labriola had allowed himself to be misled in the interpretation of Marx’s speculative framework and so elaborated his version of a philosophy of praxis on false premises. The grounds for Gentile’s critique of Labriola were, however, opposite to those of Croce. While Croce sought to establish historical materialism as a realistic conception of history, Gentile intended to pursue the path indicated by Labriola, and distill the philosophical juice (Labriola’s metaphor had been kernel ) from the stock of Marx’s analyses. This serious difference between them emerged rather more forcefully in the essay Filosofia della Prassi than it had in the 1896 essay. The interpretation of historical materialism as canon, which Gentile had ultimately accepted in the previous essay, received more drastic and negative treatment and was presented as an authentic dilemma: if historical materialism, Gentile argued, was to be understood as a ‘special and relative canon’ that may apply contingently to individual occurrences, then ‘materialism bears no novelty and becomes confused with the brand of realism inaugurated in modern history by Machiavelli’29 ; but if it was interpreted as a ‘general and absolute’ canon that entails that historical understanding must always seek ‘the actual spring of all human affairs’30 in economic life,

28 Idem, p. 150 and p. 154. 29 Idem, p. 95. 30 Ibidem.

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then ‘historical materialism is precisely a philosophy of history.’31 The canon interpretation, in short, revealed itself an ineffectual contrivance that failed to resolve the ‘dilemma’ posed by theoretical Marxism. As it ostensibly aspired to be ‘general and absolute,’ it thereby outlined a philosophy—indeed a metaphysics providing an absolute, overall intuition of reality. While, in the initial part of the essay, Gentile also returned to the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (from which he had quoted at length in his previous essay), this time he concentrated almost exclusively on the Theses on Feuerbach, translating the text into Italian for the first time from the only available edition (the one that Engels, in 1888, had published as appendix to his booklet on Feuerbach). Engels had largely reworked Marx’s text for this edition (the original would only be restored in the 1932 Ryazanov edition) and made additions and corrections mostly of a didactic or explicatory order, sometimes elaborating thoughts (such as the reference to Robert Owen added to the third thesis) that Engels believed to be implicit in Marx’s reflection. What really stood out was the wording in the final part of the third thesis, where Engels substituted his own formulation for Marx’s. What Marx had written was: Das Zusammenfallen des Ändern[s] der Umstände und der menschlichen Tätigkeit oder Selbstveränderung kann nur als revolutionäre Praxis gefaßt und rationell verstanden werden. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and human activity or self-transformation can be only grasped and rationally understood as revolutionary practice.

Engel’s text instead read: Das Zusammenfallen des Änderns der Umstände und der menschlichen Tätigkeit kann nur als umwälzende Praxis gefaßt und rationell verstanden werden.

Engels’ version excised the expression ‘oder Selbstveränderung’ (and thus all reference to the self-transformation of man) and replaced the 31 Idem, p. 96.

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concept of ‘revolutionäre Praxis’ (revolutionary praxis ) with that of ‘umwälzende Praxis’ (praxis that overturns, or overturning praxis ). Why Engels should have regarded the correction useful to clarify Marx’s thought is unclear,32 considering that the expression ‘umwälzende Praxis’ ended up being the source of numerous misunderstandings and complications. As for Gentile, who deemed his translation ‘good enough,’33 but also ‘faithful,’34 and largely followed (with some exceptions)35 the text established by Engels, he ended up translating ‘umwälzende Praxis’ with the not very literal ‘overturned praxis’36 and, at other places, ‘praxis that overturns [itself].’37 In the transition from Marx’s manuscript to Engels’ revision to Gentile’s translation, the meaning of the third thesis gradually shifted: but Gentile’s patent infidelity to Marx’s (and Engels’) original afforded a precise indication of the direction in which he was taking his own reflection and of the novelty of his interpretation. Praxis had definitely emerged as the key concept. The concept that Labriola had regarded as ‘the pith of historical materialism’ and ‘the

32 Cfr. G. Labica, Les «Thèses sur Feuerbach», PUF, Paris 1987. 33 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., p. 68. 34 Idem, p. 71. 35 In the first thesis, for example, he translated ‘Er begreift daher nicht die Bedeutung

der ‘revolutionären’, der praktisch-kritischen Tätigkeit’ with ‘Perciò egli non intende il significato che i “rivoluzionari” dànno all’attività pratico-critica’ (Therefore he does not understand the meaning the “revolutionaries” give to critico-practical activity) (ivi, p. 69). The correct translation is as follows: ‘Egli non comprende, perciò, il significato dell’attività “rivoluzionaria,” pratico-critica’ (Therefore he does not understand the meaning of “revolutionary,” critic-practical activity’) (ibid., p. 69). It should be noted, moreover, that Gentile used the translation of this passage to illustrate Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach: ‘according to Marx,’ he explained, ‘one must, complete the materialist intuition with the most fecund concept of critic-practical energy; of the energy that expresses itself by simultaneously producing and having knowledge of that which it produces: the new concept of the ‘revolutionaries’ (G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., p. 81). 36 Idem, p. 71. 37 Idem, p. 85. In the fourth volume of the Italian edition of the works of Marx, Engels,

and Lassalle published by Mongini in 1906, Ettore Ciccotti would translate ‘pratica rivoluzionaria’ (revolutionary practice) (p. 41). The whole issue of Gentile’s translation is accounted in N. De Domenico, Gentiles Praxis-Philosophie und ihr Einfluß auf die Marx-Rezeption in Italien, in Arbeit und Reflexion, edited by P. Furth, Pahl-Rugenstein, Köln 1980, pp. 126–142.

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immanent philosophy of things about which people philosophize,’38 was now found by Gentile in Marx’s Thesen. Against ‘alles bisherigen Materialismus’ (including Feuerbach’s), right from very first thesis Marx evoked the ‘menschliche sinnliche Tätigkeit,’ which is to say ‘Praxis,’ subjectively (‘subjektiv’) understood; and the word praxis recurred in the second, third, and eighth theses, as the core principle of his critique of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christentums. In the first thesis, Marx had openly acknowledged this principle, had a long history behind it; Gentile related that history to idealism, which for him covered a broad area of meaning and was synonymous with philosophy (or with philosophy proper, at any rate). It had originated, Gentile believed, in ‘the subjectivism of Socrates,’ in terms of which all knowledge involved ‘a productive activity,’ ‘a subjective construction, ongoing and progressive practice.’39 Labriola had made the same point in Socialism and Philosophy, with a reference to his early La Dottrina di Socrate, and identified in ‘the Socratic method’ the correct logical method and ‘talent of generating ideas.’40 Beyond Socrates, he found the principle to occur in Vico’s critique of the Cartesian Cogito (of the subjective principle as a given—presupposed rather than the outcome of a synthesis).41 Finally, he turned to the pedagogy of Friedrich Fröbel in the interpretation given in 1878 by Francesco Fiorentino, according to whom knowing ‘is the same as the genetic development of doing.’42 To illustrate the notion, Gentile cited scientific experiments, ‘which replicate what nature does,’43 arithmetic operations, in which the result is produced through an ‘the industry of the mind,’44 and reading, which is always a new act of ‘making’ that accompanies and recreates ‘the intelligence of the author.’45 By means of these examples, Gentile defined 38 A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici,

Vol. 2, edited by F. Sbarberi, Einaudi, Torino 1976, p. 702 (SP, p. 60). 39 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., p. 72. 40 A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici,

Vol. 2, cit., p. 771 and footnote 1 (SP, pp. 150–151 and footnote). 41 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., p. 73. 42 F. Fiorentino, ‘Friedrich Fröbel’, in Giornale napoletano di filosofia e letteratura,

apr. 1878, p. 220; then in Id., Ritratti storici e saggi critici, edited by G. Gentile, Sansoni, Firenze 1935, p. 171. 43 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., p. 74. 44 Idem, p. 75. 45 Ibidem.

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Marxian praxis as the perfect unification of doing and knowing,46 as the primary relation of subject and object,47 and went so far as to attribute a subjectivist stance 48 to Marx. His critique of the abstract realism of facts, objects, or data, and all that went under ‘bisherigen Materialismus,’ implied therefore the idea of a primary ‘practical and critical energy,’49 of a praxis that acquired knowledge in the very act of producing its object (‘simultaneously,’ Gentile specified). Practical and critical energy were at the root of the philosophy of praxis and the true basis of historical materialism as outlined by Marx against Feuerbach. Gentile’s interpretation underlined the adherence of Marx’s idea of praxis to the essential features of Hegel’s dialectic (which Gentile was now reading through the filter of Spaventa’s reform); he therefore defended the view, against Croce, that Marx’s mindset had been shaped by his early Hegelian formation, of which he had retained, particularly, a critical stance toward intellectual abstraction and a strong consciousness of concreteness and totality: ‘One cannot,’ he wrote, ‘make him un-want what he wanted; and if he wanted to philosophize, since he was so inclined by nature, pretend that his philosophy was merely the by-product and not the substance of his thought.’50 Marx’s mind, in short, never strayed from the pattern of Hegel’s thought, from the dialectics; to deny this was to have misunderstood Hegel’s philosophy, as in the case of Engels, or to want to reduce historical materialism to an empirical canon, as in the case of Croce—the truth of the matter being that Marx had criticized Feuerbach and all prior materialism using the tools that Hegel had given him. Still, in reference to the dialectic, Marx spoke of praxis but specified its content in terms of the more equivocal expression: ‘menschliche sinnliche Tätigkeit’ (sensible human activity). Marx had certainly derived from Hegel the idealistic concept of praxis, but had applied it to a different content, to matter instead of the idea, to the sensible activity of the body and not to the spirit. Marx, Gentile wrote, had operated

46 Idem, p. 80. 47 Idem, pp. 76–77. 48 Idem, p. 78. 49 Idem, p. 81. 50 Idem, p. 100.

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the ‘substitution’ of thought with matter,51 which constituted the fundamental, and most characteristic, operation of historical materialism: on the one hand, Marx criticized Feuerbach’s philosophy on formal grounds in terms of the dialectical method inherited from Hegel but, on the other hand, he replaced the content of Hegel’s system (the idea) with that of Feuerbach. In Gentile’s account, thought was represented as the product of sensible activity, as a superstructure; and sensible activity, being qualified as primary energy, could only occur as ‘unconscious’ activity,52 not illuminated by reason. This substitution on the level of content explained the other expression which Marx had variously misused in speaking of Hegel, when he credited himself with overturning the Hegelian dialectic: ‘the overturning that Marx had in mind could be none other than the overturning of Hegel’s reality by [means of] Feuerbach.’53 In his mind, Marx had taken his replacement of the ideal content of the dialectic with the sensible to consist in its overturning, whereas in reality he had lifted matter out of the author of his first refutation, Feuerbach, and then had applied to matter the idealistic principle of praxis, wherein lay the contradiction. Gentile was largely reading Marx through the categories of Bertrando Spaventa, which made his approach rather distinctive. From Spaventa’s reform of the dialectic he had derived the idea (still very much removed from his own later actualism) of philosophy as absolute form and relation, capable of penetrating the content of being (of ‘prevailing’ on being), which thus became determined and was driven into the dynamics of progress. A distinction was here still implied between form and content, between the ideal sphere and the empirical dimension of the accident; and this made it possible, in his study of Marx, for Gentile to reason in terms of a replacement of content within an identical logical form. The only content that was adequate to the dialectic (he had explained in the preface to Rosmini e Gioberti) was ‘the transcendental hypostasis of form,’ which is to say the move whereby form becomes its own object and from function-category descends to the level of an abstract concept-category. But the notion of a ‘hypostasis of form’ disregarded empirical content,

51 Idem, p. 86. 52 Idem, p. 83. 53 Idem, p. 131.

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the ‘menschliche sinnliche Tätigkeit’ of which Marx had spoken (or alternatively, in the perspective from which his friend Croce was working, its empirical content of economic utility). Ideal content and sensible content appeared interchangeable only because Gentile still conceived of them as the terms of a duality. Only at a later stage would he seek to conceive the one within the other and so unify them. But at the time of writing the 1899 essay, praxis ran into the unyielding mass of the sensible body, which was as yet not adequately structured to sustain it. This difficulty led to the crucial passage in the essay which is perfectly condensed in the unfaithful translation of ‘umwälzende Praxis’ as ‘overturned praxis’ or ‘praxis that overturns [itself].’ Against the deceptive and ill-founded overturning of the dialectic which Marx believed he had accomplished, now emerged the authentic meaning of the term ‘overturning,’ and this proper meaning brought Marx again within the compass of idealism. The point of departure was the critique of abstract materialism as variously represented by Hélvetius, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Cabanis, and, above all, Robert Owen (whose name, we have noted, Engels added at the close of the third thesis), who all shared the notion that since individual human beings are shaped by their environment, it would be enough to bring changes to the social order to obtain a transformation of all human beings. Marx, in contrast, had approached the problem in dialectical terms, whereby the human environment is itself a product of human agency; cause and effect were thus involved in a circular relation, in which practice ‘overturns [itself]’ in the sense that individuals recognize themselves in their own social product, which they continuously critique and overcome. Gentile explained: Therefore, the effect reacts upon the cause and their relationship is reversed; the effect becoming cause, which becomes effect while remaining cause, so that a synthesis of cause and effect takes place. Practice, which had the subject as starting point and the object as endpoint, is overturned, returning from the object (starting point) to the subject (endpoint). And so Marx noted that the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and human activity can be conceived as practice that overturns [iteslf] (nur als umwälzende Praxis ).54

54 Idem, p. 85.

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The overturning of practice consisted, in this interpretation, not of the movement of the body and of sensible activity, but of the spirit, in accordance with the triadic rhythm of the Hegelian dialectic. In this interpretation of the dialectic, Gentile glossed, ‘the subject, Marx’s practical activity, is the thesis,’ circumstances were the antithesis, and ‘the subject modified by circumstances and education is the synthesis.’55 Practice, by its creative activity, produced social objects and at the same time was able to subject them to critique, recognizing them as its own, as its own ‘double,’ ‘reduplication’ of itself, and ‘augmentation’ of the subject: practice, he wrote in the vein of Spaventa, ‘operates: it fixes itself upon an object; it enters into contradiction, which of itself is resolved into a synthesis; educator, educated, self-educator. Such is the necessary development of practice.’56 These were the terms of Gentile’s reformulation of practice, freed of its material presuppositions and redirected (borrowing from Marx, Hegel, Fichte, and Spaventa) to pure spiritual becoming. The individual in its abstract pre-Marxist materialist conception was discarded to be replaced (after Hegel, or Marx) by a concrete ‘social being,’57 who is such by virtue of perpetual mediation with the object, with the forms it subjectively creates and by which it is perpetually conditioned. The reasons behind Gentile’s rejection, in the first of his studies on Marx, of Croce’s thesis that historical materialism could not represent a philosophy of history were reinforced in his new analysis of the philosophy of praxis. Deriving praxis from Hegel and idealism (Socrates, Vico, and so on), Marx had based his inquiry not on empirical observation but ‘an a priori scheme,’ the ‘presupposition of all knowledge.’ While certainly backed by the analysis of ‘contingent reality,’58 the a priori was found to reside in the intrinsic and necessary movement of praxis, in terms of which the subject produced its own object and the object ‘overturns’ onto the subject itself. The principle that accounted for human action accounted also for the genesis of all history, not just as past and present, but also as future history. The issue of ‘morphological prediction,’ uncertainly elaborated in the first essay, was here resolved because prediction could now be cast as a vision, as an a priori assertion of the dialectical form, of

55 Ibidem. 56 Idem, p. 87. 57 Idem, p. 84. 58 Idem, p. 103.

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the constitutive rhythm of reality. Following Rudolf Stammler,59 Gentile maintained that neither fatalism nor determinism was present in Marx,60 whose view was rather teleological (as in Hegel) in the specific sense of an ‘internal, constitutive’ finalism.61 His was not, therefore, either an external or regulatory finalism; practice, instead, constituted the necessary relation of subject and object, and generated (by its internal workings) the objective products of its own activity as its own negation: ‘no fatalism, that is; rather, the necessary connection of cause and effect; or better, logical, rational necessity – because the cause one has in mind here is rather a final cause, due to the teleologism which, we have noted, is immanent to the dialectic of Marx.’62 Thus understood, it clearly amounted to nothing short of a philosophy of history,’ which is to say a conception of empirical history as directed by ‘an a priori scheme,’ attainable by purely rational means. Furthering his dispute with Croce, Gentile cited the class struggle as an illustration, which he ingeniously interpreted as ‘the nonbeing of being, in the Hegelian triad’63 : if capital was to be understood as the social product of human beings, as the work of productive forces, then it followed that the subject should come into contradiction with its own object, and that the conflict thus determined should prefigure the overturning of praxis as synthesis: ‘and class struggle immediately comes to be determined due to the conflict between the productive forces and the forms of production (or law, as it were). Hence occurred the class struggle; which, therefore, was the historical aspect of a permanent, fundamental fact of life: praxis.’64 Historical materialism was therefore neither deterministic, nor fatalistic, but a philosophy of history involving an internal teleology that was intrinsically necessitated by praxis. What room was then allowed to that particular subject Labriola had identified as the revolutionary work of the proletariat (but had failed to establish theoretically), and Croce had 59 R. Stammler, Wirtschaft und Recht nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung. Eine sozialphilosophische Untersuchung, Verlag von Viet & C., Leipzig 1896, pp. 37–39. 60 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., pp. 116–118. 61 Idem, pp. 91–92. 62 Idem, p. 118. This meaning of ‘teleologism’ returned several times in Gramsci’s prison meditations: cf. A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 1, edited by V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Turin 1975, p. 438 (Q4, 55; PN p. 159). 63 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., p. 104. 64 Idem, pp. 104–105.

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ultimately made depend on the elaboration of economic, moral, and sentimental forces? Here Gentile hesitated, but approached the question most rigorously in the sixth and seventh chapters of the essay and in a form consistent with his overall analysis, concluding that consciousness could only be framed as a derivative form of criticism and could only be as effectual ‘as botany, which explains how a fruit grows out of flowers,’ is in influencing ‘the development of this fruit from that flower.’65 The fact that human beings ‘were aware of it or not was perfectly irrelevant to the course of this history which is in itself materialistically determined.’66 Consciousness, in short, and political action with it, appeared to be a mere reflection of a teleology, of the seal of necessity that was to be recognized within the historical process. With or without revolution, communism would still come about. As Gentile put it, the reduction of consciousness and action to the objective rhythm of history seemed to follow from the materialistic import of the doctrine: ‘since doing/making originate not in the spirit, but in matter, which bears within itself the laws of its own development, the gradual actuation of this development is wholly independent of the determinations of the spirit, even when it is granted that the spirit is in turn determined by the materialistic conception of history.’67 The role accorded to matter in the terms of the doctrine, that is, left no real room for either consciousness or action. But Gentile was to acknowledge the weaknesses in his presentation: as he observed in the following pages, the independence of historical development from the determinations of the spirit could not be accounted for in terms of matter but of praxis — and that order of explanation, as we know, belonged not to materialism but to idealism, to which Marx had only been introduced in his youth. It belonged to Hegel, that is, before Marx took it up; and now it belonged to Gentile, as self-appointed heir of that tradition. The problem of the subject whose agency constituted practice remained largely outside the scope of Gentile’s elaboration on Marxism, though in effect he reincorporated elements of that discussion. Consciousness, he wrote, had to feature at some stage in the circle of praxis because consciousness was itself a product of practical activity, and was therefore bound to overturn onto the subject that had generated

65 Idem, p. 120. 66 Ibidem. 67 Ibidem.

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it. In his typically distinctive manner, Gentile regarded the ‘consciousness of the antagonism of interests’ not as practice, but as a product; not as subject but as an object, which, as he explained, ‘also necessarily contributes to fatal proceeding of history’: ‘it is still a question,’ he concluded ‘of the overturning of practice onto the subject; and we know that the new social revolution is understood to be the work of the proletariat, which is therefore the subject of practice.’68 But this ‘overturning of practice onto the subject’ could not occur in the form of the ‘science’; the proletariat would not be the recipient of ‘the doctrine as such,’ but just of its ‘elementary principles,’ as represented in ‘propaganda’ and ‘divulgation,’ as a quid medium between Marx’s ideas and the proletariat. In the ninth and final chapter, Gentile tried to gather the several threads of his analysis into an explicit ‘critique of the philosophy of practice’ (as the chapter title was worded). His conclusion was that Marx had fallen into a ‘grave contradiction’69 due to an ‘eclecticism of contradictory elements,’70 namely the illegitimate ‘coupling’ of the principle of practice (i.e. of the dialectical form) with matter (sensible reality) assumed as content. At the root of the contradiction, wrote Gentile: is the complete absence of any critique of the application of the concept of practice to sensible reality, or matter, which he treats as equivalent. Marx does not seem to have taken the least care to consider in what way practice could be coupled with matter, understood as sole reality; but there was the whole history of philosophy to warn him of the irreconcilability of the two principles: of that form (= practice) with that content (= matter).71

In the concluding page, combining his present conclusions with those of his 1896 essay on historical materialism, he further clarified that: to the brilliant intentions of realism, the irony of logic replied with a gross contradiction, which the careful reader of these pages will now clearly understand: it is the contradiction between content and form – akin to

68 Idem, p. 121. 69 Idem, p. 165. 70 Ibidem. 71 Idem, p. 163.

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that we discerned in the critique of historical materialism, as a philosophy of history tout court.72

The ‘materialistic monism’73 of the Thesen thus ran into contradiction because practice and matter, the two terms Marx had tried to unify, could not be unified. The error resided in Marx’s attempt to substitute the content of practice along such lines as Feuerbach had proposed, and so to apply to Feuerbach’s concept of sensible reality the principle of practice, which Marx, a ‘born idealist,’ had learned ‘with the philosophies of Fichte first and then Hegel.’74 Marx had substituted an adequate content (the spirit, the idea) with an inadequate content (matter, sensible reality) in the belief that a new synthesis could be produced; instead, the outcome was an aggregate of irreconcilable terms, impossible to harmonize. Instead of providing a synthesis, Marx had generated contradiction and eclecticism. But because every critique must presuppose a certain view of things, there is the question of how Gentile himself understood those categories in 1899 and why, from his point of view, praxis and sensible reality could in no way be brought to a synthesis. The charge against Marx could be, after all, the cause of some embarrassment: by bringing practice within the domain of sensible reality, Marx had dialecticized and spiritualized it, thus instituting a form of ‘idealism’ that was even more complete and radical than the one Gentile now seemed to propose (since he was, once again, separating its terms). While Marx had reaffirmed, with Hegel, the identity of thought and being (i.e., of practice and sensible reality) and had furthered the synthesis to an extreme degree (with the ‘menschliche sinnliche Tätigkeit’), Gentile gave the impression of wanting to restore the ‘analysis’ and the original distinction of the two terms of the dialectic. This thesis was however argued with the support of a number of clarifications from Labriola and Hegel. From Labriola’s second essay, Gentile cited the passage in which, against certain Darwinist positions, he qualified ‘the specialization of human life’ as the use of ‘artificial means’ which are to be regarded as the ‘artificial basis’ that identifies the starting point of human history.75 This, for Gentile, meant the ‘negation of naturalism’ 72 Idem, p. 165. 73 Idem, p. 156. 74 Idem, p. 164. 75 A. Labriola, Del materialismo storico. Dilucidazione preliminare, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici, vol. 2, cit., p. 547 (HM , p. 116).

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and of the ‘materialist doctrine,’ because Labriola’s words entailed that the essence of human existence resided not in ‘sensible reality’ but in the spirit and in the ‘affirmation of mentality (which is a stage beyond the senses).’76 Therefore, it was not in the sensible reality of prehistoric naturalism that the principle of practice could be properly instated, but only in its overcoming in the forms of a human and ‘artificial’ reality. Even more complex was the reference to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,77 in terms of which Marx’s sensible reality was compared to Hegel’s ‘sinnliche Gewißheit,’ the ‘sense-certainty’ which is the starting point of consciousness. Marx had erred by stopping at the first figure of sensibility, and had so erred because he regarded the subsequent figures as ‘usurpations’ of abstract thought, as ideologies: ‘so,’ commented Gentile, ‘others might say that, since the adult comes from the child, it is not the adult who works and wars and does science, etc., but the child, in the last resort.’78 With both examples, the one from Labriola, and the other from Hegel, Gentile was insisting on the Aufhebung of sensible reality, on the notion that praxis could apply to the domain of the spirit but did not reside in the natural world or in matter. Marx had thus confused the dynamic method of the spirit with mere analytical identities, which instead belong in nature. In his attempt to justify this critique, Gentile thus held fast the separation between nature and spirit, sense and intellect, matter and individual determinations, and challenged Marx’s unification of those terms in the formula ‘sinnliche Tätigkeit,’ where static ‘Sinnlichkeit’ and dynamic ‘Tätigkeit’ were forcibly synthesized into an expression. One term, that is, stood for ‘nature’ and the other for ‘history’: Marx thus saw history as the ‘overcoming’ of nature (‘Sinnlichkeit’ was in fact ‘Tätigkeit’), but still characterized nature as fixed, along the lines of Feuerbach. Seeking to clarify his thought further, Gentile produced the example of the ‘vibration of the ether’ and of ‘color.’ He explained that color is not created ‘ex nihilo’ by the senses but presupposes the ‘external element’ of ethereal vibration, which it ‘transforms into visual sensation.’79 Marx, according

76 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., p. 161. 77 To the Phenomenology in particular, which was the work Spaventa favored although

Gentile could never bring himself to appreciate it in any comparable manner. 78 Idem, p. 157. 79 Ibidem.

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to Gentile, had conceived the transformation of matter (the ‘vibration of the ether,’ in the analogy) into form (‘color’) exclusively in terms of ‘sensible activity’ and with no reference to any Kantian a priori category of the intellect. He wrote: To the category, the original function of my intellect, has to be offered the datum of sensible experience, so that the concept can be shaped. The genesis of every concept is necessarily empirical, a posteriori. But, once a universal concept, a law, has been formed then this concept, this law are a priori, and as such they govern reality. Now, if one stops short of the universality of the law, of the concept, and remains among the particulars of sensible intuition, it is evident one remains immersed in the a posteriori, where none other than that which is given by experience may be found; and sensible experience always presupposes the stimulus as its antecedent, and, by its mediation, matter. Matter therefore escapes the creative activity of the senses, nor can be regulated by them; on the contrary, it acts upon them, and governs them in some respect (e.g. the varying speed of ethereal vibrations produces different colors).80

Gentile here made explicit reference to Kant,81 but he undoubtedly also had in mind Bertrando Spaventa’s reform of the Hegelian dialectic. From Spaventa, to a greater extent than from Hegel, he derived the idea of form as an absolute relationship, which presupposes the materials of experience, and indeed finds them within itself (within the terms of its own judgment),82 because, Gentile wrote, form is as ‘original’ as the spirit.83 In the terms of this view (to which he still subscribed at the time but would criticize in subsequent years), the external element (the ‘ethereal vibration’) had to be converted into the a priori of the intellect and be transformed into a reality that was also sensible: but this operation (and herein lay the critique of Marx) could not occur in the sphere of sensible activity but required the intervention of logical activity for the reason that the senses, regarded in themselves, are not possessed of the combined critico-practical energy that Marx attributed to them, and which is instead a prerogative of thought. So on the one hand Gentile upheld against Marx

80 Idem, p. 159. 81 Idem, pp. 159–160. 82 Idem, p. 160. 83 Idem, p. 164.

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the practical nature of thought (the practical intellect of which Spaventa spoke), which Marx had confused with the ‘sinnliche Tätigkeit’; and on the other hand, he refuted Marx’s syntheses (of matter and form, of sensibility and practice) and returned to the positions held by Kant (and, again, also Spaventa), more than Hegel; which is to say Gentile had to all effects returned to the analytical distinction between nature and spirit, sense and intellect.

3

Autopraxis

Following the publication of his Scritti Filosofici, Gentile gradually became ever more critical of Spaventa’s philosophy, which he made the subject of a series of writings between 1902 and 1913,84 giving a final outline of its speculative limitations.85 To review the progress of Gentile’s critique of Spaventa would also be to trace the development of actualism, Gentile’s own peculiar philosophy. It may provisionally suffice to say that Gentile’s revision of Spaventa’s philosophy in an idealistic key entailed an overall calling into question of the theoretical framework of his own approach to Marx. From the actualist standpoint, that is, the interpretation of Marx’s philosophy along the lines of the 1896 and 1899 essays had become untenable. Gentile, however, never explicitly took up Marx again, nor to the philosophy of praxis, save for republishing his two early Marxist studies as an appendix to the third edition of the Fondamenti della filosofia del diritto in 1937.86 The revision process, on the other hand, lasted about a decade and wasn’t wholly linear: while foretokens of the mature theory can be found in parts of the 1909 memoir Le forme assolute dello spirito (the third paragraph in particular), in which Gentile operated a radical synthesis of practical activity and logical theory,87 the earliest organic presentation

84 Now collected in G. Gentile, Bertrando Spaventa, cit. 85 G. Gentile, La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, Sansoni, Firenze 1975, pp. 3–65. 86 G. Gentile, I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto. Con aggiunti due scritti sulla

filosofia di Marx, Sansoni, Firenze 1937. Let us note that Gentile never mentioned Marx even where historical and philosophical consideration seemed to require it: see, for example, the 1912 memoir Il metodo dell’immanenza, in G. Gentile, La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, cit., pp. 196–232. 87 G. Gentile, Le forme assolute dello spirito, in Id., La religione, Sansoni, Firenze 1965, pp. 260–261.

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of the theory was given two years later in the 1911 Palermo dissertation L’atto del pensare come atto puro. Practical activity had at this point morphed into the pure act, or, more intrinsically still, into the concept of autoctisis, which Gentile derived from Spaventa but elaborated along lines that from the start entailed a drastic formal critique of Spaventa’s conception. In the paragraph devoted to the process of thought, he gave an anticipation of what would shortly become his fundamental objection to Spaventa’s reform and, without ever mentioning him or his texts directly, with reference to the first triad of Hegel’s logic he wrote that thought ‘is never preceded by its own nothingness’ (which is to say by pure being), because ‘nothingness can be posited by thought alone’ so it is not the thesis that makes the synthesis but, vice versa, ‘it is the synthesis that makes the thesis possible by creating it along with its own antithesis, which is to say by creating itself.’88 This process of the self-generation of thought and reality he named autoctisis and came to represent the ultimate form Gentile gave to that philosophy of praxis he had, years earlier, derived from Marx. In the 1913 essay La riforma della dialettica (in which also appeared for the first time an ‘unpublished fragment’ by Spaventa dated June 1881), the drift of his speculation finally became clear. The purpose of the fragment was not so much to represent the point of culmination of Spaventa’s reflection, but rather to signal its limit or point of arrest, which, according to Gentile, consisted in his failure to recognize the actum for ‘the very same actus of active energy,’89 or, in other words, in not having seen that being represented the becoming of thought. Spaventa, that is, had ended up regarding thought as the ‘great prevaricator,’ i.e., had come to regard thought as the negation of being, with being understood as presupposed to thought, rather than, as Gentile now saw, generated by it. As he wrote in plainer language in a 1913 article, ‘being remained [in Spaventa] a precondition for thought.’90 Spaventa was therefore culpable of dualism to the extent that he had regarded thought as the defining negation of being and not its actual source; so the reform he had undertaken of the Hegelian dialectic remained to be 88 G. Gentile, L’atto del pensare come atto puro, in Id., La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, cit., p. 195. 89 G. Gentile, La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, cit., p. 31. 90 G. Gentile, Bertrando Spaventa e la riforma dello hegelismo, in Id., Bertrando

Spaventa, cit., p. 263.

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pursued and fully accomplished on the side of idealism by radicalizing the meaning of autoctisis. This framing of the philosophy had immediate bearings on his understanding of sensible activity; having first treated the matter in his studies on Marx, in the sections he devoted to sensation, to pleasure and pain, and to perception in the 1912 Sommario di pedagogia, Gentile brought these categories under the umbrella of the ‘conceptus sui,’ of the logical concept: the concept is, in the same manner as sensation, consciousness that the Ego has of itself in its determinacy: it too is, therefore, a sensation. [...] To be sure, the concept is universal (not general), but in the same manner as sensation; and absolute, as sensation also is: universal and absolute at a given place and moment. And indeed there is also a history of the concept, which is the history of science.91

The practice had now come to coincide with the fundamental sense of autoctisis: ‘the concept of knowing,’ he wrote, ‘coincides fully with the concept of an activity that is conducted on a reality that is not given beforehand, but is created by the activity itself – so it fully coincides with the concept of action.’92 But we must insist that from this standpoint (which was largely to remain definitive in Gentile’s thought) it would no longer have been consistent to formulate a critique of Marx along the same lines as in 1899: that critique was based on the notion that Marx had substituted form with content, the idea with matter, the spirit with sensible activity, which were thus still regarded as separate; but in his revision of Spaventa’s theory, Gentile had now unified each pair of terms as being one and the same. With practical activity now indicating the primitive energy of thought, the process, autoctisis, and generative act of all reality, the problem was now, if anything, that of the relation of the concrete to the abstract, of the reciprocal deduction of the pure act from its products and vice versa. This question was to engage Gentile over the following decade and lead to the publication of the second volume of his Sistema di logica.

91 G. Gentile, Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, Vol. 1, Sansoni, Firenze 1982, p. 83. 92 Idem, p. 82.

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4

‘Feeling ’ as Praxis

As Gentile proceeded away from praxis toward the elaboration of an idealist framework, dissonant effects were produced which Gentile attempted to remedy in the latter phase of his production by introducing to his philosophy of the pure act elements that were partly extraneous to its initial conception. Some were obliquely derived from his early studies on Marx and were to be continued by exponents of his school. Between 1928 and 1943 (when he completed the preface to Genesi e struttura della società, which would be published posthumously), this implicit revision of his system essentially gravitated around the concept of feeling, which had been central to his degree thesis Rosmini e Gioberti and then underwent radical changes over the years. We should also mark as significant that the original inquiry into a fundamental feeling, such as theorized by Rosmini in the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, was conducted around the same period as his studies on Marx, which also came to coincide with his first approach to Spaventa and his debate with Croce on the form and content of art, and then on the categorial importance accorded by Croce to economic volition.93 In 1898, Gentile had examined Rosmini’s discussion of a fundamental feeling and broadened the scope of the notion in the light of its analogies with Kant’s critique of reason: not only our sensibility was to be accounted for in terms of such a notion but the intellect too, of which it indeed provided the ‘foundation and necessary condition,’ representing the ‘dark bottom of consciousness,’ the mere ‘possibility’ of an intellect as ‘the vacuous identity of the self with itself.’94 By attributing to Rosmini’s fundamental feeling a function comparable to Kant’s notion of a transcendental apperception, Gentile much radicalized its significance and came to regard feeling as the primitive and productive synthesis of opposite terms, as yet indeterminate but beginning to move toward determination and, from there, to judgment.95

93 B. Croce-G. Gentile, Carteggio, Vol. 1, 1896–1900, cit., pp. 311–337. Gentile then discussed Croce’s treatment of feeling in the 1909 review of the third edition of the Aesthetic: cf. G. Gentile, Frammenti di estetica e di teoria della storia, Vol. 1, edited by H. A. Cavallera, Le Lettere, Firenze 1992, pp. 94–103. 94 G. Gentile, Rosmini e Gioberti. Saggio storico sulla filosofia italiana del Risorgimento, Sansoni, Firenze 1955, p. 188. 95 Idem, pp. 189–192. This aspect occasioned here a particular criticism of Spaventa, who in his opinion had not understood the connection between Rosmini and Kant.

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Gentile had conducted these analyses in the early period of his formation, long before his philosophy of actualism could begin to take shape, although those early concepts were once again presented, almost unaltered, in the 1943 edition of the work (posthumously printed in 1955 and edited by Vito Antonio Bellezza). But the formulations occasioned by the study of Rosmini remained firm in Gentile’s mind, even when the second volume of the Sistema di logica outlined an initial version of actualism. Their persistence was due to the fact that they touched upon a more general philosophical problem, going beyond Rosmini and concerning Croce (which is to say, the way Croce, in the Philosophy of the Practical and in the third edition of the Aesthetic, had reduced feeling to the practical domain of economic volition) as well as Hegel (who in the first triad of the Science of Logic had made determinacy spring from the indeterminate, seeking to deduce the solidity of Dasein from the exuberance of Werden). And finally, through Hegel, the same problem took him back to Spaventa, who had devoted a dense essay to the first categories of logic. Gentile therefore tended to assign to feeling the same generative function in the dialectic that Croce, on the one hand, assigned to vitality and that Hegel, on the other hand, assigned to the internal movement of pure being. Even in later writings, he persisted in affirming the immediate nature of feeling, its being identical with pure subjectivity, as the source of determination and, therefore, of determinate thought. In this respect, feeling came to precede the act of thinking, and even the dialectic of concrete logos and abstract logos, which had occupied the two volumes of the Sistema di logica, seemed to acknowledge and allow for the presence of this ‘dark bottom of consciousness,’ which, as such, could be regarded neither concrete nor abstract. Thus, actualism, which rested on the attribution of a primitive function to thought, was in danger of displacing thought as its founding principle, or rather of having to presuppose a more remote foundation (feeling) to such founding principle (the logical act). This involved a new framing of the entire system—no longer as a dialectic of the concrete and the abstract, within logos, but as a dialectic of feeling and logos, of bodily vitality and thought. That which had offered itself in 1898 as a stimulating exegesis of Rosmini’s text turned out to pose a serious philosophical problem.

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After the Sommario di pedagogia,96 Gentile devoted a new essay to the question of feeling in 1928 and then returned to it (around the time or reorganizing the Filosofia dell’arte) with three essays published between 1929 and 1932.97 Moving on from his early study on Rosmini, Gentile clarified his position vis-à-vis Kant, first of all, qualifying feeling as ‘analogous to,’ but ‘not identical with,’ Kant’s transcendental apperception98 : while in Kant the self was a ‘given’ and a precondition for knowledge, Gentile now proposed to conceive it as ‘process,’ as the pure dialectic of the subject, which ‘is not thought but the condition of transcendental thought itself.’99 Gentile’s primary reference was no longer the Kant of pure reason, as in his degree thesis, but rather a combination of Vico with Kant’s Critique of Judgment, from which Gentile derived ‘the need for a mediating spiritual form’ between life and thought in terms of which ‘the canonical opposition of theory and practice, intellect and will begins to give way.’100 The dialectic of thought therefore sought to illustrate a vital dynamic, which Gentile interpreted not only as art, but also as encompassing nature and the body; a process involving the ‘absolute’ opposites of pleasure and pain, ‘contrary’ principles which are ‘mutually exclusive’101 and which, by excluding each other, bring the image of feeling into definition as ‘unmovable pivot’ and ‘root’ of ‘our world.’102 Feeling represented the indeterminate basis of otherness103 and immanent origin of difference, and came to stand for ‘the energy and inner soul’ of the ‘act of thought,’104 which is to say the cause of its dynamism and origin of the dialectical movement. As he wrote in Cartesian language, for the Cogito to manifest itself, all of the force of the

96 G. Gentile, Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, Vol. 1, Sansoni, Firenze 1982, pp. 33–40. 97 G. Gentile, Il sentimento (1928), in Id., Introduzione alla filosofia, Sansoni, Firenze 1981, pp. 34–60; Id., L’arte ( 1929), ivi, pp. 121–134; Id., La natura (1931), ivi, pp. 61–78; Id., L’esperienza ( 1932), ivi, pp. 79–103. 98 G. Gentile, La filosofia dell’arte, Sansoni, Firenze 1975, p. 161. 99 Ibidem. 100 G. Gentile, Il sentimento (1928), in Id., Introduzione alla filosofia, cit., pp. 39–40. 101 G. Gentile, La filosofia dell’arte, cit., pp. 155–158. 102 G. Gentile, La natura (1931), in Id., Introduzione alla filosofia, cit., p. 72. 103 G. Gentile, L’esperienza (1932), in Id., Introduzione alla filosofia, cit., p. 95. 104 G. Gentile, Il sentimento (1928), in Id., Introduzione alla filosofia, cit., p. 50.

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Sum, of the ‘thinking subject’ and living individual is required, because otherwise ‘there can be no speaking of thought.’105 The fundamental question of who does the thinking, which could only be answered with ‘there is thought when there is an individual who is thinking,’ defined the outer boundaries of his new speculation and opened the entire framework of actualism toward an ulterior foundation, which assumed the aspect of immediate existence, of the irreconcilable contrast between pleasure and pain. Within the thinking ‘who,’ the subject of thought, and no longer within thought itself, the spark of becoming seemed to ignite. Without it, thought could only return to the stolidity of theorein, of pure contemplation, against which all of modernity, from Christianity onwards, had cried out, uniting theory with praxis and reclaiming the physical nature of feeling.106 In the face of the objections La filosofia dell’arte inevitably did raise, Gentile of course insisted that his theory of feeling had to be read within the actualist framework, explaining that if the ‘primordial feeling’ comes before the determinate activity of thought (as ‘it is not yet consciousness, nor thought’),107 it was also true that only thought ‘contains [feeling] as its object,’ encounters it ‘within itself.’108 While a necessary clarification, to which the 1932 essay L’esperienza gave particular relevance, this statement amounted to a reiteration of the problem it proposed to solve, because feeling now came out to be, at once, the antecedent and the consequent to the logical act which, in the rigid order of the system, was intended to constitute the one thing and the other, the concrete and the abstract. With hindsight, we can see how the themes that occupied Gentile between 1928 and 1932 were to remain foremost in his reflections and came to represent his most significant philosophical contribution after the Sistema di logica. They reemerged, in fact, and dramatically so, in the final pages of elevated meditation that he developed, in 1943, in the manuscript of Genesi e struttura della società. As he wrote in the preface, the novelty of this book resided in the

105 G. Gentile, La filosofia dell’arte, cit., p. 159. 106 Idem, pp. 144 ff . 107 G. Gentile, L’esperienza (1932), in Id., Introduzione alla filosofia, cit., p. 95 and note 1. 108 G. Gentile, Il sentimento (1928), in Id., Introduzione alla filosofia, cit., p. 47.

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fourth chapter, which expounded the doctrine of a ‘transcendental society’ embedded ‘in interiore homine’ and in the recasting of the overall progress of the spirit as the conversion of the alter into the socius, ‘that is, an object which is not merely object (a thing), opposed to the subject, but is in fact as much a subject as the other.’109 Such conversion affected, to be sure, the institution of the self and of the selves (of I and We), of the individual in, and as, society; but beyond that it took on a cosmic meaning, because that same alter, which in the synthesis took on the aspect of socius, also represented the ‘object,’ and ‘thing,’ and, in short, was a general figure of otherness (nature, and the body). On the level of political thought, there descended an intense and belabored revisiting of the significance of the Fascist revolution centered around the conception of the ‘Ethical state’ and the predicament of humanity at war,110 with war now regarded as necessary only ‘to arise to the splendors of peace.’111 And further, there descended from it a devaluation of the traditional idea of nationhood, which came ‘neither of land nor commonality of life, and consequently of traditions, customs, language, religion, etc.,’112 but was ‘created’ by the State, which ‘impresses its seal upon it and makes it be,’ on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the brief but loaded remark about the ‘illusion’ of ‘great empires,’ which ‘decline and are corrupted’ and ‘sooner or later go to ruin.’113 Openly, sometimes, and at other times between the lines, Gentile (who was soon to embark voluntarily on the Fascist Republic of Salò venture) latterly attempted a reinterpretation of salient aspects of the doctrine of Fascism. During his short summer break at Troghi (the book was written between August and early September 1943), Gentile returned to the reflections on Marx and the philosophy of praxis of his youth, as an attempt to justify the Fascist ideology of corporatism as a new ‘model

109 G. Gentile, Genesi e struttura della società, Le Lettere, Firenze 1987, p. 33. 110 Idem, pp. 67–68. 111 Idem, p. 124. And see ibid., pp. 104–105, on the ‘greater need for fraternity and human solidarity,’ whereby ‘the heart rises to a broader perspective, and one feels one’s neighbour within the rhythm of one’s soul, and thus gains a greater richness of spiritual life.’. 112 Idem, p. 57. 113 Idem, p. 105.

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of civil society’114 but also in an effort to provide a different interpretation of modernity. At two points in the work is the influence of Marx particularly conspicuous. Firstly, in the sections devoted to the ‘humanism of labor,’ replacing the old ‘humanism of culture,’ where he stated that ‘labor is value’—labor being praxis and the prosecution of the energy of thought ‘into the natural world.’ There is ‘no doubt,’ he concluded ‘that social dynamics, and in parallel the socialist movements of the nineteenth century, have created this new humanism, the institution of which as a concrete political reality is the task of our century.’115 Secondly, the presence of Marxism (and perhaps also of Labriola, as there are echoes here of his fourth essay, which Croce had published in 1906) came out in his critique of old-style liberalism,116 in his description of the crisis of the bourgeois order, decreed by the birth of the fourth estate and the rise of socialism and communism: Socialism and communism arose; and the liberal state, the state of the bourgeoisie began to be regarded as incapable of granting the freedom of the majority of citizens, which is made up of the mass of laborers. The crisis of the liberal state was brought about when it began to become detached from socio-economic reality, the political organization of which had been its initial mission.117

It goes without saying that Gentile drove at a critique of liberalism that would legitimize the achievements of Fascism, but his analysis rested on the old Marxist framework. This also became manifest in his controversy with Croce,118 which again centered on the question of utility and the nature of the economic domain. Interestingly, it was in this very context that the line of reasoning on feeling, that had been dropped around 1932, was resumed and in fact came to be the uniting element of all of the new ideas the book gradually introduced. It was resumed because in the discussion of Croce’s conception of economic volition, Gentile made

114 Idem, pp. 113–114. 115 Idem, pp. 111–112. 116 Idem, pp. 61–66. 117 Idem, p. 63. 118 Idem, pp. 71–72.

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it originate from the spirit as ‘a sort of instinctive, necessary, mechanical manner of operating without free agency’119 and reduced it to the ‘unconscious rationality’ shared by humans with the lower animals.120 Thus framed, utility had to do with the body and with nature, and was not, as Croce erroneously believed, the origin of human praxis. But there was still the difficulty, he immediately perceived, not of defining utility, but of accounting for its ‘genesis,’121 of making the physical originate from the synthetic unity of the spirit. At this junction, in the same way that utility had pointed to the body, the body now pointed to feeling as its stem and generative source. While it is true that in speaking of the body, Gentile explained, everyone always speaks of ‘their own body,’122 such ‘feeling-of-self ’ is that of the soul, not of the body; and the soul ‘within itself redoubles: and so it is soul (itself) and its opposite, the opposite of that which it feels: the body, which is felt and cannot feel, because it is the internal term of the soul’s feeling.’123 On the one hand, therefore, utility was reduced to the body; but on the other hand, in terms of its internal genesis, the body guided the analysis toward the vital synthesis of feeling, of the most elementary form of feeling-of-self , with regards to which the body constituted the analysis, the ‘negative which is denied.’124 As in the writings of a decade earlier, again feeling was presented as the primary synthesis, the authentic unity of opposites, the generative rhythm of all difference and of the abstract, capable of negating itself at the point of the ‘interior term’ marked by corporeity, which is to say by nature and, ultimately, utility. Thus, in chapter twelve, La politica, Gentile concluded that feeling is ‘blood of our own blood,’ and ‘the humus in which the tree of the State has its roots’: which is the proper nature of feeling, being this side of thought and the basis of thought; the condition which thought emanates from itself in its vital rhythm, and in fact finds before itself as its own condition. It is a

119 Idem, p. 73. 120 Idem, p. 72. 121 Idem, p. 75. 122 Idem, p. 76. 123 Ibidem. 124 Idem, p. 78.

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condition comparable with the corporeity the individual finds in their own consciousness as the foundation of their own being and doing.125

The ‘vital rhythm’ resided, at the same time, ‘this side’ and beyond the act of thinking: it constituted its ‘condition’ and, equally, the product ‘emanated’ by its own energy. The argument, in a way, curved into a circle and was pursued to the point of identifying the child as symbolizing the ‘immediacy of feeling’ and perfect spontaneity, and almost a metaphor for ‘political genius.’126 This circularity reproduced, with greater intensity, that which in 1928 had arisen as a fundamental logical problem, and posed itself with the greatest urgency in the last chapter of the work, where Gentile, considering immortality, proposed to explain death as the dissolution of the ‘transcendental society,’ and therefore as the return of the socius within the lifeless figure of the alter. While in previous chapters (the seventh, particularly) feeling was conceived as a vital synthesis whereby the soul perceives the body as its ‘interior term,’ now the process reversed itself, so that at the ‘drawing near of death’127 the synthesis broke down and the body ‘becomes other, a pure object.’128 The body, ‘our own other,’ thus morphed into abstraction and became nature, a stranger, and ‘no longer ours.’129 As such, it was the ‘abstract,’ as Gentile pointed out,130 and therefore ‘nothing’; but it also indicated the extreme limit of logical capability, the point at which thought (the ‘polar star’ which ‘never shuts its eyes’ and which ‘cannot abstract from itself’)131 became divided from the soul and found before itself a ‘mute’ object, now separated from the living flux of the subject. In one and the same movement, the fundamental feeling and transcendental society, I and We, vanished only to leave thought, in its regained immortality, alone in the void of all signification. Not sustained by fundamental feeling as its

125 Idem, p. 125. 126 Gentile wrote, ‘and in such feeling lies the secret of political genius.’ Idem, pp. 126–

127. 127 Idem, p. 168. 128 Idem, p. 169. 129 Idem, p. 170. 130 Idem, pp. 169–170. 131 Idem, p. 167.

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primary synthesis and the original energy from which sprang its determinations, the concrete logos also deflagrated into nothingness and followed the same course as the life of the individual. The ‘menschliche sinnliche Tätigkeit,’ of which Marx had spoken in his first thesis on Feuerbach and which in his essay La filosofia della prassi Gentile had interpreted as the intrusion of materialism into the idealistic realm of praxis, had therefore seeped into the structure of his thinking, defining the configuration of the philosophy of actualism to a far greater extent than Gentile would have originally imagined.

CHAPTER 4

Rodolfo Mondolfo

Gentile had attributed considerable theoretical importance to the philosophy of praxis, which he made the object of a serious analysis largely based on the text of Marx’s Thesen. He came, however, to drastic conclusions: its wholly misguided attempt to conjoin dialectical form and sensible matter made Marxism ‘one of the most unfortunate deviations from Hegelian thought.’ Gentile’s historiographic perspective implied the interpretation of Feuerbach as an abstract materialist and an heir to eighteenth-century sensism. For his own part, Mondolfo, as a specialist in the field of modern authorsand of Rousseau (besides being an expert in ancient philosophy), understood that the philosophy of praxis, in terms of its intrinsic value and its importance for socialist culture, could only be recovered by correcting this interpretation of Feuerbach and of his relationship with Marx. This new interpretation was advanced in the two-part article La filosofia del Feuerbach e le critiche del Marx, in 1909, soon followed by a book on the philosophy of praxis, Il materialismo storico in Federico Engels, published in 1912. Here Mondolfo laid out his critico-practical conception and, more generally, the principles of a distinctive humanistic historicism. After Labriola (a term of reference for him), Mondolfo had a key part in establishing praxis as the basis of Italian theoretical Marxism. When the Soviet revolution came (which he harshly criticized), Mondolfo’s analysis again sparked a heated debate, particularly because his interpretation of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4_4

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overturning of praxis ruled out any active form of political mediation. Mondolfo’s examination of Marxism in the light of the Italian tradition inclined toward Vico more than Machiavelli, from which naturally followed his dissent with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, which gave rise to a major fork in the development of the philosophy of praxis in Italy.

1

Marx and Feuerbach

When the split between reformists and maximalists occurred within the Italian socialist movement, Mondolfo returned to the fundamentals of Antonio Labriola’s philosophy. Starting from his early articles in Critica sociale in 1906–08, he subscribed to the notion of returning to the original thought of Marx and freeing it from the contaminations and revisions leaning now toward idealism, now toward pragmatism.1 In an article of October 16, 1908 which discussed the alleged ‘end of Marxism,’ he began to speak of ‘critical communism’ in the manner of Labriola and identified the philosophy of praxis as the theoretical basis of Marx’s thought. Critical communism, he explained, was essentially centered on the idea that ‘human beings make history within the environment that produces them; at bottom there are real conditions, the most important and decisive of which are economic conditions,’ and concluded that ‘critical communism, which is to say Marxism, basically amounts to this.’2 In the writings of this period are several elements derived from Labriola, including the critique of ‘factors’3 and the argument concerning the ‘tendential’ nature of economic laws,4 and particularly the insistence on praxis as the core of the doctrine and guarantee of its intrinsic historicity. From the start, however, Mondolfo also criticized Labriola’s residual determinism and the errors of historical interpretation in his writings. While he appreciated the notion that ‘every act of thought involves effort, which is to say it is new

1 See, in particular, Mondolfo’s subsequent interventions in the diatribe between Tullio Colucci and Ettore Marchioli in the journal Critica sociale, partly collected in R. Mondolfo, Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, Einaudi, Torino 1975, pp. 79 ff . 2 R. Mondolfo, La fine del marxismo? (1908), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 7. 3 R. Mondolfo, Tra l’ideale e l’azione. Per l’unità di teoria e praxis (1911), idem, p. 89. 4 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1923), idem, p. 75.

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labor’ and made it his own, and further embraced the ‘realistic process’ as a method leading ‘from life to thought, and not from thought to life,’5 he criticized the notion of the ‘self-criticism which is in the things themselves’ as a contradictory representation of the overturning of praxis,6 and similarly criticized the notion of a ‘rhythmic movements of real things,’7 to which Labriola again resorted in the third essay, as a fallacious representation of Marx’s understanding of the Hegelian dialectic. Mondolfo thus approached Labriola’s work both seriously and critically from the beginning, as two writings specifically devoted to Labriola in 1922 and 1924 further showed.8 The merits of Labriola, he clarified, essentially consisted in ‘the claim that the philosophy of praxis was the “pith of historical materialism,”’ on the one hand, and ‘the rejection of all theories based on historical factors ’ on the other, which were to be replaced by a newly founded historical and humanistic conception of Marxism.9 So notwithstanding the theoretical shortcomings of his predecessor, Mondolfo also acknowledged his debt in defining a conception that with ever-greater assurance he referred to as critico-practical conception, which was essentially a humanistic historicism stripped of all residues of materialism and historical fatalism.10 The reasons for such a profound affinity with Labriola were several. To begin with, Mondolfo subscribed to the interpretation of Marx’s indebtedness to Vico and further emphasized this reading, to the point of claiming (on no stronger evidence than the

5 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1909), p. 35, footnote 1. 6 R. Mondolfo, Socialismo e filosofia (1913), ibid., pp. 121–122. 7 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1909), ibid., pp. 12–13, footnote 1. 8 R. Mondolfo, Prefazione a S. Diambrini Palazzi, Il pensiero filosofico di Antonio

Labriola, Zanichelli, Bologna 1922 and R. Mondolfo, Ricordando Antonio Labriola (1924), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., pp. 242–246. See, also, Balbino Giuliano’s observations in his review of R. Mondolfo, Sulle orme di Marx. Studi di marxismo e di socialismo (Cappelli, Bologna 19202 ), in Rivista di cultura, 1920, pp. 81–84. 9 R. Mondolfo, Ricordando Antonio Labriola (1924), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 244. 10 Idem, pp. 243–245.

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famous note to the first book of Das Kapital )11 that Marx had derived12 the notion of praxis from Vico’s ‘verum ipsum factum’13 ; alongside Vico, however, Mondolfo in some places also commented on Marx’s points of contact with Giordano Bruno.14 Like Labriola, Mondolfo also made no reference to Machiavelli, as we shall see when we come to his diatribe with Gramsci.15 And although he criticized Labriola’s notions of a ‘self-criticism which is in the things themselves’ and of the ‘rhythmic

11 K. Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books, London 1976, pp. 493–494. Mondolfo’s remarks were made in Feuerbach e Marx (1923), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 73. 12 Idem, p. 73. Also, R. Mondolfo, Spirito rivoluzionario e senso storico (1915), idem,

p. 135: ‘Marx derived the principle from Vico: the true is replaced by the fact; reality resides in praxis.’ 13 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1909), idem, p. 34. And cf. Id., Contributo ad un chiarimento di idee (1924), ibid., p. 237 and Id., ‘Prassi che rovescia’ o ‘prassi che si rovescia’? (1933), ibid., pp. 402–403. Mondolfo took for granted that Marx had already read Vico at the time of writing the Thesen on Feuerbach in 1845. This has long been a controversial issue. In the first essay, Labriola had stated that a conception of history along the lines of Marx’s had been formulated by Vico who had said ‘Providence does not act in history from without’ (A. Labriola, In memoria del Manifesto dei Comunisti, in Id., Scritti filosofici e politici, Vol. 2, edited by F. Sbarberi, Einaudi, Torino 1976, p. 519 [MCM , p. 76]). But the thesis of a continuity between Marx and Vico is not new in the history of Marxism: Paul Lafargue has insisted on the Vico-Marx derivation, and so did the Vicovian writings of Georges Sorel in Le Devenir social. Marx had moved to Paris on June 19, 1843 and remained there until 1845, when he was expelled and had to move to Brussels. By that stage, Jules Michelet’s 1827 translation of Vico’s Scienza nuova (as Principes de la philosophie de l’histoire) was commonplace in France, to be followed in 1835 by the De antiquissima and the Autobiography. Direct evidence of Marx’s knowledge of Vico dates much later, to the letters to Lassalle and Engels in 1862 and the abovementioned note (n. 89) to the first book of Das Kapital, which is to say 1867. In both instances, Marx refers to the French version by Cristina Trivulzio Princess of Belgioioso (whose 1842 essay on the formation of Catholic dogma he may also have read), printed by Jules Renouard in 1844. This edition too, therefore, precedes the writing of the Thesen. Fausto Nicolini believes Marx did not read Vico any earlier than 1850, and Giovanni Mastroianni (Marx e la Belgioioso, ‘Giornale critico della filosofia italiana’, 2012, n. 2, pp. 406–426) also practically rules out early knowledge of The New Science by Marx. But the question has again been reexamined by Carlo Ginzburg, Microhistory and World History, in Cambridge World History, vi, Vol. 2, Cambridge 2015, pp. 446–473. 14 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1923), p. 60 and p. 64. 15 R. Mondolfo, Intorno a Gramsci e alla filosofia della prassi (1955), idem, pp. 296–

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movements of real things’ and rejected all determinist or fatalistic interpretations of Marxism in favor of a rigorous humanistic historicism, Mondolfo’s philosophy of praxis contemplated no room for active political intervention, which is to say, for the role of the political party in the overturning of praxis. From his angle, consciousness alone was sufficient, to the extent that (long before the Soviet revolution and the disputes that followed), he affirmed, ‘knowing is doing, wanting is acting’ because ‘without practical action there is neither consciousness nor will’; it followed from these premises there was no call for the proletariat to ‘bring the party on stage in the guise of a deus ex machina, which, by acting upon its program, shall create the new environment for the benefit of the masses, to which the masses will need only adapt.’16 This critique was levelled at the maximalist positions of Italian socialism as championed by Walter Mocchi in his motion at the Brescia congress, and revealed the absence of a Machiavellian component to Mondolfo’s order of thinking; politics and the party were not regarded, that is, as integral to the overturning of praxis. In this regard too, he showed an affinity with the peculiar forma mentis of Labriola, which makes fully intelligible his subsequent reluctance to accept both Lenin and the Gramscian notion of the construction of hegemony. Beyond the intrinsic importance of his reference to Labriola in the theoretical debate of that phase, Mondolfo promoted a heightened awareness among socialist thinkers of the course followed by Marxism in Italy after Labriola. How the influence of Giovanni Gentile was decisive to the re-elaboration of the philosophy of praxis has been recorded17 : his influence, we may add, was not restricted to La filosofia di Marx, but extended to other aspects of his philosophical inquiry and in several regards matched the construction of actualism itself, as Mondolfo showed in the chapters added in 1923 to the essay Feuerbach e Marx, in which his critique of the ‘hypostases’ and the dialectic between present and past (to which we will return shortly) is closely reminiscent of certain developments in Gentile’s thought.18 Nor did Mondolfo omit to examine Croce’s philosophy attentively, to the extent of reading beyond his Marxist essays 16 R. Mondolfo, Socialismo e filosofia (1913), idem, p. 126. 17 E. Garin, Rodolfo Mondolfo, in Id., Tra due secoli. Socialismo e filosofia in Italia

dopo l’Unità, Laterza, Bari 1983, pp. 204–234. 18 See, in particular, R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1923), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 61.

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and acutely consider his Philosophy of the Practical.19 Due attention was also given to the writings of Arturo Labriola, particularly to the 1908 work Marx nell’economia e come teorico del socialismo,20 which provided insights for his interpretation of Feuerbach. But his relationship with Gentile influenced his reflection on Marxism above everything else. Beyond the direct borrowings, which enabled him to shape the philosophy of praxis in terms that the reading of Labriola alone would not have allowed, his examination of Gentile prompted him to correct the latter’s paradigm in some crucial regards. Granted that Gentile had interpreted Marx’s conception as a philosophy of praxis, along the lines of Labriola’s third essay, he had also, however, undermined its consistency by reading into it an irremediable contradiction between the dialectical principle and its material content. The two terms in this antithesis, as Gentile saw it, were, respectively, derived from Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism, between which Marx had remained torn, incapable of adding a synthetic concept of his own beyond the practical feeling of communism. Marxism, we have seen, came out of the first of Gentile’s two essays on historical materialism as ‘one of the most unfortunate deviations from Hegelian thought.’21 Gentile’s analysis, and his drastic conclusions above all, followed from his reading of Feuerbach’s philosophy as a brand of materialism derived from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sensism. Mondolfo immediately understood that the philosophy of praxis could only be reclaimed to the doctrine of socialism by questioning this premise and rethinking Feuerbach’s analysis and the terms of his relationship with Marx. This he performed in his 1909 essay La filosofia del Feuerbach e le critiche del Marx, which appeared in two parts in the journal La Cultura filosofica and constituted a milestone in the history of the philosophy of praxis. Mondolfo too gave a translation of the Thesen, and this too was based on Engels’ text, the only version then available.22 He took into account

19 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1909), p. 37, footnote 1. 20 Avanguardia, Lugano 1908. 21 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, cit., p. 58. 22 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1909), cit., pp. 10–11.

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another Italian translation by Ettore Ciccotti,23 Paul and Lara Lafargue’s French edition of Engels’ writings,24 and the extracts cited in the recent work by Arturo Labriola25 ; his primary reference, however, remained Gentile’s 1900 translation, from which he departed to some extent but which he replicated in significant respects. Beyond some terminological changes (the use of ‘praxis,’ for instance, instead of ‘prassi’—practice), the main divergences from Gentile’s translation were the following: (1) in the first thesis, he translated ‘gegenständliche Tätigkeit’ with ‘activity that institutes the object ’ instead of ‘objective activity’; (2) in the second thesis, he translated ‘Diesseitigkeit’ with ‘objectivity’ instead of ‘positiveness’; (3) in the third thesis, he translated ‘umwälzende Praxis ’ with ‘praxis that overturns itself’ instead of ‘overturned practice’; (4) again in the fourth thesis, he translated ‘Selbstentfremdung’ with ‘self-alienation’ instead of ‘self-projection’; (5) also in the fourth thesis, he translated the verb ‘sich von sich selbst abhebt’ with ‘separates from itself’ instead of ‘rises from itself’; (6) still in the fourth thesis, he translated ‘Selbstzerrissenheit’ with ‘inner self-laceration’ instead of ‘self-duplication’; (7) and lastly, in the fourth thesis, he translated ‘praktisch revolutioniert werden’ with ‘practically overturned’ instead of ‘practically displaced.’26 Apart from these and other small changes, Gentile’s translation was substantially confirmed, though there was the issue of the translation of ‘umwälzende Praxis ’ in the third thesis. While still an unfaithful translation, like Gentile’s, Mondolfo’s characteristically replaced ‘overturned praxis’ with ‘praxis that overturns itself,’ which also had appeared in a couple of passages of 23 Ludovico Feuerbach e il punto d’approdo della filosofia classica tedesca (1886). Con appendice: Karl Marx su Ludovico Feuerbach dell’anno 1845, Luigi Mongini, Roma 190a (serie ii, fasc. 18). 24 F. Engels, Religion Philosophie Socialisme, edited by P. Lafargue-L. Lafargue, Jacques & C., Paris 1901. 25 A. Labriola, Marx nell’economia e come teorico del socialismo, cit. 26 Mondolfo’s actual Italian wording was as follows: (1) in the

first thesis, ‘gegenständliche Tätigkeit’ = ‘attività che ponga l’oggetto’ (Gentile = ‘attività oggettiva’); (2) in the second thesis, ‘Diesseitigkeit’ = ‘oggettività’ (Gentile = ‘positività’); (3) in the third thesis ‘umwälzende Praxis ’ = ‘praxis che si rovescia’ (Gentile = ‘prassi rovesciata’); (4) in the fourth thesis, ‘Selbstentfremdung’ = ‘autoalienazione’ (Gentile = ‘autoproiezione’); (5) in the fourth thesis, ‘sich von sich selbst abhebt’ = ‘si separa da se stesso’ (Gentile = ‘si eleva da se stesso’); (6) in the fourth thesis, ‘Selbstzerrissenheit’ = ‘autolacerazione interiore’ (Gentile = ‘duplicazione di sé’); (7) in the fourth thesis, ‘praktisch revolutioniert werden’ = ‘praticamente rovesciato’ (Gentile = ‘praticamente scalzato’).

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Gentile’s La filosofia della prassi but almost as an equivalent or synonym of the expression he had given in the translated text. More than the translation of the Thesen, Mondolfo’s differences with Gentile concerned the interpretation of Feuerbach and of his critique by Marx in 1845. This was the crux of Mondolfo’s reflection on Marxism, which he outlined with clarity in his 1909 essay and which he revised and corrected in subsequent writings as some of the shortcomings of his initial position became manifest. In the 1909 article, he concentrated on the refutation of a vulgate regarding Feuerbach27 which had been proposed not only by Gentile and by Eugenio Di Carlo,28 in Italy, but also by Franz Mehring.29 To an interpretation which pared down Feuerbach to the tabula rasa of materialism, he contrasted the opposite image of a thinker who, not unlike Hegel, had overcome idealism and materialism and found in the principle of praxis the synthesis and unification of opposites. He wrote: ‘this is where we see the subject-object relation assume the form of praxis, in which the reality of either term takes shape and develops dialectically.’30 The ‘most productive concept of need’ disclosed the ‘dialectical spring of development,’ which is to say the principle of progress and historicity, in which the real, perceiving in itself the absence of the negative, tends toward the rational as the negation of the negation.31 This representation ran counter to Gentile’s: Feuerbach had not inspired Marx to espouse materialism and roughly graft it onto the Hegelian dialectics, and instead represented for Marx a more self-conscious form of Hegelianism, which had overcome its idealistic flaw and realized its fundamental quest. The problem was, however, that this refutation of the traditional interpretation of Feuerbach brought down not only Gentile but Marx too in its train. Marx, indeed, had ranked Feuerbach with ‘all past materialism’ in the Thesen, and had cast aside his speculative premises in favor of Idealismus and, therefore, of praxis as ‘menschliche sinnliche Tätigkeit.’ Beyond Gentile, Mehring, or Di Carlo,

27 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1909), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 13. 28 E.Di Carlo, La concezione materialistica di Carlo Marx, Sciarrino, Palermo 1903. 29 F. Mehring, Storia della democrazia sociale, 2 voll., Mongini, Roma 1900–1907. 30 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1909), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 25. 31 Idem, p. 47.

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this critique touched on Marx, who had condemned Feuerbach’s materialism in the very same move whereby, without saying so, he had derived from it the very pith of his own philosophy. In the terms of the 1909 essay, the ‘great analogy’ between Marx and Feuerbach made it difficult to grasp the ‘differential element’ between the ‘critical communism’ of the former and the ‘humanism’ of the latter32 : one came away with the impression that Feuerbach had made all the findings, beginning with the philosophy of praxis, and that Marx, not citing his source, had done nothing more than re-elaborate the concepts developed by Feuerbach and impress a more concrete determination on the concept of need, which in Marx became economic analysis and class struggle. Aiming to criticize Gentile, Mondolfo had ended up overstating the importance of Feuerbach at the expense of Marx; taking stock of this outcome, he added significant new contributions to his later writings. But the 1909 essay had clearly defined the philosophy of praxis as the philosophical core of Marxism in a positive sense, and no longer as a deviation from Hegelian thought, thus vindicating Labriola’s essential contribution; and he had found, in the principle of the overturning of praxis, a valid theoretical tool against both the wan and stalling determinism of the reformists and the unwarranted ambitions of the maximalists. Overturning signified, in fact, synthesis, unity of subject and object, and therefore the impossibility of conceiving the two terms separately, either in passive expectation of environmental developments or as the ambition to force the course of history without adequate consideration of objective conditions.33 With Feuerbach as starting point, he gave a gnoseological and ontological interpretation of the philosophy of praxis, writing that ‘subject and object necessarily only exist as terms of a reciprocal relation, the reality of which resides in praxis,’34 and as the spring of historicity and progress: ‘the relationship between subject and object is one of opposition which gives rise to dialectical development: the object, standing opposed to the subject as its negation, gives impulse to the affirmation of the subject within the object, wherein knowledge and praxis consist.’35 Both, finally, were at the root of a social and revolutionary process in

32 Idem, p. 53. 33 Idem, p. 50. 34 Idem, p. 12. 35 Idem, p. 35.

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terms of which it was to be acknowledged (as Marx had written) that social conditions determine human consciousness; but it was equally true, possibly with all the greater force, that consciousness conversely produces the economic and social structure, unceasingly always transforming that which is ‘given’ into the ‘product.’36 The initial limit of Mondolfo’s interpretation resided in the minor importance attributed to the work of Marx, who came out as the bearer of a philosophical principle which he essentially owed to Feuerbach or, further back, to Bruno and above all to Vico. The Marx–Feuerbach relationship was reexamined in several writings produced over the course of the following years. As early as the 1912 article on ‘the philosophy of Marx’ there appeared the first signs of a changed interpretative paradigm. Mondolfo restated the most distinctive themes of his interpretation, which revolved around Feuerbach’s theory of need, ‘the equivalent of Hegelian non-being’ but ‘transported from the absolute idea to human consciousness,’ as affirmation of ‘that impulsive instance which Hegelian rationalism either neglected or denied.’ Concluded Mondolfo,37 ‘Marx derives much more than he owns up to in his famous eleven Thesen: he derives nothing less than the foundations of the philosophy of praxis.’38 However, when he came to the question of the ‘differential element’ between Marx and Feuerbach, he noted a fact which was absent from the 1909 essay: he wrote, in fact, that Marx ‘does not stop here: his alone is the concept of praxis which overturns itself .’39 While Feuerbach had centered the theory of need on the relationship between humans and nature, framing the latter as ‘external world,’ Marx had converted ‘natural elements into historical facts’ and so had historicized nature, which he regarded as the ‘prior activity’ of praxis—as past and, therefore, as spirit. The rift between Marx and Feuerbach occurred at this junction: praxis was no longer the primitive mediation of humans with nature, but a historical mediation, between the ‘further activity’ and the ‘previous activity’ of identical volitional energy. In tones reminiscent of Giovanni Gentile’s actualism (whose memory on L’atto del pensare come atto puro was delivered in 1911), Mondolfo wrote:

36 Idem, p. 34. 37 R. Mondolfo, Intorno alla filosofia di Marx (1912), idem, pp. 92–93. 38 Idem, p. 94. 39 Ibidem.

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where Feuerbach, who takes a naturalist stance, establishes a relation between man and the outside world, Marx and Engels, who take a historical stance, place the relation of further activity in the face of the outcomes of previous activity: that is the relations of praxis which overturns itself. Effect becoming cause, historical fact becoming historical factor is always the essence of the process. The outcome of human activity tends to become condition and law unto that which has generated it, the product seeming almost to want to dominate its maker: but, in turn, such active element, which is in danger of being changed into a passive element, reacts and overcomes the conditions that strove to impose themselves onto it: such that, through its own work, it creates new conditions, which again will strive to dominate it, and against which further activity will have to overturn itself. Praxis that overturns itself is therefore need, transformed from natural fact into historical fact.40

Where Marx had made an advance on Feuerbach was in recasting the relationship that saw humans opposed to nature as a dynamic unfolding entirely within the activity and taking place between further activity and the previous: in this sense, Marx had gone back to Hegel,41 to his dialectical historicism, and steered clear of naturalism and materialism. These were the only possible terms, Mondolfo wrote in 1912, in which to conceive the overturning of praxis as the core of Marxism. The overturning, in short, had no longer to do with the relationship between subject and object, between humans and that which was given (as the 1909 article had maintained), but historicized both terms. In the article ‘Spirito rivoluzionario e senso storico’ (published in German in 1915, then in 1917 in the Nuova Rivista Storica) this new interpretation of the Marx–Feuerbach relationship was made more explicit. From a thorough analysis of eighteenth-century theorists, Feuerbach came out as ‘impermeable to the principle of historicity,’42 as theorizing the ‘separation of past and future, evil and good, the real and the ideal, the conservative class and the revolutionary.’43 To bring out this limitation in Feuerbach’s conception he cited some preparatory fragments of the Wesen des Christentums from 1841 to 1845 in which we read that ‘die Gegenwart erkennst Du

40 Idem, pp. 94–95. 41 Idem, p. 95. 42 R. Mondolfo, Spirito rivoluzionario e senso storico (1915), idem, p. 128. 43 Idem, p. 139.

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nicht aus der Geschichte,’44 that ‘the present,’ he translated, ‘cannot be known by historical means.’45 With a shift from his 1909 study, Mondolfo now represented Feuerbach as an instance of ‘past materialism,’ as Marx had written in his first thesis. The philosophy of praxis, or critico-practical conception, was now credited to Marx, not Feuerbach; Marx, then, had converted nature into spirit and so elaborated a humanistic historicism in terms of which the idea of the overturning was possible. These new considerations, which must have soon followed the 1909 essay, account for the two chapters which in 1923 Mondolfo added (as Chapters 6 and 7) to the third edition of Sulle orme di Marx, ‘to outline,’ he wrote, ‘the essential features of Marx’s theory and texts, and better show what similarities and differences there are between him and Feuerbach.’46 The new chapters stand out against the old (which were reprinted without substantial changes), from which they differ for the reasons we have seen and the introduction of new developments. Firstly, Marx’s transition ‘from naturalism to historicism’ emerged very clearly: whereas Feuerbach represented history as the ‘struggle of humans with nature,’ with an object that is ‘external’ and ‘stands opposed,’47 Marx made the antithesis internal to historical process and human societies48 : The difficulties which give rise to an awareness of need are not only due to nature’s being exterior, but also to the interiority itself of historical creations, of human society in its several forms, and of the relations and 44 The Feuerbach fragment goes as follows: ‘die Gegenwart erkennst Du nicht aus der Geschichte; denn die Geschichte zeigt Dir nur die Ähnlichkeit einer Erscheinung mit einer bereits dagewesenen, aber nicht ihren Unterschied, ihre Individualität, ihre Originalität; die Gegenwart kann nur unmittelbar durch sich selbst erfaßt werden. Und Du verstehst sie nur, wenn Du selbst nicht bereits zur Vergangenheit, sondern zur Gegenwart, nicht zu den Toten, sondern zu den Lebendigen gehörst’ (L. Feuerbach, Philosophische Kritiken und Grundsätze, Vol. 2, Wigand, Leipzig 1846, p. 241). 45 R. Mondolfo, Spirito rivoluzionario e senso storico (1915), idem, p. 139. 46 R. Mondolfo, Sulle orme di Marx. Studi di marxismo e di socialismo, Vol. 2,

Cappelli, Bologna 19,233, pp. 156–232. See also the fourth edition: Cappelli, Bologna 19,484, p. 255, note 1. The two new chapters correspond to pp. 57–78 of the edition edited by Bobbio in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit. (Bobbio’s note, on p. 8, may cause some misunderstanding, because of the editorial transformation of the wording ‘Il testo delle glosse’, on p. 10, into a chapter title). 47 R. Mondolfo, Feuerbach e Marx (1923), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 58. 48 Idem, p. 59.

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conditions which shape human societies; so that the prompt for movement and transformation comes not only from outside, but also and to a greater extent from within human groups. Need thus ceases to be mere natural need and becomes the generative and driving force of history; in place of an abstract natural human being appear the real and living historical individuals; real and living in so far as they are an associated community; within history, which is the product of their work and, at the same time, a condition and stimulus for further work.49

The transition ‘from naturalism to historicism’ had theoretical implications for the whole of Mondolfo’s interpretative framework. First of all, the dialectical relationship of praxis assumed the form of the relationship between present and past, because, he explained: the past affects the present and this in turn affects the future; but at the same time it also gives impulse to further modifying action, so that historical development is the outcome of the convergence and contrast of two elements: actual conditions and human will. This is the overturning of praxis of which Marx speaks.50

In this sense, the original relationship between humans and nature became secondary to, if not replaced altogether by, that between the actuality of will and its products (its ‘hypostases,’ Mondolfo wrote here); and the overturning was presented as the capacity of a present act to modify incessantly all that is willed, all of the actual conditions within which the act occurs. This was, besides, the ‘reciprocity’ of praxis and theory,51 their concrete unity, and the ultimate meaning of Marx’s eleventh thesis: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ In the seventh chapter, Mondolfo pursued this line of reasoning and configured the dialectic of praxis as a relationship between the forces and forms of production, specifying that the struggle against the forms is in fact a struggle between ‘forces of expansion’ and ‘live forces of conservation,’ which is to say class antithesis.52 The past was thus embodied as form, as social institution, as the hypostasis in which 49 Idem, pp. 60–61. 50 Idem, p. 61. 51 Idem, p. 63. 52 Idem, pp. 64–65.

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volition had become fixed: and around form as a positive fact, the conflict between a conservative and a revolutionary will was fought. As Mondolfo had made clear, form (the past, the willed) stood in this dialectic for the non-being of the Hegelian dialectic, replacing the ‘spring’ which Feuerbach had identified as need. Ultimately, it indicated the productive relations, which were for Marx the ‘structure.’53 The overturning consisted, that is, in the uplift of the ‘practical moment’ above the ‘critical moment,’ in the capacity of present volition to change past volition, in the emergence of the conditioned as a new condition and cause, of the educated as educator, in a perpetual circle which illustrated the origin of historicity entirely within the bounds of the rhythm of the human spirit. Here too Gentile’s influence could be discerned, with Mondolfo seeking to frame the philosophy of praxis as a consistent form of Marxism capable of resisting the destructive critique that his mentor, in his two writings on historical materialism, had formulated.

2

Friedrich Engels and Historical Materialism

Mondolfo’s 1912 book Il materialismo storico in Federico Engels represents the highest point in the speculation on the philosophy of praxis in those years. To get there, Mondolfo had first come to an exact definition of ‘real dialectics,’ centered on the concept of the ‘overturning’ which, however, he developed and brought further, in some ways decisively, beyond the reexamination and reinterpretation (undoubtedly the most thorough before Gustav Mayer’s biography)54 of Engels’ work. The volume is in thirteen chapters and divided into three parts: in the first part (Chapters 1–8) Mondolfo reviewed the Marx-Feuerbach relationship and determined Engels’ position on the subject; the second part is entirely made up of the long ninth chapter and devoted to the interpretation of Engels’ writings; the third and last part (Chapters 11–13) is purely theoretical in nature and enucleates the fundamental tenets of the philosophy of praxis.

53 Idem, pp. 67–68. 54 G. Mayer, Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie, 2 voll., Ullstein, Frankfurt 1975. The

two volumes of Mayer’s work were published separately (before being collected in 1934 by the publisher Nijhoff in The Hague) in 1920 and in 1934 by the publisher Springer in Berlin.

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The analysis was inspired by the same principle that had led Gentile to denounce the contradictory nature of historical materialism: like Gentile, Mondolfo also believed dialectics and materialism to be irreconcilable terms, with the one standing for the activity of the human spirit (praxis) and the other for the mere, unfathomable passivity of nature (matter); but what Gentile had objected to Marx, Mondolfo now held against Engels. The turning point had been the investigation of Feuerbach’s philosophy, which showed how Marx was immune from the critique Gentile leveled against him and how Marxism, in its authentic configuration, was unambiguous on those counts. The ambiguity derived from the unfortunate choice of historical materialism as a name for their philosophy, which misled Marx and Engels too, in the first place, into believing that their theory, based on praxis, could find an adequate philosophical premise in materialism. Mondolfo returned to this question of denomination several times and in different works, aware of the problem it had posed for Labriola and Croce, and for his own part always preferring the formula ‘critico-practical conception.’55 Marx himself, in short, had been mistaken about the meaning of his own philosophy, and Engels had been all the more mistaken—especially when in writings such as the Anti-Dühring he had insisted on the end of philosophy and unlikely theories regarding the reality of the external world. These mistakes Mondolfo accounted for as largely ‘verbal,’ with sound philosophical principles ill-served by inadequate turns of phrase which generated misunderstandings. He asked, for instance, whether experience according to Engels should ‘be interpreted in the manner of old-style materialism, as passive mirroring, as impressions on a tabula rasa, or as praxis whereby the activity of the subject develops within the object.’56 Labriola had been culpable of the same errors and misunderstandings when he proclaimed the Anti-Dühring as the alpha and omega of Marxist philosophy,57 and spoke of the ‘rhythmic movements’ and ‘self-criticism’ of ‘real things,’58 under the influence of the confused and equivocal ideas of his illustrious friend.59 As the case

55 R. Mondolfo, Il materialismo storico in Federico Engels, La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1973, p. 131, pp. 133–134, p. 201, pp. 210–214, p. 235. 56 Idem, p. 44. 57 Idem, p. 7, footnote 1. 58 Idem, p. 216. 59 Idem, p. 47, footnote 1.

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had been for Gentile, tertium non datum: it had to be either praxis or materialism, with no possible synthesis of the two principles. At the same time, we know, Mondolfo had corrected Gentile’s analysis in some crucial regards and come to different conclusions. Having mapped out the history of Marx and Engels’ relationship with Hegel, with the Hegelian left, and with Feuerbach, he was in a position to account for their toying with materialist phraseology as a verbal and merely superficial phenomenon, which left the fundamental principle of praxis unscathed. The discussion of Hegel’s philosophy in the book on Engels, shows how the dialectical method had come to represent the identification of the real and the rational in static terms60 ; Feuerbach had been the first to substantiate, against Hegel, the reality of human ‘need’ which Hegel had ultimately denied. In his critique of Hegel, on at least two occasions Mondolfo resorted to Croce’s precedent over Gentile. First, he cited Croce’s argument against Hegel’s ambition to absorb all science within the scope and methods of philosophy in order to criticize the dominance Engels had assigned to the empirical sciences; because now, Mondolfo explained, Engels was reversing Hegel’s point of view but maintaining the same paradigm: ‘the Hegelian submission of the sciences to philosophy becomes for Engels the subjection of philosophy to science, because science has appropriated the method that Hegel considered exclusive to philosophy.’61 Secondly, Mondolfo rejected Hegel’s philosophy of history, which he interpreted as ‘application of the dialectical form […] to the nexus of the distinct,’ thus demonstrating he subscribed to Croce’s main criticism of Hegel as having overseen distinct forms in his logic and reasoned only in terms of opposites: The idea of an absolute final end of history was related in Hegel to an application of the dialectical form (which only has validity as synthesis of opposites) to the nexus of the distinct, which was eventually to lead to an interruption of the dialectical process itself, when the series of the distinct came to an end. [...] Hegel assumed the distinct of history and forced them into the triadic form; but in this way he transformed the dialectic from immanent contradiction (from negation necessarily intrinsic to the reality itself of each term, and because of the indefinite extent of its development)

60 Idem, pp. 73–74. 61 Idem, p. 18.

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into a sort of extrinsic connection, due to the fact each term has a concrete existence independent of the successive stages.62

In his critique of the philosophy of Hegel, Mondolfo therefore resorted to the concepts of Croce, not Gentile. While Hegel’s limitations did not affect the vitality of the dialectical method, they accounted fully for Feuerbach’s response, who had re-established the reality of need against Hegel, and that of Marx and Engels, who had couched their theory in materialist language without, however, accepting the speculative principle of materialism. As a matter of fact, going down Feuerbach’s path and historicizing the concept of need, Marx and Engels had returned to Hegel, or rather to the dialectical method, divesting it of the static outcomes of the system and immersing it in the concrete reality of history. Equivocal in certain regards and severally misunderstood, still the dialectic had manifested itself in their work in its truly essential nature as the overturning of praxis. The concept of the overturning was at the heart of Mondolfo’s work on Engels. In general, it signified that consciousness is not only produced by material conditions, that the subject is not only a reflection of the object, but that there is also a reverse relationship whereby the subject reacts onto the material foundation and impresses on it its determination. This circular relation did away entirely with determinism and fatalism and assigned to subjectivity primacy in the constitution of the real world, which for this very reason was defined as history and history alone. Though clear in outline, there were problems with the full philosophical developments of the overturning and with the attempt to qualify it as constitutive of Marxism.63 For Mondolfo, not only did subject and object enter into a circular relationship of mutual conditioning; more precisely still, the object was the product of the first term, the subject, in a movement that, therefore, occurred entirely within the ideal sphere of subjectivity. In the first instance, Mondolfo was reiterating (with Gentile)

62 Idem, pp. 79–80. 63 It was precisely on these themes that Mondolfo’s book immediately aroused discus-

sion. Among the most notable criticisms are those of E. Di Carlo, Per la interpretazione e la critica di alcune doctrine del Marx e dell’Engels, Reber, Palermo 1914 and Id., Chiarimenti su la dialettica engelsiana, in Rivista di filosofia, 1916, n. 5, pp. 700–715; and those of E. Marchioli, La filosofia di Engels, in Critica sociale, 1912, n. 10–11, pp. 27–32.

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that the subject–object relationship corresponds to that between present and past, in the sense that current will acts upon (overturns onto) the willed, upon that which it has generated in the course of history, thus also preparing the future: ‘past activity,’ he wrote, ‘becomes, in the persistence of its results, the condition of activities to come: condition, and not cause (the distinction between these terms, not always sufficiently observed by Engels, is of the utmost importance), and dialectical condition, since further action has to represent its overcoming.’64 What in Marx had been structure now assumed the features of the abstract in Gentile, ever resurgent and ever surpassed by the concrete actuality of the will. Mondolfo supplied several instances of this, as when, on the subject of force and interest, he maintained that ‘force presupposes an economy,’ or rather, ‘a pre-existing economy,’65 ‘could not prevail’66 without force and action and so unfold in history. The structure, in fact, was not the ‘hidden god’ of which Croce spoke, but was produced by force, and by force regarded as preterite. With a Hegelian quotation from the Anti-Dühring (‘necessity is blind only in that it is not understood’), Mondolfo introduced a further complication into this picture. The overturning, he explained, could not occur on the strength of consciousness alone, based on the awareness of the intrinsic laws of structure. Indeed, the ‘critical’ moment, that of the understanding of objective reality, coincided in fact with the structure, was the negative limit of action. Mondolfo cited Kant, but here too there were clear echoes of Croce’s theory of individual judgment as the historical and perceptual premise of practical volition, which is to say as the substance and limit of action: Necessity, therefore, which we regard as intrinsic to historical processes, has two aspects or moments: one objective, determined by pre-existing conditions (which, however, are none other than the product of former human activity); one subjective, determined by need, which urges to overcome present conditions. Without the concurrence of both moments, without the unity of the two aspects, there is no historical necessity. Herein lies necessity properly regarded, as only a critico-practical conception makes possible: the objective aspect corresponds to the moment of 64 R. Mondolfo, Il materialismo storico in Federico Engels, cit., p. 229. 65 Idem, p. 315. 66 Idem, p. 319.

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the critique (in the Kantian sense), which produces knowledge of the limits of action (negation); the subjective aspect corresponds to the moment of praxis, which under the impulse of need produces action (negation of the negation).67

By way of illustration of the overturning, Mondolfo reinstated Croce’s circular relationship between the theoretical and the practical, but introduced Feuerbach’s component of need, as historicized by Marx, to act as stimulus to the negation, that which occasions the transition from critique to praxis. The fact remains that class consciousness was not, for him, class action and simply stood for the objective, structural moment in historical development. Need, moreover, wedged between the moments of theory and praxis, was indeed the negative prompt that reveals the unacceptability of reality, but was not itself the onset of action. Between theory, however, shot through with the dissatisfaction of need, and practice, there was still a hiatus. Having reached this crucial point, Mondolfo accepted Croce’s conclusion that ‘in the socialist movement, the cold objectivity of prediction cannot replace the heat of the reasons for action’ and ‘ethical and sentimental reasons’ were needed.68 The hiatus was the same that had made Croce proclaim that political programs could not be derived from theoretical analysis nor, signally, socialism from historical materialism. Mondolfo resolved the problem in terms of the will as an ‘active principle,’ as subjective energy that is independent of structural circumstances, free and capable of overcoming objective conditions: ‘the will is not encompassed within the circumstances; it is an active principle of its own accord, without which the overcoming of circumstances in action would not be feasible.’69 He also accorded a peculiar teleology to the will, as the capacity to operate according to its own ends ‘under the impulse of its needs.’70 The circle of critique and praxis in which the idea of the overturning was instantiated had the will at its center, and history overall could be represented as a dialectical relationship of praxis with itself, with the results of its own action, as Mondolfo clearly explained:

67 Idem, p. 236. 68 Idem, p. 253. 69 Idem, p. 238. 70 Idem, pp. 250–251.

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Foregone praxis, which is the overcoming of the conditions from which it arose, becomes in its outcomes the condition and limit of the next, which in turn, in overcoming it, translates into the condition and limit of a further: in this lies the indefinite process of human activity in history, the understanding of which characterizes the doctrine of Marx and Engels.71

Represented in the guise of a circle of the will, history appeared truly concrete, the totality and integral correlation of all its moments; in Labriola’s language, historical factors were mere abstractions, products of the will, but removed from the living energy of praxis.72 In this connection Mondolfo made two of the most relevant attempts to interpret the questions of theoretical Marxism that had animated the debate on the supposed crisis in Marxism and revisionist instances: on the one hand, there was the issue of the falling rate of profit as it emerged from the third book of Das Kapital (which Engels published in 1894) and on which Croce himself had dwelt; on the other hand, there was the issue of value and surplus value, to which he devoted the close in his book.73 In both regards, he tested the applicability of the principle of the overturning and proclaimed the ethical character of the will, alongside its economic and utilitarian (as well as, on the other hand, heuristic) components. The doctrine of an ‘automatic downfall of capitalism’74 due to ‘necessary and ineluctable laws’75 seemed to him immediately unlikely in the terms of economic theory: Marx had pointed to laws that indicated trends and served the purpose of ‘exciting opposing forces into action,’76 bringing before the eyes of the proletariat the grim spectacle of barbarism and ruin 71 Idem, p. 246. 72 At a certain point, in a passage of Chapter 12 (ibid., p. 297), commenting on Engels’

letter to Conrad Schmidt of 27 October 1890, Mondolfo tried to clarify the genesis of abstract figures in relation to the division of labour and the formation of intellectual groups. It is possible that, together with the Engels source, this passage came to influence the Gramscian program of a ‘history of intellectuals,’ which will be discussed in the second part of this book. 73 A connection between Mondolfo and ‘revisionism’ was excluded by N. Bobbio, Introduzione, in R. Mondolfo, Umanismo di Marx. Studi filosofici 1908–1966, cit., pp. xxx–xxxvi; this relationship is instead affirmed, against Bobbio’s thesis, by G. Marramao, Marxismo e revisionismo in Italia, De Donato, Bari 1971, pp. 293–305. 74 R. Mondolfo, Il materialismo storico in Federico Engels, cit., p. 261. 75 Idem, p. 264. 76 Idem, p. 267 and p. 275.

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and so prompting the revolutionary forces toward the overturning. He concluded: ‘Here, too, is to be seen the dialectical process of praxis that overturns itself.’77 Borrowing Sorel’s expression of ‘myth,’ he thus closed his analysis by qualifying Marx’s theory of the downfall of capitalism as ‘instrumental’ and ‘propagandistic,’ to serve as stimulus to the will and to revolutionary praxis: growing misery and degradation thus have the function of a myth, illustrate a trend, which is painted in the colors of an accomplished reality, in order to arouse a livelier voluntary reaction, as the awareness of relative misery against the impression of the pending threat of absolute misery is stronger. [...] This theory, then, is one of those enlivening instruments for faith in voluntary action, which Sorel has felicitously named myths: it is a means of propaganda, aimed at awakening, though the depiction of the consequences to which present conditions would tend without the reaction of the oppressed class, consciousness of the need to react to them and overcome them.78

This reading of the theory in Marx as mythical and instrumental was developed by Mondolfo in subsequent years, signally in two 1920 articles. In the first, devoted to the ‘antinomy of revolutionary consciousness,’ he advanced the interpretation of ‘the myth of growing misery’ as ‘an antihistorical stance,’ as ‘a resurgence of anti-historicism amid the conceptions of the champions of historicity,’ who hoped by it to point to ‘the climb to the luminous peak, requiring a prior fall into the dark abyss; catastrophe as marking the divide between the two eras, severing one from the other.’79 The second article addressed the ‘contemporary social problem’ and spoke of the ‘two myths of the concentration of wealth and of growing misery’ as graphic illustrations of ‘growing intolerance of privilege’ aimed to ‘excite a stronger and more lively response from those who wish to banish them.’80

77 Idem, p. 275. 78 Idem, pp. 276–277. 79 R. Mondolfo, L’antinomia della coscienza rivoluzionaria (1920), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 181. 80 R. Mondolfo, Il problema sociale contemporaneo (1920), idem, p. 190.

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But in the final chapter of the book,81 Mondolfo faced the far more difficult problem of accounting for Marx’s theory in the terms of a philosophy of praxis. Here too, Croce provided the starting point with his account of the Marxian theory of value as labor as a ‘concept of difference,’82 as the elliptical comparison between capitalist society and the speculative notion of a society of laborers alone. To Croce’s analysis, which he accepted in principle, Mondolfo made a few essential adjustments. In the first place, he shifted the focus from the theory of value to surplus value, regarding the latter independent of the former and, in itself, devoid of economic significance. Mondolfo was already breaking away from Croce’s framework: Croce had assigned null economic validity to the theory of value as labor, whereas Mondolfo attributed value as labor economic validity, but regarded surplus value as a distinct notion. Surplus value was to be taken, for Mondolfo, as a ‘concept of difference’ resulting from an elliptical comparison, but in a different sense from Croce’s. The central concept was labor, which Marx (against Ricardo and the classical economists) had radically revised by recovering the core principle of ‘labor force’ as mere ‘productive capacity’ regarded as a commodity in the negotiation agreement with the capitalist.83 Marx, therefore, did not regard labor as lending value to its products, but as ‘the crystallized social labor that [the labor force] contains.’84 The problem came down to the reduction of labor to a commodity, which the proletariat countered with the different idea (to be credited to Locke, above all)85 of the rights ‘of humans over their own person and free activity.’86 It was only from the angle of the vindication of the laborer as person that surplus labor could come out as the subtraction of the individual’s own personality and was to be damned, calling instead for a different rationale for the social division of products. Such a division was not to be understood in individual terms either (as if the worker should individually claim rights on the immediate output of their activity), but socially:

81 R. Mondolfo, Il materialismo storico in Federico Engels, cit., pp. 365–386. 82 Idem, p. 366. 83 Idem, pp. 370–371. 84 Idem, p. 370. 85 Idem, p. 375. 86 Idem, p. 382.

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The claim that surplus labor is unpaid labor only makes sense if the labor force is not regarded as a commodity. And this is precisely the point of view of the proletariat. The labor force belongs to the individual as a human being endowed with individual rights: against the reduction of a person to exchange value, to commodity, the proletariat claims each human has rights over their individual person and their free activity. From this right of ownership over one’s own work descends [...] the right to the division of produced goods in proportion to the expenditure of labor. By replacing the criterion of social distribution for that of the individual exchange of goods, the concept of labor force as the property of the individual also replaces that of the labor force as commodity or exchange value. Labor is thus the basis for rights, but ceases to be regarded as commodity, precisely because in the division there is no equivalence, but only proportionality between the labor one has performed and their share of assigned goods.87

Surplus labor was thus a ‘concept of difference,’ as Croce had understood, but the terms now involved were the commodified situation of capitalism and the division of social products ‘as would occur in a communistic society of free individuals.’88 In his discussion with Carlo Rosselli in 1924, Mondolfo clarified his point of view, in a particularly poignant passage, which expresses a fundamental aspect of his interpretation of Marxism: The unwanted byproduct is messianic fatalism, in contrast with the essentially voluntaristic affirmation of praxis; but the same cannot be said of the concept of surplus value, even if economic science rejects the notion as well as the notion of value as labor. Its function remains practical and not scientific; it has moral and not economic value; its definition emerges not from the analysis of the present reality alone, but from its comparison with an ideal society of free laborers, in which the labor force ceases to be regarded as commodity, as occurs in our society, and regains the dignity that is proper to human individuality as generator of new values.89

As revised by Mondolfo, Croce’s model came out considerably altered, not only in that the problem of defining surplus value now replaced that

87 Idem, pp. 381–382. 88 Idem, p. 378. 89 R. Mondolfo, Contributo ad un chiarimento di idee (1924), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 237.

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of value, but especially in that Croce’s fictional society of pure workers, serving as abstract type, was now replaced by an ethical ideal, based on the vindication of the right of each laborer to their own personal freedom, and on a conception of property largely derived from Locke and from natural law. But, all things considered, Marx’s conception was also profoundly altered, in so far as the link was severed between the theory of value and the theory of surplus labor (and therefore of surplus value), with the latter now relating to an ideal of equal product division, in so far as labor force was exclusively regarded as the ‘crystallized social labor that it contains’ and no longer as a criterion for the determination of value.

3

Lenin and the Russian Revolution

The Russian revolution of 1917 was a watershed for Mondolfo as well as for all Italian Marxists for political and theoretical reasons, and for Mondolfo signified the need to revise his interpretative paradigm significantly. With only a hint of paradox, one could in fact say that Mondolfo interpreted the revolution along the same lines as Gramsci had done in the article ‘La rivoluzione contro il “Capitale”’ but arrived at opposite conclusions: while Gramsci praised the Bolsheviks for dismissing ‘the book of the bourgeoisie’ in order to preserve from within it ‘its immanent, vivifying principles,’90 Mondolfo regarded that very dismissal to have been the irreparable error of the revolution. As of 1919, indeed, he cited Gramsci’s opinion in support of his own anti-Bolshevik position: ‘Has not,’ he wrote, referring to Gramsci’s article, ‘L’Avanti here presented and extolled the initiative of the Leninists as the revolution against Capital ?’91 In 1923, he again made a direct allusion to it when he claimed that even to the minds of its ‘Western apologists’ the Russian revolution constituted ‘a repudiation of historical materialism and of the critico-practical doctrine.’92 For his own part, from the columns of L’Ordine Nuovo Gramsci gave a pointed reply to Mondolfo’s quip against him in the article ‘Leninismo e Marxismo.’ Like the sternest (and most 90 A. Gramsci, La rivoluzione contro il ‘Capitale’ (1917), in Id., Scritti politici, Vol. 1, edited by P. Spriano, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1973, pp. 130–131 (SPW 1910–1920, pp. 34–37). 91 R. Mondolfo, Leninismo e Marxismo (1919), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 146. 92 R. Mondolfo, Le attività del bilancio (1923), idem, p. 231.

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pitiable) of professors who at exams is never pleased and invariably fails his students, so acted Mondolfo: ‘question: Marx? We answer: Lenin. But this is unscientific (fools us!), will never satisfy the philological mind of the scholar and the archaeologist.’93 As far as their reciprocal opinions would go, we shall see, this diatribe was to leave a lasting mark. As a qualified representative of the reformist camp of Italian socialism, Mondolfo regarded the shortcomings of the Russian revolution not as subjective, but essentially as an objective matter: Lenin had betrayed Marx’s essential teaching and started the revolution where conditions were the least favorable. Russia was wide of the stage of development of capitalist economies which Marx and Engels had deemed necessary for socialist insurrection, leading Mondolfo to ask: ‘had the capitalist economy in Russia come to the most advanced development its productive forces were able to achieve?’94 This argument he repeated countless times, and even likened Lenin to the ‘great’ but ‘tragic’ hero of which Engels had spoken in The Peasant War in Germany, where he commented that ‘the worst that could occur to the leader of an extreme party’ was to take power ‘when the movement is not ready for the class it represents to take control and to implement the measures that dominion on behalf of this class would require.’95 Lenin had not so much been mistaken in his initial theories on the power of the Soviets (to which Mondolfo was in fact attentive and even sympathetic), as about Russia’s objective condition, which had induced him to ‘accelerate the rhythm of history by violent means’96 and to substitute the action of an inexorable dictatorship for the rhythm at which modernity progressed. In his articles on the historical dynamics of events in Russia, he observed that the revolution was only ‘a communist proletarian revolution’ in ‘appearance,’ but in reality embodied ‘a petit-bourgeois agrarian revolution.’97 The consideration that the revolution was not the outcome of the workers’ drive to socialize production but of the desire of the lower agricultural classes 93 A. Gramsci, Leninismo e marxismo in Rodolfo Mondolfo (1919), in Id., Scritti politici, Vol. 1, cit., p. 241. 94 R. Mondolfo, Leninismo e Marxismo (1919), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 149. 95 Idem, p. 151. 96 R. Mondolfo, L’insegnamento di Marx (1919), idem, p. 156. 97 R. Mondolfo, I punti del problema (Per definire la discussione marxistica) (1925),

idem, p. 256.

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to divide among themselves the property of the great landlords and of the State became more and more central to Mondolfo’s analysis and had strong repercussions on his interpretation of the situation in Italy and of the rise of Fascism.98 His main premise for the interpretation that the Russian insurrection had been driven by the selfish aspirations of the peasants to land ownership emerged in the two articles he published in Critica sociale in May and June 1925 in response to the theses expressed by Augusto Monti and Mario Missiroli regarding the ‘problem of the middle classes.’ Here he underlined the backward ‘spiritual disposition’ of the agricultural classes with their incurably ‘conservative mindset,’ whose aims were not the unity of the proletariat but ‘the splitting up of large estates.’99 The ambition of the workers’ movement to socialize production was, therefore, irremediably at odds with the agricultural classes’ wish to create small estates: ‘there is no mistake, socialism and the proletariat cannot seek allies and collaborators among the agricultural middle classes; but they can and must try to avoid making enemies of them.’100 Now, the ‘spiritual disposition’ of Italian peasants was the same that had triggered the Russian movement and now posed an insoluble problem for the Soviets: ‘the farmer, who has become, or aspires to become, a small owner, has a strong attachment to the notion of ownership: any offence or threat against that idea will produce a violent and bitter reaction. Like Russia, like Italy.’101 The Russian revolution, he concluded, could and should have been avoided: for that to occur, the European economic system should have had the judiciousness to involve Russia within its own rhythm of development, as Keynes and Nitti had advised; and the Russian proletariat, besides, should have seconded the modernizing process and asked for ‘the control of production’ in exchange, instead of igniting a

98 R. Mondolfo, Leninismo e Marxismo (1919), idem, p. 149; Id., Il problema sociale contemporaneo (1920), idem, p. 192. There had also been a diatribe with Arturo Labriola on the subject, who had supported the identity of Marxism and Leninism and had accused Mondolfo of ‘converting the revolutionary doctrine of Marx into an antidote against the poison of Lenin’ (Arturo Labriola, Leninismo e Marxismo, in Critica sociale, 1919, n. 2, pp. 19–23). 99 R. Mondolfo, Il problema delle classi medie, in Id., Sulle orme di Marx, Cappelli, Bologna 19484 , p. 177. 100 Idem, p. 179. 101 Idem, p. 178.

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premature revolution.102 While there were too many counterfactuals to this analysis that went against the grain of the Tsarists’ attitude of closure, they also indicated clearly the line of reasoning Mondolfo was pursuing. Over the following years, Mondolfo took an increasingly critical position regarding the Soviet State (now entirely in Stalin’s hands), to which he applied the categories of state capitalism and, above all, of totalitarianism; though, as for the latter indictment, Mondolfo saw a convergence of the Soviet system with the state of decadence in the West, where the ‘mindset of the man as mass who renounces their spiritual autonomy’103 had prevailed. But his understanding of the Russian revolution had profound and unpredictable reverberations on the theoretical core of his research, which consisted, as we know, in the philosophy of praxis and the idea of the overturning. Mondolfo’s Marxism was based on the dialectical principle that humans act on their environment on the impulse of social needs, shaping and defining their environment through the primary energy of their will. This was not the materialist position whereby humans are the product (or a reflection) of their environment, but the idealist and activist position whereby, to the contrary, the environment is shaped by conscious action—to the extent that, having left behind Feuerbach’s theme of the dialectic with nature, the whole process is meant to take place in history in the terms of the relationship that human beings have with their objectified forms, with themselves. But the critique of the Leninist ideology, which again brought up the question of the conditions and the material basis for action, seemed to lead Mondolfo back to the materialist framework (not just historical, but philosophical and epistemological)104 he had once criticized. This was the essence of Eugenio Garin’s observation when, sharp as usual, he condensed his objection in a few lines: ‘to salvage human freedom from revolutionary “violence,” recourse is now made to historical necessity, to the ineluctability of things.

102 R. Mondolfo, Sulle orme di Marx, cit., pp. 25–26. 103 R. Mondolfo, Dai problemi del ‘Manifesto’ ai problemi del futuro (1965), in Id.,

Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 397. 104 See, in particular, the two articles of his discussion with Lelio Basso in 1926, where

the criticism of philosophical idealism was most explicit: ‘let us keep in mind that objective reality is an undeniable fact outside of us, with which we must come to terms […]. If you have nothing outside of you (said Feuerbach, followed by Marx) you are nothing. The spirit, which exists only, would be inert and without development’ (R. Mondolfo, Per la revisione del bilancio idealistico, idem, p. 269).

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As the self-criticism in things for which Labriola was criticized resurfaces, the “overturning of praxis,” the “praxis that overturns itself” is in effect emptied of its revolutionary thrust.’105 To this criticism Mondolfo replied with an open letter in 1966, in which he merely repeated that, within the circle of praxis, it was necessary to emphasize adequately both the objective conditions and subjective action.106 His reply to Garin was disappointing, because in too many of his writings after 1919 Mondolfo had insisted, against Lenin and against the voluntarist trend that had emerged in European philosophical and political culture,107 on the need for action not to force objective conditions and the course of history. Class consciousness (a point he stressed several times) had to go in step with the phase of historical and economic development of a country, and never rely on the preeminence of political action, which the proletariat had ‘overestimated,’ nurturing something approximating a ‘faith in omnipotence.’108 Such outspokenness lent substance to Garin’s observation and made the theory of the overturning of praxis unstable. If action had to be subordinate to objective conditions, the dialectic of forces and forms which Mondolfo had derived from Marx was in danger of folding back into a self-movement of the forms alone, into a dialectic internal to the structure and contradictions of forms, with action no longer representing the negation of the forms but their necessary outcome. Mondolfo reiterated the essential points of his position in several articles, as when in 1920, taking his cue from a review by Guido De Ruggiero, he spoke of the ‘antinomy of revolutionary consciousness’ to designate the twin tendencies of historicism and anti-historicism, reverence for the past and abstract voluntarism, stressing instead synthesis and overcoming as the necessary perspective.109 These words were perhaps of use in countering the disintegration of Italian socialism between a 105 E. Garin, Storia della filosofia italiana, Vol. 3, Einaudi, Torino 1978, pp. 1328–

1329. 106 R. Mondolfo, Clarimenti sulla filosofia della prassi (1966), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., pp. 410–413. 107 See R. Mondolfo, Il socialismo dopo la prima guerra mondiale (1919), in Id., Sulle orme di Marx, cit., p. 48. 108 R. Mondolfo, Il materialismo storico (1923), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 226. 109 R. Mondolfo, L’antinomia della coscienza rivoluzionaria (1920), idem, pp. 169–

185.

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reformist right and a maximalist left, but nonetheless left in place the theoretical problems opened by the Russian Revolution. It is not to be believed, however, that Mondolfo made no significant changes to his philosophy of praxis or merely fell into contradiction, as Garin’s overly concise critique seemed to suggest. On the contrary, as he persisted in his diatribe on communism, two poles began to emerge with growing clarity in his conception: on the one hand there were the objective conditions, which undeniably assumed the rigid form of the economic structure and of a largely self-enclosed dialectical movement, not liable to transformation through political means; but, on the other hand, the ethical element gradually stood out to become the real stimulus to the energy of praxis, albeit in the guise of need. The ethical element was emphasized, for example, in the 1921 debate with Sergio Panunzio, in which Mondolfo criticized his interlocutor’s position and pointed out the moral nature of the distinction between the concepts of force and violence: the overturning of praxis rests upon an ethics of freedom, he argued, and derives its meaning from the ‘inexhaustible drive to liberation.’110 But for this ethical principle, the overturning of praxis would have amounted to a reiteration of the paradigm of objective conditions and forms, and action could never have triggered the dynamics of progress. Unlike Labriola and Croce, besides, Mondolfo saw a clear ethical basis in Marx’s thought, which came from his kinship with Rousseau and with seventeenth-century natural law philosophers: Marx’s proletariat was the heir to immortal principles and, above all, realized them in itself, being the class which, through its own liberation, heralded the liberation of all of humanity. After the Russian revolution, Mondolfo gave more and more attention to the ethical slant of praxis, and this inclination was further reinforced by reading Marx’s early texts, particularly the 1844 Manuscripts. While his notes on them seem not to give these texts (which he discovered after writing his main essays on Marxism) specific significance beyond what could already be gleaned from the Thesen and Marx and Engels’ other known texts, they did in fact point him to the fundamental concept of alienation, which thereafter became a cardinal point of his reinterpretation of the philosophy of praxis. In the 1965 introduction to the multi-author

110 R. Mondolfo, Forza e violenza nella storia (1921), idem, p. 207.

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volume Bilancio del Marxismo, he commented on the relevance of the concept in his reflection: Both I, writing when the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology, which expound the theory of the alienation of labor and of the laborer, were as yet unavailable, and other later writers, whose point of view was analogous to mine, did not take into account the importance Marx attributed to alienation itself as giving impulse to the claims of the proletariat and to the revolutionary action necessary to regain human individuality and an opportunity for self-development.111

This was no small detail: the theory of alienation was constitutive of the philosophy of praxis and indicated the ethical energy that set in motion the dialectical circle of the ‘overturning,’ which meant that action triggered the reaction against objective conditions, as opposed to the reverse. But, for this reason too, the reaction could only spring as the liberation of the individual moral agent, not as party or trade-union action. Mondolfo’s new perspective certainly incorporated elements of Croce’s idea of moral strength as capable of being embodied in economic volition and directing it toward universal ends. A core element of Croce’s liberalism thus reverberated in the doctrine of the liberation of the proletariat as means to the emancipation of all of humanity. But Mondolfo then built up this conception on the basis of completely different historical and philosophical sources than Croce’s. Not only because of their take on Marx and Engels: he and Croce also differed in what they regarded as immortal principles and the evaluation of natural law and enlightenment authors—particularly Rousseau, whose importance for Marx Mondolfo had established in the 1912 essay.112 Mondolfo, moreover, gave a historical account of the chief concepts in his reflection in a series of essays: one of the most important was devoted to Mazzini e Marx in 1923. When their relative differences vis-à-vis the religious element (and, for 111 R. Mondolfo, Dai problemi del ‘Manifesto’ ai problemi del futuro (1965), idem, pp. 389–390. 112 R. Mondolfo, Rousseau nella formazione della coscienza moderna, Formiggini,

Genoa 1912. The essay had appeared in Rivista pedagogica, 1912, fasc. 3 and was reprinted in 1954 by La Nuova Italia. In an article of 1963 (R. Mondolfo, Marxismo e libertà, in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 374), Mondolfo would refer to his 1912 essay, stating that he had shown ‘the essential indebtedness of Marx’s idea of the alienation of man to Rousseau.’

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the later Mazzini, also of class struggle as a viable method) were taken into account, both revolutionaries seemed to participate of the same ideal tradition, with Mazzini as precursor of a philosophy of praxis113 and Marx as an advocate of the value of nationhood in the superior perspective of world-unity.114 Likewise, the traits of Mondolfo’s peculiar reformism emerged in the essays on Ferdinand Lassalle (1909 and 1925) and his commemoration of Jean Léon Jaurès (1924).115

4

Mondolfo and Gramsci

We have already seen that between February and May 1919 Mondolfo and Gramsci were involved in a dispute over their respective appraisal of the Russian revolution and of Lenin’s interpretation of Marx. It is a fact, however, that both were inspired by Antonio Labriola and the philosophy of praxis and that both made decisive contributions to Italian Marxism, albeit with considerable differences on the theoretical as well as political level. Whether, on the other hand, Gramsci’s theses were ever influenced by Mondolfo and to what extent has remained a debated and unsettled issue among interpreters ever since the first publication of the Prison Notebooks.116 The statements Mondolfo made on at least three 113 R. Mondolfo, Mazzini e Marx, in Id., Sulle orme di Marx, cit., pp. 196–197.

Quoting Mazzini’s letter to Pierre Leroux of 7 September [1848], where he spoke of ‘purification des milieux,’ Mondolfo commented: ‘it is the revolutionary praxis, Marx’s umwälzende Praxis.’ Mazzini’s letter was published for the first time by P.F. Thomas, Pierre Leroux. Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa doctrine, Alcan, Paris 1904, p. 321 and its importance had been pointed out by F. Momigliano, Giuseppe Mazzini e le idealità moderne, Libreria Editrice Lombarda, Milano 1905, p. 389, from which Mondolfo probably took it. 114 R. Mondolfo, Mazzini e Marx, in Id., Sulle orme di Marx, cit., pp. 214–215. 115 R. Mondolfo, La filosofia della storia di Ferdinando Lassalle (1909), idem,

pp. 315–344; Id., L’opera di Lassalle (1925), idem, pp. 345–347; Id., L’idealismo di Jaurès e la funzione storica della ideologia, idem, pp. 352–355. 116 Among early interpreters, Augusto Del Noce said: ‘the positions of Mondolfo and Gramsci are exactly opposite’ (A. Del Noce, Insegnamenti di uno strano dialogo, ‘Il Mulino’, 1970, n. 211, p. 313). Del Noce returned to Mondolfo’s thought several times, always accentuating his dependence on Ardigò’s positivism: see, for a conclusive version, Id., Giovanni Gentile. Per una interpretazione filosofica della storia contemporanea, Il Mulino, Bologna 1990, pp. 77 ff . Also G. Bergami, Il giovane Gramsci e il marxismo (1911–1918), Feltrinelli, Milano 1977, pp. 26–27, note 6, goes so far as to ‘exclude a direct influence of Mondolfo on Gramsci.’ On the opposite front, Mondolfo’s influence on Gramsci was underlined by Enzo Santarelli, both in his review to R. Mondolfo, Da

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occasions do not particularly help decide the matter. In a 1955 article in Critica sociale, taking his cue from some studies by Nicola Matteucci,117 Mondolfo stated that while there was ‘a line of continuity in Italian Marxism “from Labriola to Mondolfo and to Gramsci,”’ that did ‘not mean that I was an influence on Gramsci.’ ‘Certainly,’ he continued, ‘both he and I were strongly influenced by Labriola; but it is also quite likely that even though Gramsci knew some of my studies on Marxism (though insufficiently, it seems) my interpretation did not affect him at all.’118 In 1963, having read Enzo Santarelli’s review in Critica marxista, he slightly attenuated the previous statement and wrote that at all the points ‘where Gramsci opposes the orthodoxy of “dialectical materialism,” his struggle and doctrinal slant are closely related to Labriola’s and mine; which is not the same as saying I influenced him, notwithstanding the opinions of those who counter (Santarelli in Critica marxista) that in prison Gramsci was commenting on my Materialismo storico.’119 Finally, in his letter to Norberto Bobbio dated May 6, 1967, he again denied that his writings were an influence; while he had had pupils, such as Angelo Tasca, he could not remember that Gramsci ever ‘enrolled in any of the courses’ Mondolfo held ‘in Turin from 1910–1911 to 1912–1913, which, besides, had nothing to do with Marxism.’120 ‘Influence’ and ‘influx’ are perhaps not the most appropriate categories for the case under discussion. Broadly speaking, the writings of Mondolfo were an influence on Gramsci’s Marxist education (as Santarelli intuited) within the limits of an ongoing but not always accurate frequentation that was marked by dissent from the beginning, then more pronouncedly after 1919. Gramsci knew Mondolfo and had actually attended his classes in the history of philosophy at the University of Turin in the academic

Ardigò a Gramsci (Nuova Accademia, Milano 1963), in Critica marxista, 1963, n. 2, pp. 170–175, and in E. Santarelli, La revisione del marxismo in Italia. Studi di critica storica, Feltrinelli, Milano 1964. 117 N. Matteucci, A. Gramsci e la filosofia della prassi, Giuffrè, Milan 1951; Id., La cultura italiana e il marxismo dal 1945 al 151, in Rivista di filosofia, 1953, n. 1, pp. 61–82. 118 R. Mondolfo, Intorno a Gramsci e alla filosofia della prassi (1955), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., pp. 280–281. 119 R. Mondolfo, Le antinomie di Gramsci (1963), idem, p. 402. 120 N. Bobbio, Introduzione, in R. Mondolfo, Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici

1908–1966, cit., p. xlv, note 2.

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year 1913–1914; while those courses were not about historical materialism, Gramsci could still have learned about Mondolfo’s interpretation of Marx from his texts, from Angelo Tasca, who was a friend, and from Annibale Pastore’s complementary courses in theoretical philosophy, which he attended in the academic year 1914–1915 and dealt with Marxism with a constant reference to Mondolfo’s theses.121 The library of Attilio Carena, which documents the activities of the ‘Club di vita morale’ founded by Gramsci, Carena, Viglongo, and Boccardo in 1917,122 holds a copy of the first volume (Studi sui nostri tempi) of the third edition (1923) of Sulle orme di Marx—it was one of the books suggested by Gramsci, and included the writings on the crisis of the period and the remarks on Lenin.123 In 1919 Gramsci was responding to Mondolfo from the columns of L’Ordine nuovo, and in 1922 and 1923 certainly didn’t fail to pick up on Piero Gobetti’s equally forceful polemic against Mondolfo’s writings on the Russian revolution. Even during the prison period Gramsci continued to be interested in Mondolfo’s writings. In his letter to his sister-in-law Tatiana of March 25, 1929, in which he described a three-point work program he had imagined, he gave ‘a list of books that should all be in Rome, if I am not mistaken about any of them,’ and added that they were ‘books which I had bought with the intention of doing some research, and therefore fall within a specific cultural framework, and which I will need in the future.’124 Among these books was Mondolfo’s Il materialismo storico di F. Engels, which he evidently intended to use for a study of the ‘theory of the history of historiography’ or of the ‘development of intellectual groups.’ In an entry in Notebook A (the one devoted to translations), which served as a memo for the letter to Tatiana, next

121 Cf. E. Garin, Intellettuali italiani del xx secolo, Editori Riuniti, Roma 19,872, pp. 356–358 and G. Mastroianni, Da Croce a Gramsci, Argalia, Urbino 1973, pp. 167 ff . Pastore’s accounts appear in D. Zucàro, Antonio Gramsci all’Università di Torino (1911–1915), in Società, 1957, n. 6, pp. 1092–1111. Cf. A. Pastore, Gramsci tra i miei discepoli, in L’Avanti!, Feb. 25, 1951, p. 3; Id., Eccezionale studente, in L’Avanti!, Jan. 3, 1952, p. 3. 122 Cf. G. Bergami, Il giovane Gramsci e il marxismo (1911–1918), cit., pp. 121–134. 123 Idem, p. 190. 124 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 1, edited by A.A. Santucci, Editrice L’Unità, Roma 1988, pp. 182–183.

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to the title of Mondolfo’s book Gramsci jotted down ‘I don’t remember’; which probably meant he couldn’t remember exactly whether the book had in fact remained in Rome,125 and would be consistent with the March 25 letter that followed in which he wrote ‘if I am not mistaken about any of them.’ For the 1975 critical edition of the Notebooks, Valentino Gerratana composed an ‘index of works cited in the Notebooks’ which indeed records Mondolfo’s book on Engels as one belonging to the Gramsci collection but without prison markings126 ; in the section on ‘articles, reviews and notes by known authors,’ instead, Gerratana records Gramsci’s reference from Notebook 16127 to the article ‘Razionalità e irrazionalità nella storia,’128 published in 1930 in the Nuova Rivista Storica, whereas among the ‘books and pamphlets not cited’ were the essay ‘Il problema delle classi medie’ (La Giustizia, Milan, 1925) and the two volumes of Sulle orme di Marx in the Cappelli edition of 1923–1924.129 If we try to make sense of these indications, it would seem Gramsci’s knowledge of Mondolfo’s work remained incomplete and fragmentary, and almost entirely consisted of his recollections from before prison, which is when he was following the essays printed in Critica sociale and read the book on Engels and the essays from the first volume of Sulle orme di Marx. The Notebooks, where Mondolfo’s name occurs in eight entries, would confirm this impression. In the first series of his Appunti di filosofia Gramsci mentioned the book on Engels, stressing the usefulness of a monograph on Marx’s collaborator, but also noting he could not remember the ‘intrinsic merit’ of the work: ‘Mondolfo’s book therefore seems to me very useful, and while I cannot now remember its

125 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), Vol. 2, edited by G. Cospito and G. Francioni, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma 2007, p. 851. 126 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 4, edited by V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino 1975, p. 3066. The book on Engels, held at the ‘Fondo Librario Antonio Gramsci’, presents ‘underlining and annotations in the text’: cf. I Quaderni e i libri del carcere, edited by F. Giasi, Arkadia, Cagliari 2017, p. 171. 127 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, edited by V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino 1975, p. 1848 (Q16, 7). 128 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, 4, cit., p. 3099. 129 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, 4, cit., p. 3134.

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intrinsic merit, it indicates a route to be pursued.’130 Mondolfo’s name also appeared in connection with Antonino Lovecchio’s book Filosofia della prassi e filosofia dello spirito,131 in a note from the same series of the Appunti that was then reworked in Notebook 11.132 A more interesting reference appears in the third series of the Appunti di filosofia and was also remarked on by Mondolfo133 : it concerns, more directly, an article by Alessandro Levi on Giuseppe Ferrari, from which Gramsci extrapolated a passage on the ‘overturning of praxis’ which he compared with Mondolfo’s approach to Marxism, noting down for himself: ‘recover his writings on philosophy and history. Like R. Mondolfo, Levi too is of positivist extraction (of the Padua school of R. Ardigò).’134 However, when in 1934 Gramsci reworked his notes from the ‘miscellaneous’ Notebook 4 into the ‘cultural matters’ of Notebook 16 he wrote about Mondolfo’s work with more specific interest, though still doubting (having read Sandro Diambrini Palazzi’s book on Labriola, too)135 that Mondolfo had ever got rid of the ‘fundamentally positivist stance of a pupil of Roberto Ardigò.’ Mondolfo, however, had proven receptive to the idea that ‘the philosophy of praxis is an independent and original philosophy which contains in itself the elements of a further development, so as to become, from an interpretation of history, a general philosophy’; but then also lamented that, ‘as far as [he could] remember,’ the books of Mondolfo ‘do not seem to develop coherently’ ‘Antonio Labriola’s position.’136 In Notebook 16, in short, Gramsci clarified his judgment on Mondolfo: his merit was to have persisted with the philosophy of

130 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 420–421 (Q4, 42). 131 Idem, p. 445 (Q4, 60). 132 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, edited by V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino 1975, p. 1371 (Q11, 5). 133 R. Mondolfo, Intorno a Gramsci e alla filosofia della prassi (1955), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., pp. 281–282: ‘my unforgettable friend Levi had given my interpretation of historical materialism the most generous and enthusiastic support, and he did not miss the opportunity to defend and reaffirm it, as he did in this essay on Ferrari.’ 134 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1079 (Q8, 72). E cfr. Id., Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., pp. 1368–1369 (Q11, 4). 135 S. Diambrini Palazzi, Il pensiero filosofico di Antonio Labriola, with preface by Prof. Rodolfo Mondolfo, Zanichelli, Bologna 1923. 136 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, pp. 1855–1856 (Q16, 10bis-11).

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praxis, which however, as a student at the school of Ardigò, he could only develop so far as his positivist extraction would allow—as his opinions on Lenin and the Russian revolution had shown. While not materially in a position to make exact reference to the texts, Gramsci, as we shall see, was still able to identify the terms of his divergence from Mondolfo as residing in the absence, in Mondolfo’s philosophy of praxis, of the ‘Machiavellian aspect,’ of the principle of ‘hegemony’ and of political initiative. In Notebook 16, however, Gramsci also radically revised what he had written in Notebook 4 about Mondolfo’s book on Engels and now gave it his approbation (after having reread it, perhaps, or gone through his recollections more thoroughly). He wrote: For example, what would be the value of Rodolfo Mondolfo’s book on the historical materialism of F[rederick] E[ngels], published by Formaggini in 1912? In a letter to Croce, Sorel expresses doubts whether, given Engels’ scant capacities as an original thinker, such a subject can be studied, and he frequently repeats that one should not confuse the two authors. Apart from the question raised by Sorel, it would seem that for the very reason that (apparently) it is asserted that the second of the two friends has scant capacities as a theoretician (or at least occupies a subaltern position in relation to the frst), it is indispensable to study who is responsible for the original thought. In reality, apart from Mondolfo’s book, no systematic research of this type has been undertaken in the world of culture. Indeed, [Engels’s] expositions, some of which are relatively systematic, have by now been given a position in the front rank as an authentic source, and indeed as the only authentic source. For this reason Mondolfo’s volume seems very useful, at least for the guiding line which it traces.137

So, Mondolfo’s book was taken as the model for new research aiming to re-establish the respective positions and relative merits of Marx and Engels, since the current trend in Marxism was to assume Engels’ theses, erroneously, ‘as an authentic source, and indeed as the only authentic source’ to understand the theories of Marx. Such is the extent of the available information regarding Gramsci’s position vis-à-vis Mondolfo and the question of the ‘influence’ Mondolfo may have had on him. Things stand quite differently, of course, from the opposite angle, because Mondolfo was able to read and reflect on Gramsci’s prison writings for a long time and repeatedly criticized them. The 137 Idem, p. 1844 (Q16, 5-5bis).

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chief chapters of this critique consist of two articles, one published in 1955 and the other in 1963, both of which originally appeared in Critica sociale.138 Essentially, Mondolfo neatly lined up his reasons for agreeing and those for disagreeing with Gramsci. He began by stating there was ‘a fundamental theoretical convergence between Gramsci and myself,’139 which consisted in Labriola’s teachings as a common point of departure and in the critique of philosophical materialism and determinism, leading to the idea of a philosophy of praxis—an expression he believed Gramsci adopted (as Matteucci also believed) not in order to ‘elude the suspicions of prison censors’ but for the far more intrinsic consideration that ‘historical materialism,’ as an expression, seemed ‘too far bound up with to a deterministic and unrefined understanding of Marxism.’140 Granted that there was such a common basis, however, their theoretical positions diverged along lines that largely coincided with the ones Gramsci himself had stated in Notebook 16: the chief point of divergence had to do with the concept of hegemony and the Machiavellian element of political initiative (a modern embodiment of the Prince), which for Gramsci was the mainspring of praxis and of its overturning but Mondolfo saw as a foreign and contradictory element with regard to the order of theoretical elaboration. The essential point was this: not only did Mondolfo reject the theory of hegemony; but above all, he considered it to stand in open conflict with Gramsci’s theoretical premises and to constitute a ‘contradiction’ with ‘the fundamental principle of the philosophy of praxis,’141 such that it stood as an ‘antinomy’ within the framework of the Notebooks. In the 1963 article, partly on the strength of the interpretations by Giuseppe Tamburrano and Enzo Santarelli,142 Mondolfo added some chronological detail to his own reading. A picture came out, largely

138 R. Mondolfo, Intorno a Gramsci e alla filosofia della prassi (1955), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, pp. 279–304; Id., Le antinomie di Gramsci (1963), idem, pp. 398–409. 139 R. Mondolfo, Intorno a Gramsci e alla filosofia della prassi (1955), idem, p. 284. 140 Idem, pp. 284–285. 141 Idem, p. 284. 142 G. Tamburrano, Antonio Gramsci, Lacaita, Manduria 1963; E. Santarelli,

review of R. Mondolfo, Da Ardigò a Gramsci (Nuova Accademia, Milano 1963), in Critica marxista, 1963, n. 2, pp. 170–175.

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based on Tamburrano, whereby ‘as of 1920’ Gramsci had ‘abandoned’ the theory of works councils and, owing to a dispute with Bordiga, had espoused the Bolshevik and Leninist doctrine of the party: ‘between 1925 and 1926, Gramsci solved the conflict between the libertarian and totalitarian tendency in favor of the authoritarian conception.’143 Both the Lyon theses and the essay on the southern question in Italy, that is, seemed to him to indicate a swing to totalitarian positions. On this subject, Mondolfo further rejected Tamburrano’s interpretation that in prison Gramsci had reviewed the grounds for such a conception and embraced ‘a new democratic perspective.’144 On the contrary, the Notebooks were a display of Gramsci’s stark antinomy, with the libertarian principles of the philosophy of praxis on the one hand, and, on the other, the authoritarian notion of hegemony. In support of such an interpretation, he repeatedly resorted to commenting (questionably, to tell the truth) two passages out of the Notebooks, as they appeared in the preliminary postwar edition.145 In the first passage, out of Notebook 11, Gramsci reflected on the difference between ‘arbitrary constructions’ and ‘scientific research.’ After pointing out that ‘any arbitrary constructions are pretty rapidly eliminated by historical competition,’ that freedom of discussion and propaganda ‘should not be conceived of in the administrative and police sense’ and that it seemed to him ‘necessary to leave the task of researching after new truths […] to the free initiative of individual specialists,’ he concluded that it wasn’t ‘at all inconceivable that individual initiatives should be made orderly and disciplined, passing through the sieve of academies or cultural institutes of various kinds and only become public after undergoing a process of selection, etc.’146

143 R. Mondolfo, Le antinomie di Gramsci (1963), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 401. 144 Idem, p. 402. 145 The Turin publisher Einaudi brought out a six-volume thematic edition between

1948 and 1951 under the editorship of Felice Platone. The commentary on these two excerpts from the Gramsci Notebooks will be carried out in the second part of this book: see below, Part II, this chapter. 146 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1079 (Q11, 20bis-21).

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Isolating the passage from its full context, Mondolfo presented it as a case for ‘preventive censorship,’ rather than a reflection on the elaboration of scientific truths,147 and then proceeded to contrast it with those passages in the Notebooks in which Gramsci advocated freedom of discussion and tolerance for one’s opponents. Here was proof, that is, of Gramsci’s continuous ‘swinging’148 between the poles of freedom and authoritarianism, which Mondolfo identified, respectively, with the philosophy of praxis and the theory of hegemony. The other passage on which he rested his case was one (already discussed by Matteucci) first drafted in Notebook 8 and then re-elaborated in Notebook 13, in which Gramsci spoke of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ and of the need for ‘a previous economic reform and a change […] in the social and economic fields,’ to conclude that ‘In men’s consciences, the Prince takes the place of the divinity or the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis for a modern laicism and for a complete laicization of all aspects of life and of all customary relationships.’149 While to Mondolfo the passage spelled out an authoritarian streak in Gramsci,150 it in fact fed into the broader problem of the political education ‘of those who are not in the know’151 which in Notebook 13 Gramsci had indicated as the problem addressed by Machiavelli. But according to Mondolfo the appeal to common sense and the political and pedagogical attitude of Gramsci testified to an elitist vision and to the impatience of those who will not wait for class consciousness to mature of its own accord and wish to use the tools of power to force it: the people, he wrote, ‘are the raw material to be used toward an end that they do not yet perceive, but which others believe embodies

147 R. Mondolfo, Le antinomie di Gramsci (1963), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 406. 148 Idem, p. 409. 149 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1561 (Q13, 2a; SPN , p. 133).

See the first draft in Id., Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 953 (Q8, 11; PN Vol. 3, p. 249). For a sound reading of the passage see G. Vacca, Alternative Modernities. Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, Cham (CH): Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 179 ff. and pp. 220 ff . 150 R. Mondolfo, Le antinomie di Gramsci (1963), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 406. 151 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1600 (Q13, 14).

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the historical course to which the people have to obey.’152 With such an exercise of political initiative and of the hegemonic function, Mondolfo saw Gramsci side with ‘the theses of Stalin and Ždanov’ quite in spite of his own theoretical premises. With his critique of Gramsci, Mondolfo had restated the bottom line of his own conception of Marxism, which may have had to do with the influence of the positivism of Ardigò, and which, at any rate, he had asserted from his earliest writings on historical materialism: the ‘overturning of praxis’ did not involve the ‘Machiavellian component’ of a positive intervention of political reason, but was to occur according to the strict laws of progress, within which the will, while being the principle of all becoming, is still subject to the conditions that history, slowly unfolding, imposes on it.

152 R. Mondolfo, Intorno a Gramsci e alla filosofia della prassi (1955), in Id., Umanismo di Marx. Scritti filosofici 1908–1966, cit., p. 297.

PART II

Antonio Gramsci

CHAPTER 5

The Philosophy Notes

Following his arrest on November 8, 1926, Gramsci was only able to begin composing his notebook entries in February 1929 (when permission for him to write in his cell was finally granted); the research plan of his writings gradually defined itself as his reflection proceeded. This solitary work was continued down to mid-1935 (though some entries may date as late as early 1937, bearing in mind Gramsci died on April 27 of that year) and eventually yielded the over two thousand handwritten notes entered across thirty-three Prison Notebooks (two further notebooks, bearing the prison stamp, were left blank).1 In May 1930, Gramsci commenced the three series of notes he devoted to the theoretical and philosophical question of Marxism and gathered under the general heading Notes on Philosophy. Materialism and Idealism—his first attempt at an original vision prior to the inauguration of the ‘special’ series of Notebooks in May 1932. Before the latter work was started, these meditations document the gradual affirmation of an autonomous

1 See G. Fabre, Lo scambio. Come Gramsci non fu liberato, Sellerio, Palermo 2015, pp. 374–393, which dates some of the notes in Notebook 14 to 1937. But see also G. Francioni, ‘Un labirinto di carta (Introduzione alla filologia Gramsciana),’ in International Gramsci Journal, 2016, n. 1, pp. 47–48, note 67.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4_5

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conception of a philosophy of praxis, partly continuing the tradition inaugurated by Labriola but largely assuming the traits of a new approach to Marxist theories of reality.

1

Preliminary Considerations

One of the most important outcomes of recent Gramscian philology has been the dating of the three series of Notes on Philosophy, to which Gramsci devoted the fourth, seventh, and eighth of his notebook.2 Gramsci began on the first series in Notebook 4 (§§ 1–48) in May 1930, and around that time also began to write his notes on the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno in the same notebook; the first series was then concluded between October and November that year. In November 1930, Gramsci then began composing the second series in Notebook 7 (§§ 1–48) and concluded it around November 1931. In that same month, he immediately started on the third series in Notebook 8 (§§ 166–240) and concluded in May 1932. On the whole, Gramsci devoted two years of work to the Notes on Philosophy; meanwhile, in the miscellaneous sections of the first nine Notebooks, he continued to expound themes which he would then rework into the first of the ‘special’ Notebooks (April–May 1932). The chronology itself gives some measure of the importance of the three series of the Notes on Philosophy; together with the notes on Dante, to which they are closely related, and the miscellaneous notes on intellectuals to be found in Notebook 4, §§ 49–77, they mark a

2 On the new phase of Gramscian studies, see G. Vacca, Alternative Modernities. Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (CH) 2021, pp. 3– 19 and G. Liguori, Gramsci conteso. Interpretazioni, dibattiti e polemiche (1922–2012), Editori Riuniti University Press, Roma 2012. For the dating of the Notes on philosophy, the essential reference is G. Francioni, L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei «Quaderni del carcere», Bibliopolis, Napoli 1984. But see also, by Francioni, Come lavorava Gramsci, in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, Vol. 1, edited by G. Francioni, L’Unione Sarda-Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Cagliari-Roma 2009, pp. 21–60; and, for a recent synthesis of his interpretation: G. Francioni, Un labirinto di carta (Introduzione alla filologia gramsciana), cit., pp. 7–48. See also G. Cospito, ‘Verso l’edizione critica e integrale dei “Quaderni del carcere”,’ in Studi storici, 2011, n. 4, pp. 896–904 and G. Cospito, F. Frosini, Introduzione, in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Quaderni miscellanei (1929–1935), tome 1, edited by G. Cospito, G. Francioni, F. Frosini, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma 2017, pp. xv–lxiv.

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turning point in Gramsci’s prison research, inaugurating a new perspective based on a philosophical intuition that was to lead, gradually but fairly straightforwardly, to the idea of a philosophy of praxis. It is understandable that, right at the start of the first series, Gramsci felt the need to warn the potential reader of the provisional nature of his notes, which impressed him all the more dramatically, as, in the course of his reflections, it appeared to him his new theoretical insights were coming close to their most radical and innovative definition. Immediately following a quip on Kantian teleology, he remarked, ‘Look over this argument carefully. In general, remember that all these notes are provisional and written as they flow from the pen: they must be reviewed and checked in detail because they undoubtedly contain imprecisions, anachronisms, wrong approaches, etc. which do not imply wrongdoing because the notes have solely the function of quick memoranda.’3 Gramsci’s concern was not limited to the immediate scope of his contention with the tenets of Bukharin’s manual4 (from which two radically opposed conceptions of Marxism emerged), and was indicative of his awareness that several strands of his thought were at variance with any accepted notion of orthodoxy, or, at any rate, with the consolidated trends in historical materialism. Only as of April/May 1932 (and then, with greater evidence, in the ‘Special’ Notebooks) did Gramsci regularly resort to the formula ‘philosophy of praxis’ in place of ‘historical materialism.’ This occurred not only in the C texts (reworking previous A texts), but also in newly drafted texts (B texts), especially in Notebook 8. As editors of the first edition of the Notebooks, Felice Platone and Palmiro Togliatti 3 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q4§16; PN Vol. 2, p. 159. The same reminder was repeated with greater emphasis on the initial page of Notebook 11, Gramsci reworked his entry from Notebook 4 and followed it with the further remark: ‘written without having the cited books at hand, it is possible that after consulting those works, radical corrections will have to be made, as the very opposite of what is here written may turn out to be true’ (Id., Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, edited by V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino 1975, p. 1365: Q11, 1a). 4 N.I. Boukharine, La théorie du matérialisme historique. Manuel populaire de sociologie marxiste, Éditions Sociales Internationales, Paris 19274. On the edition used by Gramsci in prison, see Gerratana’s note in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 4, cit., p. 2539: ‘although the volume is not among the prison books, there is no doubt that this text reached Gramsci in Turi’. The absence of Bukharin’s book from the Gramsci Fund is due in all probability to an intervention by Ambrogio Donini in 1952: see G. Cospito, F. Frosini, Introduction, in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, Quaderni miscellanei (1929–1935), Vol. 1, cit., pp. xxxii–xxxxiii and footnote 57.

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wrote a glossary entry noting that Gramsci had resorted to such wording in order not to ‘incur suspicion by the censors.’5 Even when not literally restated (as in the 1975 critical edition), the idea that the new formulation served the sole purpose of preventing problems with the police authorities (but had no decisive theoretical import) went almost unchallenged amongst philologists and critics until very recently.6 As Vacca, however, has remarked, ‘the substitution of the expression “philosophy of praxis” for “historical materialism”’ went in parallel with ‘a changed view of the fundamental problem underlying the “research program” of the Notebooks’7 —one which was confirmed and refined over the full period, between May 1930 and May 1932, in which Gramsci elaborated a new conception of Marxism. Key moments in this process are the Notes on Philosophy, the notes on Dante and the miscellaneous notes on intellectuals in Notebook 4. Besides, the need for a new defining expression (a need that had been felt by Labriola, before him, and a considerable faction of Italian Marxists) which would do away with the inherent ambiguities of the term ‘materialism,’ had surfaced throughout the diatribe against Bukharin’s manual, and occasionally cropped up in some of the notes: as in the quotation, in Notebook 4, from a letter by Pietro Giordani to Princess Carlotta, stating that ‘when something new is discovered in the sciences, one must adopt an entirely new term for it so that the idea remains precise and clear;’8 or, to give another example, in the examination of the term ‘materialism’ in Notebook 8, again taken up in Notebook 11.9 The need for ‘an entirely new term’ for ‘something new’ had therefore become impressed on Gramsci’s mind as he pursued his critique of Bukharin, from which original themes emerged that could not be subsumed within the traditional materialist lexicon.

5 A. Gramsci, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Einaudi, Torino 19664 , p. xxiii. See F. Platone, Relazione sui quaderni del carcere. Per una storia degli intellettuali italiani, ‘Rinascita,’ 1946, n. 4, pp. 81–90. 6 See, in general, V. Gerratana, ‘Punti di riferimento per un edizione critica dei “Quaderni del carcere”,’ in Prassi rivoluzionaria e storicismo in Gramsci, in Critica marxista-Quaderni, 1967, n. 3, pp. 240–259 (in particular pp. 256–257). 7 G. Vacca, Materialismo storico e filosofia della praxis, in Attualità del pensiero di Antonio Gramsci, Bardi Edizioni, Roma 2016, p. 135. 8 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q4§34; PN Vol. 2, p. 175. 9 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q8§211; PN Vol. 3, p. 358); idem, pp. 1408–

1410 (Q11, 28bis–29).

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Gramsci may, at first, have thought to define the new philosophy as a form of ‘historicism’ and have assigned that value to the adjective in the phrase ‘historical materialism.’ At some later point, however, it must have become apparent to him that there was a more radical theoretical problem at stake that did not reside entirely in the ‘historical’ dimension of human nature; one, that is, that drew on a deeper core that needed to be investigated in the terms of praxis: not just historicism alone, then, but a philosophy of praxis was involved. He determined, at that stage, to recover the tradition inaugurated by Labriola, the antecedents and outcomes of which he was familiar with, and which he intended not merely to reiterate but to renew profoundly. The reader of the Notes on Philosophy will soon become sensitive to the gradual emergence of the new formulation, which only became established by successive approximations. Besides more marginal occurrences, the first verbatim occurrence of the phrase is to be first found in an entry in Notebook 4 (that may be dated August–September 1930) devoted to an essay by Antonino Lovecchio10 which may have revived Gramsci’s interest in practice as a speculative theme. More interesting still is its occurrence in Notebook 5, in a miscellaneous note from November–December 1930, where it is stated that Machiavelli ‘also articulated a conception of the world which could also be called “philosophy of praxis” or “neo-humanism,” in that it does not recognize transcendental [sic] or immanent [sic] (in the metaphysical sense) elements but is based entirely on the concrete action of man, who out of historical necessity works and transforms reality.’11 In Notebook 7, in a note dating between the end of 1930 and the early months of 1931 in which he discusses the ‘component parts of Marxism,’ he observed that ‘In philosophy,’ dialectical unity results from ‘praxis,’ defined as the ‘relation between human will (superstructure) and the economic structure,’12 but the definitive consecration of the phrase takes place in Notebook 8, where it recurs extensively. One occurrence, in a long and significant note from February 1932, again relates to Machiavelli13 ; the phrase is then reiterated in at least six notes belonging to the 10 A. Lovecchio, Filosofia della prassi e filosofia dello spirito, Zappone, Palmi 1928. A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 445 (Q4§28; PN Vol. 2, p. 167) and Vol. 3, cit., p. 1371 (Q11, 5). 11 Idem, Vol. 1, cit., p. 657 (Q5§127; PN Vol. 2, p. 378). 12 Idem, Vol. 2, cit., p. 868 (Q7§18; PN Vol. 3, p. 170). 13 Idem, Vol. 2, cit. pp. 977–978 (Q8, §61; PN Vol 3, p. 271).

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third series of the Notes on Philosophy,14 composed between December 1931 and April 1932. Particularly significant, among the notes in Notebook 8, is § 198 (later reworked in Notebook 10), in which Gramsci analyses two texts by Croce (one from the first series of Croce’s Conversazioni Critiche, the other from a note, devoted to Gentile, in Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx) and aims to show that Croce’s interpretation of Marx is ultimately self-contradictory precisely on account of his devaluation of the philosophy of praxis. The sequence shows that Gramsci did not devise the phrase philosophy of praxis at once and in order to avoid censorship, but in the process of a protracted and very complex theoretical elaboration which traversed the redaction of the Notes on Philosophy; only subsequently, as of May 1932, did it become established and then used systematically in the ‘Special’ Notebooks. At the latest, that is, starting with the composition of Notebook 8, Gramsci had deemed it appropriate to identify a distinct line of thinking which he gradually refined in order to make its theoretical originality all the more evident.

2

Gramsci’s Return to Labriola

In his writings of the early 1920s, Gramsci (and Togliatti too, besides)15 had acknowledged Labriola as the only intellectual of the workers’ movement who had attended to ‘theoretical activity, in other words struggle on the ideological front.’16 In general, Labriola’s three essays on historical materialism had contributed significantly to Gramsci’s early political and 14 Idem, pp. 1051–1052 (Q8, 57bis–58); p. 1060 (Q8, 61bis–62); p. 1079 (Q8, 72bis); p. 1080 (Q8, 73); p. 1087 (Q8, 77); p. 1088 (Q8, 77bis-78). 15 P. Togliatti, La nostra ideologia (L’Unità, July 7, 1925), in Id.., Opere. i. 1917– 1926, edited by E. Ragionieri, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1974, p. 648: ‘after the first original exegesis and elaboration of Antonio Labriola—who was also a philosopher and, if not directly through Hegel, was also related, through Herbart, to the currents of German philosophy—after Antonio Labriola the normal way for us to proceed towards Marxism was that of so-called scientific positivism, in its most heterogeneous forms, from the metaphysics of Auguste Comte to the … criminology of Enrico Ferri.’ 16 A. Gramsci, La costruzione del Partito comunista 1923–1926, Einaudi, Torino 1974,

p. 54. (SPW 1921–1926, p. 288). And cf. Id., Achille Loria e il Socialismo (1918), in Id., La città futura 1917–1918, Einaudi, Torino 1982, p. 615: Loria and Treves—one reads—‘have caused the intellectual production of Italian socialism to stagnate, although with the writings of Antonio Labriola it had had such a shining principle and full of promise.’ And in the article Misteri della

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theoretical education, much in the same way as they had afforded Italian communism its initial cultural orientation. But during the prison period, when Gramsci began composing the Notes on philosophy, his appreciation of Labriola deepened as new levels of meaning were disclosed to him, which had decisive repercussions on the interpretation of Marx and the Marxist classics. Gramsci clearly saw the limits of Labriola’s theorizing and pointed them out, such as in his censure of the 1902 interview on colonialism, which he condemned for its ‘pseudohistoricism, a mechanical and rather empiricist way of thinking,’ which, when compared with the thinking of Bertrando Spaventa, appeared far from ‘dialectical and progressive.’17 In the structure of Notebook 11, there is an immediately apparent contrast between the critical remarks in the initial pages18 and his conclusion to the Notebook that ‘it is necessary to bring Labriola back into circulation and to make his way of posing the philosophical problem predominant.’19 Reviewing the content of the third essay on historical materialism, Gramsci realized the philosophy of praxis constituted its fundamental principle and one that could be used, from the first page of the Notes on Philosophy, as a critical tool in both his critique of Bukharin’s manual and Benedetto Croce’s interpretation of theoretical Marxism. From Labriola came the insight that Marx was ‘a non-systematic thinker’ and ‘a personality in whom theoretical and practical activity are indissolubly intertwined,’20 and also the creator of a new Weltanschauung, but one that was implicit in works of a historical and practical nature. ‘Historical materialism,’ he wrote, ‘was born in the form of practical criteria (at least for the most part) by pure chance, because Marx devoted his intellectual powers to other problems; but implicit in these practical criteria is an entire conception of the world, a philosophy.’21 Gramsci’s use of the adjective ‘implicit’ captured the essence of the new reading he gave of Marx and Marxism; after Marx, it appeared to him, neither

cultura e della poesia, in Id., Il nostro Marx, Einaudi, Torino 1984, p. 348, he speaks of ‘critical communism,’ using the characteristic expression of Labriola. 17 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1061 (Q8§200; PN Vol. 3, pp. 349–350). 18 Idem, pp. 1366–1368 and p. 1370 (Q11, 3–4 and 4bis). 19 A. Gramsci, SPN , p. 388. 20 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 419 (Q4§1; PN Vol. 2, p. 137). 21 Idem, p. 434 (Q4§13; PN Vol. 2, p. 155).

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Engels22 nor any of the subsequent theorists of the communist movement (with the partial exception of Lenin, as we shall see) had been able to develop those lines of thought that lay unexpressed in the doctrine of Marx. The idea that a philosophy was nestled within Marxism and that what remained outstanding was to elaborate it animated Gramsci’s critique of the ‘double combination’ whereby some elements of Marxist theory had been ‘absorbed by certain idealistic currents,’ on the one hand, and, on the other, Marxist theory had been contaminated with other systems of thought: criticizing the principle of ‘combination’ (which constituted the trend of theoretical Marxism after Marx) meant discovering the independence, originality, and self-sufficiency of Marxism as a philosophy in accordance with the precedent (if not wholly unique, at any rate isolated) afforded by Labriola.23 The starting point of Gramsci’s inquiry was thus given by the theoretical or, more exactly, philosophical autonomy of Marxism—a standpoint which found its illustrious precedent and point of reference in Labriola. It also involved a critique of current Marxism—that is, of Soviet Marxism, on the other hand, and of the Marxism of Lukács, on the other (to the extent that he had been able to study him),24 as well as of the several trends being developed in Italy and Europe. The claim that Marxism constituted a self-sufficient philosophy bore the implication, one must note, that the entire development of historical materialism after Marx was to be deemed insufficient. Gramsci elaborated this position by analogy with the historical categories of the Reformation and the Renaissance, which he derived from Benedetto Croce’s Storia dell’età barocca in Italia. As a preamble to his point, he quoted from Croce: The Renaissance movement remained aristocratic, the movement of elite circles, and even in Italy—its mother and nurse—it never spilled out of the courtly circles, it did not filter all the way to the people, it did not become custom or ‘prejudice or, rather, collective persuasion and faith. The Reformation, however, did indeed have this capacity of penetration,

22 Idem, p. 420 (Q4, 42). 23 Idem, pp. 421–425 (Q4§3; PN Vol. 2, pp. 141–145). 24 Idem, p. 469 (Q4§43; PN Vol. 2, pp. 193–194).

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but it paid for it with a delay in its intrinsic development, with the slow and oftentimes discontinuous maturation of its vital germ.’25

Couched in the terms of a historical metaphor was the critique of the twin limitations of marxism and idealism: the one arresting at the popular stage of revolutionary practice, and even assuming the forms of the ‘prejudice’ and ‘superstition’ of vulgar materialism, incapable of elevating itself to a universal form of thinking26 ; the other sealing itself within a philosophy that found no mediation with the ‘national element’ and the common expectations of ‘the people.’27 Hence came the portrayal of Croce as philosopher of the same mold as Erasmus,28 the former damning communism much in the same terms as the latter had used in dismissing Luther’s crudity, namely ‘ubicumque regnat lutheranismus, ibi literarum est interitus.’29 The rift between the Renaissance and the Reformation, between Idealism and Marxism, between philosophy and common sense, defined the task at hand as the need to operate a synthesis between theory and practice: ‘in short, this is about having a Reformation and a Renaissance at the same time.’30 In the following entry, and in a somewhat Weberian vein, Gramsci further compared the prospective enterprise to Calvin’s translation of the ‘concept of grace,’ which of itself bore implications of ‘fatalism and passivity,’ into capitalist initiative. The parallel rifts dividing theory from praxis, the spirit of the Renaissance from the culture of the Reformation, the materialistic conception of history from revolutionary initiative, structure from superstructures all pointed in a similar direction, which in Gramsci’s reflection assumed the contours of the problem of hegemony and, more generally, of political subjectivity; he wrote in one of the B texts:

25 B. Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia, Laterza, Bari 1929, pp. 11–12, cited in

A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 423 (Q4§3; PN Vol. 2, pp. 142–143). Gramsci’s italics. 26 Idem, pp. 423–424 (Q4§3; PN Vol. 2, p. 143). 27 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 852 (Q7§1; PN Vol. 3, p. 154). 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. As Gramsci recalled them, Erasmus’ words were: ‘Wherever Luther goes, culture dies.’ For the use of this phrase from the letters of Erasmus, see A. R ossi, Gramsci da eretico a icona. Storia di «un cazzotto nell’occhio», Guida, Napoli 2010, pp. 52ff., which contains a preface by Biagio De Giovanni. 30 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 892 (Q7§43; PN Vol. 3, p. 192).

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To show that the process of the molecular formation of a new civilization currently under way may be compared to the Reformation movement, one could analyze, among other things, selected aspects of the two phenomena. The historico-cultural node that needs to be sorted out in the study of the Reformation is the transformation of the concept of grace from something that should ‘logically’ result in the greatest fatalism and passivity into a real practice of enterprise and initiative on a world scale that was [instead] its dialectical consequence and that shaped the ideology of nascent capitalism.31

It was the new examination of Labriola that enabled Gramsci to arrive at an original formulation of the concept of orthodoxy, beyond Kautsky’s controversy with revisionist positions. Orthodoxy involved going ‘back to [the] genuine origins’ of Marxism, doing away with the simplifications of current materialism in order to address Marx’s texts not only in their actual terms, but in the light of the ‘implicit’ philosophical inspiration that informed Marx’s conception: the concept of ‘orthodoxy’ should be renewed and brought back to its genuine origins. Orthodoxy is not to be looked for in this or that disciple of Marx, in this or that tendency connected with currents extraneous to Marxism, but rather in the concept that Marxism is sufficient unto itself and contains in itself all the fundamental elements not only for constructing a whole conception of the world, an entire philosophy, but also for giving life to a complete practical organization of society, that is, for becoming an integral, complete civilization.32

The name of Labriola occurs at all of the places in Notebook 8 in which Gramsci expounds the new orthodoxy, as it gradually came to be framed in the terms of a philosophy of praxis. The third series of the Notes was in fact inaugurated with a statement of intent regarding the study of the genesis of Labriola’s historical materialism and dialectics,33 and the statement was followed, a dozen or so pages later, by three especially dense entries (§§ 198, 199, 200) in which Gramsci began to focus on what a philosophy of praxis might involve, first examining Croce’s analysis, then 31 Idem, pp. 892–893 (Q7§42–44 Vol. 3, pp. 191–193). 32 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 435 (Q4§13–14; PN Vol. 2,

pp. 155–157). 33 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1041 (Q8; PN Vol. 3, p. 612).

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seeking its origins in St. Thomas and Leibniz, and, thirdly, bringing up (for the first time) the Vicovian proposition ‘verum ipsum factum,’ which Croce had developed ‘in the idealistic sense’ quite in spite of the fact that ‘historical materialism is certainly indebted to this concept (as originally found in Hegel and not in its Crocean derivation).’34 Orthodoxy, in this new sense, was intimately bound with the emergent conception of praxis, and Labriola was to be credited as the first thinker to have identified it as the principle underlying the thought of Marx.

3

The Overturning of Praxis (Gramsci and Marx)

Toward the new interpretation of Marx’s thought, which in part continued the analyses of Gramsci’s pre-prison period but in crucial regards developed new themes, Labriola was thus largely influential. At least until 1922, it has been authoritatively argued, Marx had been ‘just one among the sources, and not even the most influential, that inspired Gramsci’s personal vision of history and socialism.’ Indeed, Marx appeared, at times, to represent ‘almost an obstacle to an active, selfconscious conception of socialism and its corresponding political action.’ Still, one has to bear in mind Gramsci had only been able to access a few of the texts firsthand, and among these the Manifesto and the Holy Family, as well as Engels’ Principles of Communism. These he had read through the lens of the philosophies that were most congenial to him (notably of Bergson and Sorel) and of the interpretations that had most influenced him (with Croce and Gentile foremost). In this regard, the Soviet Revolution and Lenin’s doctrines brought decisive new elements to his reflection, but also reinforced the impression that the writings of Marx needed to be reinterpreted in the light of subsequent theoretical developments. Gramsci’s upbringing, one could say, had taken place within the process of Marxist revision and led him to absorb from Croce the view that historical materialism served ‘for historiography and not for history in progress’ (i.e., was an interpretative canon), and from Labriola and Gentile (differences between them notwithstanding) the rather different idea that at the bottom of Marx’s thought there could be found an implicit philosophical principle that Marxists were to deploy and mediate on the terrain of subsequent history and culture. That’s why the Soviet

34 Idem, pp. 1060–1061 (Q8§199; PN Vol. 3, p. 349).

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Revolution struck him as spelling out the insufficiency of Marx’s theses—a notion he famously condensed in the statement ‘the Bolsheviks reject Karl Marx,’ because ‘that thought which is eternal, […] represents the continuation of German and Italian idealism, […] which in the case of Marx was contaminated by positivist and naturalist encrustations;’35 and elsewhere that Marxism is founded upon ‘philosophical idealism’ and that Marx, who ‘was not a philosopher by profession,’ ‘sometimes also slumbered.’36 These are famous pronouncements, and there are countless others along these lines; what they ultimately go to show is how Gramsci’s Marxism had shaped itself not only on the texts of Marx, but from the start had been open to other theoretical influences. Although his early sources (signally Croce and Lenin) continued to influence his though, Gramsci’s position began to shift as he took to rereading Marx’s chief writings in prison and to derive from them concepts and principles largely neglected by the Marxists of his time. The mediation of Labriola was decisive, in this new phase. Formerly, he had rated and understood Labriola’s essays on historical materialism in the light of what Croce and Gentile had made of them. He now perceived that Labriola represented a unique occurrence in the history of Italian Marxism and one that granted privileged access to Marx. What was required was to reread Marx’s writings in terms of the intuition that Marxism constituted an independent philosophy that needed stripping of all the outside elements that had been attached to it and had distorted its meaning. Labriola had advocated a return to Marx and the search for the kernel of his philosophy, which was essentially a philosophy of praxis. Gianni Francioni’s dating of the texts has convincingly established May 1930–July 1931 as the period of the translation from German of the anthology of Marx’s writings Lohnarbeit und Kapital. Zur Judenfrage und andere Schriften aus der Frühzeit, in Notebook 7; which is the same period in which Gramsci produced the first series of the Notes on Philosophy and part of the second series.37 To Giuseppe Cospito we owe 35 A. Gramsci, La rivoluzione contro il Capitale, in Id., La città futura, Einaudi,

Torino 1982, pp. 513–514 (SPW 1910–1920, p. 34). 36 A. Gramsci, Misteri della cultura e della poesia, in Id., Il nostro Marx, Einaudi, Torino 1984, p. 348. 37 Ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Ernst Drahn, Reclam Universal Bibliothek, Leipzig s.d.2 (1st ed. 1919). For dating: G. Francioni, Nota al testo, in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), Vol. 2, cit., pp. 835–898. See also

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an elegant and well-informed critical apparatus38 that precisely indicates the significance of these translations. Rather than following the original edition, Gramsci worked on the texts according to a personal ‘hierarchy of values in descending order’39 which proceeded from the Theses on Feuerbach (n. 1), to an extract from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (n. 2), followed by the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto (n. 3), leading, toward the end, to a passage from the Holy Family (n. 7). This, we shall see, is the sequence of the return to Marx in the Notebooks, which is noteworthy in the light of what is left out, starting with Das Kapital, and of the place that each of those texts was to assume in his theorization: the Theses on Feuerbach were to trace the outline of the philosophy of praxis; from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy were to emerge the two fundamental principles of the ‘formation of a collective will,’40 which is to say of political subjectivity41 ; whereas the concept of translatability was derived from the Holy Family. To these texts be added the Misery of Philosophy for its influence on the conception of superstructures.42 Gramsci himself, besides gave a precise indication in Notebook 4 of the significance of these four texts in his approach to Marxist theory: From a theoretical point of view, The Poverty of Philosophy can be seen as the application and development of the Theses on Feuerbach, whereas The Holy Family is an intermediate and still vague phase, as one can see

L. Borghese, Tia Alene in bicicletta. Gramsci traduttore dal tedesco e teorico della traduzione, ‘Belfagor,’ 1981, pp. 635–665. The translation is in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), Vol. 2, edited by G. Cospito and G. Francioni, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma 2007, pp. 743–813. 38 Idem, pp. 814–828. 39 G. Cospito, Introduzione, in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Quaderni di

traduzioni (1929–1932), Vol. 1, edited by G. Cospito and G. Francioni, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma 2007, p. 26. 40 A. Gramsci , Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1057 (Q8§195; PN Vol. 3, p. 346). 41 Idem, p. 869 (Q7§20; PN Vol. 3, p. 171): ‘The two propositions —(1) society does not set itself tasks unless the necessary and sufficient conditions for their successful completion already exist; (2) no form of society disappears until it has exhausted all its possibilities of development’. We will return to the meaning of the two principles in the last chapter of this book. 42 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 461 (Q4§42; PN Vol. 2, p. 193).

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from the passages referring to Proudhon and especially to French materialism.[…] one should recall Engels’ statement that the economy is ‘in the final analysis’ the mainspring of history; […] directly connected to the wellknown passage in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy which says that it is on the terrain of ideologies that men ‘become conscious’ of the conflict between form and content in the world of production.43

Gramsci’s translations from German reveal a general lack of confidence both with the practice and with the language, though the point of the translations was for Gramsci to learn German, not to produce texts for publication. Because he mostly proceeded word for word, his translations are inelegantly littered with patent calques and several misunderstandings. As regards the translations of Marx, two notable elements stand out in particular. Firstly, Gramsci for the most part translated ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’ with bourgeois society (i.e., in twenty-two instances) and only on a couple of occasions offered the correct interlinear variant of civil society.44 Secondly, working on the Ernst Drahn edition of the theses on Feuerbach (which gave the text by Engels), Gramsci translated ‘umwälzende Praxis,’ in the third thesis as ‘overturning of practice.’ As edited by Engels, Marx’s text read: Das Zusammenfallen des Änderns der Umstände und der menschlichen Tätigkeit kann nur als umwälzende Praxis gefaßt und rationell verstanden werden.

Which Gentile, providing the first Italian translation, gave as: The coincidence of changes in the environment and human activity can be conceived and understood rationally only as overturned practice.45

But Gramsci translated:

43 Idem, p. 462 (Q4§38; PN Vol. 2, p. 185). 44 See A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), Vol.

2, cit., pp. 815–816, note 21 (Q3§90; PN Vol. 2, p. 91). 45 G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, Sansoni, Firenze 1959, p. 69: ‘Il convergere del mutarsi dell’ambiente e dell’attività umana può essere concepito e compreso razionalmente solo come rovesciamento della prassi.’

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The convergence of the changing of the environment and of human activity can be conceived and understood rationally only as an overturning of practice.46

Gramsci’s ‘overturning of practice’ was possibly even further removed from the German than Gentile’s ‘overturned practice,’ to the extent that ‘overturning’ now was assigned the grammatical role of head of the phrase, instead of ‘Praxis.’ In the context of his translations, this deviation from his word-for-word general manner of proceeding stands out as a striking exception and may read as an attempt to produce a more meaningful rendering of the original wording. Although the expression ‘an overturning of practice’ was far removed from the German, it does give a clear indication of the ideas Gramsci was trying to elaborate at the time. It is not entirely accurate, therefore, to say that Gramsci merely reproduced Gentile’s translation, because he introduced his own variations and corrections: ‘overturned practice’ or ‘overturning of practice’ are not indeed the same, in philosophical terms—what Gramsci did replicate, rather, was the tendency to superimpose his own interpretation on the letter of the original text. From his prison isolation, besides, Gramsci had no way of even knowing of the 1932 David Rjazanov edition, which re-established Marx’s wording, nor of the debate that had sprung from the translations of Gentile and Mondolfo, starting with the articles by Giuseppe Capograssi and Eugenio Di Carlo, which both appeared in 1933 in the Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto.47

46 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), Vol. 2, cit., p. 744. See, in the same sense, Id., Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1051 (Q8, 38). 47 G. Capograssi, «Prassi che rovescia» o «prassi che si rovescia»? Postilla a Rodolfo Mondolfo, ‘Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto,’ 1933, pp. 746–749; E. Di Carlo, rec. to A. Poggi, Il concetto del diritto e dello Stato nella filosofia giuridica italiana contemporanea, ‘Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto,’ 1933, p. 439.

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4

From Marx to Hegel

Croce’s definition of Marx as the ‘Machiavelli of the proletariat’48 was later borrowed by Gramsci, but took on a different meaning and was developed in an original manner that bore a connection with the philosophy of praxis—a theme that Croce had instead dismissed and left to Labriola and then Gentile. Gramsci agreed that the work of Marx did not amount to an accomplished philosophy, but it certainly did have at its center the questions of political initiative and of historical understanding, and constituted, overall, an exercise in self-conscious realism. At the same time, those practical aims rested upon an implicit understanding of the world, and that was the theoretical principle that it befell on Marxists to explicate as a distinct conception of reality. Hence the parallel with Machiavelli, whom Gramsci read as the proponent of an ‘intellectual and moral revolution’ contained ‘embryonically’ in his writings and which ‘has not yet taken place “openly” as a “public” form of the national culture.’49 Where Machiavelli had revealed how the exercise of power ‘drips with tears and blood,’ so Marx had unveiled the foundation of politics and ideologies not only for the benefit of the proletariat, but as universal knowledge. He wrote: This position of Machiavelli’s recurs for Marx: Marx’s thought, too, has been useful not only to the class explicitly addressed by Marx (who, in this respect, is different from and superior to Machiavelli) but also to the conservative classes whose leading personnel in many cases had its political apprenticeship in Marxism.50

In this sense it could be said, with Croce, that historical materialism constituted a canon. But not only was it a canon in terms of which the genesis of historical forms could be understood; it also implied a philosophy of great moment—though one that had not been fully developed by its originator. As well as reiterating some of the positions of Machiavelli (namely his realist stance and the thesis of the autonomy of politics), 48 B. Croce, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, Laterza, Bari 1978, p. 104. On the definition of Marx as ‘Machiavelli of the proletariat’ see A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 503 (Q4, 33), reworked in Id. , Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1315 (Q10, 25a). 49 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 431 (Q4§8; PN Vol. 2, 152). 50 Idem, p. 431 (Q4§8; PN Vol. 2, p. 152).

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Marx had, moreover, made considerable advances on his predecessor, combining his art of politics with a component of radical historicism, which is to say an entirely renewed conception of human nature: The basic innovation introduced by Marx into the science of politics and of history, in comparison with Machiavelli, is the demonstration that ‘human nature,’ fixed and immutable, does not exist, and that, therefore, the concrete content (as well as the logical formulation?) of political science must be conceived as a historically developing organism.51

As a representative of historicism and of the autonomy of politics, Marx considerably surpassed Machiavelli. However, Gramsci soon realized that the converse was also true, in other regards. There was, in Marx, no such theory of the political subject as could be of guidance to the ‘new prince,’ i.e., to ‘the party that wants to establish the state.’52 These were the limitations inherent in Marxian doctrine which Lenin had sought to remedy with the ‘revolution against Capital’ and which Gramsci regarded as the correlate of the ‘intellectual and moral revolution’ initiated by Machiavelli: where Marx had historicized the autonomy of politics, then, Lenin had modernized the prince. A crucial passage on the comparison between Marx and Lenin appears in Notebook 753 : ‘Marx is the creator of a Weltanschauung, but what is Ilyich’s position? Is it purely subordinate and subaltern?’ The answer came in the negative, as ‘Ilyich’s position’ could not be considered ‘subordinate’ or ‘subaltern,’ even if by this one meant he had merely translated theory into practice, the Weltanschauung into action. Lenin, rather, had grasped the meaning of hegemony and made a discovery of ‘philosophical importance,’ which integrated and corrected Marx. Lenin was a ‘philosopher,’ just in the way that Marx was, not on account of what he had written on materialism and empirio-criticism, but for having overstepped the boundaries of Marxian doctrine in actual practice, thus reinstating at the heart of the doctrine the crucial institution of political subjectivity, the contemporary embodiment of Machiavelli’s prince. Granted, Lenin had not fully resolved the matter; but he had identified and addressed it. That’s why Gramsci went so far as to compare the 51 Idem, pp. 430–431 (Q4§8; PN Vol. 2, cit., p. 151). 52 Idem, p. 432 (Q4§10; PN Vol. 2, p. 153). 53 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 881–882 (Q7§33; PN Vol. 3,

p. 183).

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Marx–Lenin relationship with the Christ–Paul relationship and spoke of ‘two phases,’ ‘that are simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous,’ where the Pauline–Leninist moment is to be taken as ‘organization’ and ‘action,’ indeed, but also ‘expansion of the Weltanschauung.’ The interpretation that Marx was, albeit implicitly and ideally, the central moment in a history of theoretical development induced Gramsci to aim for a comprehensive account of that narrative in the Notebooks. The rediscovery of Labriola, which must have occurred in the early prison period, pointed Gramsci to the speculative core of a philosophy of praxis—a matter he was now able to examine uninfluenced by Gentile’s essay. But Lenin, on the other hand, had shown, against Marx’s residual determinism, how decisive the problem of the constitution of the political subject, of the ‘modern prince,’ was. Somewhat similarly, but in the domain of economic theory, Gramsci thought to find in Ricardo’s theory of a ‘particular market’ the cue for a solution of the problem of value. In this return from Marx to Ricardo, there clearly transpired the influence of the notion of ‘pure economics,’ with which Croce had taken his leave of Marxism. The earliest references to Ricardo, indeed, are made in connection with Gramsci’s critique of Antonio Graziadei, against whom Croce had launched an earlier controversy. In Notebook 7, while not yet mentioning Ricardo explicitly, Gramsci wrote that, In order to refute Graziadei […] it must be acknowledged that economic science starts from the hypothesis of a particular market (whether it be a purely competitive market or a monopolistic market), except that one must then determine what variations might be introduced into this constant by this or that element of reality, which is never ‘pure.’54

That the critique was leveled not only at Ricardo, but at Croce and at pure economics, became clear in a later entry dealing with the ‘elliptical comparison,’ Croce’s account of Marx’s theory of value. In this entry, Gramsci wondered whether it could be ‘that there is inadvertently a grain of truth in the way Croce unfolds his demonstration of the elliptical comparison.’55 As well as answering the question in the affirmative,

54 Idem, p. 878 (Q7§30; PN Vol. 3, cit, pp. 179–180). 55 Idem, p. 890 (Q7§42; PN Vol. 3, p. 191).

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Gramsci went a step further than Croce in supporting the interpretation that Marx’s theory of value was derived from Ricardo’s ‘particular market.’ Wrote Gramsci, Thus we are not dealing in any way with an ‘elliptical comparison’ made by Marx as the ‘proponent’ of a future social structure different from the one he studied but with a theory that ensues from the reduction of economic facts to their pure ‘economic nature’—that is, to the maximum determination of the ‘free play of economic forces.’ There is no doubt that Ricardo, like the other classical economists, was extremely shrewd and his labor theory of value was not at all shocking to his contemporaries […]. This problem is tied to the fundamental problem of ‘pure’ economic science— that is, to the problem of searching for and identifying the economic concept and economic fact that are independent of other concepts and facts that pertain to other sciences.56

Gramsci would later come to regard the notion of a particular market as a promising lead into the logic of Marx’s interpretation of economics, but to begin with he brought it into the argument as a refinement of the theses of pure economics and Croce’s thesis of the elliptical comparison. Basically, Gramsci found there was some ‘grain of truth’ in Croce’s position (which Labriola had vigorously rejected), but made two corrections. Firstly, by allowing that Marx’s theory of value rested on the abstraction of ‘a purely competitive market or a monopolistic market’ economics, he challenged Croce’s ‘normative’ interpretation, i.e., that it should represent some society of laborers or indeed a model ‘regulated society.’ Secondly, he concurred with Croce that the aim was to isolate ‘the economic concept and economic fact that are independent of other concepts and facts that pertain to other sciences;’ but whereas for Croce the category of economic utility included ‘all those facts that can be embraced by the concept of “economy,”’ so that ‘even love, for ex., is an economic fact, etc.’ Gramsci insisted that the domain of economics proper be restricted to the ‘production and distribution of material economic goods.’57 In general, Gramsci resorted to Labriola, Lenin , Ricardo, and several others when he needed to make adjustments to some salient aspect of

56 Idem, pp. 890–891 (Q7§42; PN Vol. 3, p. 191). 57 Idem, p. 891 (Q7§42; PN Vol. 3, p. 191).

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Marx’s doctrine or fill in a gap, which resulted in an approach to Marxist theory with few precedents and comparable instances in contemporary thought. The decisive matter, however, concerned Marx’s relationship with Hegel and the problem of dialectics more generally. Here Gramsci had to face two lines of interpretation, both potentially destructive. On the one hand, there was Croce, who had downplayed Hegel’s influence on Marx and dismissively spoke of early readings; but Gentile, on the contrary, had found the theoretical essence of praxis to reside in Hegelianism and dialectics—only to then underline its irremediable conflict with the materialism he believed Marx had inherited from Feuerbach. Gramsci assumed a wholly independent stance vis-à-vis Hegel, whom he regarded an exception in the history of philosophy; by so doing he removed the grounds for the prejudice against idealism (and even the Hegelian conservative exponents) that was so ingrained with Marxist theorists, starting with Engels. While in some measure Gramsci retained the Marxist language of ‘overturning,’ the notion underwent a process of profound elaboration, to the extent that the Hegelian imprint on his thought emerged more marked and incisive than it had been with any of the Italian idealists, starting with Croce and Gentile. In Notebook 4, Gramsci explained how ‘In the history of philosophical thought, Hegel plays a separate role, because in his system, in one way or another, even if only in the form of a “philosophical romance,” it is possible to understand what reality is;’ therefore, he concluded, ‘historical materialism is a reform and a development of Hegelianism’.58 Against Croce’s interpretation, in Hegel was to be found the philosophical premise of historical materialism. At the stage of the passage just quoted, Gramsci still saw historical materialism as the ‘reform’ and ‘development’ of Hegelianism; but Marx’s indebtedness to Hegel proved to be much deeper at each successive examination of the philosophy, to the point that, on some crucial points of theory, the Hegelian component took over entirely. This position is reflected in the Philosophy Notes under three ideal headings. In the first place, in one of the B texts (though it is, in fact, a recurring theme in the Notebooks), Gramsci emphasizes the Hegelian notion

58 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 471 (Q4§45; PN Vol. 2, p. 196).

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of ‘civil society’59 and goes on to underline the ‘great importance’ of ‘the position that Hegel ascribed to the intellectuals’ as a matter that ‘must be studied in detail,’ in effect treating Hegelian Rechtsphilosophie as the premise to his own line of research on the history of the intellectuals.60 Secondly, Gramsci argued for an interpretation of Hegel (hence the title of the three series of Notes on Philosophy) not as an idealist but as the unifier of materialism and idealism.61 ‘In his youth,’ he explained, ‘Marx relived this whole experience: Hegelian, Feuerbachian materialist, Marxist; in other words, he reforged the destroyed unity into a new philosophical construction: this new construction of his, this new philosophy is already clearly evident in the theses on Feuerbach.’62 Hegel had unified materialism and idealism; Marx had had to recombine materialism and idealism after ‘Hegel’s successors destroyed this unity, returning to the old materialism with Feuerbach;’ but after Marx, his successors had again steered historical materialism toward the narrowest materialism. Hence the conclusion that ‘As for this expression, “historical materialism”: greater stress is placed on the second word whereas it should be placed on the first—Marx is fundamentally a “historicist.”’63 Gramsci’s position, then, could have been no more divergent from Gentile. According to Gentile, Marx had generated an irremediable contradiction between dialectics and materialism, but for Gramsci, Marx had unified the two terms, repeating the operation Hegel had performed before him. The third aspect, however, deserves special consideration. Hegel, we have seen, dialectically unified idealism and materialism, which made his position not one of pure idealism (as believed by Engels and in the Marxist vulgate), but of a dialectical fusion of the two terms, which Marx then replicated under different historical conditions and which further needed to be repeated under the present conditions. Bukharin’s fundamental error consisted in not having grasped this concept, leading him 59 The reference is to N. Bobbio, Gramsci e la concezione della società civile, in Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, Vol. 1, edited by Pietro Rossi, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1975, pp. 75–100. 60 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1054 (Q8§187; PN Vol. 3, p. 343). 61 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 424 (Q4§3; PN Vol. 2, p. 144) and idem, p. 433 (Q4§11; PN Vol. 2, p. 154). 62 Idem, p. 424 (Q4§3; PN Vol. 2, p. 144). 63 Idem, p. 433 (Q4§11; PN Vol. 2, p. 154).

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to conceive historical materialism as a sociology. In his ignorance of the dialectical premises of Marxism, Bukharin was prevented from understanding the third thesis on Feuerbach: ‘The uneducated and crude environment has exercised control over the educator; vulgar common sense has imposed itself on science instead of the other way round. If the environment is the educator, it must in turn be educated, as Marx wrote, but the Popular Manual does not comprehend this revolutionary dialectic.’64 Marx found the basis of his theory in the dialectics because only in the dialectics could he unify materialism and idealism and so conceive the ‘overturning of praxis’ (as Gramsci translated). But what did Gramsci mean by dialectics? And in what way did he frame its relationship with Hegel’s logic and with the Italian philosophical tradition (within which the dialectic and its reform had been the object of wide debate)? The most pointed statement is made in the third series of the Notes on Philosophy, in a short passage devoted to Croce which was then reworked in Notebook 10: Theory of revolution-restoration, a domesticated dialectic because it ‘mechanically’ presupposes that the antithesis should be preserved by the thesis in order not to destroy the dialectical process, which is therefore ‘foreseen’ as an endless mechanical repetition. In real history, though, the antithesis tends to destroy the thesis. The result is a supersession, but one cannot ‘tally’ in advance the blows that will be delivered—this is not a boxing ring with its established rules. As the antithesis gains ground, implacably, the more so does the thesis—in other words, it will manifest all its potential vitality. (Croce’s position is similar to Proudhon’s that was criticized in The Poverty of Philosophy; domesticated Hegelianism.)65

This is a passage worthy of careful analysis. In relation to Croce, Gramsci speaks not only of ‘domesticated dialectic’ but of ‘domesticated Hegelianism,’ and makes a reference to the second chapter of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy, in which Marx conducted his critique of the ‘metaphysics of political economy’ and of Proudhon. The domestication of the dialectics consisted in the fact that ‘the antithesis’ was ‘preserved by the thesis,’ in an attempt ‘not to destroy the dialectical process’ and also to foresee the development of the process itself. In speaking 64 Idem, p. 877 (Q7§29; PN Vol. 3, pp. 178–179). 65 Idem, p. 1083 (Q8§225; PN Vol. 3, p. 372).

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of ‘revolution-restoration,’ Gramsci was alluding to Croce’s theory of progress and decline and the way in which, in his historical works especially (Gramsci probably had the Storia dell’età barocca here in mind), Croce had configured the rhythm of historical process. But from there Gramsci immediately went on to the way in which Croce had rethought Hegel and reformed Hegelian dialectics by introducing the category of the distinct. According to Croce, Hegel’s mistake consisted in the preservation of the antithesis in the thesis: in the notion that the negative cannot but be manifested by being preserved within the positive as it is superseded by it. But, Gramsci argued, in ‘real history’ the ‘supersession’ is only in the ‘result,’ and not predictable a priori: in fact, before the ‘result’ is realized, the pair of opposites, thesis and antithesis, develop ‘implacably,’ which is to say autonomously and independently of each other, so that neither term appears as yet superseded and outdone by the other. So dialectical synthesis does occur, but only in the result, as the outcome of a real, undecided struggle, in which positive and negative compete with equal value and energy. The lines of Gramsci’s thinking are clear enough, and equally clear is his attempt to represent political struggle as a concrete dimension of historical process. But in this way Gramsci did not strike against Croce’s proposed reform of the Hegelian dialectic, which is to say the distinct, but precisely against what Croce had derived from Hegel, the dialectic of opposites. His critique affected Hegel (and Marx) no less than Croce, because Hegel (in criticizing the Kantian conception of negative quantities and real opposites) had qualified the opposition as ideal, regarding the negative as included and superseded in the positivity of determination. Gramsci therefore blamed Croce for domesticating the dialectic and hoped, with Marx, to return to its proper terms. Such was the influence Hegel had on him, however, Gramsci did not realize that the ‘domestic’ element (the philosophy of history, we may call it) was already an essential component of the Hegelian dialectic.

5

The ‘Historical Bloc’

The unfaithful translation of the third thesis on Feuerbach had induced Gramsci to regard the overturning of praxis as the theoretical core of historical materialism and to gradually develop that notion, both lexically and conceptually, into the new framework of a philosophy of praxis.

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The category that is most comprehensive and indicative of his theoretical conclusions at that stage is that of historical bloc,66 which he actually derived, rather accidentally, from a writing by Georges Sorel.67 It is a writing he had certainly had occasion to read in his pre-prison period and then probably encountered again in a book by Giovanni Malagodi.68 In the prefatory letter to Daniel Halévy in his Reflections on Violence, Sorel clarified the nature of ‘myths,’ such as ‘those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the Revolution, and by the followers of Mazzini,’ and stressed that ‘we should not attempt to analyze such groups of images in the way that we break down a thing into its elements, that they should be taken as a whole [en bloc], as historical forces.’ Quite similarly, Malagodi spoke of the ‘relatively fleeting states of our voluntary consciousness,’ which equally had to be taken ‘as a whole [in blocco], as historical forces.’69 In the face of the contrast between analytic and synthetic methods, the category of historical bloc answered the need to regard certain objects, whether they be myths or fleeting states of voluntary consciousness, in the unity of their historical determination, as a bloc; and it further enabled Gramsci to provide an alternative account to the concrete, circular relation between structure and superstructures from the causal determinism of Bukharin’s interpretation of historical materialism. Gramsci’s metaphors of the ‘necessary and vital connection’ between skin and skeleton in the human body,70 or anatomical structure and skin color71 were illustrative of the primacy of synthesis over analysis and the impossibility, as Sorel had said, of breaking down the 66 G. Cospito, Il ritmo del pensiero. Per una lettura diacronica dei «Quaderni del carcere» di Gramsci, Bibliopolis, Napoli 2011, pp. 218–225, defines the historical bloc as ‘the summary formula of the essential pair of terms’ (structure-superstructures) (idem, p. 218) and convincingly shows how, starting from mid 1932, Gramsci progressively abandoned this expression (pp. 221–222), so much so that, after that time, it ‘will no longer appear in newly written notes.’ Cospito’s analysis (which corrects the previous theses of Nicola Badaloni and Hugues Portelli) confirms, therefore, the importance of this concept in the period Gramsci was writing the Notes on philosophy. 67 G. Sorel, Riflessioni sulla violenza, in Id., Scritti politici, edited by R. Vivarelli, Utet, Torino 1963, pp. 96–97. 68 G.F. Malagodi, Le ideologie politiche, Laterza, Bari 1928. 69 Idem, p. 95. 70 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 437 (Q4§13; PN Vol. 2, p. 158). 71 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1091 (Q8§240; PN Vol. 3,

p. 381).

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unity of the historical process ‘into its elements.’ Gramsci was underlining the circular totality of the relations here at stake, their dialectical synthesis: ‘One cannot think of an individual who has been “flayed” as a real individual—the reality is he’s dead, no longer an active and functioning entity but an object for the anatomical table.’72 If one attempted to regard the structure in itself, as the only real element capable of acting upon human consciousness, and thus regarded it separately from the superstructures instead of as forming a unified bloc with them, the structure would be as good as the corpse in the metaphor. In Notebook 7 the point was clearly made that ‘the concept of historical bloc’ is ‘the philosophical equivalent of “spirit” in Croce’s philosophy;’ and added, ‘the introduction of dialectical activity and a process of distinction into the “historical bloc” does not mean negating its real unity.’73 The category of historical bloc stood to indicate ‘the real unity’ of the ‘spirit,’ by virtue of which the distinct elements of the synthesis, ‘dialectically’ regarded as a bloc, were held together by a concrete nexus. From the elaboration of Sorel’s phrase there emerged, in short, Gramsci’s representation of reality, which found its counterpart in the Marxian principle of the overturning of praxis. The starting point was still the critique of Croce’s treatment of the relationship between structure and superstructure in the Elementi di politica: Marx, Croce had written, ‘regarded economic life as the substance and moral life as appearance, as illusion or “superstructure,” as he called it.’74 Whether justly or not, Gramsci challenged this interpretation, denouncing the ‘prejudice’ against ‘the intrinsic value of ideologies,’75 and upheld against such interpretation the notion (which was rather his own than Marx’s) of historical bloc. For Marx, he explained, ‘ideologies’ are anything but appearances and illusions; they are an objective and operative reality, but they are not the mainspring of history, that’s all. It is not ideologies that create social reality, but it is social reality, in its productive structure, that creates ideologies. How could Marx have

72 Ibid. 73 Idem, Ivi, p. 854 (Q7§1; PN Vol. 3, p. 157). 74 B. Croce, Elementi di politica, Laterza, Bari 1925, pp. 91–92. 75 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 441 (Q4§20; PN Vol. 2, p. 163).

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thought that superstructures are appearance and illusion? Even his theories are a superstructure.76

But, on the same note, he immediately corrected himself by adding that the productive structure does create the ideologies, but only within the circularity of the historical bloc, wherein the converse also holds to the extent that the superstructures in turn create ‘social reality.’ His means of defending Marx’s position from Croce’s critique went beyond the letter of Marx’s writings, in a theoretical perspective that relied not only on Marxist tenets but also on the object of his refutation. Structure and superstructures, that is, were bound together in a dialectical relation, often in the form of mutual interaction. The exact terms of this relationship posed a capital problem for him, for which he sought diverse solutions that may not have always been consistent but clearly indicated the direction of his line of inquiry. At one point, for instance, in one of the B texts that was not copied into the ‘Special’ Notebooks, he configured the relationship between material forces and ideologies as a relationship between matter and form—a rather loaded terminology, redolent of Aristotelianism as much as of Croce: The analysis of these statements, in my view, lends support to the concept of ‘historical bloc’ in which in fact the material forces are the content and ideologies are the form. This distinction between form and content is just heuristic because material forces would be historically inconceivable without form and ideologies would be individual fantasies without material forces.77

Working from a tentative definition of historical bloc as relation of form and content, Gramsci soon saw that for the definition not to be empty and devoid of value, material forces and ideologies needed to constitute an undivided unity of content and form, each permeating the other and each the synthesis of the two moments. Further on, in § 24, a similar problem arose as he attempted to account for the nature of error within a theoretical framework defined by the circularity of the historical bloc. He acutely observed that ‘mechanical historical materialism’ could not explain the ‘possibility of error,’ because it regarded ‘every political act’ 76 Idem, pp. 436–437 (Q4§15; PN Vol. 2, p. 158). 77 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 869 (Q7§21; PN Vol. 3, p. 172).

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as a ‘reflection’ of the structure, as something ‘determined’ by it: unless one accorded political subjectivity a margin of autonomy, it was impossible to justify the notion of ‘error’ itself, the difference between being and not being, between theory and praxis. ‘The principle of “error,”’ he explained, ‘is complex: it could consist in an individual impulse stemming from a mistaken calculation;’ and so combined in one formulation two different readings: one relating to the ‘individual impulse,’ and the other to ‘incorrect calculation.’78 The first of the two terms referred back to Croce’s theory of the practical origin of error, but the second term appeared to contradict the first by hinting at the possibility of a theoretical error stemming from miscalculation rather than impulse. While wavering between one explanation and the other, his critique of ‘mechanical historical materialism’ was to the point, as was the need to ‘distinguish’ the constituent terms in the concrete connection of the historical bloc. In another B text in Notebook 8 Gramsci appears to take his reflection in an obscure and somewhat paradoxical direction. The passage goes: The structure and the superstructures form a ‘historical bloc.’ In other words, the complex and discordant ensemble of the superstructures reflects the ensemble of the social relations of production. From this, one can conclude that only a comprehensive system of ideologies rationally reflects the contradiction of the structure and represents the existence of the objective conditions for revolutionizing praxis. If a group is formed that ideologically is 100 percent homogeneous, it means that the premises for this revolutionizing exist at 100 percent—the ‘rational’ is actively and actually real. This reasoning is based on the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructures (a reciprocity that is, precisely, the real dialectical process).79

While replete with difficulties, on closer inspection the text is of considerable interest. The premise, Gramsci clarifies at the close, lies in the principle of the ‘necessary reciprocity’ between structure and superstructures, which constitutes the ‘real dialectical process.’ Such ‘reciprocity’ provides a perfect representation of the category of the historical bloc, which is, one could say the indicator of its conceptual import. But Gramsci was here proposing some form of a mental experiment, seeking

78 Idem, Q7§24; PN Vol. 3, p. 174. 79 Idem, p. 1051 (Q8§182; PN Vol. 3, p. 340).

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to illustrate (ex absurdo, almost) the asymmetry between the two terms involved in the dialectical nexus. The ‘contradiction of the structure’ could be integrally reflected only by ‘a totalitarian system of ideologies,’ by a group that is ‘100 percent homogeneous’ ideologically. Only in such an instance would the overturning of praxis be assured by ‘objective conditions,’ which is to say by the structure itself. With a mischievous quip couched in Hegelian language, he added that were such a ‘system of totalitarian ideologies’ to come about, then would the ‘rational’ be ‘actively and actually real.’ In the instance imagined by Gramsci, indeed, the real (the structure) and the rational (the superstructures) would come to coincide, would each be the reflection of the other 100%, with neither discrepancy nor residue. But the gist of the argument was that such a state of affairs never occurs in politics: the overturning of praxis does not occur under ‘objective conditions,’ but in the perpetual asymmetry of structure and ideology. A reciprocal connection between them holds indeed, but as between distinct terms, because reality (the structure) never conforms to the rational (the ideology), and the overturning of praxis will always be a subjective enterprise; one that requires the active intervention of hegemony, of political initiative.

6

Materialism and Idealism: The Reality of the Outside World

From the very title, Materialism and Idealism, Gramsci indicated that the object of his dual critique in the Notes on Philosophy would be the two principal trends in contemporary thought, though Gramsci took the interpretation of either term beyond its received meaning. Thus, while on the one hand materialism identified the determinism and mechanism of Bukharin’s manual and of several trends in Marxism, on the other hand it also signified realism, which is to say the dualist position which involved a faith in the reality of an external world. Likewise, the object of Gramsci’s refutation was the abstract idealism which separates thought from being, speculative philosophy from common sense (and thus denied its own premises); but his own interpretation of praxis was in fact based on

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the strict definition of idealism whereby, as Hegel had famously stipulated, ‘the finite is ideal.’80 Developing an intuition of Gentile’s, Gramsci wrote in Notebook 8 that: ‘It must be demonstrated that the “subjectivist” conception finds its “historical” and nonspeculative interpretation [(and supersedes its speculative form)] in the concept of superstructures; it has served the purpose of superseding transcendence on the one hand and “common sense” on the other, but in its speculative form it is a mere philosophical romance.’81 The separation of thought from being, of the idea from reality, and of form from content that a mere ‘speculative form’ involved (as opposed to historical interpretation) ran counter to the logic of the Hegelian dialectic; and though it too was termed idealism, it was, in fact, an error and degeneration of idealism. One of the key running themes in the Notes is the refutation of all naturalistic accounts of external reality, which Gramsci endeavored to bring it back to its human and historical foundation. Thus, for example, against Bukharin, he accounted for the concept of matter itself as a ‘human relation,’ i.e., ‘an object of production and property, as the crystallization of a social relation that itself coincides with a particular historical period.’82 And elsewhere, moving from a polemical reference to Feuerbach’s ‘man is what he eats’ (from the latter’s review of Moleschott), he redefined ‘human nature’ as history, therefore as ‘spirit.’83 As Gramsci understood them, materialism and idealism were symmetrical, rather than mutually exclusive, in so far as each failed to incorporate historicity; materialism hypostasized being in the way that idealism hypostasized thought, so that both failed to see the unity of the two moments and the reciprocal conversion of one into the other. The point was well expounded in the note in the first series devoted to the connection of quantity to quality. Observing that ‘ne suffit pas d’additioner tous les Pierres et toutes le Maries pour obtenir une société’ and that therefore ‘every society is something more than the mere sum of its components,’ Bukharin could not 80 G.W.F. Hegel, Scienza della logica, Vol. 1, trans. by A. Moni, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1981, p. 159. 81 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 1078–1079 (Q8§217; PN Vol. 3, p. 367). 82 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 443–444 (Q4§25; PN Vol. 2, pp. 165–166). 83 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 883–885 (Q7§35; PN Vol. 3, pp. 185–186).

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however account for a ‘social aggregate’ being ‘more than the mere sum of its parts’ in terms of ‘physical law.’ Idealism, for its own part ‘hypostatizes this “something,” [and] makes it into an entity unto itself,’ as in the instance of the ethical state of Gentile. But the ‘most fruitful and original element’ of historical materialism (here, patently, already a philosophy of praxis), resided in seeing clearly in what way ‘quality is closely connected to quantity,’ thereby overcoming the double abstraction operated by the materialists and idealists to the detriment of the concrete and dynamic unity of history.84 But from the contrastive critique of materialism and idealism there emerged, as has been said, a number of theoretical questions to which Gramsci fervently applied himself. Starting from Bukharin’s manual (which served him as a mere pretext), Gramsci began to focus on the question of the ‘objective reality of the external world,’ as he called it.85 In the assumed dualism of thought and being, from which derived the conception of truth as the ‘adaequatio’ of knowledge to reality, resided the central problem of materialism, or rather of realism. Hegel, in his first truly systematic work (the Phenomenology of the spirit ) had gradually surpassed that dualism figure after figure and resolved it in ‘absolute knowledge,’ in the supreme principle of science and idealism. With Hegel, the conclusion came to represent the true beginning, so that the identity of thought and being (absolute knowledge) became the original seat of philosophy, from which the difference (of thought and being) had to be derived dialectically: ‘In historical materialism,’ wrote Gramsci in a distinctly Hegelian vein, ‘thought cannot be separated from being, man from nature, activity (history) from matter, subject from object: such a separation would be a fall into empty talk, meaningless abstraction’86 In his critique of the realism of the external world, Gramsci took on board Hegel’s position but introduced several complicating elements, first of all by linking the dualistic premise to a religious conception of things and then by deriving from it the category of common sense. This analysis (which, as we shall see, was to prove decisive in his reflection) was influenced by Bergson’s philosophy, which he had certainly pondered in his

84 See A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., Q4§32; PN Vol. 2, pp. 173–174. 85 See A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 894 (Q7§47; PN Vol. 3,

p. 194). 86 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 467 (Q4§41; PN Vol. 2, p. 191).

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pre-prison period: one may cite, to give just one example, the conference on L’âme et le corps of 28 April, 1912, in which ‘l’espérience immédiate e naïve du sens commun’ is described in similar terms to the ones Gramsci then used.87 Even when cloaked in the garbs of materialism or positivism, realism remained, in short, the supreme expression of Christian metaphysics and, more precisely, of the Catholic religion: Adam who opens his eyes for the first time in the world and believes that it was created by him in that instant (or something of the sort). He forgets that according to the Bible—and therefore according to the religious view—not only was the world created before Adam, but God created it for him. Religion, then, cannot distance itself from the view that ‘reality’ exists independently of the thinking individual.88

The concept is reiterated in Notebook 8, where it is qualified as ‘a “commonsense” fact:’ for which reason, turning now against Bukharin’s manual ‘the use of this experience of common sense as the basis for a destruction of the theories of idealism by ridicule has something rather “reactionary” about it—an implicit return to religious sentiment.’ And he concluded: idealist theories constitute the greatest effort at intellectual and moral reform that has ever been made to eliminate religion from the sphere of civilization. This is related to the question of how and to what degree the concept of superstructures of historical materialism is in fact a realization of idealism and of its assertion that the reality of the world is a construction of the spirit.89

It is beyond dispute that Gramsci approached the question of the ‘objective reality of the external world’ from the angle of the idealism of Hegel and Bergson, and also of Croce and Gentile, and from that angle could indicate the religious descent of the notion and its seeping into common sense; nor was this fundamental approach ever significantly

87 H. Bergson, L’âme et le corps, in Id., L’énergie spirituelle. Essais et conférences, Felix Alcan, Paris 1919. 88 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 894 (Q7§47; PN Vol. 3, p. 195). 89 Idem, p. 1076 (Q8§215; PN Vol. 3, p. 365).

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revised.90 A different and strictly distinct problem (which should not be confused with that of realism) concerned the objectivity of the world, which is to say the constitution of a non-subjective, common reality. Here Gramsci departed from idealist positions (from Hegel, but above all from Croce and Gentile) and approached some of the distinctive themes of pragmatism (while carefully signaling the autonomy of his own position). If realism bore a strict relation with religious conceptions, so was objectivity a construct of empirical science, i.e. of the antagonist of religion in the modern world. Where Croce had placed the principle of objectivity in the class of pseudo-concepts (or of conceptual fictions, but at any rate of the practical constructs of economic volition), Gramsci insisted on the two-faceted nature of empirical science, which in one regard was to be classed as a superstructure, and therefore as an ideological form, but in a different regard had a part in the process of construction of the world of common experience. Science, he wrote, ‘occupies a special place’ among superstructures, because, although ‘it always appears clothed by an ideology,’ it derives concretely from the ‘union of objective fact and hypothesis or a system of hypotheses which go beyond the mere objective fact,’ to the extent that it is possible ‘to separate the objective fact from the system of hypotheses— appropriating the former and rejecting the latter—by means of a process of abstraction that is inherent to scientific methodology itself.’91 Gramsci expanded on the distinction between ‘objective fact’ and ‘system of hypotheses’ in a further series of notes in Notebook 4. In § 41 Gramsci came to a further conclusion and stated that the scientific method operates ‘a selection from among sense perceptions, from among the most basic elements of knowledge’ and regards some as ‘fleeting’ and others as ‘lasting.’ In this way, he added, ‘what is common to all humans’ is established, ‘What is affirmed is being in itself, permanent being, the being that is common to all humans, being that is independent of all merely particular viewpoints. But this, too, is a conception of the world; it is an ideology.’92 Necessarily, then, the philosophy 90 There are passages in Notebook 10, in which Gramsci hinted at a more problematic

interpretation of the question, for which he turned to Kant, suggesting that ‘external reality’ could indicate not the ‘unknowable’ but what is not yet ‘known’ (ibid., p. 1291, p. 1329 and p. 1333). 91 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 430 (Q4§7; PN Vol. 2, pp. 150– 151). 92 See, idem, pp. 466–467 (Q4§41; PN Vol. 2, pp. 190–191).

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of praxis ‘accepts this point of view’ and instead rejects that of ‘common sense.’ But with regard to the previous § 7, above, a substantial novelty had been introduced: objectivity was a construct of science, but science was, at the same time, an ideology. Objectivity could thus be framed as a ‘struggle for knowledge’ and itself be subsumed within the question of hegemony. In § 47 the question of the nature of scientific work is taken up in relation to a statement in Engels’ Anti-Dühring, allowing Gramsci to specify that when the facet of ‘theoretical activity’ is distinguished from that of the ‘practical-experimental activity of scientists,’ ‘the rise of the experimental method’ must be taken as the truest meaning of science, whereas ‘theory’ constitutes the ‘ideological’ moment in scientific discourse.93 With the two great forces on modernity, religion and science, engaged in an ideal struggle to uphold their supreme view of the world, historical materialism stood firmly on the side of the scientific method against the religious representation (and against common sense). Objectivity was to be understood in the sense that it has in the experimental method of empirical science, when it has been purged of all residues of realism and positivism (here exemplified by a reference to Bertrand Russell) that often accompany theoretical activity. As Labriola had also observed, experimental practice and the philosophy of praxis were related by a strong analogy, as both aimed to enucleate ‘the dialectical mediation between man and nature, the elementary “historical” cell.’94 What emerged at this point in the exposition was, we might say, the Galilean nature of the philosophy of praxis, based as it was on the practices of experimentation, doubt, and research. The question of objectivity had capital implications for Gramsci’s overall way of thinking, extending into his political meditation. In the first place, we have seen, the struggle for hegemony, in its broadest and most universal sense, played itself out in the construction of objectivity. From the start, scientific process had been framed as ‘a struggle for knowledge of the objectivity of the real’ in opposition to the religious and the realist view of the world. But a connection also held between the question of objectivity and the problem of ‘cosmopolitanism.’ As the matter was presented in Notebook 8, the ‘struggle for objectivity’ had come

93 Idem, p. 473 (Q4§47; 2 Vol., p. 198). 94 Ibid.

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to coincide with the ‘struggle for the cultural unification of the human race:’ ‘experimental science,’ Gramsci wrote, ‘is the terrain on which this objectivization has reached its maximum realization; it is the cultural element that has contributed the most to unifying humanity. It is the most objectivized and concretely universalized subjectivity.’95 This was, quite possibly, the most radical turn in his interpretation of the scientific method. The construction of objectivity by means of a struggle for knowledge was to lead to the ‘unification of the human race,’ in the sense that, from the ‘elementary “historical” cell’ of praxis, a truly common human world was to emerge that could see itself as united under a shared system of truth-values: in the language of Hegel, it was a matter of realizing the ‘concrete universal, historically concrete,’ the ‘process of objectification of the subject.’ This was a task Gramsci assigned to the empirical sciences, once they were reconciled with the principle of idealism and had been stripped of all residues of realism and positivism. These meditations on the reality of the external world and objectivity brought Gramsci closer to the root of the philosophy of praxis. There is a famous passage in Notebook 4, again on the subject of the ‘“objectivity” of knowledge,’ that reads like a tentative definition: ‘Philosophy of the act (praxis), not of the “pure act” but rather of the “impure”—that is, the real—act, in the most secular sense of the word.’96 In one regard, Gramsci made a plain acknowledgement of his debt toward the actualism of Giovanni Gentile (which he did not seek to hide); but he also introduced a revision and correction of the philosophy, to the extent that ‘the act,’ which actualism regarded to be ‘pure’ (as the concrete and absolute logos within which the infinite figures of the abstract logos manifest themselves), was presented as ‘impure’—for Gramsci the act meant the struggle and the operations of the historical production of humankind. This was not a complete philosophy, consistent in all its parts, but it certainly outlined a plan of inquiry that, within the very limited bounds of prison, Gramsci sought to put to the test, often working from the periphery, rather than from the center of problems. Some examples are enlightening, such as when, working on his recollections of Bertrand

95 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 1048–1049 (Q8§177; PN Vol. 3, p. 337). 96 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 455 (Q4§37; PN Vol. 2, pp. 177– 178).

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Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy,97 he criticized what he interpreted as a fundamental assumption of realism and clarified ‘the purely historical nature’ of the ‘relations between whole civilizations’ defined in terms of ‘East’ and ‘West,’ ‘North’ and ‘South.’ These were ‘real’ categories to the extent that ‘they allow one to travel by land and by sea and to arrive at the predetermined destination,’ but nonetheless ‘arbitrary and conventional constructions,’ which is to say ‘historical’ constructions deriving from the development and conflicts of civilizations where ‘the rational and the real become one and the same thing.’98 Or, to give a seemingly opposite example, when in response to a remark by Mario Camis in the La Nuova Antologia, he objected that even ‘the infinitesimally small phenomena’ can be conceived ‘independently of the subject that observes them’ because they are not ‘created’ but ‘observed:’ not in the ‘religious’ sense that they exist independently of the observer, but in the historical and concrete sense that where ‘the phenomenon is repeated and can be observed by various scientists,’ it has ‘objectivity’ beyond the ‘sphere of personal intuition.’99

7

Common Sense

While Gramsci’s observations on common sense in the Notebooks range widely, it is essentially seen to be defined by religion (‘The main components of common sense are provided by religion,’ he explained),100 with religion in turn to be understood as a realistic (and metaphysical) conception of the world. While stressing at several places that common sense ‘is not a single conception, identical in time and place,’101 his starting point and chief line of argument was that it derived from religion. It constituted, that is, the ‘“folklore” of philosophy’ and the ‘philosophy of nonphilosophers,’ and was, at bottom, ‘a disjointed, incoherent, and inconsequential conception of the world that matches the character of the

97 The edition available to Gramsci was the translation by B. Ceva, Sonzogno, Milano 1922. 98 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 874 (Q7§25; PN Vol. 3, p. 176). 99 Idem, p. 1048 (Q8§176; PN Vol. 3, pp. 337–338). 100 Idem, p. 1045 (Q8§173; PN Vol. 3, p. 333). 101 Ibid.

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multitudes whose philosophy it is;’ what stood opposed to it was the ‘“homogeneous”—that is, systematic—philosophy’ of ‘homogeneous’ social groups.102 Common sense was, therefore, a philosophy because ‘all men are philosophers’103 —but it was an inferior, acritical philosophy waiting to be critically examined and surpassed by the self-conscious, ‘systematic’ philosophy that is organic to progressive social groups. Common sense was therefore neatly defined, and yet the geometry of the main outline proved to be not easily reducible to the theoretical framework of the Notebooks. Firstly, there was the problem of how the dialectic of common sense and philosophy was to intervene upon the current dialectic of structure and superstructures (the dialectic of the historical bloc): the problem, in Marxian terms, of how the overturning of praxis was to occur. A number of problems emerge from the analysis of these dialectical terms and their correlations. On the one hand, common sense was a ‘conception of the world,’ however ‘disjointed’ and ‘inconsequential,’ and so could only be conceived as a superstructure, as the ideology of a given social and economic structure. Once reformed and transformed into ‘good sense,’104 it could be expected to overturn onto the structure itself, as in the relationship between the educator and the educated. In practice, though Gramsci’s accounts are not wholly consistent, common sense often tended to situate itself within the objective space of the structure, to constitute not the overturning but the overturned element in the historical bloc. In one of the B texts in Notebook 10, Gramsci indeed gave an account of the material conditions of a society (which, in the preface to The Critique of Political Economy, Marx had unequivocally indicated as the ‘economic structure of society’) in terms of its ‘tradition,’ its ‘actual past,’ ‘the testimony […] of what has been done and continues to subsist as the condition of the present and the future,’ and therefore to define the overturning of praxis as the dialectic of past and present, with contemporary critique acting upon the tradition crystallized in common sense. This common sense/philosophy dialectic (past/present, tradition/critique) tends in the texts to overlap with the dialectic of structure and superstructures. While the overturning of praxis involved, in its fundamental conception, the mutual relation of structure

102 Ibid. 103 Idem, p. 1375 (Q11, 11); SPN p. 422. 104 Idem, p. 1063 (Q8§204; PN Vol. 3, p. 352).

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and superstructures, there are places in the text in which the second term (the superstructural term in the relation) explodes the boundaries of its initial definition and comes to incorporate a further and more radical dialectic, namely the dialectic of common sense and philosophy, which is also defined ‘historical bloc.’105 The texts do not entirely clarify, besides, what the critique of common sense would involve. In what terms is the word critique to be understood in Gramsci’s analysis? Gramsci is adamant that the starting point for the philosophy of praxis resides in the critique of common sense: ‘A philosophy of praxis must initially adopt a polemical stance, as superseding the existing mode of thinking. It must therefore present itself as a critique of “common sense.”’106 Underlying the main categories of his inquiry, of the history of the intellectuals, and of intellectual and moral reform, there was the constant preoccupation of how to unify ‘feeling’ and ‘knowing’ into ‘understanding,’ into a system of knowledge that was finally at one with the ‘rudimentary passions of the people,’ in a ‘living’ and not ‘bureaucratic’ relationship: that, he explained, is how ‘the “historical bloc” is created.’107 An immanent, not an abstract and purely speculative, critique was required—one that would weave into the fabric of common sense and transform it from within. This too was a case of the overturning of praxis, and essentially was a reformulation of the problem that lay at the center of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, the progress of consciousness from sense-certainty to absolute knowledge realized the immanent critique of common sense, or rather the full Aufhebung of common sense, with its immediate faith in the representation and transcendence of the external object. It was precisely at this turn in the dialectical method that Croce had departed from it (and Gentile too, basically). Apart from paying little attention to the Phenomenology, Croce had, at any rate, rejected its outcomes, and the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature foremost. This was, essentially, a reflection of the condescension of Croce (and Gentile) toward common sense, which

105 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 452 (Q4§33; PN Vol. 2, p. 175). 106 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1080 (Q8§220; PN Vol. 3,

p. 369). 107 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 452 (Q4§33; PN Vol. 2, pp. 174–

175).

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Gramsci pointed out several times108 ; both were skeptical about the possibility of intervening upon the common conception of the foundations of truth, and neither believed that philosophy could ultimately make the world transparent by the exercise of rational criticism. Interestingly, it was in this connection that Gramsci picked up on the theme of the ‘religion of liberty’—the preoccupation, which he shared with Croce, with the safeguard of fundamental liberties and the broadening of their base against the impingements of the authoritarian principle. Gramsci manifestly and repeatedly wavered between the paths indicated by Hegel and Croce; but in the majority of entries, and at the bottom of his own analysis, what prevailed was the Hegelian notion of a revolutionary transformation of common sense into good sense, of a mundane realization of the principle of immanence that would supersede the religious representation of reality. Nonetheless, he wavered. One instance is the entry in Notebook 8 (then slightly reworked in Notebook 11): the philosophy of an epoch is not the philosophy of an individual or a group. It is the ensemble of the philosophies of all individuals and groups [+ scientific opinion] + religion + common sense. Can such a philosophy be created ‘artfully’? Through the work of an individual or a group? The only possible way is through critical activity, and specifically through posing and critically resolving specific philosophical problems. In the meantime, though, one must start with the idea that the new philosophy is different from every previous philosophy, etc.109

Here Gramsci posed the fundamental question: ‘can such a philosophy be created “artfully”?’ The answer, however, came in the negative, with the remark that the ‘philosophy of an epoch’ cannot be informed by means of reason alone. In the face of the ‘folklore’ of common sense, of its ‘disjointed’ religious and transcendent premises, the only possibility lies

108 See, for example, A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1045 (Q8§173; PN Vol. 3, pp. 333–334): ‘Croce often seems to take pleasure in the fact that certain philosophical propositions are shared by common sense. But what can this mean, concretely? In order to prove that “all men are philosophers,” there is no need to resort to common sense in this way. Common sense is a disorderly aggregate of philosophical conceptions in which one can find whatever one likes.’ The same criticism was addressed to Gentile: see idem (Q8§175; PN Vol. 3, pp. 335–336). 109 Idem, p. 1069 (Q8§211; PN Vol. 3, p. 358).

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in ‘critical activity,’ in ‘posing and critically resolving specific philosophical problems.’ Thus framed, ‘critical activity’ could not generate ‘good sense,’ could not replace common sense with the transparency of reason; what it could do was to foster awareness and lay the grounds for political action, but not coincide with it. But then, on the following page, Gramsci’s tone changed again, and ‘critical activity’ again returned to answer the need to ‘create a “new common sense.”’ In spite of his conclusion a few lines earlier, somewhat in the spirit of an Enlightenment philosopher he then wrote: Perhaps it is useful to make a ‘practical’ distinction between philosophy and common sense in order to be better able to show what one is trying to arrive at. Philosophy means, rather specifically, a conception of the world with salient individual traits. Common sense is the conception of the world that is most widespread among the popular masses in a historical period. One wants to change common sense and create a ‘new common sense’— hence the need to take the ‘simple’ into account.110

8 The Provisional Nature of the Philosophy of Praxis In Notebook 8 (and, more in general, over the entire series of the Notes on Philosophy), Gramsci gave a substantial account of the philosophy of praxis; this work went in parallel with the project of a ‘new AntiDühring:’ a project to which he gave the name of ‘Anti-Croce’ and in which he intended to carry out (as he did, in part, in Notebook 10) ‘the polemic against speculative philosophy but also, implicitly, the polemic against positivism and mechanical theories—degenerations of the philosophy of praxis.’111 Speculative philosophy, we have seen, was unable to synthesize ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ into ‘understanding:’ the speculative thinker was a Renaissance philosopher unable to embrace the spirit of a Reformation. The critique of speculative philosophy therefore questioned the role and standing of intellectuals vis-à-vis common sense. At the opposite end, we could say, Gramsci had identified in the domain of the ‘elementary “historical” cell’ and of the ‘dialectical mediation between man and nature’ the genesis of all ideas, of categories (which are historical, 110 Idem, p. 1071 (Q8§213; PN Vol. 3, p. 360). 111 Idem, p. 1088 (Q8§235; PN Vol. 3, p. 378).

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not eternal), and of truth itself. In line with Labriola and in its plainest sense, the philosophy of praxis meant just this: that all ideas have a genesis and are descended from volition and action—more precisely, from the ‘impure’ generative act of history. The fact that speculative philosophy itself stemmed from praxis did not entail for Gramsci that the latter made the former redundant and could replace it in the task of ‘critical activity.’ Criticizing the claim to autonomy and separateness of speculative philosophy on the grounds of its genesis from practical activity, Gramsci held fast to its prerogatives of theoretical elaboration and construction. It is essential to have clear this aspect of Gramsci’s conception, particularly to understand his perspective on translatability. In § 169 of Notebook 8, Gramsci gave the terms of the relationship between theory and praxis, though only the conclusions of his analysis were then transcribed in Notebook 11.112 The ‘average worker,’ he noted, ‘has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his activity in and understanding of the world.’ Still, the worker will have a theoretical consciousness that is ‘implicit in his activity’ and ‘unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the world;’ but also an ‘explicit’ theoretical consciousness largely coinciding with the common sense that he too inherits from the past. In this sense, practical activity brings along with it a theoretical consciousness that combines what is new and what is old, value and disvalue, the positive and the negative, and that is, to this extent, ambivalent. In the light of the insufficiency of practical activity alone toward a clear consciousness Gramsci returned to the question of hegemony: if practice entailed a clear consciousness, revolutionary initiative would be inscribed in the worker’s very being and would follow automatically. But there was that implicit streak which indeed brought along with it a distorted and conservative outlook. What was required was a different, unified consciousness: ‘Consciousness of being part of a hegemonic force (that is, political consciousness) is the first stage on the way to greater self-awareness, namely, on the way to unifying practice and theory.’113 Beyond the inherent ambiguity of practical activity there was the consciousness of political unity and the

112 Idem, p. 1386 (Q11, 16a). The analysis of this re-elaboration of Notebook 11 will be carried out in the fourth chapter of this second part. 113 Idem, p. 1042 (Q8§169; PN Vol. 3, p. 330).

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consciousness of philosophical elaboration (theory): ‘I pointed out elsewhere that development of the concept-fact of hegemony represented a great “philosophical” as well as a political-practical advance.’114 The philosophy of praxis needed to open into a philosophical dimension: it was praxis, indeed, but above all it was a philosophy. The gravest mistake of contemporary historical materialism, in fact, consisted in the reduction of all theory into action, in not according to philosophy its prerogatives; it was, at present, in its ‘economic-corporative phase,’ acting as revolutionary doctrine that identifies with immediate action alone and cannot translate the implicit situation of the worker into explicit hegemony: ‘The insistence on “practice”—that is, the separating of theory from practice (a purely mechanical operation), instead of distinguishing between the two after having affirmed their “unity”—means that one is still in a relatively rudimentary historical phase; it is still the economic-corporative phase in which the general framework of the “structure” is transformed.’115 What Gramsci proposed was to ‘distinguish,’ not ‘separate,’ theory from practice: that is to say, produce the philosophical space of hegemony, in which theory and practice could be unified ‘on the way to greater self-awareness.’ The philosophy of praxis was never conceived as the end of philosophy. Philosophy, on the contrary, had to rise above the structure and above practical activity too, and in the form of hegemony, explicate the worker’s consciousness, as yet ensnared by the legacy of common sense. This was not speculative philosophy, however, but a hegemonic consciousness already implicit in the structure of practical activity. Because it claimed to have neither genesis nor history, speculative philosophy was the philosophy of separation and detachment, aiming to distance the ‘pure’ from the ‘impure.’ Still, Gramsci was well aware of the specific problem posed by the ‘speculative form’ of philosophical systems; a problem of which, he wrote, ‘it would be wrong to conceal the difficulties.’ In one of the last entries to the Notes on Philosophy,116 one that was further refined in Notebook 11 (§ 53), he asked whether the speculative component was ‘proper to every philosophy’ and ‘synonymous with philosophy and with theory’ or were instead the reflection of a ‘historical question.’ It

114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid.

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was indeed the latter, Gramsci believed: a ‘historical question’ coinciding with the ‘complete hegemony of the social group of which it is the expression,’ and therefore also the starting point of the molecular ‘disintegration’ of its power.117 The speculative moment of philosophy signaled, that is, the ‘apogee’ of a hegemonic cycle and the reaction to a phase of decline, where the actual fragmentation in the real world inspired, in response, an aspiration to systemic consistency and perfection. As the ideological form of social decline and backlash of the sense of an end, it was also capable of producing, just like the art and poetry of decadence, the highest achievements in metaphysical harmony and in the architectonics of style. Here too reverberated the observations Croce made in the Storia dell’età barocca regarding the Renaissance, decadence, and artistic expression. There was, thus, grandeur and historical poignancy in the rise of the speculative form, but Gramsci also noted that while the philosophy of praxis was the critique of speculative philosophy, the ‘critique itself will have its own speculative phase, which marks its apogee.’118 This was an ostensibly surprising statement: if the apogee of the speculative form marked the decline and incipient disintegration of an epoch, how was it possible that the Marxist critique of the speculative form should also be realized as speculative form? But the apogee of criticism, Gramsci argued, would not display the same features as the epochs of decadence, which came about in the transition from one form of society to another, because this apogee would mark ‘the beginning of an historical phase of a new type in which necessity and freedom have organically interpenetrated and there will be no more social contradictions, so that the only dialectic will be that of the idea, a dialectic of concepts and no longer of historical forces.’119 There was a patent reliance, here, on the Marxian myth of the realm of freedom; there, the transition from prehistory to history would be realized which Gramsci had, at other places, represented in the seemingly different terms of a regulated society. Gramsci drew on the myth of communism in order to represent the ideal scenario of a society that had emancipated itself from need and social conflict—a situation we might describe as post-modern, in which the speculative form could be

117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid.

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re-appropriated and so could the free exercise of rationality; once emancipated, the systems erected by the speculative form would no longer represent the trajectories of hegemony, neither in the sense of its fullness nor of its decadence. Similarly, he had written in Notebook 4: ‘Absolute idealism, or at least certain aspects of it, would be a philosophical utopia in the realm of necessity, but could become “truth” after the transition from one realm to the other.’120 The insistence on the eventuality of the rebirth of speculative philosophy at the apogee of criticism tied in with one of the most problematic aspects of Gramsci’s analysis—namely the idea that the value of historical materialism, as of any other philosophy, was only provisional. If all knowledge and ideological forms were relative, as the philosophy of praxis taught, the same principle had to apply to the philosophy of praxis itself— itself perforce declaring its own ideological and provisional character: ‘As a philosophy, historical materialism asserts theoretically that every “truth” thought to be eternal and absolute has practical origins and has represented or represents a provisional value. But the difficulty lies in making people understand what it means “in practice” to interpret historical materialism itself in this light.’121 In a later entry he further clarified his position: even historical materialism is an expression of historical contradictions; indeed, it is the perfect, complete expression of such contradictions: it is, therefore, an expression of necessity and not of freedom which does not and cannot exist. However, if it is demonstrated that contradictions will disappear, then it is implicitly demonstrated that historical materialism, too, will disappear and that the realm of necessity will give way to the realm of freedom, that is, to a period in which ‘thought’ or ideas are no longer born on the terrain of contradictions.122

120 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 465 (Q4§40; PN Vol. 2, p. 164). 121 Idem, p. 465 (Q4§40; PN Vol. 2, cit, p. 189). 122 Idem, p. 471(Q4§45; PN Vol. 2, p. 196). The issue was further clarified in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1319 (Q10, 27), where he wrote ‘there is, however, a fundamental difference between the philosophy of praxis and other philosophies’ because the philosophy of praxis ‘is the theory itself of such contradictions.’ The difference would therefore consist in this, that while the other philosophies are only parts of the dialectical conflict, and are therefore only ideologies, the philosophy of praxis is at the same time a part, and to that extent an ideology, but also the awareness of the totality of the historical process.

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The notion that speculative philosophy would have a new beginning in the realm of freedom was therefore based on the principle that Marxism too represented a provisional ideology; once it had attended to its office, which was one of liberation on the theoretical and practical level, then it would disappear. This may seem, at first sight, a position of total historical relativism, to the extent that, having asserted the historical nature and practical origin of all worldviews, Gramsci then carried the theses to the extreme conclusion of including his own theory in the general scheme of things. But Gramsci’s reiterated pronouncement about the rebirth of the speculative form actually proves that this was not the case: that Gramsci intended exactly the opposite. If all historical philosophy is destined to perish (and that would include Marxism), there is, then, a critical rationality that does not die, and indeed survives and fully asserts itself in the realm of freedom. It is not a worldview connected to one social group or the other, nor is it involved in the conflict; it coincides, instead, with the indissoluble element of human reason, which ideological forms have concealed, and smothered, and twisted to their own ends, but which they never managed to destroy. It will, therefore, manifest itself, at the right time, in its pure and speculative form, as plain reason. While ostensibly relativistic, Gramsci’s argument was in fact the staunchest negation of relativism—reaffirming, at an ideal level, the possibility of a logical act, which is only realized in its impure form in human history, but which, in and of itself, is fully realized in its constitutive critical function.

9

Translatability

Gramsci was working toward a conception in which theory and practice were distinct but involved in a circular relationship of mutual interaction. This difficult movement, which truly was the core of the philosophy of praxis, was to be seen in the overturning of praxis of the third thesis on Feuerbach, or even in the historical bloc, the point of which was to describe the elementary core of the doctrine. At a certain point, Gramsci began to represent this movement in terms of ‘translatability.’ A variety of theoretical sources contributed to define this category, not all of them easily reconcilable. The first inspiration came from Marx and Engels’ Holy Family, which suggests that if one wanted to compare ‘French equality with German “self-consciousness,”’ one would find ‘that the latter principle expresses in German, i.e., in abstract thought, what the former says

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in French, that is, in the language of politics and of thoughtful observation.’123 The passage is quoted several times after its first occurrence in the first Notebook (§ 44), and in Notebook 8 it was even related to its source in Hegel.124 Gramsci also discerned an analogous conception in Lenin’s speech at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922, in which Lenin had criticized the resolution of the Third Congress on organizational issues, judging it ‘too Russian,’ ‘entirely permeated with Russian spirit.’125 Further angles on the question Gramsci drew from the Italian pragmatists, especially from an essay by Giovanni Vailati126 and a short work by Giuseppe Prezzolini.127 Then, in special, Gramsci returned to Bertrando Spaventa’ theory of the circulation of European thought (with its echoes in Labriola’s unfinished fourth essay) and also to Benedetto Croce, whose philosophy of the spirit was built on the circular nexus of theory and practice. The matter had thus expanded considerably, and again intercepted all of the critical nodes of the philosophy of praxis. Gramsci gave his most precise definition of translatability at the start of the second series of the Notes on philosophy, where he wrote that, The principle of mutual translatability is an inherent “critical” element of historical materialism, inasmuch as it presupposes or postulates that a given stage of civilization has a “basically identical” cultural and philosophical expression, even though the language of the expression varies depending on the particular tradition of each “nation” or each philosophical system.128 123 F. Engels-K. Marx, La sacra famiglia, edited by A. Zanardo, Editori Riuniti, Roma 19792 , p. 47. 124 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 1066–1067 (Q8§208; PN Vol. 3, p. 355). 125 V. I. Lenin, Cinque anni di rivoluzione russa e le prospettive della rivoluzione mondiale. Relazione al IV° Congresso dell’Internazionale comunista (13 novembre 1922), in Id., Opere complete, 33° vol. (agosto 1921-marzo 1923), edited by B. Bernardini, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1967, pp. 395–396. 126 G. Vailati, Il linguaggio come ostacolo alla eliminazione di contrasti illusori, ‘Il Rinnovamento,’ 1908, fasc. 5–6. On Vailati, in relation to the philosophy of praxis, cf. V. Milanesi, Un intellettuale non ‘organico’ : Vailati e la filosofia della prassi, Liviana, Padua 1979. 127 Giuliano il sofista (pseud.), Il linguaggio come causa d’errore. H. Bergson, Spinelli e C., Firenze 1904. 128 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 851 Gramsci, (Q7§1; PN Vol. 3, p. 153).

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The existence of ‘a “basically identical” cultural and philosophical expression’ at a given ‘stage of civilization’ was therefore posited; at other places Gramsci similarly spoke of a ‘single conception of the world’ with reference to which ‘theoretical principles’ display a ‘convertibility from one to the others,’ ‘all of them together’ constituting a ‘homogeneous circle.’129 The circle was homogeneous because the bottom line of an epoch was also univocal: a revolutionary impulse might be expressed in political language in one place and in the language of pure theory in another: in France as revolution and in Germany as philosophical system. It circulated and was translated not only in accordance with the peculiar genius of a nation but also with the distinct form that a nation embodied: the one inclining to theory, the other to practical activity. But the lesson of pragmatism was that no translation is innocuous and that conversion from one language to another also altered and distorted the fundamental meaning: ‘this “translatability” is not perfect in all details (including important ones); but “deep down” it is.’130 If the fundamental impulse to progress also came through ‘“national” thrusts,’131 Gramsci here revised Bertrando Spaventa’s model: an idea, that is, did not migrate from Italy to France to Germany according to a teleological design, only to return, at a later time, to its country of origin; it remained anchored to the expression it was given in a given country, taking on different forms. From a different theoretical angle, the terms of the translation were determined by the distinct forms that the spirit was capable of assuming, now presenting itself in the language of theory, now that of praxis, in a ‘homogeneous circle’ that bore analogies with the way in which Croce had envisioned the relations between the domains of the spirit in his philosophy. Elaborating on a theme from Croce, Gramsci affirmed that ‘“true” philosophy’ and authentic ‘thought’ resides in ‘one dominant and predominant activity,’ where it will often manifest itself as ‘implicit,’ and ‘sometimes in contradiction with what is stated ex professo.’132 An example might be the amateurish philosophical writings of a politician whose philosophy is much better expressed in his own field of work and

129 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 472 (Q4§46; PN Vol. 2, p. 197). 130 Idem, p. 468 (Q4§42; PN Vol. 2, p. 193). 131 Ibid. 132 Idem, p. 473 (Q4§46; PN Vol. 2, p. 197).

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‘political writings.’ While implicit in action, philosophy became explicit in works of theory, being translated into the different language of speculation: in the way that Kant had translated Robespierre and, more generally, the German philosophers had represented as concepts the ideals of the French Revolution. Gramsci’s perfect symmetry between the two terms (the ‘homogenous circle’) and foregrounding of the conversion of praxis into theory somewhat altered the terms of the question as presented by Marx. In Gramsci as in Croce, however, the converse was also true, so that theory has to be translated into the political language of praxis: Marx’s Hegelian source, he explained, seemed to him much more ‘important as the “source” of the view, expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach, that the philosophers have explained the world and the point now is to change it; in other words, that philosophy must become “politics” or “practice” in order for it to continue to be philosophy. The “source,” then, of the theory of the unity of theory and practice.’133 Translatability was ultimately the key to the sense of the eleventh thesis, the transition from theory to practice: but translatability involved the reciprocity of the two terms, as historical bloc and overturning of praxis, in the homogeneous circle, and thus in the light of the third thesis. The cue Gramsci had taken from the Holy Family became rooted, furthermore in the concrete historical reality of nations, which in turn circulated within a European spirit and underlying cosmopolitanism. Gramsci’s elaboration of translatability involved several sources, most of which he could only refer to from memory, as they were physically inaccessible to him in prison. Some writings by Vailati and Prezzolini, a speech by Lenin, then especially Spaventa and Croce, were brought to interact with Marx’s text, often altering its letter in the light of his own project of a philosophy of praxis—which became ever more independent of the current conception of historical materialism. Correcting a pronouncement of Lenin’s, he went so far as to write in Notebook 4 that ‘really and truly historical materialism’ is that of ‘the general philosophical part,’ which does not study the distinct facts and concepts of history, politics, and economics but the form of their interrelation, the way they are ‘tied together in organic unity,’ their own translatability. Only at the end of the investigation of ‘general philosophy,’ ‘namely, the organic nexus of history-politics-economics,’ would it be possible to explain ‘how 133 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1066 (Q8§208; PN Vol. 3, p. 356).

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history and politics are reflected in economics, how economics and politics are reflected in history, how history and economics are reflected in politics.’134 The key concepts of his inquiry, the historical bloc and the overturning of praxis, here found their most fully accomplished theoretical formulation; they indicated the direction that the philosophy of praxis needed to take, in the light of the common basis of an epoch and of the mutual translatability of the distinct terms that make up its structure.

134 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 465 (Q4§39; PN Vol. 2, p. 189).

CHAPTER 6

The Notes on Dante

Over the two years of the elaboration of the three series of the Notes on philosophy, between May 1930 and May 1932, Gramsci also produced a series of ten entries in Notebook 4 on Canto X of Dante’s Inferno. These observations on Dante made up the initial core of Gramsci’s meditations on aesthetics and initiated his strictly philosophical engagement with the production of Benedetto Croce. Furthermore, while Gramsci set out to investigate the relation between structure and poetry, his analysis opened into the broader question of praxis, and, more generally still, on the new perspectives in theoretical Marxism: out of this work, that is, the category of catharsis began to emerge as a key concept in his understanding of reality.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4_6

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1

The Cavalcante Code

Gramsci first mentioned the intent to study Dante to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht in a letter dated August 26, 1929.1 He asked her to procure him Vincenzo Morello’s short work on Dante, Farinata, Cavalcante, after which he had already asked ‘a long time ago.’2 Intent to study the character of Cavalcante Cavalcanti in depth and establish ‘his position in the structure and art of the Divine Comedy’ indeed appeared in the list of ‘Main Topics’ entered at the beginning of the first notebook on February 8, 19293 ; but it went further back still, to the pre-prison period, as an article from 1918 shows. In his letter of August 26, Gramsci stated that he had made ‘a small discovery,’ stressed the significance of Cavalcante over Farinata, and added that his discovery ‘would in part correct B. Croce’s thesis on the Divine Comedy, which is too absolute.’4 He also introduced a theme that would recur in this analysis, namely the wall paintings at Pompeii, and particularly the representation of ‘Medea killing the children she had by Jason,’ where she is ‘depicted with a blindfold over her face’ because, he surmised, ‘the painter is unable or unwilling to depict that face.’5 He promised, then, to write the Dante comment, or at any rate ‘write some notes and perhaps sketch the preparatory draft for a future comment,’ being well aware that such a project would require minute investigations in large city libraries—not the solitude of prison confinement. Gramsci then made no further reference to Dante until February 1931. He continued his work on notebooks 1–7 and probably also started on notebook 8, and discussed other issues in his correspondence with Tatiana (including Croce’s conference at Oxford and the latter’s diatribe on

1 Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 1, edited by A. A. Santucci, Editrice L’Unità, Roma 1988, p. 205. Excerpts of this letter are given in A. Gramsci, PN Vol. 2, p. 598, Notes to Notebook 4. 2 Cf. Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 172. December 17, 1928: ‘I am giving you a list of the volumes you can send me: […] a book by Vincenzo Morello on Canto X of Dante’s Inferno, published by Mondadori, the exact title of which I do not know.’ 3 See A. Gramsci, PN Vol. 1, p. 365, Notes to Notebook 1 (1929–1930): Description of the Manuscript. 4 Cf. A. Gramsci, PN Vol. 2, p. 598, Notes to Notebook 4. 5 On Gramsci’s reference to the Pompeii frescoes see below in this chapter.

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aesthetics with Lunaˇcarskij).6 On February 23, 1931 he then mentioned to Tatiana having received ‘some time ago’ Umberto Cosmo’s Vita di Dante, which ‘Piero [Sraffa] thought might interest me’; he launched on an ambivalent and somewhat embittered autobiographical sketch, mentioning the ‘affection’ and ‘veneration’ for his former teacher as well as their harsh political dispute in 1920 and their meeting again in Berlin in 1922; but also, which saddened him, certain hints in this work on Dante that Cosmo was lapsing from his former beliefs as Crocean idealist into Catholicism; and finally asked Tatiana to inquire with Sraffa about Cosmo’s current situation.7 Sraffa sought Cosmo and forwarded Gramsci’s inquiries after him. On August 11, he was thus able to communicate to Tatiana Cosmo’s reassurance that no changes had occurred in him: that he was still ‘wholly independent’ and attached to ‘no school, no church, no party.’8 To this, Gramsci replied on August 17, when his state of health was at a critical point,9 that his conjecture about a conversion was based on the closing pages of the Vita di Dante as well as on Cosmo’s prior collaboration with Pietro Gerosa10 ; he then recalled the ‘first fifteen years of the century,’ when he and Cosmo participated ‘wholly or in part in the movement of moral and intellectual reform initiated in Italy by Benedetto Croce,’ which to him seemed ‘even today the major contribution to world culture made by Italian contemporary intellectuals,’ and ‘a civic achievement that must not be lost.’11 Apart from being concerned by the notion itself that Cosmo might have converted to the Catholic ideology, these words 6 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 257–258. Croce’s Oxford conference (‘Antistoricismo’) was printed in La Critica, 1930, fasc. 6, pp. 401–409. It was then reprinted in B. Croce, Ultimi saggi, Laterza, Bari 1935, pp. 246–258. On the complex publication history of this conference see E. Giammattei, I dintorni di Croce, Guida, Napoli 2009, pp. 109–131. 7 Cf. A. Gramsci, PN Vol. 2, pp. 612–613, Notes to Notebook 4. 8 P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci, edited by V. Gerratana, Editori Riuniti, Roma

1991, p. 19. 9 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, edited by A.A. Santucci, Editrice L’Unità,

Roma 1988, p. 21 and p. 189. 10 Gramsci was here referring to their collaboration on Da Dante a Pontano. Saggi di prosa e poesia latina umanistica, a cura di U. Cosmo e P. Gerosa, Società Editrice Internazionale, Torino 1927. 11 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 23 (PN Vol. 2, p. 615, Notes to Notebook 4).

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were also intended (vis-à-vis Tatiana, Cosmo, Sraffa, Togliatti, and the few others who would read them) to reaffirm the principle of idealism— interestingly at the very point at which his work in the Notebooks and the intended study on Dante would bring in a serious revision of the idealist framework. On August 30, Sraffa let Tatiana know he had forwarded the part of Gramsci’s letter that concerned him to Cosmo and that he’d wait for his reply, if there was any12 (which was in turn reported to Gramsci by Tatiana on September 2).13 We know of no reply from Cosmo to Gramsci’s letter of August 17, but in September, at any rate, Gramsci returned to the project of an essay on Dante with alacrity, as two letters to Tatiana show (September 7 and 20). Much to the concern of Sraffa and Tatiana, this probably coincided with a temporary pause in the work on the history of intellectuals.14 In the letter of September 7, in fact, he announced a brief sketch of the intended essay, asking for it to be sent to Cosmo for his competent opinion,15 and then proceeded to outline his thoughts on Dante in the September 20 letter to Tatiana.16 Gramsci’s point of departure was an objection to an essay Francesco De Sanctis had published in May 1869 on Dante’s portrayal of Farinata in Canto X,17 whereas his endpoint was an equally detailed criticism of the second chapter of Croce’s Poesia di Dante. These were his main terms of bibliographic reference, but he also mentioned a more recent article by Luigi Russo written in response to a study of Croce’s that had appeared in Michele Barbi’s Studi danteschi, and Croce’s reply to Russo in La Critica (1928).18 But Gramsci’s main argument, essentially, had to do with De 12 P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci, cit., p. 29. 13 Idem, p. 32. 14 Idem, p. 23. 15 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 32. 16 ‘I’m going to write briefly,’ he began, ‘on personal matters, because today I would

like to write up my plan on Canto X to send to my old university professor and seek his advice; if I don’t do it today, I’ll never do it again’ (idem, p. 36). But a few lines later began a detailed account of the ‘plan.’ 17 The reference is to F. De Sanctis, Il Farinata di Dante, in Id., Saggi critici, Vol. 2, edited by L. Russo, Laterza, Bari 1979, pp. 320–348. 18 Russo’s article was printed in Leonardo, December 20, 1927. Cf. A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 38–39: ‘I have De Sanctis’ essays and Croce’s Dante. I read in the 1928 number of Leonardo part of Luigi Russo’s study published in Barbi’s journal and the part I read mentions Croce’s argument. I have the issue of La Critica with Croce’s reply. But I haven’t seen these materials in a long time, that is, since before I first thought

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Sanctis’ reading of the episode. According to Gramsci, De Sanctis had perceived the scansion of the Farinata episode into two distinct moments but reduced it to a mere succession in which Farinata was first represented ‘heroically’ and then as a ‘pedagogue.’ Gramsci concluded that in De Sanctis’ interpretation ‘Farinata is poetry first and then becomes structure’19 ; but instead of reading Canto X of the Inferno as a sequence in which Farinata is demoted to ‘structure,’ he suggested, one should see a sequence of ‘two dramas,’ of Farinata and of Cavalcante, and not ‘Farinata’s drama alone.’20 Gramsci focused his analysis on Cavalcante, whose full poetic autonomy he intended to isolate from the drama of Farinata. Both characters are, of course, placed in the same circle of hell and both fall under the same ‘law of retribution’ whereby, in their case, ‘for having wished to see into the future’ they can only see the past and future of earthly affairs, but not the present. But whereas the drama of Farinata is political and triggered by the fact that as soon as he ‘hears Florentine spoken’ he immediately ‘becomes a partisan again, the Ghibelline hero’ (though he too has a daughter), Cavalcante is involved in a truly poetic human drama of ‘inexpressible intensity,’ for unlike Farinata, Cavalcante ‘thinks only of Guido,’ his own son, whose present state is unknown to him.21 In his entries in Notebook 4, we shall see, Gramsci insists on the intensity of Cavalcante’s sorrow, which, unlike the political sorrows of Farinata, is a wholly human sorrow and, as such, ‘ineffable,’ ‘unexpressed,’ and only referred to in an oblique form, not directly represented. It is the intensity of Cavalcante’s pain that Gramsci compares to the Pompeii fresco in which Medea (as he remembered it) is blindfolded in the scene of the death of her sons by Jason. The painting, he seemed to recall, had been the object of a series of lectures by Pietro Toesca at the University of Turin in 1912: the ‘eyes blindfolded,’ also mentioned by Lessing in the Laocoon, were the

of the main idea of this plan, because I had it all stored at the bottom of a box.’ The Luigi Russo’ study was published in 1927: L. R usso, ‘Il Dante del Vossler e l’unità poetica della Divina Commedia,’ in Studi danteschi, 12, 1927, pp. 5–29. The part Gramsci read is L. R usso, ‘Critica dantesca,’ in Leonardo, 1927, 12, pp. 305–311. In 1928, Croce replied to the article printed in Studi danteschi: La Critica, 26, 1928, pp. 122–125. 19 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 36 (PN Vol. 2, pp. 600–601, Notes to Notebook 4). 20 Ibidem. 21 Idem, p. 37 (PN Vol. 2, p. 601, Notes to Notebook 4).

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only way to represent ‘a parent’s infinite sorrow’ and prevent the feeling from freezing into a pathetic grimace. In Cavalcante’s case, he argued, the impossibility of seeing the present acts as a blindfold; so that Dante’s use of a past form (ebbe: ‘had’) in their exchange about Guido is taken by Cavalcante to mean his son has died and throws him into a state of dejection whereby he collapses to the ground, catatonic. Where De Sanctis had seen the poetry precipitate into structure as Farinata the hero became Farinata the pedagogue, Gramsci had seen the spark of authentic poetry in the drama of Cavalcante, which was human and not political. From this reading, which was at the center of his whole argument, Gramsci drew a further conclusion which concerned Croce as well as De Sanctis: ‘It seems to me that this interpretation mortally wounds Croce’s thesis on the poetry and structure of the Divine Comedy. Without structure there would be no poetry and therefore the structure also has a poetic value.’22 In a similar way, stage directions enable the dramatist to define his characters, Gramsci argued, whereas George Bernard Shaw had completed the character sketch of John Tanner, in Man and Superman, with an explanatory appendix to the play. The significance of the drama of Cavalcante in Canto X thus carried philosophical implications, raising the issue of the relation between poetry and structure and showing how the latter, in fact, contributes directly to the generation of the poetic moment. In the letter of September 20, Gramsci gave the first overall statement of his thoughts on Dante. Due to her illness, Tatiana only passed it on to Sraffa in December, who then forwarded it to Cosmo.23 Cosmo replied with a long letter (December 29) that only reached Gramsci in March 1932.24 Cosmo discussed the bibliography, recommending Luigi Russo’s Problemi di metodo storico,25 an essay by Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz which had appeared in La Critica in 1922 with an afterword by Croce,26 and the studies on Dante by Michele Barbi. In essence, Cosmo approved the work plan and encouraged Gramsci to pursue it, at least as far as its two

22 Idem, p. 38 (PN Vol. 2, p. 602, Notes to Notebook 4). 23 P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci, cit., p. 36 and p. 38. 24 Idem, p. 50. Cosmo’s letter is on pp. 54–56. 25 L. R usso, Problemi di metodo critico, Laterza, Bari 1929, Laterza, Bari 1929. 26 V. Arangio R uiz, ‘Il problema estetico della Commedia,’ in La Critica, 20, 1922,

pp. 340–358.

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chief headings went: he agreed with the main thesis that, in Canto X, ‘alongside the drama of Farinata there is also the drama of Cavalcante,’ so that each ‘suffers his own drama’ and is unresponsive to the other’s, but did not expand on the subtler characterization that Gramsci had made of their interaction and of Cavalcante’s sorrow; secondly, while deeming it hard to prove that ‘this interpretation [of Canto X] could mortally wound Croce’s thesis on the poetry and structure of the Comedy,’ he generally agreed that the poeticism of the Cavalcante episode ‘emanates from the structure of the work,’ as he too was finding in writing his commentary of the Paradiso.27 Gramsci was not greatly satisfied with Cosmo’s comments, parts of which he copied, for example, into Notebook 4 remarking that ‘there is much that could be said about these notes by Prof. Cosmo.’28 Meanwhile Gramsci’s letters on Dante were duly delivered by Sraffa to Togliatti, following the usual route that ensured Gramsci’s communications with the clandestine party headquarters in exile. On December 27, 1931, Sraffa first reported back to Tatiana the comments of a ‘Piedmontese friend’ with whom he had discussed ‘Nino’s ideas about the Farinata canto’ and who immediately recalled ‘having heard something similar once, he does not remember whether from Nino himself, or from Gobetti or one Calosso, I believe a school friend of his.’29 The ‘Piedmontese friend’ was Togliatti (who was actually Genoese, but had met Sraffa in Turin), whereas the ‘one Calosso’ was Umberto Calosso, who had been Gramsci’s fellow student at the University of Turin and then his collaborator at L’Ordine nuovo, and was then living in Paris.30 On February 22, 1932 Gramsci commented on the observation of his ‘Piedmontese friend’ in a letter to Tatiana, saying he’d first had the idea for a study on Dante while reading Isidoro Del Lungo on Dino Compagni’s 27 The book was published by Laterza in 1936: U. Cosmo, L’ultima ascesa. Introduzione alla lettura del Paradiso, Laterza, Bari 1936. 28 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 529 (Q4§86; PN Vol. 2, p. 259). 29 P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci, cit., p. 42. 30 Umberto Calosso’s collaboration with L’Ordine Nuovo had been assiduous since August 1921, with his participation in the editorial staff of the newspaper and a series of articles signed under the pseudonym of Mario Sarmati. But prior to that, on August 9, 1919, he had written an open letter that was published in the weekly edition of L’Ordine Nuovo. Around that time, Calosso was influenced by Croce, who responded both sympathetically and critically to Calosso’s writings on Alfieri and Manzoni: see B. Croce, Terze pagine sparse raccolte e ordinate dall’autore, Vol. 2, Laterza, Bari 1955, pp. 55–59.

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Cronaca fiorentina several years earlier, particularly the section in which Del Lungo established the date of Guido Cavalcanti’s death.31 He then added that his interest in Canto X of the Inferno had been aroused by reading Croce’s Poesia di Dante, ‘where the Cavalcante episode is related in such a way as to make it clear that his being a “counterpoint” to Farinata is not contemplated.’32 As for Umberto Calosso, he could recall an article of his about Canto X appearing in the Giornale dantesco, but also commented ‘I don’t remember what it said anymore; though I’d exclude it had anything to do with this idea of mine.’33 He then concluded by saying ‘the matter has very little importance,’ ‘because I never thought of becoming a Dante scholar,’ which was an open message to Sraffa and Togliatti that neither his interest in Dante nor communications on the subject would be pursued much further. Togliatti’s mention of Calosso took Gramsci back to a time and events long gone, to conversations on Dante and on Canto X of the Inferno that had in fact taken place in Turin: Calosso’s article in the Giornale dantesco had appeared in 1915, well before his collaboration with L’Ordine nuovo, and focused on the theme of separation and Dante’s nostalgia and regrets toward Guido Cavalcanti and their old friendship—an entirely different matter from the one Gramsci proposed to investigate some ten years later. There was thus no direct relation between what Calosso had once written and Gramsci’s work in Notebook 4. Several years later (ca. 1948), rather, Calosso acknowledged his article drew on ‘conversations with his schoolmate Gramsci.’ In 1981, Norberto Bobbio found and published a handwritten note by Calosso in which he mentioned learning of Gramsci’s idea from the Prison letters and wishing to develop the theme in a book on Il dramma dell’amicizia in Inferno (The Drama of Friendship in Hell ), which he would dedicate to Gramsci.34 Words to that effect

31 Isidoro Del Lungo, Dino Compagni e la sua Cronica, Vol. 1, Le Monnier, Firenze 1879, pp. 187–188; Vol. 2, Le Monnier, Firenze 1879, p. 98. 32 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 87. Gramsci was referring to two pages about the Inferno in chapter three, in which Croce discussed the figure of Farinata: B. Croce, La poesia di Dante, Laterza, Bari 1948, pp. 76–77. 33 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 87. The article mentioned by Gramsci is: U. Calosso, Guido Cavalcanti nel decimo canto dell’Inferno, in Giornale dantesco, 23, 1915, pp. 236–253. 34 N. Bobbio, Calosso e Gobetti, in Umberto Calosso antifascista e socialista, edited by M. Brunazzi, Marsilio, Venezia, 1981, p. 60 and p. 71 note 1.

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(although nothing came of the proposed work) also appear in a letter Calosso wrote to Natalino Sapegno on August 16, 1948: I’m preparing, though the matter keeps being postponed, to rewrite some early comments of mine on Canto X of the Inferno published in the Giornale dantesco in 1915 and written before the other war. The interest perhaps stems from certain conversations that Gramsci and I, schoolmates at that remote age, were having at that time; he speaks of it in the Letters fleetingly and outlines an essay on the same subject. I will ask [Felice] Platone, when I am in Rome, whether such an essay does exist. However, if it did not exist, my essay would in a way be an echo of it. I therefore count on rewriting that early text of mine in a simpler way and to call it: Il dramma dell’amicizia in Inferno. I maintain that Canto X is a secret commemoration of Guido Cavalcanti, that is to say of two friends brought apart by the facts of life, who still remained faithful to that ‘stellar friendship’ of which Nietzsche speaks with reference to Wagner. It is curious that I should now experience, towards Gramsci and others, that feeling that I talked about, I don’t know how, 38 years ago!35

Calosso (who had only had access to the letters, not the notebooks) could give firsthand evidence of Gramsci’s early interest in Canto X of the Inferno, as also subsequent letters by Gramsci confirm. Still, Gramsci’s theme was not the ‘drama of friendship’ that so interested Calosso: Gramsci’s theme was equally dramatic but presented Cavalcante in a different light. The ‘Piedmontese friend’ was again named in Sraffa’s exchanges with Tatiana, on May 2, 1932 as the source of a more detailed indication: the friend who had previously said he had heard about the Farinata issue did some research and found the subject discussed in an issue of a Turin newspaper published in 1918, with the title Sotto la Mole: Nino’s article is titled Il cieco Tiresia [The Blind Tiresia] and comments a news item regarding a young girl in a small village in Italy who became blind after divining the war would end in 1918: at the close, Antonio’s theory about the Farinata and Cavalcante canto is related along the same lines as in a recent letter of his, but in no more than ten lines in print.36

35 N. Sapegno, Calosso lettore di Alfieri e Manzoni, in Umberto Calosso antifascista e socialista, cit., pp. 58–59. 36 P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci, cit., p. 64.

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Two days later, on May 4, Sraffa informed Togliatti that he had ‘passed on the note on Farinata that will certainly interest Antonio,’37 but there was a sense the Dante project had been exhausted and that new topics would have to be found to communicate with Gramsci: Croce’s Storia d’Europa, to begin with, followed possibly by ‘De Man’s works.’ Still, the mention of the article in L’Avanti! of April 18, 1918 (in the Sotto la mole column of the Turin chronicles) was some news, as it had not emerged hitherto and was duly made a note of by Gramsci, with a few lines of commentary, in §85 of Notebook 4.38 There was, in fact, a lead in that article that would be pursued in the new investigations on Dante.39 At the time, another Turin newspaper, La Stampa, had run an article about a young boy from a place called Ostria, in the Marche region, who had prophesied the end of the war and immediately afterwards had become blind; commenting on the news Gramsci had underlined the connection between prophecy and blindness in the myths of Tiresias and Cassandra. From there, he had gone on to Canto X of the Inferno, in which, he explained, ‘Farinata and Cavalcante are punished for having wanted to see too far into the world beyond and hence transgressing Catholic discipline’; and were punished, he added, by ‘the inability to know the present.’ He also noted that ‘criticism has failed to grasp this drama’ and that the interest in Farinata’s ‘pride’ brought along with it the underestimation of Cavalcante’s ‘highest drama that is consummated in a few words’—a ‘difficult drama, complicated, that can only be understood by reflection and reasoning.’ And he concluded by remarking on the difference between Dante’s refined poetry, in which ‘Cavalcante does not see, but he is not blind,’ and the naive common sense that expressed itself in the Greek myths as an immediate link between prophecy and blindness. The correspondence and fourth notebook bear witness to the fact that, between August 1929 and May 1932, Dante had become a topic in Gramsci’s speculation but also, through the mediation of Tatiana, in his communication with Sraffa and, through Sraffa, with Togliatti and

37 Idem, p. 224. 38 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, edited by V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino

1975, p. 527 (Q4§85; PN Vol. 2, pp. 257–258). 39 A. Gramsci, Sotto la mole (1916–1920), Einaudi, Torino 1960, pp. 392–393.

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the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party in exile. This circumstance raises specific questions in the analysis of the material, the nature of which is, at once, philosophical discourse and encrypted political correspondence. It has been proven, not just as regards Dante, but, e.g., Croce’s Storia d’Europa, that Gramsci’s letters contained coded messages relating to his prison conditions as well as the general political situation.40 It befell on the recipients, Togliatti in particular, to decipher the content and read the implied message beneath the ostensible literary or philosophical discussion. There was, besides, no established cipher such that the message could be decoded automatically and unfailingly; each time, the code was constructed through subtle mechanisms of oblique identification whereby individual ideas or impressions were projected onto one character or the other, or onto some consideration.41 Gramsci, we might say (mirroring a theme that features highly in the Notebooks), proceeded figuratively, metaphorically, to convey one meaning by means of another. From this dual register descends a very peculiar character of Gramsci’s letters (and frequently of his notebook entries) which discloses itself, on a literary level, as a highly acute tension between the biographical and philosophical component, between the urgencies of life (and of immediate communication, personal or political) and those of the intellect. While, upon closer inspection, this ambiguity is inherent in all philosophical production, it expresses itself here in the highest possible degree. Such tension demands of the interpreter the continuous effort of calibrating their judgment and establishing what might be concealed in a passage on Dante or Croce—deciphering the code in a historical and political light and gauging precisely what interpretative tools were available to its intended addressee. It is an essential task, because it may disclose what tormented Gramsci in the years of his imprisonment, especially in his relations with the international communist movement. It would be equally erroneous, however, to assume that all of Gramsci’s meditations were metaphors and that the task of interpretation should consist in such 40 A. R ossi, Dante corriere segreto tra Gramsci e Togliatti, in A. R ossi, G. Vacca, Gramsci tra Mussolini e Stalin, Fazi, Roma 2007, pp. 38–45. 41 Other examples, besides Cavalcante, would be the passage on Francisco Goya in

Notebook 3, from the biography by Eugenio D’Ors (La vie de Goya, Gallimard, Paris 1928): A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 310 (Q3, 17); and the comments on Croce’s edition of Silvio Spaventa, Dal 1848 al 1861. Lettere scritti documenti (Laterza, Bari 19232 ), which he mentions in the letter to Tatiana of January 13, 1930 (A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 215).

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deciphering work. On the contrary, his metaphors were the result of a complex elaboration to which Gramsci devoted all of his intelligence and into which he put every possible care, in the awareness that the fate of his work depended on his intellectual legacy above everything else. In writing on two levels, Gramsci attended to both levels of discourse, which is why his meditations on Dante are not only a dramatic chapter in the history of the political vicissitudes of those years but also a generous effort toward the understanding of poetry and art. It is as such that they deserve to be appreciated, against the background of the culture of that time and also in terms of the development of his thought. The metaphor of Cavalcante lent itself to several readings. Gramsci’s addressees could not fail, first of all, but see the projection of Gramsci himself in Guido’s father, who was set firmly apart from Farinata by his private, intimate pain and drama of solitude. The note that rings most distinct in these writings is not the overtly political, Ghibelline drama of Farinata, but the inmate’s personal drama of separation from his affections and his own son, for which he struggled to find adequate words. The past form of the verb ‘ebbe’ that had been the seal of desperation in Cavalcante’s conversation with Dante defined also Gramsci’s own frame of mind as to the condition (which had already been of Tiresia and Cassandra) of being able to look into the past and envision the distant future, but not of being allowed to read the present and interpret the current situation. In speaking of Cavalcante, Gramsci perceived his own isolation and remoteness from the flow of current events, denounced his own loneliness to his friends, and to some extent attributed to them responsibility for it; ultimately, through Cavalcante, he came to identify himself with the image he had formed for himself of Dante as the supreme poet. As we shall see, Dante came to be seen by Gramsci wholly unlike Machiavelli: as poet rather than as politician, and, if anything, as the creator of a ‘political utopia’ whose eyes were turned fixed on the past, and neither the present nor the future.42 There was, therefore, quite transparently, a personal note to the Cavalcante code which related to his family situation and the failed attempts at his liberation. But there was, more immediate than that, a political slant, because Sraffa and Togliatti were urging Gramsci to write at a crucial moment in the history of Italian communism. His return to Dante, in

42 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 758–760 (Q6, 37bis–38bis).

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September 1931, thus followed the Italian Communist Party’s fourth congress in Cologne (April 14–21), where the leadership had voted the Comintern line and named Gramsci a martyr under Fascism.43 Gramsci was likely informed of the outcomes of the congress in May 1931 by means of a note in invisible ink he received from Sraffa, written on a cutting of an article from The Economist.44 Politically, Gramsci regarded the fourth congress resolutions to be hasty and problematic, to say the least. But the Dante metaphor here cut at a different level, regarding his canonization, when what he believed was needed was a more concerted effort to end his imprisonment, which alone would have allowed him to fight his political battle and express his dissent from the current course of communist politics. Thus, the two sides of the Cavalcante code, the personal and the political, were unified into a message that was loaded with meaning on both fronts. The Cavalcante passages lend themselves, of course, to graver readings on the grounds of other, more or less likely, analogies. Both protagonists in the canto were heretics, after all: they too were followers of Epicurus ‘Who with the body make the spirit die,’ and as leaders of the conflicting Ghibelline and Guelph factions were largely responsible for ‘The slaughter and great havoc … / That colour’d Arbia’s flood with crimson stain.’ But whereas Farinata stood ‘disdainful,’ ‘as in high scorn he held / E’en hell,’ Cavalcante rose from his grave like ‘a shade’ and spoke ‘with tears,’ concerned about the fate of his own Guido, and then collapsed after hearing (and misinterpreting) Dante’s words. But when Cavalcante fell, overwhelmed by despair, Farinata ‘chang’d not count’nance stern, / Nor mov’d the neck, nor bent his ribbed side.’ It cannot be ruled out, then, that in these letters that were also to reach Togliatti through Tatiana and Piero Sraffa, Gramsci had encoded a harsh but realistic metaphor to represent the uneasy state of his relationship with the other leader of his own party (the party they had founded together and of

43 P. Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, Vol. 2, Einaudi, Torino 1976, pp. 308–325; G.Vacca, Vita e pensieri di Antonio Gramsci. 1926–1937 , Einaudi, Torino 2012, pp. 123–124. 44 E. R iboldi, Vicende socialiste. Trent’anni di storia italiana nei ricordi di un deputato massimalista, Azione Comune, Milano 1964, pp. 182–183; G. Vacca, Vita e pensieri di Antonio Gramsci. 1926–1937 , cit., p. 126 and footnote 33.

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which Togliatti was now, de facto, sole leader and Comintern representative), brought about by the conspicuous absence of attempts to negotiate and obtain his liberation.

2

The Eleven Notes on Dante

Gramsci’s eleven entries on Canto X of the Inferno in Notebook 4 make up a series numbered §78 to §88. It is most likely that Gramsci began them in May 1930 and continued, with several interruptions, until May 1932, and so was occupied with them over about two years. Over the same period (or just afterwards, in the case of Notebook 9), Gramsci scattered his other Notebooks with opinions of essentially the same nature on Dante’s poetry. Dante never quite emerged as the central figure, although the inherent interest of the age of the communes in Italy and the theme of cosmopolitanism might have inspired a more in-depths analysis; still, the observations devoted to him draw a picture of a coherent interpretative framework which is worth bearing in mind. In Notebook 5, there is an entry written between October and November 1930 (the same period as the entries on Canto X) in which Gramsci comments on an article by Manlio Torquato Dazzi on Albertino Mussato45 and distinguishes ‘two main currents’ in the development of modernity in Italy, one dominated by the ‘particular’ and culminating in the intellectual figure of Leon Battista Alberti, and the other ‘Ghibelline in the broad sense,’ which had its crowning moment in Machiavelli and to which Dante too belonged, but in a middling and unresolved form, as the adversary of communal anarchy and the power of the Church but still within the bounds of ‘a semi-medieval solution.’ So that, he concluded, ‘Dante really constitutes a transition, whose assertion of secularism is still couched in medieval language.’46 This canonical interpretation of Dante as an unresolved transition between the Middle Ages and modernity reappeared in an entry in Notebook 6, written between March and August 1931, where Gramsci expanded on the comparison with Machiavelli and denied any ‘genetic connection’ between the two characters; he rigorously classed ‘Dante’s political theory’ as utopia and ‘poetic material taking shape, in a state 45 M.T. Dazzi, Nel sesto centenario della morte di Albertino Mussato, ‘Nuova Antologia,’ 16 July 1929, pp. 154–175. 46 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 614–615 (Q5§85; PN Vol. 2, p. 338).

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of effervescence’ which would come to be fully expressed only in the Comedy, ‘both in its “structure” as a continuation of the effort (now in verse form) to synthesize the emotions into a doctrine and in its “poetry” as an impassioned invective and a drama in progress.’47 As in Notebook 5, Dante emerged politically as one who ‘wants to overcome the present, but with his eyes turned to the past,’48 with a further remark on the relationship between this historico-political dimension and the poetic component: politics in Dante became ‘matter’ for the construction of a poetic ‘form,’ which was the converse of what could be said of Machiavelli. The interpretation of Dante as essentially a poet is confirmed in the entry on Giuseppe Toffanin in Notebook 7,49 written in December 1931, and in another in Notebook 9, from 1932, where Dante (but also Leopardi) is unfavorably compared with Shakespeare and Goethe, is not ranked among the ‘great geniuses,’ ‘because of his remoteness in time, and the period of which he is the expression, the transition of the Middle Ages into the modern age.’50 Dante was, thus, a transitional figure, ‘the swan song of the Middle Ages but also the harbinger of the new age and the new history,’ so that in Notebook 6 there came the comparison with the transition from ‘old man’ to ‘new man’ (to communism, that is), where ‘this swan song is wonderfully brilliant’ because ‘the new melds with the old, the passions become red-hot in an incomparable manner.’51 The more politics receded into the background, the more clearly the poetry emerged as the drama of an age of transition, where the new supersedes the old, but also merges with it in a clash of contrasting feelings. It was only in 1935 that Gramsci rediscovered the political significance of Dante, which he identified in the move for a ‘national cultural politics’ that is the De vulgari eloquio, as ‘the reaction of intellectuals to the debacle of political unity that presided in Italy under the name of the “balance of power among the Italian city-states”’.52

47 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 759 (Q6§85; PN Vol. 3, pp. 70–

71). 48 Idem, p. 760 (Q6, 38bis; the sentence doesn’t appear in the English text). 49 Idem, pp. 905–907 (Q7§68; PN Vol. 3, pp. 204–206). 50 Idem, p. 1187 (Q9, 91). 51 See, idem, pp. 733–734 (Q6§64; PN Vol. 3, p. 48). 52 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, 3rd vol., cit., p. 2350 (Q29, 9–10).

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This is the frame of reference in which Gramsci’s eleven entries on Canto X of the Inferno are to be inserted and interpreted—entries Gramsci composed working largely on memory and on a very limited number of bibliographical sources. This also accounts for the disproportionate importance, as we shall see, that Vincenzo Morello’s modest book on Dante, Farinata, Cavalcante 53 assumed: a work Gramsci received before November 18, 1929 and returned to his brother Carlo on March 13, 1931. To it be added the essays on Dante by De Sanctis, Croce’s La Poesia di Dante (in the third edition of 1922), a 1927 article by Luigi Russo,54 Fedele Romani’s essay on Il canto X dell’Inferno,55 the information on a posthumous book by Enrico Sicardi gleaned from a review by Giuseppe Gargàno,56 his recollections of Isidoro Del Lungo’s work, reinforced by a 1927 article by Pio Rajna,57 and very few other pieces. On the strength of this scant material, Gramsci tried to articulate, largely through sheer ingenuity, the discovery he had announced to Tatiana on August 26, 1929. Vincenzo Morello’s two conference papers ‘Dante e Farinata’ and ‘Cavalcante e il suo disdegno,’ printed together in a small volume in 1927, were discussed by Gramsci in two entries (§83 and §87) from different periods; they received from him a degree of attention disproportionate to their merit, although he did regard them as almost a symbol of the decline in studies on Dante. Some of the themes of the controversy were provisionally outlined for later, more detailed, treatment (such as the discussion of Farinata’s knowledge of his acquired kinship with Guido, which Morello argued against),58 but others are stated with clarity, such

53 Mondadori, Milano 1927. 54 L. R usso, ‘Per la poesia del Paradiso dantesco,’ in Leonardo, 8, 20 ago. 1927,

pp. 200–202. 55 F. R omani, ‘Il canto decimo dell’Inferno,’ in Giornale dantesco, 1906, 1, pp. 34–37. Romani’s essay derived from two lectures given in Orsanmichele and Padua on February 18 and May 4, 1906 and may have contributed to Gramsci’s understanding of the canto as drama: cf. M. Sansone, Farinata, in Enciclopedia dantesca (1970), sub voce. 56 E. Sicardi, La lingua italiana in Dante, Casa Editrice Optima, Roma 1928. The review by Gargàno has the same title as the book: in Il Marzocco, 15, April 14, 1929, p. 1. 57 P. R ajna, Del Lungo e la Cronica di D. Compagni, Il Marzocco, 20, May 15, 1927. 58 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 523 (Q4§83; PN Vol. 2, pp. 253–

255).

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as the idea Gramsci had formed of the significance of Canto X and more generally of Dante’s overall standing in the development of Italian history: the focus of Gramsci’s reasoning, however, narrowed down to his rejection of the ‘political interpretation’ of the canto, which Morello had defined as ‘political par excellence,’ and to underlining the ‘dramatic and poetic content of the canto,’59 which, in his opinion, climaxed on the note of ‘paternal love,’ which is to say in a human, and not civil, drama. This essential contention required a different reading that would show the poetic centrality of Cavalcante over Farinata; it also presupposed a more general interpretation of Dante, who was not, he explained, the pure Ghibelline Morello supposed him to be but was ‘basically an “intellectual”’ whose ‘sectarianism’ and ‘partisanship’ were ‘more intellectual than political in the immediate sense.’60 The critique of Vincenzo Morello (who signed himself Rastignac), was centered on the negation of the political character of Canto X; from there stemmed his attempt to interpret the relationship between Farinata and Cavalcante in a different key from that which had gradually prevailed starting from De Sanctis. Gramsci also observed that, in the canto, ‘their dramas are tightly intertwined’; but he immediately added, condensing his reading in a precise synthesis, that ‘Farinata is reduced to the structural role of “explicator” in order to make the reader enter deeply into the drama of Cavalcante.’61 The statuesque standing and political integrity of Farinata was to be read as the moment of ‘structure’ that would resolve itself poetically, with Cavalcante, in the ‘dramatic factor’ triggered by Dante’s ‘ebbe.’ Cavalcante was then the culmination of the entire poetic construction, within which was resolved the political and analytic coldness of Farinata. To illustrate this tension between the two characters, Gramsci made recourse to the categories he had derived from the second chapter of Croce’s Poesia di Dante: ‘structure’ and ‘poetry.’ Projecting the interpretative scheme of Croce onto Canto X, Gramsci identified the ‘structure’ with the evolving representation of Farinata, in its scansion into two moments (as De Sanctis had taught); and instead regarded as ‘poetry’ the dramatic climax in the apparition of Cavalcante, synthesized, in lines 67–72, by his sudden standing erect and immediate prostration.

59 Idem, p. 525 (Q4§83; PN Vol. 2, pp. 255–256). 60 Ibidem. 61 Idem, p. 524 (Q4§83; PN Vol. 2, p. 255).

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In this sense, Gramsci could attribute to Farinata ‘the structural role of “explicator”’ in the poetic climax of the drama. This distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘poetry,’ however, soon led Gramsci to realize that the two terms, instead of standing apart from each other, came to intertwine and merge, and outline a more complex dialectic than seemed to emerge from Croce’s analysis. In the opening §78 of the series, arranging the different themes into a possible sequence, he observed that ‘the structure should have led to a more accurate aesthetic evaluation of the canto, since every punishment is shown being enacted’62 ; and a few lines below he returned to the same question, gave an analysis of the canto, and stated that the ‘components’ of the drama ‘are furnished by the structure,’ and then concluded: ‘the structural passage, then, is not merely structure, it is also poetry; it is a necessary element of the drama that has taken place.’63 Pursuing this line of reasoning to its extreme conclusion, Gramsci represented the entire construction of the canto as constituting a ‘structural passage’ the precipitate of which was manifest poetry, but came about in such a way that while the poetry unmistakably resounded in the reader’s mind and imagination, it could not be identified with any of the words which purportedly expressed it. Strictly speaking, the poetry was not expressed in any of the lines (not even the six lines on Cavalcante which, to his mind, were the culmination of the canto) which formed the lyrical fabric of the text. For this reason, §78 was immediately followed up by an entry devoted to the objection that could have been raised against this apparent identification between poetry and the ‘unexpressed.’ He wrote, ‘My observations might give rise to the following objection: that this is a criticism of the unexpressed, an account of the non-existent, an abstract inquiry into plausible intentions that never took the concrete form of poetry, although there are still external traces of them in the mechanism of the structure.’64 And shortly afterwards he again asked: ‘but can one reconstruct and criticize a poem other than in the world of concrete expression, of historically realized language?’65 By posing these questions, Gramsci had clearly identified the center of the matter, which descended from the unexpected conclusion that the

62 Idem, p. 517 (Q4§78; PN Vol. 2, pp. 248–250). 63 Idem, p. 518 (Q4§78; PN Vol. 2, pp. 249–250). 64 Idem, p. 519 (Q4§79; PN Vol. 2, p. 250). 65 Ibidem.

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poetry constituted, with regard to the flow of the structure, an unexpressed element—something other than the ‘concrete language’ of the verses, and capable of igniting a spark in the mind of the reader into which, in an instant, the entire edifice of the structure fell. In a later note, Gramsci appears to have found an answer to this intuition in a brief 1927 article on the Paradiso by Luigi Russo, which commented on a previous study by Augusto Guzzo from 1924 and some passages of Karl Vossler’s interpretation of Dante. Gramsci copied out in full the passage in which Russo discusses Dante’s ‘renunciations of description’ in the Paradiso (the phrase occurred in the Guzzo study). Among other things, the transcribed passage states: ‘it seems to me that the poet is never so expressive as in these confessions of his expressive impotence […]. That is the poetry of the ineffable; and one should not mistake the poetry of the ineffable for poetic ineffability.’66 While formulated with reference to the Paradiso, Russo’s observations seemed to fit perfectly with the discovery Gramsci believed he had made on Canto X of the Inferno, and particularly the six Cavalcante lines; and noted, in fact, that ‘According to Russo, one cannot speak of renunciations of description in Dante. These renunciations are, in negative form, full and sufficient expressions of everything that is really astir within the poet.’67 Not ‘renunciations of description,’ but ‘full and sufficient expressions’; which is to say poetry ‘in negative form.’ This reflection on poetry ‘in negative form’ and its relationship with structure evoked the distant past of when, in 1912, in Turin, he had attended some lectures by Pietro Toesca on the painting of Medea at Pompeii. In the introductory entry §78, he recalled ‘The picture at Pompeii of Medea killing the children she had by Jason: Medea is depicted with a blindfold over her face—the painter is unable or unwilling to depict that face’ and then, almost as counterpoint, ‘the case of Niobe, but in a work of sculpture: covering her face would have meant removing the actual content from the work.’68 To this he returned in entry §80, deriving further information from an article by Paolo Enrico Arias69 which mentioned a passage by Pliny on Timanthes of Cythnus and Lessing’s Laocoon; Gramsci observed that ‘In the painting of the sacrifice

66 L. R usso, Per la poesia del Paradiso dantesco, cit., pp. 201–202. 67 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 527 (Q4§84; PN Vol. 2, p. 257). 68 Idem, p. 517 (Q4§78; PN Vol. 2, p. 248). 69 P.E. Arias, ‘I monumenti di Ifigenia in Aulide,’ in Il Marzocco, 28, July 13, 1930.

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of Iphigenia at Pompeii—which differs in its general composition from Timanthes’ painting—the figure of Agamemnon is also veiled.’70 The repeated references to George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, which struck him for the inclusion of John Tanner’s didactic manual as an aid to interpretation, goes back to the same order of problems.71 The list of these references (drastically curtailed by the meagerness of bibliographic resources in prison and only minimally compensated by memory) indicates quite precisely the line Gramsci intended to pursue from Canto X of the Inferno. The categories with which he approached the Divine Comedy were the ones Croce had outlined in the second chapter of Poesia di Dante, based on the latter’s work in aesthetics since 1902; but his analysis of the canto of Farinata and Cavalcante had forced him to introduce a correction as he found that poetry, instead of constituting a place within the work, was instead the precipitate of the structure into a dimension that, while unexpressed, nevertheless was constitutive of the lyrical moment. This unexpressed, which ignited in the mind of the poet and reader, and which could be only called poetry, derived from the impossibility of giving a representation of pain—at least such pain as that of Cavalcante in the face of the fate of his own son, which could not be represented in words. It seemed Gramsci had touched a general, i.e., philosophical, problem of aesthetics, which he tried to document by as many instances the history of art and literature could provide. The veil on Medea and Agamemnon (contrasted by ‘the case of Niobe’) seemed to equally indicate the impossibility of representing grief, which is the peak of lyrical poetry; but, conversely, the John Tanner appendix in Shaw’s Man and Superman revealed the conversion of structure into poetry in the simplest form of a legend contributing to the intelligence of a literary piece.72

70 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 520 (Q4§80; PN Vol. 2, p. 251). 71 Idem, p. 517 and p. 530 (Q4§78 and §88 Vol. 2, p. 248 and p. 260). Again,

Gramsci based himself on an article found in Il Marzocco: A. Sorani, Gordon Craig e il teatro, Il Marzocco, 44, November 1, 1931 (which refers to the work by Edin R ose, Gordon Craig and the Theatre, Sampson Low, Marston, London 1931). 72 This interest in the structural function of the appendix toward the interpretation of Shaw’s Man and Superman is reminiscent of the interpretation, given on several occasions, of the drama of Pirandello, in which ‘cultural merit’ prevails over ‘aesthetic merit’ and his role as company leader and director becomes essential to the correct understanding of the poetic aspects: see, for example, Gramsci’s observations in Notebook 9, with a perceptive

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Gramsci’s recollection of the Pompeii painting of Medea resulted, in fact, from some confusion. One can suppose that, in his lessons on Medea in 1912, Pietro Toesca had retraced the origins of the myth, with references to the earliest written tradition (Hesiod, Theogony, 992 ff ., and Pindar Pythian, 4), then dwelt with particular care on the tragedy of Euripides and a segment of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (7, 174 ff .), where infanticide was mentioned for the first time, and finally commented on representations in figurative art, from the Roman sarcophagus of 150 AD, held at the Berlin Staatliche Museen, depicting the ‘history of Medea,’ to the two first-century frescoes at the Naples Archaeological Museum, including the one from the House of the Dioscuri, referred to as ‘Pompeii fresco.’ Toesca probably followed this course with his habitual rigor, dwelling somewhat on Medea’s gaze in the Pompeii depiction, a gaze averted from the two sons she is about to kill and almost suspended ‘between impulse and action’ (to use the phrase of Aby Warburg),73 but it is almost impossible he should have commented on the veil or blindfold of which Gramsci speaks. The reason being, no bandage covers Medea’s face in the painting in question: with the image before his eyes, Toesca could not have proffered ‘the painter is unable or unwilling to depict that face.’ Medea’s face is clearly represented, though her gaze must appear averted from her victims-to-be, due to the pathos of incipient action. Similarly, some misapprehension concerned ‘the case of Niobe,’ because all of the sculptures that can be admired at the Uffizi in Florence and at the Horti Sallustiani in Rome represent the ‘daughter of Niobe’ in the act of falling to the ground and dying, and not her mother’s distress, as can be read in Homer (Iliad, XXIV, 599–620) or in Ovid (Metamorphosis, VI, 146–312). His recollections were therefore inexact, but the line of investigation was still clear; and his error over Medea did in fact have a source, which emerges in §80 where the brief article by Arias is cited. First there comes a passage from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (XXXV, 73), where we read the following about Timanthes’ Sacrifice of Iphigenia:

comparison with Shakespeare’s theater, in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 1195–1197 (Q9, 96–97). 73 A. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas: Mnemosyne, Gesammelte Schriften II.1, edited by Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie, 2008).

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Nam Timanthi vel plurimum adfuit ingenii. Eius enim est Iphigenia oratorum laudibus celebrata, qua stante ad aras peritura cum maestos pinxisset omnes praecipueque patruum et tristitiae omnem imaginem consumpsisset, patris ipsius voltum velavit, quem digne non poterat ostendere.

The source for the image of the veil was thus Pliny, and the veil was painted by Timanthes over the face of Agamemnon, given the impossibility of plausibly representing his grief directly. This image, in fact, was, and had been, very successful over the centuries (even prior to Pliny), both in the ancient world, as Cicero (Orator, XXI, 74) and Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, II, XIII, 12–13) show, as in modernity, from Leon Battista Alberti74 to Benedetto Varchi.75 It is likely, therefore, that not remembering exactly the classical genesis of the veil, Gramsci projected it onto Medea. This is, upon inspection, a characteristic and emblematic quid pro quo, which illustrates, in a passage of considerable theoretical density, the method by which so many passages in the Notebooks were put together—constantly poised between the frailty of memory and the sometimes desperate search for the confirmation of facts. But, in spite of the error in recollecting distant things in the absence of documentation, it was precisely Agamemnon’s veiling before the sacrifice of Iphigenia that Gramsci saw in Dante’s description of Cavalcante—a father whose grief, as in Timanthe’s representation, could not be expressed and had to be veiled: in Dante’s narrative, the sorrow precipitated at Dante’s accidental reference to Cavalcante’s son in the past tense.

74 Leonbatista Alberti, Della pittura e della statua, Società tipografica de’ classici italiani, Milano 1804, p. 66: ‘And Timanthe of Cyprus is praised for that table, with which he defeated Colotes, because having painted the melancholy of Chalcas, and then the greater melancholy of Ulysses, and then had put all his powers into painting Menelaus, his resources were exhausted, and, unable to give a powerful expression to the agony of the father, he covered his head with a veil.’ 75 Benedetto Varchi, Due lezioni sopra la pittura e scultura, Lorenzo Torrentino, Firenze 1549, pp. 114–115. Varchi’s observations are all the more interesting because, shortly afterwards, they mention Dante and, in particular, Canto X of the Inferno (ibid., pp. 116–117).

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Poetry and Structure

The discovery Gramsci had first announced to Tatiana was not a matter of philology, then; its domain was philosophy, and, more precisely, aesthetic theory. The study of Canto X of the Inferno had suggested the notion of a generative rhythm of art, of a fundamental nucleus of expression from which, as he immediately perceived, should follow a revision of the relation between structure and poetry as Croce had presented it in his 1921 book (and was supported by his philosophical writings at large). In Canto X, Gramsci could not see Farinata descend from one level of representation, at the beginning of the canto, to another extreme, in accordance with the analysis first given by Francesco De Sanctis and then continued by others, down to Croce; the center, rather, was occupied by Cavalcante Cavalcanti, by the grief of a father who believes to have been given ill news of his son and so stands out, from among the tombs of the circle of heretics, in stark contrast with the detached coldness of the Ghibelline leader. In the six lines (67–72) that compose the drama of Cavalcante, Gramsci saw poetry lighten up like a spark of pure and intense art from the mighty edifice of narrative structure. But, for Gramsci, this observation was the preamble to a further: namely that poetry somehow stood apart from structure in this representation of Cavalcante’s grief without being given adequate and distinct expression in words—the poetry related, rather, to a note so deep that it remained unexpressed and could be visible only in the light of an intimate communication between the poet and his reader. For this observation, as we have seen, he sought (in his memory and in the scant bibliography he had available) confirmation of the veil used by the ancients to conceal the most violent expressions of grief in their figurative representations. While factually (though understandably) inaccurate, Gramsci’s analysis pointed in the right direction, because ancient art would have provided materials for his thesis (as shown, for instance, by Aby Warburg). Gramsci was unable to pursue the investigation but had still identified a promising lead to frame the relationship between structure and poetry. As outlined by him, structure tended to coincide with the entire sphere of expression; poetry, on the other hand, no longer resided in any given line of the poem, but appeared as the precipitate of the entire structure at a highly dramatic point, but also, strictly speaking, as a component that was at once unexpressed and inexpressible. It was veiled, indeed, by a drape such as that which had prevented Agamemnon from regarding with his own

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eyes the sacrifice of Iphigenia. This was the thesis toward which Gramsci tended in his reasoning: one that, as he had initially intuited, ‘would in part correct B. Croce’s thesis on the Divine Comedy, which is too absolute.’76 But the consequences of this initial correction, it soon emerged, were farther-reaching than at first appeared: by rethinking the relationship between structure and poetry in a few lines of Canto X, he had, in fact, touched a sensitive point in the conceptual system of Croce that affected his aesthetic theory and, more generally, the ordering of the categories of the spirit. As we saw from his letter to Tatiana (September 10, 1931), the list of works in Gramsci’s possession included the essays by Francesco De Sanctis, Croce’s book, one part of the essay by Luigi Russo, and Croce’s reply,77 and these were essentially his sources for this analysis. Out of all of Croce’s book, of which he owned the 1922 third edition,78 Gramsci dwelt in particular on the second chapter, dealing on the distinction between poetry and structure (written by Croce after the descriptive sections of the work that follow it in the printed book). When Croce’s work came out, around the time that Gramsci was a student in Turin, it triggered a wide debate in which Umberto Cosmo also took part with an article in the Turin newspaper La Stampa (January 23, 1921); we cannot know for certain to what extent Gramsci followed that debate and how much of it he could, therefore, remember; but it is certain that he understood exactly the theoretical problems that were involved. The distinction of poetry and structure was not intended to ‘divide the one Dante into two or more Dantes’79 but rather to reaffirm the ‘dialectical unity’ (as Croce defined it)80 of the diverse moments composing the poem; nor was it in the least intended (as some equivocated) to separate truth from error, the good from the bad, and in short, the positive from the negative, as discernible opposites within the overall poetic construction. The distinction had probably been elaborated by Croce in his previous

76 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 205 (PN Vol. 2, p. 598, Notes to Notebook 4). 77 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 38–39. 78 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 4, cit., p. 3045. 79 B. Croce, La poesia di Dante, cit., p. 20. 80 B. Croce, review of S. Frascino, ‘Ravvedimento critico. Per la nuova edizione del «Dante» di Karl Vossler,’ in La Critica, 25, 1927, p. 183.

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studies on Goethe, Shakespeare, and Corneille and descended from the broader philosophical problem of the distinction between the theoretical and practical spheres, between aesthetic intuition and economic utility: in a theoretical framework that drew on philosophy and theology, and on politics and science, the structure related to the practical activity of the imagination, to the exercise of the will, and stood as the ‘solid and robust edifice’ concealed by ‘luxuriant vegetation,’ as a notorious metaphor of Croce’s would have it. The dialectic of the two terms corresponded, therefore, to the broader dialectic of theory and practice; in the terms of the dialectic, poetry, the work of aesthetic intuition, had the structure within itself only as the material part of its autonomous formal energy— which was not the same as saying that the structure went so far, in his understanding, as to generate (or be the foundation of) the poetry. The two moments were united dialectically in the sense of a synthesis of the distinct, not of opposites, because poetry and structure in themselves were not categories that gave rise to any real opposition. So, neither could it be said, strictly speaking, that one superseded the other, that poetry was the supersession of structure in a dialectical sense. Gramsci had touched upon a difficult question, and the criticism of Dante’s poem (especially given the nature of Dante studies after De Sanctis—and before Nardi or Gilson inaugurated a new trend) represented a particularly difficult test for the theory that was beginning to form. Understandably, then, Gramsci almost exclusively turned his attention to Genesi e unità della «Commedia», the article Luigi Russo had published in two parts in 1927 before merging them into a long essay in 1929.81 Gramsci had only read the first part of Russo’s article, and then Croce’s 1928 brief reply, in review form, to the second part.82 These texts, combined, were sufficient to give him a rather precise idea of the general terms of Russo’s critique of Croce. Most probably, Luigi Russo’s approach became the center of his speculation, not so much in the sense of what he could draw from Russo, but, rather, because Russo took a different, and in some respects opposite line to Gramsci’s interpretation. Russo, that is, disagreed with Croce’s apparent claim that poetry was born 81 L. R usso, Problemi di metodo critico, Laterza, Bari 1929, pp. 39–79. Then in L. R usso, La critica letteraria contemporanea, Vol. 2, Laterza, Bari 19543 , pp. 1–40 and Id., Ritratti e disegni storici, Vol. 3, Laterza, Bari 1951, pp. 224–263. 82 B. Croce, review of L. R usso, ‘Il Dante del Vossler e l’unità poetica della Divina Commedia, in La Critica, 26, 1928, pp. 122–125.

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from the structure, which is to say, as he wrote, ‘that for Croce the structure precedes the poetry,’83 so that ‘on the one hand there is, supposedly, the conceptual design, and on the other the lyricism that flourishes on that design.’ Russo countered that ‘poetry always generates its own structure,’ because ‘the poetic act presupposes nothing; but thought, the intentional world, structure, absolutely presuppose the poetic act.’84 Whether rightly or wrongly, Russo attributed to Croce the precedence of structure over poetry, whereas, by indicating poetry as the generative fulcrum of the structure, he instead overturned the sequence (confirming his position in later writings).85 This correction of Croce presumably drew on elements of the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (and, more generally, of actual idealism)—an inspiration that was made explicit in the critical evaluation of the work of Karl Vossler, which in several ways was conducted along similar lines to Gentile’s. Not that Russo denied the distinction between poetry and structure, which he indeed emphasized vigorously (‘the distinction between poetry and structure,’ he wrote, ‘appears today incontestable and indisputable’)86 ; but his account of the structure as the product of the poetic act touched on an essential point of Croce’s philosophy and called into question (on the same lines as actual idealism), the distinction of the economic moment from the theoretical moment of poetic intuition. It is safe to assume that, with the few selected sources available to him, Gramsci was devoting particular attention to the theoretical aspects of the discussion. His ‘little discovery,’ that is, was intended to ‘in part correct’ the thesis of Croce ‘which is too absolute.’ Except that, in so doing, he was also moving in the opposite direction to the one proposed by Luigi Russo in the article he had before him. For Russo, let us repeat, the structure could not precede poetry because, to the contrary, poetry generated ‘its own structure.’ Things stood differently for Gramsci, not only in that the structure preceded the poetry to a greater extent than Croce himself

83 L. R usso, La critica letteraria contemporanea, Vol. 2, cit., p. 31. 84 Idem, p. 33. 85 See the later writing ‘La critica letteraria del Croce e il nostro storicismo,’ in L. R usso, La critica letteraria contemporanea, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 201–210: ‘poetry does not come “after” nor does structure come “before.” […] But the structure is as though generated from within the soul that is poetically moved’ (ibid., p. 207). 86 L. R usso, La critica letteraria del Croce e il nostro storicismo, cit., p. 206.

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would have conceded, but the entire poem resolved itself in its structural edifice, precipitating into its poetic and intuitive moment at a highly dramatic point which, nonetheless was unexpressed and to all intents and purposes inexpressible, but in the instance in question (Dante’s Canto X) was fully embodied as Cavalcante’s fatherly sorrow. Gramsci’s correction ultimately ran counter to the one proposed by Russo: economic volition was divested of all autonomy by Russo, whereas, for, Gramsci economic volition coincided with the literary construction as a whole, while still allowing the theoretical and intuitive moment of poetry to stand out individually.

4

Aesthetics and Catharsis

The theoretical elaboration prompted by the analysis of Canto X of the Inferno provided the basis for all of Gramsci’s subsequent aesthetic theory and literary criticism and has to be regarded as a decisive moment in the development of his thought. Gramsci, that is, had derived and fully embraced Croce’s distinction between poetry and non-poetry, between artistic interest and non-artistic interest (with a further acknowledgment of Croce’s aesthetics),87 and went so far as to reproach Croce for his shift of emphasis from those categories in his later defense of the ‘classical’ against the ‘romantic’ (in the Aesthetica in nuce), reaffirming instead the need for an aesthetics that had no ‘other task than that of elaborating a theory of art, beauty, and expression.’88 On such a distinction was grounded his opposition to Giovanni Gentile and the philosophies of actual idealism (of which Luigi Russo was a more or less explicitly conscious exponent) and to the Marxist and materialist vulgates, which tended to reduce art to the cause of mere political propaganda: on this point, in a 1933 entry in Notebook 15 about the ‘criteria of literary criticism,’ Gramsci wrote in the most direct way there were only two factual orders to consider, ‘one that is of aesthetic nature, or of pure art, and the other of cultural policy (i.e., of politics pure and simple).’ Making sure to drive home the concept to those who wished to reduce art to mere political instrument, he added that ‘the formal principle of the distinction of spiritual categories and their unity of circulation, while abstract, allows

87 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 586–587 (Q5, 27bis–28). 88 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 794 (Q6§124; PN Vol. 3, p. 102).

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us to grasp actual reality and to criticize the arbitrariness and the pseudoexistence of those who will not play cards up or are mediocre individuals who came into a position of command by chance.’89 This was an impressively frank statement, reaffirming the principles of the distinction and ‘unity of circulation’ of spiritual categories in spite of the penchant for abstraction that marked its theorizers, and notably De Sanctis and Croce. Gramsci, therefore, held fast to the distinction between poetry and non-poetry, which at the same time implied the distinction between art and volition (the former as the intuitive and theoretical moment, and the latter as the practical and economic moment). Still, he attempted to elaborate the terms of the distinction differently from Croce’s 1902 great Aesthetic. To his mind, both interpretations were inconceivable: whether Croce’s distinction between structure and poetry in the work on Dante (widely, if incorrectly, understood as an alternation between poetic and non-poetic moments in the text) or Luigi Russo’s reversal whereby the structure found its genesis and origin in poetry, neither seemed capable to Gramsci of resolving the issues which the distinction posed in the first place. Over 1932, the question was addressed from different angles in its general philosophical terms (in Notebooks 10 and 11), but without foregrounding the specific matter of aesthetics. It returned to the foreground, however, in a few entries in Notebooks 14 and 15 written in early 1933, in which Gramsci seemed to resume his analysis from the point at which he had left it with his observations on Canto X of the Inferno. In §28 (ca. January 1933), he took his cue from a very recent article by Luigi Volpicelli90 (which had ‘neither sense nor basis’) to return to discuss the fundamental thesis in Croce’s aesthetics of the distinction between intuition (as the theoretical moment) and expression (as the practical moment). This distinction he summed up with the formula that ‘the work of art is already “perfect” even as it resides in the artist’s brain alone,’ though the artist then ‘outwardly “marks” his phantasies for the sake of “his own remembrance.”’91 The distinction between intuition and expression was linked to the more general distinction between the theoretical sphere and the practical sphere, and above all to the sequence whereby, in Croce’s system, one preceded the other,

89 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., pp. 1793–1794 (Q15, 22). 90 L. Volpicelli, ‘Arte e religione,’ in L’Italia letteraria, 1, January 1, 1933. 91 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1686 (Q14, 15).

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albeit in an organic circularity of interrelations (first elucidated in 1909). Gramsci admitted the distinction between intuition and expression, which he thought one ‘might admit as legitimate with some approximation and in a certain sense. But only with some approximation and in a certain sense.’92 The distinction was therefore to be preserved but had to be reinterpreted. He added, shortly afterwards, the terse correction that, contrary to what Croce believed, the artist ‘is an artist only to the extent that he outwardly “marks,” objectifies, and thus historicizes his phantasies.’93 There could be, that is, no art before the practical moment of expression, because art takes form in the act of the ‘marking’; but the distinction (to be preserved as intrinsically valid), has for its foundation that practical moment, emerges and is vivified within ‘history’ and the forms of a ‘determinate society.’ In the language of the notes on Dante, poetry descended from structure, and structure (in spite of what Croce and Russo believed) preceded and did not follow the moment of poetry. The point was again made in §72 (February 1933), as the discussion touched on a fundamental issue in aesthetic theory, namely the relation between content and form. Behind the two terms ‘content’ and ‘form’ were to be seen the same questions of structure and poetry, of the ‘marking’ and intuition. While the wording changed, the problem remained the same. Gramsci moved from the apparent paradox that while content and form ‘are the same thing,’ that ‘does not mean that we cannot draw the distinction’ between them.94 In dialectical terms, the point was to be able to understand the unity and the difference of the two moments, in such a way that form indeed depended on its content, and descended, in fact, from its concreteness, but also asserted its full autonomy and independence. In this line of argument, he posed the question which for him had become the essential question: ‘may we talk of the precedence of content over form?’95 To speak of the ‘precedence’ of content (structure, marking) over the intuitive moment of art, or of non-poetry over poetry, was to reverse the entire aesthetic process as Croce had (to Gramsci’s understanding) conceived it. The answer was outlined in very few sentences, providing the core of a distinctly complex analysis. It is

92 Ibidem. 93 Ibidem. 94 Idem, p. 1737 (Q14, 37). 95 Ibidem.

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legitimate to speak of the precedence of content, he explained, only in the sense that ‘a work of art is a process, and changes in content are also changes in form’; considered in itself, a work of art is an ‘elaboration,’ a process in the course of which ‘successive attempts’ manifest themselves as changes in content, as a change in subject matter. But in relation to this process (this was the essential point), ‘it is “easier” to talk about content than about form, because content can be “summed up” logically.’ The thesis of the ‘precedence’ of content, in short, tends to conceal the superiority of form, which descends from the process of the elaboration of content, from the changes in the marking and the structure, but also rises above it, manifestly engendering art in the distinct and irrepressible mode of the beautiful. The themes that again emerged (though in a more complex elaboration informed by the speculative work conducted over Notebooks 10 and 11) were those underlying the reading of Canto X and the figure of Cavalcante. They emerged once more, we might add, to form a substantially coherent picture. Even within the broader domain of art and aesthetic theory in general, Gramsci sought an alternative and original way to overcome the limitations of the idealist stance he attributed to Croce (while, at the same time, salvaging the fundamental elements in his teachings) and of countering the tendency, dominant in much of the Marxist theory of his time, to reduce art to political commitment and social critique. Beyond that, the interpretation of Dante’s canto and, more generally, of the relation between form and content in art opened up a more complex question, which concerned not only aesthetics but the overall architecture of the philosophy of praxis and, more specifically, the theoretical question of hegemony. It is in this connection that, in the entries on Dante, Gramsci introduced the category of catharsis from Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics,96 which had governed a great segment of the history of aesthetic theories. The pertinence of the concept of catharsis to his conception of Marxism, indeed, suggested itself over the course of the work on Canto X of the Inferno, so that Gramsci began to employ it both in the reworking of previous notes and in the composition of the

96 Aristotle, Politics, 1341b, 35 ff.; Id. Poetics, 49b, 24–28.

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B texts.97 Notably, there is a passage in Notebook 10 in which catharsis came to indicate ‘the starting-point for all the philosophy of praxis,’ which is to say the transition from the structure to the superstructures, from the economic moment to the ethico-political moment, and, finally, the genesis of subjectivity itself, understood as ‘the chain of syntheses which have resulted from the evolution of the dialectic.’ In fact, he wrote: The term ‘catharsis’ can be employed to indicate the passage from the purely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment, that is the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the minds of men. This also means the passage from ‘objective to subjective’ and from ‘necessity to freedom.’ Structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive; and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives. To establish the ‘cathartic’ moment becomes therefore, it seems to me, the starting point for all the philosophy of praxis, and the cathartic process coincides with the chain of syntheses which have resulted from the evolution of the dialectic.98

Moving from the criticism of Dante, Gramsci had identified a meaningful analogy between aesthetic catharsis (as in the drama of Cavalcante) and historical catharsis, involving the transcendence of economic structure into the subjective sphere of the superstructures. The analogies in point were as poignant as the differences were remarkable, however. In poetry, the lyrical moment arose from the structure as an unexpressed and inexpressible feeling; in its ethico-political form, instead, catharsis engendered ‘the chain of syntheses’ of civil society, the order of a subjective expression that could convert the ‘external force’ which makes man ‘passive’ into an impulse to activity and freedom. Gramsci addressed the issue in a dense entry in Notebook 10, in which he reworked passages from Notebook 8 but introduced the concept of catharsis as a new 97 Gramsci spoke of ‘catharsis’ in regard to Dante, in §82 of Notebook 4: ‘The “aesthetic” and “dramatic” accent in this line falls on “ebbe” and it is the source of the drama of Cavalcante, interpreted in the explanatory passages of Farinata. And there is the “catharsis”’ (A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 521; PN Vol. 2, p. 252). Apart from an incidental use in Notebook 4 itself (ibid., p. 452), the term was to occur again, as we shall now see, in Notebook 10 and, sporadically, in Notebooks 11 and 23. See also, for its one occurrence in the Lettere, his letter to Iulca on August 8, 1933. 98 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, p. 1244 (Q10, 2; SPN pp. 366–467).

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element. Croce, he wrote, had replicated the framework of the problem of aesthetics in his notion of an ‘ethico-political history’ and had hypostatized the moment of hegemony: ‘the ethico-political moment is in history what the moment of “form” is in art; it is the “lyricism” of history, the “catharsis” of history.’99 In a sense, Croce had overemphasized the importance of catharsis by regarding history in the same way as aesthetics, divorcing the ‘ethico-political moment’ from the reality of the structure and so depriving it of an appropriate historical genesis. In another entry further below, he clarified the critique in the terms of the dialectical nature of the historical bloc: ‘ethico-political history,’ he wrote, ‘to the extent that it fails to take into account the concept of historical bloc, in which socio-economic content and ethico-political form concretely identify in the understanding of a given historical period, is nothing other than a polemical display of more or less interesting philosophizing; but it is not history.’100 The workings of catharsis needed to be differently understood in the two domains: while in art it gave rise to a distinct concept, which could be regarded in speculative terms, in history the distinctions ‘are not, nor can be, presented “speculatively.”’101 Croce had over-extended the category of catharsis and regarded history as though it were art; he had, then, hypostatized the moment of hegemony and cut it off from its roots, which instead go deep into the structure. In Gramsci’s account, instead, hegemony was the catharsis of the structure, but preserved within itself its genesis, both in the terms of the ‘distinction of “vertical” groups’ (which is to say, the relationship with the objective forces of the economic sphere), and as ‘“horizontal” stratifications’ in the relationship ‘among different civilizations and cultures’ (which were the same grounds on which the principle of translatability rested).102 Croce had presented catharsis in speculative terms, separating it in the abstract from its structural roots; consequently, and at this very junction, it had lent itself to become ‘the “matrix” of Gentile’s actual idealism’ and the legitimation of the ‘solipsistic’ terms of Gentile’s philosophy.

99 Idem, p. 1222 (Q10, 45). 100 Idem, pp. 1237–1238 (Q10, 50a). 101 Idem, p. 1222 (Q10, 45a). 102 Idem, p. 1223 (Q10, 45a).

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The inquiry into the concept of catharsis, then was first prompted by the criticism of Dante’s canto X to acquire extraordinary significance in Gramsci’s philosophy. On the one hand, in the critique of Croce, it provided a key to a new examination of the relationship between the aesthetic dimension and the ethico-political dimension; on the other hand, it led Gramsci back to the key idea of his theory, the question of hegemony, which Croce had acknowledged but hypostatized, and so needed to be reconceptualized in the terms of the dialectical link between two interrelated realities: the structure and the superstructures.

CHAPTER 7

The Anti-Croce

The input to begin a critical reexamination of the philosophy of Croce came to Gramsci from the work on Canto X of the Inferno. With Croce’s categories of poetry and structure, and their problematic relationship, as starting point, Gramsci began an inquiry into questions of aesthetics at large, and realized they ultimately were strictly related to the general problems of the philosophy of praxis via the category of catharsis. The insight brought Gramsci to inaugurate the first of his ‘special’ Notebooks and to return to examine questions that had remained in the background of his work on Dante. Devoting Notebook 10 specifically to the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, he endeavored to reassess his own position vis-à-vis idealism and the dialectics, which Croce had already revised in terms of the nexus of the distinct (as opposed to the dialectic of opposites). In a preparatory entry in Notebook 8, Gramsci estimated that the project he was about to outline, and proposed to call the AntiCroce, could potentially involve enough intellectual work to engage ‘a whole group of men’ over ‘ten years.’ To begin with, he laid down the essential lines of inquiry.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4_7

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1 Preliminary Remarks on the ‘Special’ Notebooks Gramsci’s letter to Tatiana of March 21, 1932 was the closing act of the work on Dante. In the same letter Gramsci also told his sister-in-law that he had ‘received the notebooks: the best are the two smaller ones (for number of pages) that you sent in the second parcel, the certified mail one. Notepads cannot be used.’1 About one month earlier, on February 22, he had asked for ‘some standard notebooks, such as the ones for use in school, with not too many pages, 40–50 at most, to prevent them from becoming a boundless hotchpotch of miscellaneous thoughts.’2 The ‘smaller notebooks’ were needed to ‘tidy up’ the notes on Italian intellectuals; because they were scattered over a series of miscellaneous notebooks (from 1 to 8), he now proposed to ‘arrange’ those entries and ‘divide them by subject’ so as to ‘achieve some logical order.’3 The new system, elaborated around February 1932, thus involved that while continuing to write new entries about works he read (or had read) and to record his own thoughts on various subjects (as he did in in Notebook 9, written between April and November 1932), he would also begin to collate and rework his previous entries under specific subject headings; under those same headings he would also add new entries on the same subject to achieve the ‘logical order’ he aimed for. By the time he actually embarked on this work, between February and April, Gramsci had already come to the decision of ordering his thoughts and reading notes into a coherent sequence. Thus were born the ‘special’ Notebooks, starting with the four (10, 12, 13, and 11) that first came into definition and were then mostly finished within that period. The decision marked a turning point in the development of an opus that, for all its insights, remained otherwise fragmentary. This does not mean that the Notebooks as a whole can be neatly divided between initial documentation and further elaboration—which is to say there is no exact line of division between the miscellaneous and ‘special’ Notebooks. As 1 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, edited by A.A. Santucci, Editrice L’Unità, Roma 1988, p. 97. 2 Idem, p. 87. For a description of the notebooks, see G. Francioni, L’officina Gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei «Quaderni del carcere», Bibliopolis, Napoli 1984, pp. 85–93. 3 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 87.

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Gianni Francioni says, ‘there is,’ strictly speaking, ‘no definite moment in the history of the Prison Notebooks at which Gramsci decided to compose the ‘special’ Notebooks: ‘this intent was already implicit in the way the work was organized from the very first notebook.’4 When we look at Gramsci’s different drafts of tables of contents, from the letter to Tatiana on March 19, 1927 to the ‘groupings of subjects’ in Notebook 8, it is apparent that all of his work came under a plan and was organized by subjects, though the overall plan kept changing as his thoughts and research perspectives evolved. It has to be pointed out, too, that while the ‘special’ Notebooks are not miscellaneous, neither do they properly have the structure of a book or monograph: they are arranged in accordance with a line of research, but they constitute an intermediate genre, part miscellany, though not as erratic, and part monograph, though not as well ordered. In each are to be found entries from previous notebooks (the A texts), often reworked with significant variants (the C texts) and interspersed with newly added texts (the B texts) to form a unified whole, as the 1975 critical edition and subsequent surveys of Gramsci’s work (down to the intended new national edition) have finally made clear.5 So, Gramsci first mentioned his intent to Tatiana in his letter of February 22, 1932, where he only made mention of the ‘notes I wrote about Italian intellectuals,’ which, he explained, ‘are scattered over a series of notebooks, mixed with other various notes, and I should first gather them all to sort them’; the ‘small notebooks’ were needed ‘to rearrange these notes, divide them by subject and sort them.’6 The initial plan probably only involved the notes on intellectuals, which Gramsci gave center place in his studies, and was in fact to be realized in the shorter Notebook 12. We may also suppose that, between March and April, the initial project was expanded to the more systematic (though unfinished) list of ten ‘groupings of subjects’7 that appears on the second page of Notebook 8: 4 G. Francioni, L’officina Gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei «Quaderni del carcere», cit., p. 69. 5 For a comprehensive analysis of the philological issues and of the criteria applied in the new national edition, see: ‘L’edizione nazionale e gli studi gramsciani,’ in Studi storici, 2011, 4. 6 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 87. 7 Q8, PN Vol. 3, p. 233: Gramsci left the rest of page 2 and the all of the following

page blank, for the obvious purpose of continuing the list.

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1. Intellectuals. Scholarly issues. 2. Machiavelli. 3. Encyclopedic notions and cultural topics. 4. Introduction to the study of philosophy and critical notes on a Popular Manual of Sociology. 5. History of Catholic Action. Catholic integralists—Jesuits— modernists. 6. A miscellany of various scholarly notes (Past and present). 7. The Italian Risorgimento (in the sense of Omodeo’s L’età del Risorgimento Italiano but emphasizing the more strictly Italian motifs). 8. Father Bresciani’s progeny. Popular literature (Notes on literature). 9. Lorianism. 10. Notes on journalism. Apart from documenting Gramsci’s desire to continue with ‘A miscellany of various scholarly notes’ (n. 6), and regardless of the intervening ‘Encyclopedic notions and cultural topics’ at n. 3, the headings ‘Intellectuals’ (n. 1, then developed in Notebook 12), ‘Machiavelli’ (n. 2, then developed in Notebook 13 and, subsequently, in Notebook 18), and ‘Introduction to the study of philosophy’ (n. 4, then developed in Notebook 11) give a clear sense of what Gramsci initially saw to be his hierarchy of subjects. There is, on the other hand, no explicit reference to a ‘philosophy of Benedetto Croce,’ though that would be the subject matter of the first of the ‘special’ Notebooks, namely Notebook 10. But, on April, 12 Tatiana (with Piero Sraffa’s endorsement) announced she would soon send him Benedetto Croce’s History of Europe, asking for his ‘observations’ which, she explained, ‘could be very useful for my work.’8 This request from Tatiana and Sraffa forced a novelty into the plan of work drawn up for Notebook 8, evoking one of those main themes in the ‘miscellaneous’ Notebooks which Gramsci had already identified in one of his lists and possibly thought of dealing with, let us say, obliquely across all of the ten headings in this new list: the promise of the History of Europe, instead, provoked a more direct engagement with the philosophy of Croce than the Notes on Philosophy and the Notes on Dante had

8 P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci, edited by V. Gerratana, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1991, p. 59, footnote.

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permitted; this inspired him to devote a ‘special’ Notebook to the ‘philosophy of Benedetto Croce.’ At the same time, Notebook 10 only came first in the numbering sequence of the ‘special’ Notebooks, because in parallel Gramsci also began composing Notebooks 12 (on intellectuals) and 13 (on Machiavelli), which he started working on no later than May. Lastly, the writing of Notebook 11, which in many regards is the culmination of Gramsci’s theoretical work and the most systematic of his writings, largely overlapped with the writing of Notebooks 10, 12, and 13, and has a unifying function to the extent that it clarifies how the philosophy of praxis provided the common theoretical basis for the analyses in the neighboring notebooks.

2 Early Considerations on the History of Europe, the Origins of the Anti-Croce Writing on April 12, Tatiana forewarned Gramsci that Croce’s History of Europe would soon reach him: not stating her actual intent, she instead asked him to produce ‘a review’ (‘you should write a review because it interests me a lot’) and added that his comments would be ‘useful’ to her for a work she had undertaken (‘your observations could be very useful for my work’).9 Tatiana was acting under instruction from Sraffa and the aim was to keep Gramsci mentally engaged for his own sake; within this framework of benevolent make-believe, then, what Tatiana had in mind was a game of Chinese boxes whereby Gramsci would write an actual review of Croce’s new book which she would then use in her own work. The volume was in fact sent to the prison in Turi10 and Gramsci confirmed its arrival on May 9; but he was denied access to it, because ‘the books sent to me were not delivered to me; for each one I would have to make a request to the Ministry, which is absurd as well as tedious.’11 That copy of the book is part of the collection at the Fondo Gramsci,12 but he certainly had no access to it at the time of this correspondence with

9 Idem, p. 59, footnote. 10 Idem, p. 61 and p. 63, footnote 2. 11 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 111. 12 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 4, edited by V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino

1975, p. 3046: ‘F. [ondo] G. [ramsci], C. [ontrassegni] carc. [erari], Turi, the Warden’s signature is missing.’

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Tatiana,13 and still in August was applying to the head of government to be granted leave to make use of it. The letters and notes on the History of Europe were therefore written without Gramsci’s having direct knowledge of the work: what he had read, however, were some anticipations, such as the Capitoli introduttivi presented in 1931 at the Accademia di scienze morali e politiche della Società Reale di Napoli14 and perhaps also the extract produced by the Academy of Croce’s Le rivoluzioni del 1848, il compimento del moto liberale-nazionale e la crisi del 1870.15 So, in his reply on April 18, he immediately clarified he would write ‘a few critical notes’ which he hoped would be useful to Tatiana, but ‘not a full review,’ in that ‘it would be difficult work to improvise.’16 At the same time, Sraffa and Tatiana were asking to have ‘an outline of at least 50 pages of his history of intellectuals.’17 Citing Sraffa’s words, Tatiana wrote: ‘at the time, you promised a 50-page outline of the History of Intellectuals: it should be ready by now.’18 Gramsci answered rather categorically in his letter of May 2, saying it would not come, because, ‘my point of view on the question sometimes changes: it is perhaps still early for me to summarize and synthesize it. It is still in a fluid state and will need further elaboration.’19 This goes to show how the groupings of subjects presented in Notebook 8 overlapped and changed places, so that the first of them, on ‘Intellectuals,’ which at first seemed to lend the idea of the special notebooks most of its substance, now appeared to recede as it had not been sufficiently elaborated to be dealt with directly. The Croce suggestion that had come from Tatiana came to the fore, whereas Notebook 12, on the ‘history of intellectuals,’ remained grounded.

13 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 2826–2827, footnote 1. 14 B. Croce, Capitoli introduttivi di una storia dell’Europa nel secolo decimonono, «Atti

della R. Accademia di scienze morali e politiche di Napoli», F. Sangiovanni, Naples 1931. See Antonio Gramsci. I Quaderni e i libri del carcere, edited by F. Giasi, Arkadia, Cagliari 2017, p. 151: ‘on the half title N 67, 7047, Gramsci Antonio, warden Azzariti’s approval, with the round stamp of the special prison at Turi.’ 15 B. Croce, il compimento del moto liberale-nazionale e la crisi del 1870, «Atti della R. Accademia di scienze morali e politiche di Napoli», F. Sangiovanni, Napoli 1931. 16 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 105. 17 P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci, edited by V. Gerratana, Editori Riuniti,

Roma 1991, p. 58. 18 Idem, p. 60, footnote 3. 19 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 110.

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Though he did not possess the History of Europe (the importance of which he clearly understood from what he had read), Gramsci was immediately won over by the desire to reckon with Croce’s philosophy. We may plausibly suppose (this, at least, is our guess) that over the following days, approximately between April 12 (date of Tatiana’s letter) and April 18 (date of his first answer on matters to do with Croce), Gramsci wrote the first two pages of Notebook 10 and laid down ‘some methodological criteria’ at the opening of the first of the ‘special’ Notebooks. Those criteria read as an introductory survey, but already spell out the basic principles of his analysis. It may be read as a kind of guide, the contents of which were to be expanded and developed in subsequent notes. Firstly, the last three of these notes (§§ 3–5) give a bibliographic reference to three key points in the elaboration to come: there is a reference to a letter by Sorel,20 concerning Croce’s influence on Bernstein and in general on revisionism; a reference to a passage by Guido Calogero on the relationship between Croce and Hegel’s dialectic,21 that had already appeared (but was not quoted extensively) in Notebook 622 ; and there is a reference to a passage from Etica e politica (from the chapter Stato e Chiesa in senso ideale e loro perpetua lotta nella storia) dealing with the relationship between force and consensus, which is to say hegemony.23 Having identified these three themes, therefore, Gramsci limited himself to making a note of the documentation that was available or seemed more relevant to him. In the brief introductory note and in the first two notebook paragraphs (§ 1 and § 2) he also made a short, but considerably to the point, note of the main guidelines in assessing the philosophy of Croce and its attendant problems. First of all, the general principle was that it was necessary to ‘study the philosophy of Croce’ not in an extrinsic or prejudicially polemical way, but ‘in accordance with some of the criteria affirmed by Croce himself.’ That meant not addressing the ‘general philosophical question,’ but contextualizing it in its own time in order to understand 20 ‘Lettere di Georges Sorel a Benedetto Croce,’ in La Critica, 1927, p. 311 (letter xlv, September 9, 1899). 21 G. Calogero, ‘Il neohegelismo nel pensiero italiano contemporaneo,’ in Nuova Antologia, 1930, pp. 409–427. 22 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 805 (Q8; PN Vol. 3, p. 233). §143 is dated October 1931. 23 Gramsci is referring to the chapter entitled ‘The Unending Struggle Between Church and State,’ in B. Croce, PM , cit., pp. 183–191.

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its ‘reflecting’ the current mode of existence; it also involved examining not only ‘the systematic and organic works’ but the ‘minor writings’ and diverse expressions of the ‘philosophical biography’ of an author, and then proceeding to study his critics, be they ‘positivists, neo-Scholastics, present-day idealists.’ Above all, he identified what seemed to him the core of Croce’s philosophy as historiography, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ‘philosophy of practical activity, political science, and ethics.’24 The theory of history and the philosophy of practical activity thus struck Gramsci as the principal headings of Croce’s philosophical work and his most remarkable achievements, making it necessary to start from there. Following that, in paragraphs 1 and 2, Gramsci dwelt on the critical points in Croce’s system of thought; while recognizing the significance of Croce as one of the chief critics of the philosophy of praxis, Gramsci believed he could show there were problems in the philosophy of Croce that only the philosophy of praxis could overcome. Croce had the merit of affirming the identity of philosophy and history and had given a new meaning to historicism in the terms of his doctrine of individual judgment. This thesis, ‘most rich of critical consequences,’ was a derivation from historical materialism, probably in the interpretation of Antonio Labriola; and, at any rate, was ‘immanent in historical materialism,’ Gramsci underlined.25 It supplied the foundation for the philosophy of praxis and marked Croce’s superiority over his critics and their objections (beginning with Gentile). However, Gramsci too leveled two fundamental objections against Croce’s understanding of it. The first objection concerned the relationship between ‘becoming’ and the ‘“concept” of becoming.’ Gramsci wrote: the point to clarify is this: does Croce see becoming as becoming itself or as the ‘concept’ of becoming? This seems to me the point from which we need to start the analysis: 1) the historicism of Croce, and in the last analysis, his conception of reality, of the world, of life, which is to say his philosophy ‘tout court’ [...]. While it is necessary, in the constant flow of events, to fix certain concepts without which reality could not be understood, it is also necessary, and indeed essential, to have firmly in mind that while reality in motion and the concept of reality can be logically treated as 24 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1239 (Q10, 1). 25 Idem, p. 1241 (Q10, 1a).

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distinct, historically they must be conceived as an inseparable whole. What otherwise happens is what happens with Croce, that history becomes a formal history, a history of concepts, and in the final analysis a history of intellectuals, or rather an autobiographical history of Croce’s thought, a history of flies who believe they drive the coach.26

Removing ‘every residual trace of transcendence’ from historicism, Gramsci rejected Croce’s understanding of ‘categories,’ which in the Crocean system were the agents of historical becoming. While it was possible to operate the distinction between concepts and becoming, becoming had to come first: and that was to say, the actual unity of historical process, and therefore the historical ‘genesis’ of all concepts. On this matter, Gramsci went back to Labriola’s original critique of Croce, and indeed brought Labriola up in these lines. This observation, however, was followed by a further critique. Croce’s merit was to have of grasped (partly through the influence of historical materialism) the identity of philosophy and history, which is to say he had grasped the full meaning of historicism. But where Croce saw a dyad, the philosophy of praxis added a third term, politics, which Croce had not brought within the scope of the theoretical understanding of historiography and had ascribed to the domain of practical volition, passion, and feeling. But when philosophy, history, and politics were identified, as Gramsci did, the entire frame of reference changed: the logical, theoretical nature of judgment could find its authentic source in practical activity (in economic volition), and so reunite (as praxis) what Croce had separated. Gramsci wrote: Croce’s proposition of the identity of history and philosophy is most rich of critical consequences: 1) it is mutilated if it does not also come to the identity of history and politics (and by politics we must understand that which gets realized and not only the different and repeated attempts at realization, some of which fail in themselves) and 2) therefore also the identity of politics and philosophy. [...] If the politician is a historian (not only in the sense that he makes history, but in the sense that operating in the present he interprets the past), the historian is a politician; and in this sense (which Croce also sees) history is always contemporary history, which is to say, it is politics: but Croce cannot arrive at this necessary conclusion,

26 Idem, pp. 1240–1241 (Q10, 1–1a).

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precisely because it involves the identification of history and politics, and therefore of ideology and philosophy.27

The observation about the ‘identification of history and politics, and therefore of ideology and philosophy’ raised a further problem, the grave implications of which Gramsci soon saw. If philosophy came to be identified not only with historiography but also with politics, and originated no longer in the theoretical act alone, but also in the practical act, it followed that philosophy could no longer be regarded a disinterested understanding of the world but was an ideological construct, produced by one social ‘force’ or another on the grounds of that social force’s particular ends and interests. It was a serious matter, which again evoked the theme of the end of philosophy, and which Gramsci regarded as a perilous trap. He wrote: but if it is necessary to acknowledge this identity [of politics and philosophy], how is it then possible to distinguish ideologies (which are, according to Croce, instruments of political action) from philosophy? That is, the distinction will be possible, but only in terms of degrees (quantitatively) and not qualitatively. Ideologies, indeed, will be the ‘true’ philosophy, because they will turn out to be the philosophical ‘vulgarizations’ that incite the masses to concrete action, to the transformation of reality. That is, they will be the mass dimension of any given philosophical conception, which in the ‘philosopher’ assumes the nature of abstract universalism, outside of time and space, which are peculiar traits of a literary and anti-historical origin.28

There is the tension of intrinsic, perhaps intimate contradiction in the tone of the passage. Having laid down the critique of Croce, Gramsci honestly and acutely drew the sums and showed that from the identification of philosophy and politics it followed that the ‘true’ philosophy would be in fact an ideology, and that the distinction between ideology and philosophy would be a matter of ‘quantitative’ criteria alone. The implications of his own logic, Gramsci acknowledged, meant that ‘ideologies’ were to be understood as the vulgate of a philosophical conception, but capable of inciting the masses to concrete action: being ‘the mass

27 Idem, pp. 1241–1242 (Q10, 1a). 28 Ibidem.

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dimension of any given philosophical conception,’ its popular representation or mythological translation, the ideology allowed the penetration of theoretical concepts into ‘common sense’ and could translate into concrete mass action. That was again the Hegelian account of the status of myths and religion (to which Croce subscribed, besides); far from resolving philosophy into ideology, this conception instead presupposed ideology, which it regarded as inferior philosophy, as the conversion of philosophy into forms that the masses would receive as familiar. Gramsci faltered: on the one hand was his aversion to abstract philosophy, floating ‘outside of time and space,’ which made him work toward its full reunification with politics and practical activity; but, by regarding ideology as the ‘vulgarization’ of a philosophy, he wound up reaffirming the preeminence and priority of philosophy proper.29 Such was the import of Gramsci’s initial considerations on the History of Europe—which let us be reminded, he had not been able to read. Between the April 18 letter to Tatiana (though the exact date is not known) and early June, Gramsci laid down the ‘general methodical criteria’ in a series of six letters30 and a cluster of five entries in Notebook 8 (§§ 225, 227, 233, 236, 240). Over the same period, between April and May or June, Gramsci probably also reworked these thoughts into the final pages of Notebook 10, seeking to give an even more effective and coherent presentation of his observations. All of the work was done within a very short span of time, as Gianni Francioni has noted.31 Within the space of less than two months, Gramsci had given a masterly example of his circular mode of work, in which the same thoughts were taken up and revised several times in different places, with additions and revisions made. If we look at the letters to Tatiana and the corresponding notes in Notebook 8, two advances on the introductory page to Notebook 10 stand out, both addressing the meaning of ethico-political history. They bear witness (hence their significance) to Gramsci’s acquired ability to bring his own critical categories to bear on Croce, namely the concept

29 A preoccupation with the issue of ideologies, ‘in the pejorative sense,’ stuck with Gramsci over the subsequent period; cf. for instance, entry II, 24 in Notebook 10: idem, p. 1263 (Q10, 8). 30 The letters are dated April 18, April 25, May 2, May 9, May 23, and June 6. 31 G. Francioni, L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei «Quaderni del

carcere», cit., p. 104.

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of hegemony and that of a passive revolution.32 In the letter of May 2, he touched upon the analogies between Croce’s idea of ethico-political history (of which, he wrote, ‘the History of Europe ought to be and become the paradigm’) and the principle of hegemony, but indicated two limits of Croce: while grasping the concept of hegemony, in fact, Croce in effect denied its presence in the philosophy of praxis and, furthermore, ‘hypostatized it,’33 which is to say he isolated it from the dialectic of the ‘historical bloc,’ unable to see its relation with the ‘structure.’34 What he wrote to Tatiana on May 2, and was primarily intended for the exiled Party directive, was rather significant in this regard: One can concretely say that, in historico-political activity, Croce only stresses the moment that in politics is called ‘hegemony,’ consensus, or cultural orientation, to distinguish it from the moment of force, coercion, or the legislative and official intervention of the state, or otherwise of police intervention. If truth be said, it is not at all clear why Croce believes his approach to the theory of history can do away with all philosophy of praxis once and for all. As a matter of fact, right at the time in which Croce elaborated what he appears to see as an ultimate weapon, the greatest modern theorists of the philosophy of praxis were working in that very direction and the moment of ‘hegemony’ or cultural orientation was being systematically revalued against the mechanistic and fatalistic conceptions of economism. Indeed, it has been possible to affirm that the essential feature of the philosophy of praxis in its most modern form consists precisely in the historico-political concept of ‘hegemony.’35

Courting paradox, Gramsci put both Croce and Lenin in the same class and contrasted their position with the ‘mechanistic and fatalistic conceptions of economism,’ but also with politics enacted without hegemony, without consensus, and thus merely authoritarian and enforced. Ideas

32 Gramsci’s resorting to these categories in his assessment of Croce is probably to be also interpreted in terms of his communication with the Party headquarters in exile, apprising Sraffa and Togliatti of the developments in his theoretical and political reflection. 33 The metaphor of the ‘arbitrary and mechanical hypostasis of the moment of hegemony’ was to appear in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1222 (Q10, 45), but is already implicit in the letter of May 2 and the corresponding notes in Notebook 8. 34 See, idem, pp. 1237–1238 (Q10, 50a). 35 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 110.

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along these lines were expressed in Notebook 8, where Croce’s conception of history was again compared with the ‘aspect of “hegemony” in the State’ and to the ‘history of the intellectuals and specifically of the great intellectuals, all the way to the top—to the intellectual who has expressed the central nucleus of the ideas that are dominant in a given period.’36 In more analytical mode, at other places Gramsci distinguished ethics and politics and regarded only the former as referring ‘to the activity of civil society, to hegemony,’ and the latter to domination, ‘to state or governmental initiative and coercion.’37 With more specific emphasis on the link of hegemony with the ethical dimension, Gramsci also showed how Croce had in fact come to recognize ‘the “true” State in civil society, in the moment of consensus and hegemony, bringing to full development a promising intuition of Hegel’s.’ The other aspect to emerge in the letters and in the Notebook 8 entries was the connection with the ‘passive revolution,’ namely the idea that Croce, in writing the History of Italy and the History of Europe, had ‘tamed’ the conflict by starting the two narratives from 1870 to 1815 and leaving out the revolutionary premises of the histories he related.38 The point was clearly made in Notebook 8 that ‘Croce’s book is a treatise on passive revolutions (to use Cuoco’s phrase), and they cannot be explained or understood in the absence of the French Revolution, which was a European and world event, not just a French one.’39 Shortly afterwards, Gramsci also observed this question could be linked with that of the ‘“war of position” as opposed to war of movement.’40

36 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1084 (Q8§227; PN Vol. 3, p. 373). 37 Idem, p. 1302 (Q10, 21). 38 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 112. 39 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1088 (Q8§236; PN Vol. 3,

p. 378). A philosophical development of this criticism of Croce, with reference to the Hegelian dialectic, can be found at p. 1221 (Q10, 44a–45), where Gramsci wrote, among other things: ‘that such a way of conceiving the dialectic was mistaken and “politically” dangerous, was clear to the politically moderate Hegelians during the Risorgimento, such as [Bertrando] Spaventa.’ 40 Idem, p. 1089 (Q8§236; PN Vol. 3, p. 378). Let us recall that in Notebook 10 (9a) Gramsci would stress that ethico-political historiography ‘really crowns all of the philosophical work of Croce,’ whose work, he added, ‘all leads to this outcome’ (ibid., pp. 1267–1268).

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In Notebook 8, Gramsci was now able to state the task of the ‘Anti-Croce’ and adopted (for the first time) an expression that was to recur in Notebooks 10 and 11 but never appears in the letters (nor was, we may suppose, related to the direct or indirect recipients of the letters). Speaking of the contrast between speculative philosophy and the philosophy of praxis, he wrote that: All historicist theories of a speculative character have to be reexamined and criticized. A new Anti-Dühring needs to be written from this point of view, and it could be an Anti-Croce, for it would recapitulate not only the polemic against speculative philosophy but also, implicitly, the polemic against positivism and mechanistic theories—degenerations of the philosophy of praxis.41

In the Notebook 10 entries, the Anti-Croce formula was accounted for at greater length. Gramsci again made the point that in Croce’s conception could still be discerned the influence of the philosophy of praxis, albeit translated ‘into speculative language.’ He cited, in this connection, his encouragement to the younger generations to reflect on the writings of ‘Europe’s greatest thinker’ when, in 1917, he had reprinted Croce’s article ‘Religione e serenità’ in La città futura.42 That text from fifteen years back showed some immaturity, he now thought, though it expressed a valid position that should be given ‘a critically more elaborate form.’ The matter was still one of ‘reckoning with the philosophy of Croce,’ or rather of becoming ‘heirs’ to what was ‘the current exponent, worldwide, of classical German philosophy,’ and to regard it still as ‘the premise for a revival of the philosophy of praxis.’ But, at the same time, it was also necessary to criticize this ‘premise’ and to conduct a similar operation on ‘the philosophical conception of Croce … that the early theorists of the philosophy of praxis conducted on the conception of Hegel.’ There was thus a marked difference between his attitude in 1917 and 1932. In 1917, he remembered, he had regarded Croce’s philosophy as the ‘premise’ for the philosophy of praxis, whereas now, in 1932, that ‘premise’ had to be held firm but at the same time refuted. The formula of the ‘Anti-Croce’

41 Idem, p. 1088 (Q8§235; PN Vol. 3, p. 378). 42 A. Gramsci, ‘Due inviti alla meditazione,’ in La città futura, February 11, 1917

(reprinted in A. Gramsci, La città futura 1917–1918, edited by S. Caprioglio, Einaudi, Turin 1982, p. 21).

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stood to indicate this task of superseding, in a dialectical sense, the thesis that was to be regarded as most relevant. He thus wrote: Croce fights the philosophy of praxis with too much acrimony and his choice of allies in this battle, such as the mediocre De Man, is paradoxical. His doggedness is suspect, and may turn out to be a ruse to avoid a proper settling of scores. But an open and in-depths settling of scores is exactly what is in need. Work of that order, an Anti-Croce that might have the significance and importance within the modern cultural atmosphere that the Anti-Dühring had for the generation before the Great war, would be worth the work of a whole group of men over ten years.43

The most pertinent comment to this passage was given by Gramsci himself in a Notebook 10 entry in which he observed that Engels’ statement about Marxism being the heir to classical German philosophy was to be understood not in the sense of a ‘historical circle already completed’ in which ‘the vital part of Hegelianism has already been definitively absorbed once and for all,’ but ‘as a historical process still in motion in which the necessity for a philosophical cultural synthesis is being renewed.’44 The ‘synthesis,’ he explained, was necessary because once again materialism and idealism had become separated and it was the task of the philosophy of praxis, in the wake of Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach, to unite them yet again. The conception underlying the Anti-Croce, in short, entailed the theoretical demand for recurring, or even perpetual, work of dialectical synthesis and unification that would enable the philosophy of praxis to cast off the one-sidedness of materialism and to acknowledge the internal truth of idealism—while still criticizing the contradictions and vestiges of pure speculation of the latter. The critique, that is, was to go together with the capacity to incorporate the live philosophy and respond to its shortcomings. The concept came up again in Notebook 11, in the short § 51 (a ‘C text’ in which Gramsci reworked § 235 of Notebook 8). The difference between the two versions resides in the fact the C text (following by a few months) lays greater emphasis on the ‘immanentist conceptions’ which the philosophy of praxis is intended to fulfill precisely by eliminating the

43 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1234 (Q10, 49–49a). 44 Idem, p. 1248 (Q10, 3a; SPN , p. 402).

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speculative moment that still characterizes Croce’s theory. The revised entry reads: concepts and philosophical positions to be examined in an introduction to the study of philosophy: transcendence, theology, speculative philosophy, speculative historicism. Has not ‘speculation’ (in the idealistic sense) introduced a new type of transcendence into the reform of philosophy characterized by immanentist conceptions? It seems as if the philosophy of praxis is the only consistent ‘immanentist’ conception. It is particularly worth re-examining and criticising all historicist theories of a speculative character. A new Anti-Dühring could be written, which from this point of view would be an ‘Anti-Croce,’ and which brought together not only the polemic against speculative philosophy but also that against positivism, mechanicism and degenerate forms of the philosophy of praxis itself.45

The question of ‘immanence’ came to acquire a special meaning in the context of the Anti-Croce and in Gramsci’s general system of thought. One of the B texts in Notebook 10, for example, clarifies the meaning acquired by the term in the philosophy of praxis, stressing that immanence signified not only the surpassing of transcendence, but also synthesis and therefore translatability: ‘at the origin of the philosophy of praxis,’ he wrote, are the ‘three cultural movements’ of classical German philosophy, classical English economics, and French politics; the ‘new concept of immanence’ therefore indicates ‘the unitary “moment” of synthesis,’ ‘which has been translated from the speculative form, as put forward by classical German philosophy, into a historicist form with the aid of French politics and English classical economics.’46 Again, this was not a ‘historical circle already completed,’ but the perpetual task of translating the distinct terms of philosophy, of economics, and of politics one into the other, correcting and integrating what in the thought of Croce had been conceived only at the level of speculative philosophy.

45 See, idem, pp. 1476–1477 (Q11, 62; SPN , p. 371). 46 Idem, p. 1247 (Q10, 2a–3; SPN , pp. 399–400).

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Hegemony of Croce?

Gramsci came to see the work of Croce as a transcription of the philosophy of praxis into speculative terms. In Notebook 7 he had defined Croce a ‘historical materialist “unconsciously” or consciously in the sense of what he calls “surpassing.”’47 In the Notebook 10 re-elaboration, he instead wrote ‘Croce was a philosopher of praxis “without knowing it.”’48 The concept of ‘transcription’ lends itself particularly well to sum up this interpretative module, which has a peculiar complexity. On the one hand, it marks the point of the highest level of awareness that Marxism came to achieve philosophically, signally for its critique of materialism as its own ‘degraded form.’49 On the other, it marks the inadequacy of Croce’s attempt to transcribe Marxism into a philosophy that was, however, a speculative philosophy; and that was the same as missing the essential point of Marxism, which could only find expression in the formulae of the ‘historical bloc’ and of the ‘overturning of praxis.’ Gramsci, that is, believed Croce’s philosophy needed to be resumed and continued, but also, and foremost, criticized—which is to say corrected as to the speculative limitations that it incorporated. And that was, in short, the point of the Anti-Croce. The idea that Croce had effected a transcription of the philosophy of praxis brought along with it a definite periodization of his intellectual biography, which Gramsci held to in all his assessments of Croce. Within the limits that his condition of inmate allowed, in terms of keeping abreast with Croce’s studies, Gramsci could envisage three phases prior to 1932: firstly, there had been Croce’s studies on Marx, which represented one of the high points in late nineteenth-century Marxist theory, and had influenced Bernstein and Sorel and initiated the whole revisionist current; then, the construction of the system, from the great Aesthetic in 1902 to the essays in Teoria e storia della storiografia (constituting the fourth volume of the philosophy of spirit), which Gramsci saw as the culmination of the speculative transcription of Croce’s original insights; finally, subsequent to the Great war, the start of his regression and decline, coinciding with his failure to take on board the significance of the new framework brought about by Lenin and the Soviet Revolution, followed 47 Idem, p. 854 (Q7§1; PN Vol. 3, p. 156). 48 Idem, p. 1298 (Q10, 20). 49 Idem, p. 1291 (Q10, 17a).

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by his polemic against communism and historical materialism, which had to be understood as the ‘a disavowal (or rather reversal) of Croce’s initial, pre-1900 position […], a logically unjustified reversal, [which] is also a disavowal, equally unjustified, of his own previous philosophy (at least a conspicuous part of it).’50 Croce’s denial of Marxism, essentially, cut him off from the source from which his own philosophy and historicism had sprung. What clearly interested Gramsci was Croce’s system, the philosophy of the spirit as elaborated in the Aesthetic, then the Logic and Philosophy of the Practical, through the essays in the Theory & History of Historiography. As Gramsci saw it, the transcription of the philosophy of praxis had taken place in the years 1902–1917, a time in which Croce had developed the cardinal concepts that the Anti-Croce now needed to discuss, assimilate, and criticize—the critique of the Hegelian dialectic, the distinct forms of reality, the dispute with Gentile, the theory of error, the framing of politics as passion, and the discussion of ideologies and religion. True though it was that the ‘minor writings’ deserved careful study, it was in these ‘systematic and organic works’51 that the great speculative problems emerged. Gramsci’s critique of Croce, besides, which ultimately addressed the reasons for the latter’s ‘disavowal’ and ‘reversal’ of Marxism, increasingly narrowed down to the erroneous interpretation of Marx and Marxism, whereby, as Croce had affirmed, ‘the philosophy of praxis “separates” the structure from the superstructures, thus re-issuing the dualism of theology and positing an “unknown god-structure.”’52 This was the principal misapprehension in Croce, since, to Gramsci’s mind, the philosophy of praxis introduced no separation of the structure, which instead was incorporated in the circle of the historical bloc, was discernible in the ‘overturning of praxis’ and in its indissoluble link with the movement of the superstructures. On closer inspection, we are to read this as both a critique and an acknowledgment: that was the way the matter stood to Gramsci’s mind—and that was partly a tribute to what he himself had learnt from Croce; but it could not equally be said that was also the exact state of affairs with Marx and early twentieth-century Marxism (which had been, in fact, Croce’s intended target).

50 Idem, p. 1298 (Q10, 20). 51 Idem, p. 1239 (Q10, 1). 52 Idem, p. 1300 (Q10, 20a).

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If our assessment is correct, it is easy to understand the place Gramsci assigned to Croce in Italian and European philosophy—a position defined by the twin metaphors of the Renaissance and Reformation: in Gramsci’s estimation, Croce had achieved actual hegemony on the intellectual class, not just in Italy but worldwide, but his philosophy (notwithstanding his views on the religion of liberty, expressed in the History of Europe)53 had failed to engage common sense and so operate an effective ‘intellectual and moral reformation’; he had failed to achieve, that is, a full hegemony. As a philosopher, Croce had exerted a strong and justified influence on European culture, but not hegemony. Gramsci spoke, in fact, of an ‘inadequacy of idealist philosophy to become an integral (and national) conception of the world,’54 writing that ‘Croce did not “go to the people,” did not wish to become a “national” element […] did not wish to create a band of disciples who […] could have popularized his philosophy and tried to make it into an educative element, starting in the primary school.’55 The insistence, here and at other places, on the want of the ‘“national” element’ in Croce sheds light, moreover, on Gramsci’s understanding of the ‘cosmopolitan intellectual,’ ‘world leader of culture,’56 or even of a ‘lay pope’57 —who cannot, unlike the actual Pope, ‘influence whole masses of people.’ Croce’s influence, that is, was ‘profound,’ and even ‘ingrained,’ ‘less clamorous than Gentile’s’ but more effective.58 And yet, it was limited by his ‘Erasmian’ stance as ‘Renaissance’ character, by his want of hegemony, of a concrete, reformational hold on national common sense. In essence, ‘from 1900 to 1914’ (the period between the first issue of La Critica and the composition of the greater systematic works) Croce was, together with Giustino Fortunato, ‘the national leader of the cultural movements which arose to renovate the old political forms.’59 His

53 See idem, p. 1298 (Q10, 20): ‘in fact, the History of Europe is the first of Croce’s books in which his anti-religious convictions assumed active political significance and could reach an unprecedented audience.’ 54 Idem, p. 1294 (Q10, 19). 55 Idem, p. 1294 (Q10, 18a; SPN , p. 132, note 14). 56 Idem, p. 1302 (Q10, 21a). 57 Idem, p. 1307 (Q10, 23; SPN , p. 56). 58 Idem, p. 1306 (Q10, 23). 59 Idem, p. 1353 (Q10, 37a; SPN , p. 150, note 39).

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influence could be seen in the emergence of ‘every creditable new youth movement,’ such as La Voce, L’Unità, L’Azione liberale, La Patria, and, above all, Piero Gobetti’s La Rivoluzione liberale, which accomplished the first authentically revolutionary translation of the principles of Croce’s newly founded liberalism. And the same influence could also be seen, we may add, in L’Ordine nuovo, which in 1919 had already begun to embody the Anti-Croce in concrete terms, relying on some of Croce’s fundamental concepts but, at the same time, subjecting them to critical review.

4

The ‘Dialectic of the Distinct’

The most significant instance of ‘translation’ of the philosophy of praxis in the terms of Croce’s philosophy of spirit, Gramsci noted, concerned ‘the principle of distinction’ or, as he often called it, the ‘dialectic of the distinct.’60 The category of utility, that is, was the most conspicuous outcome of Croce’s studies on Marx and historical materialism; although it involved the mediation of pure economics, Croce’s category of utility came close to translating the principle at work in Marx’s theory into the economic form of reality. The reason, he added, for which ‘many of the Actual idealist philosophers’ do not understand the importance of the distinctions is that this passage in the logic is structurally linked to historical materialism. In the subsequent entry (which reworked two texts from Notebook 1), he praised Croce’s ‘truly heroic’ resistance to the ‘degradation of traditional philosophy’ at the hands of Gentile and the Actual idealists, whose chief fault was to have identified ‘philosophy’ with ‘ideology,’ the ‘real’ with the ‘ideal,’ ‘theory’ with ‘practice.’61 Against such unwarranted conflations, Croce had fought ‘with all his might’ since the Great war, when ‘ideology and philosophy entered into a frenetic union’62 ; Croce, with his Pagine sulla guerra, was to be credited for keeping each of those conceptual pairs distinct and for rescuing the universal value of culture: for these reasons, he concluded ‘the study of his writings from 1919 to the present is of the greatest value.’63

60 Idem, p. 1354 (Q10, 38). 61 Idem, p. 1355 (Q10, 38a). Cf. Q1§132; PN Vol. 1, p. 216. 62 Idem, p. 1356 (Q10, 38a). Cf. Q1§132; PN Vol. 1, p. 216. 63 Idem, p. 1356 (Q10, 38a). Cf. Q1§132; PN Vol. 1, p. 216.

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Here and at other places, Gramsci openly acknowledged Croce’s intellectual role. Unlike Gentile, Croce had distinguished philosophy and ideology, and had been able to do so because he had inherited the principle of distinction from the philosophy of praxis. But when he attempted to go further into the matter, the details were far less clear and Gramsci found the doubtful issues to prevail. His main doubts concerned Croce’s critique of Hegel (initiated in 1906), in terms of the ‘dialectic of the distinct,’ whereby Croce had subtracted the fundamental forms of reality (intuition, the concept, volition) from the logic of opposites and the dynamics of contradiction. Immediately he perceived this reform of Hegelianism concerned not only Croce, but also Gentile, and Spaventa before them, as well as other Neapolitan exponents of Hegelianism. The questions he asked revealed a fundamental anxiety, an unresolved perplexity: it remains to be seen whether the movement from Hegel to Croce-Gentile was not a step backwards, a ‘reactionary’ reform. Have they not made Hegel more abstract? Have they not left out the more realistic, historicist part of that philosophy? And is that not the part of which the philosophy of praxis represents, within certain limits, a reform and surpassing? And was it not the philosophy of praxis, globally regarded, that caused Croce and Gentile to take this turn, even though they used this philosophy for particular doctrines?64

The idea that the reform of dialectics might have been ‘reactionary’ and a ‘step back’ from Hegel is formulated recurrently in the Notebooks. At the same time, the converse conception was also held—that the logic of the distinct could not be given up. Gramsci accounted for the problem in historical terms, remarking how Hegel’s work descended from the French Revolution and Napoleon, whereas the entire Italian tradition, from ‘Vico-Spaventa-(Gioberti)’ to ‘Croce-Gentile’ was rooted ‘in historic events whose importance was regional and provincial.’ And he concluded: ‘Herein lies the fundamental difference between Vico and Hegel, between God and Providence and Napoleon as world spirit, between pure abstract speculation and the philosophy of history which should lead to the identification of philosophy with history, action with thought, and the German proletariat as the sole inheritor of classical 64 See idem, pp. 1316–1317 (Q10, 26).

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German philosophy.’65 The difference between Vico and Hegel was mirrored in Croce and Gentile—sons and heirs, under this interpretation, no longer of Hegel and Marx, but of Vico, Gioberti, Spaventa and, therefore, of the backwardness of the Italian national tradition. This remained a moot point, however, and the relationship between Croce and Hegel one of the most insidious questions for Gramsci. The solution proposed by Croce was ‘merely verbal,’ but the methodological question of acknowledging that, alongside opposites, there is also the matter of the distinct was a real one.66 Wondering whether, besides a ‘historical solution,’ a ‘speculative solution’ could be given to the problem, Gramsci ventured to examine the fundamental concept of his own meditation, that of the historical bloc or overturning of praxis, to see how, and to what extent, that allowed to account for ‘distinction.’ While it seemed clear that the superstructures (art, morality, philosophy, etc.) had to be distinct from each other, thus recreating among the forms of consciousness the ‘dialectic of the distinct’ (no longer understood as eternal categories, but as superstructural forms, with a genesis in structure and in history), the problem of defining the fundamental link between the two terms of the historical bloc, i.e., structure and superstructure, was much more complex. In the degraded version of materialism, the superstructures were the illusory reflection of the ‘hidden god,’ of structure, and had no reality or autonomy of their own. In Gramsci’s conception, on the other hand, the circle in which structure and superstructures were bound had to be so conceived that each of the two terms had its own actual reality, in a relationship that was of mutual distinction as well as dialectical. In a crucial passage in Notebook 10 (which reworked an entry on Machiavelli from Notebook 4), Gramsci gave an incisive, dramatized, and once again problematic representation of the problem. He wrote: What we can say, meanwhile, is that while politico-economic obsession (practical, explanatory) destroys art, morals, philosophy, these activities are intrinsically also ‘political.’ That is, economico-political passion is destructive when it comes from outside, is imposed by force, according to a pre-established plan (and that it should be so may be politically necessary, and there are times when art, philosophy, etc. slumber, while 65 Idem, p. 1317 (Q10, 26a). Cf. Q4§56; PN Vol. 2, p. 234. 66 Idem, p. 1316 (Q10, 25a).

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practical activity is always in motion), but it may also become implicit in art, etc., when the process is normal, non-violent, when there is homogeneity of structure and superstructures and the State has overcome its economico-corporatist stage.67

There was a distinction to be made, that is, between historical phases of domination, in which the superstructures ‘slumber’ but practical activity remains ‘in motion,’ and phases of ‘hegemony,’ in which ‘there is homogeneity of structure and superstructures and the State has overcome its economico-corporatist stage.’ Only the latter situation, in which the process is ‘normal,’ allowed the relation between structure and superstructures to be regarded in its correct theoretical terms. That’s when ‘the politico-economic obsession’ ceases to ‘destroy’ art, morals, and philosophy and the relationship between the two moments is reversed: it is at such phases, that is, that these activities become political, whereas the ‘politico-economic’ moment becomes implicit—which is to say that it springs from the unbridled activity of those forms. In this passage, the central theme of which is the question of the distinct in Croce, Gramsci came to the conclusion that when the structure becomes ‘obsession,’ it ‘destroys’ the superstructural forms (in a similar way, we may add, to Croce’s category of the useful/vital). Structure, he could also now claim, arises from the activity of superstructural forms, which is exactly the overturning of praxis in the terms of the third thesis on Feuerbach—and that was, at this stage in Gramsci’s elaboration, the way in which the physiognomy of the ‘structural’ moment came to be determined.

5

The Speculative ‘Residue’ and Fate of Philosophy

By means of a singular (and intentional) substitution of concepts, Gramsci proposed to identify religion as the essential element in Croce’s doctrine. In point of fact, Croce did not regard religion as the synthesis of theory and practice, but a representational form that came about within the domain of economic and practical volition and that, because of its intrinsic limitations, could not translate itself into the full dimension of the concept. In a passage in Notebook 10, Gramsci openly admitted to

67 Idem, p. 1316 (Q10, 26).

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not having a clear understanding of the place of religion in the philosophy of the spirit, writing that ‘it would not be surprising if Croce maintained the practical origin of mythological religions,’ in spite of not having, he added, ‘so far explicitly written’ as much.68 Without adequate access to the works, he could only sense in which direction Croce’s understanding of religion was going, but not place it exactly within his speculation. Basing himself on a set of earlier readings (the fragment on ethics from ‘Religione e Serenità,’ which he had reprinted in 1917, the article on Church and State, and the initial chapters of the History of Europe, where the religion of liberty was introduced), and taking as starting point an observation made in the 1931 Capitoli introduttivi, Gramsci came to a formulation of religion as ‘a conception of reality with a morality conforming to this conception, presented in mythological form.’ From which he concluded that ‘every philosophy, that is, every conception of the world, is religion, inasmuch as it has become a “faith;” that is, inasmuch as it is not regarded as a theoretical activity (creation of new thought) but as a stimulus to action (concrete ethico-political activity, towards the creation of new history).’69 Religion, essentially, realized the mutual conversion of theory and practical activity, the synthesis and overturning: and in this sense, he clarified, the ‘significance’ and the ‘intellectual function’ of Croce were ‘those of an authentic religious reformer’70 who could not be reconciled with the myths of traditional religion. Several times Gramsci named the Calvinist model, since Calvinism had been able to convert a religious conception into a norm of practical existence, into a dynamism of initiatives unheard of in the initial stages of the Reformation. The meaning that religion, as a ‘bloc’ of theory and action, had for the philosophy of praxis is stated clearly in § 54 of Notebook 10, a B text, in which Gramsci tackled the question of ‘What is man?’ as the ‘first and principal question of philosophy.’71 The matter was not one of defining human nature; rather, Gramsci asked ‘what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he “make himself,” can he

68 See idem, pp. 1299–1300 (Q10, 20a). 69 Idem, p. 1217 (Q10, 43a). 70 Idem, p. 1218 (Q10, 44). 71 Idem, p. 1343 (Q10, 34a; SPN , p. 351).

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create his own life?’72 The ‘most important’ of the ‘ways of considering life and man’ came from the religions, and the Catholic in particular: however mistaken the conception, it nonetheless permeated common sense and was reproduced in ‘all hitherto existing philosophies.’ Christian and Catholic anthropology thus presented themselves as the funding metaphysics of European culture, to which must stand opposed another religion in the form of a ‘morality in conformity with a new conception of the world’—a conception that would not veer off into mere speculation but translate into action and a shared way of life. The new starting point, then, had to be the community, the meaning of social spheres and of history, which is to say the relationships of men with ‘other men,’ as well as with ‘the natural world,’ since ‘it is through these “societies” that the individual belongs to the human race.’73 Still, Gramsci firmly held that ‘the source of this activity is the consciousness of the individual man who knows, wishes, admires, creates (in so far as he does know, wish, admire, create, etc.) and conceives of himself not as isolated but rich in the possibilities offered him by other men and by the society of things of which he cannot help having a certain knowledge.’74 Giving center place to the ‘individual being,’ to individual freedom, while coming to see it as the mainspring of the societas hominum and of the societas rerum, was to be the principle of a new religious conception, of a new Weltanschauung and renewed way of existence. Religion had produced that connection of theory and action which was also ‘the central nexus of the philosophy of praxis, the point at which it becomes actual and lives historically (that is socially and no longer just in the brains of individuals), when it ceases to be arbitrary and becomes necessary-rational-real.’75 The becoming real of theory, its translation into a ‘morality appropriate to it’ that could give a new configuration to common sense, represented, for Gramsci, the exact realization of the ‘overturning of praxis’ of which Marx had spoken.76 Structure and superstructures were, thus, related in the newly conceived terms of this fundamental circle, in which theory ceased to be speculative, because it 72 Idem, pp. 1343–1344 (Q10, 34a–35; SPN , p. 351). 73 Idem, p. 1346 (Q10, 35a; SPN, pp. 351–353). 74 Ibidem (SPN , pp. 353–354). 75 Idem, p. 1266 (Q10, 9; SPN , p. 369). 76 Ibidem (SPN , p. 369).

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had its genesis in praxis, but equally acted upon the structure of action and overturned it—which is to say that it transformed it in a revolutionary sense. While the subject was, then, born within the structure, it had the specific means to realize its catharsis, i.e., to realize itself on the terrain of superstructures (of theory proper, that is) and prepare the grounds for the overturning which is the essential moment of the revolution (namely, intellectual and moral reform). As Gramsci saw it, that was the ‘core of the philosophy of praxis,’ the point upon which all of theoretical Marxism had to converge and then be profoundly rethought. Framing things thus, Gramsci was inevitably faced with all of the issues that had occupied the minds of Croce and of other classic authors, to whom he now turned, for his own elaboration, within the limits that his small library allowed. The fundamental lines of the circle of theory and praxis were clear enough, but that circle was a theoretical device that became problematic when it came to the relations between its various constitutive terms. First of all, there was to establish whether theory, which had its genesis in praxis, was fully resolved and accounted for in terms of praxis, or was instead possessed of its own reality and intrinsic energy, of its own autonomy. Croce had solved the problem with his critique of the dialectic and the theory of the distinct forms of the spirit. Within the circular relation of theory and practice, that is, he saw theoretical knowledge as presupposing the reality of a practical world of volition, wherein the matter and content of judgment resided; but also that it remained distinct from its object on account of its internal principle of intuition and logic. Arguing that ‘practice takes precedence,’77 Gramsci changed the terms of the question and was forced to clarify the meaning and limits of such precedence. If theory was the outcome of praxis, it followed that every speculative effort would constitute an ideology, a conception that was organic to the social group that was the expression of the structure. If, conversely, theory could make itself separate from its origin in practice, then it became again necessary to distinguish between ideology and philosophy, between a worldview that descended from the social structure and a critical capability that had its own margin of autonomy. This question was squarely posed by Gramsci and became a primary theme in his meditation. He wrote:

77 Idem, p. 1272 (Q10, 11).

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link between philosophy, religion, ideology (in the Crocean sense). If religion is to be understood as a conception of the world (a philosophy) with standard of conduct conforming to it, what difference can there be between religion and ideology (or means towards action) and ultimately between ideology and philosophy? Is there or can there be a philosophy without a moral will that conforms to it? Can the two aspects of religion, the philosophy and norm of conduct, be conceived as separate and how can they be so conceived? And if philosophy and morality are always unitary, why must philosophy logically precede practice and not vice versa? Or is such framing not absurd, and should we not conclude that the ‘historicity’ of philosophy is one and the same as its ‘practicality’?78

If philosophy and moral will could be separated, it followed that philosophy and ideology were distinct and that the philosophy could in no way be conflated with ideology. Of course, ‘practice takes precedence,’ as Gramsci often repeated, and the categories need to be understood in their concrete historical genesis. But, within these limits, philosophy was not resolved into ideology: this was, in fact, the essential point which caused a real break with the tradition of theoretical Marxism. Indeed (as Gramsci variously underlined), if philosophy were to be resolved into ideology, there could be no talk of a philosophy of praxis. Croce’s interpretation of the theses on Feuerbach, according to which Marx’s intent was to ‘repudiate’ and altogether ‘do away with’ philosophy in general, not just traditional philosophy, was thus to be rejected categorically. Following Engels, Gramsci instead insisted that ‘the “heir” is the continuator of his predecessor,’79 transforms his work but continues it, preserving the meaning of his knowledge. Analogously, and still polemizing with Croce, he repeated that the superstructures are not illusions; they are reality, and indeed constitute the fundamental reality by way of which the overturning of praxis is possible. In the same entry, Gramsci formulated two distinctive expressions to explain the place of philosophy within the circle of theory and practical activity. First of all, he claimed that once philosophies are historicized there remains a speculative ‘residue’ which ‘will not be so great as would initially appear,’ but which must be ‘owned’ and ‘justified’ because it

78 Idem, pp. 1269–1270 (Q10, 10). 79 Idem, p. 1271 (Q10, 10a).

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constitutes the moment of philosophy proper, the one which cannot ultimately be fully historicized: is not ‘philosophy’ just that which is ‘residual’ after the analysis by means of which the ‘social’ component in the work of the philosopher is identified? We must first own this claim and justify it mentally. After we have distinguished what is social or ‘historical’ in a given philosophy, and corresponds to a requirement of practical life, to a requirement that is neither arbitrary nor cerebral (and this is certainly not always an easy distinction to make, especially if attempted presently and without enough perspective distancing), it will be necessary to assess this ‘residue,’ which will not be so great as would initially appear if the problem were posed from the angle of Croce’s prejudice that it is a futility or a scandal.80

In the second place, reaffirming Croce’s principle of the identity of philosophy and history, he claimed there is an ‘implicit’ philosophy in practical activity to which philosophers must give a coherent and systematic, explicit, theoretical form. Gramsci had probably Lenin in mind, which is to say the affirmation of the principle of hegemony by practical means alone, which the philosophy of praxis would elaborate as theory. There was also at work the Hegelian notion of philosophy as the apprehension of one’s own time through thought, but recast in critical terms, in the sense that the task of explicit philosophy is not only to bring out the truths of common sense, but to rectify them in preparation for the overturning of praxis: in any case, what emerges is the theoretical passage whereby the philosophy of praxis, while being the continuation of Hegelianism, ‘overturns’ it and yet does not, as Croce believes, seek to ‘supplant’ all kinds of philosophy. If philosophy is the history of philosophy, if philosophy is ‘history,’ if philosophy evolves because the general history of the world evolves (meaning, the social relations in which men live) and not because a great philosopher supplants a greater philosopher, and so on, it is clear that by the practical work of making history one is also making ‘implicit’ philosophy which will be made ‘explicit’ by the coherent elaboration of philosophers; problems of knowledge will be posed which, alongside their ‘practical’ form of resolution, will sooner or later be given a theoretical form by specialists, after

80 Idem, p. 1272 (Q10, 11).

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that popular common sense (embodied in the practical agents of historical transformation) has posed them in their naive form.81

The question of the ‘residue’ and the distinction between ‘implicit philosophy’ and ‘explicit philosophy’ introduced a considerable complication into the structure of the philosophy of praxis, as numerous other examples would confirm. If it was correct to say that ‘the principle must first be established that all men are “philosophers,”’ the problem was to understand ‘exactly what the difference consists in,’ so that, from the midst of all other men, a philosopher rises above other men to produce a coherent system of thought.82 In Notebook 10 and subsequent Notebooks, Gramsci enlarged upon this theme by addressing the question of unity and of distinctions. This is where the critical examination of Croce came into definition, indicating the main lines of Gramsci’s new conception of Marxism, starting from the key questions of intellectuals and hegemony. Reasoning in § 17 of Notebook 10, for example, on ‘Croce’s definition of religion as a conception of the world which has become a norm of life,’ Gramsci redefined the terms of the identity of philosophy and historiography by radically rethinking the scope of the historiography of philosophy; while part of its work was to address the ‘philosophy of philosophers’ (representing the highest expression of an epoch in the form of theoretical systems), it also, and above all, had to investigate the ‘conceptions of the world held by the great masses’ together with those ‘of the more restricted leading (or intellectual) groups.’83 Strands that had been severed were being woven again into an organic conception of the philosophy of history in which the ‘conceptions of the world’ that were rooted in the social fabric, both among the ‘intellectuals’ and as common sense, defined the point of conjunction between philosophy and history and, most importantly, indicated the place at which to come to terms with historicity. While the underlying principle of a philosophy resided in a Weltanschauung, that Weltanschauung was also the founding moment of history for its capacity to impress its mark on an epoch. Gramsci recombined what tradition had separated, calling for a broader look at civilization and the past. But immediately he returned to the fundamental

81 Idem, p. 1273 (Q10, 11a). 82 Idem, p. 1342 (Q10, 34–34a; SPN , p. 347). 83 Idem, p. 1255 (Q10, 5a; SPN , pp. 344–345).

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question: the elements of what reality presents as a ‘bloc’ needed to be distinguished; the analysis must follow the synthesis; and while it was correct to point out the organic wholeness of the historical flow, one still had to return to the ‘philosophy of philosophers’: The philosophy of an historical epoch is, therefore, nothing other than the ‘history’ of that epoch itself, nothing other than the mass of variations that the leading group has succeeded in imposing on preceding reality. History and philosophy are in this sense indivisible: they form a bloc. But the philosophical elements proper can be ‘distinguished,’ on all their various levels: as philosophers’ philosophy and the conceptions of the leading groups (philosophical culture) and as the religions of the great masses. And it can be seen how, at each of these levels, we are dealing with different forms of ideological ‘combination.’84

Historicity was produced by the ‘combination’ of elements, from the fact that philosophy, the activity of intellectuals, and common sense formed an actual ‘bloc.’ But the task of philosophy of praxis was then to disarticulate the whole, to govern the separate moments, ‘distinguish’ one from the other and assign its specific function to each one. This problem was the greatest and came to orient all of Gramsci’s philosophical analysis. Before Gramsci attempted to order these thoughts (in Notebook 11, above all), the matter had already come up, as, e.g., in Notebook 13 (‘annotations on the politics of Machiavelli’), where he began to rework an entry from Notebook 8.85 Defining the philosophy of praxis a ‘systematic (coherent and logical) conception of the world,’86 and then reflecting on the place of political science within it, he tried to translate Croce’s circle of distinct forms into the categories of Marxist theory that were more congenial to him. The distinction was not to be sought among ‘the moments of the absolute Spirit,’ as Croce believed, but ‘the levels of the superstructure’; while upon first approximation the principle of distinction touched on the mutual relation between superstructures, these, on a global level, had to have a different relationship with the structure. Before he came to this consideration, he added that, among the different levels of the superstructure, the moment of ‘political activity’ came first, but 84 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1255 (Q10, 5a; SPN , p. 345). 85 See, idem, pp. 977–978 (Q8§61; PN Vol. 3, pp. 271–272). 86 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1568 (Q13, 4a; SPN , p. 136).

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the fact that politics represented ‘the first moment or first level’ in the circle of superstructures was not the same as claiming that it took priority in eminence: politics, he said, is the ‘first level’ because at that level ‘the superstructure is still in the unmediated phase of mere wishful affirmation, confused and still at an elementary stage.’87 The sequence of the superstructures, that is, was to be understood as starting from politics (even though the superstructures remained mutually distinct and translatable), but only to the extent that politics, in itself, stood as the lowest and most immediate of all levels. What this logic entailed was that ‘political activity’ was not hegemony, and that the latter, in order to result in the overturning of praxis, needed to be realized at all levels of the circle of superstructures (in art, philosophy, and morals) and so lead to the emergence of a full subjectivity capable of expressing the hegemony. The clarification, while important, did not fully answer the question of the status of the distinct in the philosophy of praxis. Gramsci had done so much as clarifying that the superstructures constitute a circle of distinct levels in mutual relation to each other, and that ‘political activity’ took first place in the circle inasmuch as it was the ‘unmediated,’ ‘confused,’ and ‘elementary’ stage in that circle. But the question of the relationship of the superstructures, not among themselves, but with the structure, remained. Gramsci made the most succinct of remarks to hint that, while the logic presiding over the superstructures was one of mutual distinction (which for him meant translatability), the structures were governed by a different logic: by the dialectic of ‘contraries,’ as he wrote, by which he certainly meant ‘opposites’ and ‘contradictories’ in the Hegelian sense. His phrasing was: concept of ‘historical bloc,’ i.e. unity between nature and spirit (structure and superstructure), unity of contraries and the distinct.88

If the historical bloc defined the general terms of the relation between structure and superstructures, the ‘unity of contraries’ and unity of ‘the distinct’ had to indicate the internal logic of each of the two spheres; in the sense that the one, governed by the dialectic of opposites, generated not just itself but also the other, which instead was governed by the circle

87 Ibidem (SPN , p. 137). 88 Idem, p. 1569 (Q13, 4a; SPN , p. 137).

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of the distinct. The rigor of Croce’s philosophy of the spirit was shattered: for Croce, what made forms distinct was that within them they nestled the opposition of contrary terms (the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the good and the evil); here, instead, it was not contradiction that ran through the distinct forms, but their mutual translatability, whereas the source of the dialectical movement lay beyond them, in the structure that had generated them. More precisely, the superstructures, starting from the immediate level of politics, found the opposition and contradiction within themselves because they were generated by the structure: because of the contradictory nature of the structure, that is, they preserved an ideological nature as the mark of a conflict which was in place when they originated and of which they represented a projection (to at least some extent). In a regulated society, Gramsci repeated at several places, the distinct levels would be rid of that ideological function which they derived from the structure: ‘there will be no more social contradictions, so that the only dialectic will be that of the idea, a dialectic of concepts and no longer of historical force.’89 This, however (and Gramsci again made the point in this entry) did not mean, as Croce had wrongly thought, that the superstructures were ‘appearances,’ illusions devoid of substance, and that the structure instead pointed to a ‘hidden god,’ a ‘noumenon.’ The essential point was that Gramsci believed the superstructures to be as real as the structure. In the systematic representation of reality that the philosophy of praxis intended to give, reality was made up of the relation of the two moments: of the dialectical structure and of the arrangement of the superstructures in a circle of distinct levels. And the relationship that held between the structure and the superstructures was, strictly speaking, neither dialectical nor of distinction, but indicated, rather, the connection between the two logics of the opposites and of the distinct. As we know, this connection bore the name of historical bloc, or, in the language of Marx’s theses, of the ‘overturning of praxis.’ The sequence of the distinct levels that began in ‘political activity,’ was, in short, called upon to ‘overturn’ the dialectic of the structure, that hinged on the logic of opposites.

89 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1482 (Q11, 64bis; SPN , p. 370).

CHAPTER 8

Praxis

The crowning concept of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, ‘civil hegemony,’ was expounded in Notebooks 8 and 13. This development in the theory involved the analysis of the dynamics of modernity, with the interplay between the national component and the international dimension, which had evolved to become global and cosmopolitan; it also involved an inquiry into the fundamentals of politics in the light of the categories of civil society and of the order of the superstructures. Gramsci’s nearest sources, Hegel, Gioberti, Croce, and Lenin, provided the basis for a fully developed theory of the constitution of the political subject, and this (at a time characterized by advanced development and the crisis of the nation-states) he saw as embodied in collective will and in the political parties: unlike Machiavelli’s ‘live’ myth, that is, the ‘modern Prince’ was a collective entity. Moral and intellectual reform were to give concrete expression to the idea of a war of position, supplanting the old notion of a revolution and of a war of movement, and realizing the overturning of praxis. For the latter to occur, there was needed a robust political and intellectual mediation that would take the workers’ movement beyond its economic-corporative stage.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4_8

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1

Hegemony and Criticism

In Notebook 7, Gramsci had produced translations from the German out of the anthology of Marxian writings Lohnarbeit und Kapital, including ‘the two fundamental principles of political science’ from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, dated January 1859.1 The passage from Marx went: A social order does not perish until all the productive forces for which it still has room have been developed and new and higher relations of production have taken their place, and until the material conditions of the new relations have grown up within the womb of the old society. Therefore, mankind only poses for itself such tasks as it can resolve; if one observes more closely, one will always find that the task itself only arises when the material conditions for its resolution already exist or at least are in the process of formation.2

In the Notes on Philosophy, these texts had served Gramsci to counter Croce’s tendentious reading and argue for the reality of ideologies—the fact that ‘ideologies are far from arbitrary’ and ‘are real historical facts.’3 The key passage for this interpretation of Marxism also came from the 1859 Preface, where it preceded immediately the passage cited above: With the change in the economic foundation the entire massive superstructure is subverted more or less rapidly. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which has to be assessed faithfully with the method of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic forms: in short, the ideological forms on the level of which men become conscious of this conflict and resolve it.4

1 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, edited by V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino 1975, p. 1774 (Q15, 13; SPN , p. 106). 2 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), edited by G. Cospito and G. Francioni, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma 2007, p. 747 (SPN , p. 432). 3 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1319 (Q10, 27). 4 The wording of Gramsci’s Italian translation from the German is as follows: ‘col

mutamento della base economica si sovverte tutta la enorme superstruttura più o meno rapidamente. Nell’osservazione di tali sovvertimenti bisogna far distinzione tra il sovvertimento materiale nelle condizioni della produzione economica, che deve essere constatato

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Together with the theses on Feuerbach (translated on the previous page of Notebook 7), this latter short extract from Marx provided the basis for the most mature phase in the prison meditation, because it encapsulated the core of the theory of hegemony and because the concept of a passive revolution could be ‘rigorously deduced’ from it.5 In short, the passage did not give the solution to the problem but stated the terms and the limits within which it had to be framed. Together with the key concept of the overturning of praxis from the third thesis on Feuerbach,6 it showed how the process that leads to the formation of the political subject was a matter that still needed to be clarified, because it could not simply be ‘deduced’ from the material base of the structure but had to be elaborated on the ‘level’ at which ‘men become conscious of this conflict and resolve it.’ In stark contrast with the position held by Mondolfo, the overturning of praxis meant defining the figures of political subjectivity, repossessing humanity, in the context of advanced modernity, of the unity of theory and action and the ability to give shape to the structure itself (starting from the economic base) under the ensigns of a communal, historically based enterprise. The text in which the problem was elaborated with greatest intensity was written between June and July 1932,7 on twelve pages in Notebook 11 (sheets 11–22), to inaugurate the Introductory notes to the study of philosophy and the history of culture and came under the separate title i. Preliminary references. This is a well-known text, which engaged Gramsci

fedelmente col metodo delle scienze naturali, e le forme giuridiche, politiche, religiose, artistiche e filosofiche, in una parola: le forme ideologiche, nel cui terreno gli uomini diventano consapevoli di questo conflitto e lo risolvono.’ A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), cit., p. 746. Cf. K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. (from the second German edition) N.I. Stone, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904, p. 12 (In the English translation, this passage of translation from the German into Italian reads: ‘With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’). 5 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1774 (Q15, 13; SPN , p. 106). 6 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), cit.,

p. 744. 7 See G. Francioni, L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei «Quaderni del carcere», Bibliopolis, Napoli 1984, pp. 109 ff . and, in summary form, p. 144.

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for about a month; while full of hesitations and leaps in logic, it also gives a comprehensive picture of the results of his speculation at that time. And while it is a ‘C text,’ reworking notes from Notebook 8 and one from Notebook 10, a careful look at the textual variants will plainly show how a radical transformation had occurred, and also how, in a short span of time (a matter of weeks, in some cases) new questions had emerged to enrich the investigation. The starting point was the observation, from the third series of the Notes on Philosophy,8 that ‘It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing,’ and ‘the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers.’9 On the contrary, ‘all men are “philosophers,”’ possessed of a ‘spontaneous philosophy’ that is immanent to praxis and ‘proper to everybody,’ and comes to them through language, which incorporates ‘determined notions and concepts’; through the ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’ in which they necessarily participate; through ‘popular religion’ and ‘folklore,’ which imply ‘beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and acting.’10 Philosophy was not, then, a name to reserve for theoretical systems and specialist works, but belonged to ‘all men,’ because no living being goes without a more or less coherent and valid conception of the world. There was, therefore, a spontaneous philosophy, such as popular religion, which defined the historical structure of an era. Gramsci, however, gave a very critical, and complex, reading of such common sense. In the first place, it had the feature of being ‘disjointed’ and ‘episodic,’ like ‘a conception of the world mechanically “imposed” by the external environment,’ especially by conformism within a social group11 ; the philosophy of the ‘man-in-the-mass,’ or ‘collective man,’ that is, was traversed by insoluble contradictions: even within an ‘individual consciousness, let alone collective consciousness,’ it had the character of fragmentation and was nothing like the ‘intellectual order’ that philosophy stands for.12

8 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1063 (Q8, 63bis). 9 Idem, p. 1375 (Q11, 11; SPN , p. 323). 10 Ibid. 11 Idem, pp. 1375–1376 (Q11, 11-11bis; SPN , p. 323). 12 Idem, p. 1378 (Q11, 12a; SPN , pp. 324–326).

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This notion of a demotic philosophy was not intended as praise of common sense, but as a means to criticize it with greater force and precision. Upon closer inspection, three features of this spontaneous philosophy stand out. In the first place, Gramsci regarded ‘good sense,’ or ‘the healthy nucleus that exists in “common sense,”’ as ‘overcoming bestial and elemental passions through a conception of necessity which gives a conscious direction to one’s activity.’13 The framing of common sense as a ‘passion’ constitutes a precise reference to Croce’s Philosophy of the Practical, in which volition (praxis) was presented as overcoming the multiplicity of passions in a unifying act of true will.14 Secondly, spontaneous philosophy bore the weight of the past in the form of tradition and had not been redeemed by thought in the concreteness of current praxis.15 The third aspect, outlining the contradictory nature of spontaneous philosophy, was the most complex. The contradiction of the ‘active man-in-the-mass’ who ‘has a practical activity’ resided in his having ‘two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness),’ to the extent that on an implicit level he acted for the practical transformation of reality, but on another level, simultaneously, he was the expression of an ‘explicit or verbal’ philosophy that contradicted that implicit praxis, a philosophy ‘which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.’16 The question was not one of the contrast between theory and praxis, but between two theories, between an ‘implicit’ philosophy, capable of affirming as action the reality of the will, and an ‘explicit’ philosophy that was simply ‘inherited’ from the past. This framing of spontaneous philosophy gave rise to the need for criticism17 and the particular form of its determination. The ‘level of awareness and criticism,’ as he called it, was to present itself as the unification of that which is ‘disjointed’ and ‘episodic.’ Unification meant overcoming anachronism, the weight of the past, in order to match current levels of advanced thinking: ‘To criticize one’s own conception of the world means therefore to make it a coherent unity and to raise

13 Idem, p. 1380 (Q11, 13a; SPN , p. 328). 14 B. Croce, Filosofia della pratica. Economica ed etica, a cura di M. Tarantino,

Bibliopolis, Napoli 1996, pp. 155–163 (PM , pp. 215–228). 15 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1383 (Q11, 15-15bis). 16 Idem, p. 1385 (Q11, 16; SPN , p. 333). 17 Idem, pp. 1375–1376 (Q11, 11-11bis; SPN , p. 323).

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it to the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world.’18 Criticism was meant not as abstract work, but as the concrete business of raising common sense to the current level of historical progress, and so also converting it into ‘good sense’: in this resided the connection between the unification of common sense and the process of worldunification, the new kind of cosmopolitanism discussed in the Notebooks. The method for the exercise of such criticism was free discussion and dialectics, understood as the capacity to assert one’s reasons, assimilating otherness, and discerning ‘arbitrary constructions’ from those that are historically founded.19 The passage that so alarmed Mondolfo (‘Nor is it inconceivable that individual initiatives should be made orderly and disciplined, passing through the sieve of academies or cultural institutes of various kinds and only become public after undergoing a process of selection, etc.’)20 was not an invocation of censorship enacted by political power, but referred to dialectics, to Gramsci’s faith (unwarranted, perhaps) in historical process, in its ability to discern what is real and rational from what is arbitrary and purely individual. In the face of the contradictoriness of spontaneous philosophy, criticism was to make explicit what was implicit in practical activity, raise it to the level of consciousness, unburden action of the weight of anachronism, and reunify the internal with the external. The task of politics as Gramsci came to envisage it was to conduct such criticism, in the ‘secular sense’ of establishing a unity ‘between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct,’21 which is to say between theory (the explicit philosophy) and praxis (the implicit philosophy). In the key passage on this theme, he specified that within the consciousness of the ‘active man-in-the-mass,’ ‘a struggle of political “hegemonies” and of opposing directions’ took place which could go so far as total inertia, the cessation of all life and action; only ‘political consciousness,’ as the real form of hegemony, could trigger the process of unification, bolstering practical activity with theory. He thus wrote:

18 Idem, p. 1376 (Q11, 11a; SPN , p. 324). 19 Idem, pp. 1392–1393 (Q11, 20bis-21; SPN , p. 341). 20 Ibid. 21 Idem, p. 1378 (Q11, 12bis; SPN , p. 326).

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critical understanding of self takes place through a struggle of political ‘hegemonies’ and of conflicting directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper, leading to a superior elaboration of one’s own conception of reality. Consciousness of being part of a particular hegemonic force (that is to say, political consciousness) is the first stage towards a further progressive self-consciousness in which theory and practice will finally be one. Thus the unity of theory and practice is not just a matter of mechanical fact, but a part of the historical process, whose elementary and primitive phase is to be found in the sense of being ‘different’ and ‘apart,’ in an instinctive feeling of independence, and which progresses to the level of real possession of a single and coherent conception of the world. This is why it must be stressed that the political development of the concept of hegemony represents a great philosophical advance as well as a politicopractical one. For it necessarily supposes an intellectual unity and an ethic in conformity with a conception of reality that has gone beyond common sense and has become, if only within narrow limits, a critical conception.22

Shortly below, he identified ‘political parties’ (plural, let us note) as ‘the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place.’23 In these passages, taken as a sequence, his central philosophical theme of the criticism of spontaneous philosophy (taken to the ideal limit of a reunification of theory and praxis, i.e., of a transparent and self-conscious praxis) became conjoined with the categories of politics, hegemony, and the history of intellectuals, and so came to outline the modern conception of the function of political parties as the bearers of a system of knowledge in line with ‘the most advanced thought in the world.’ This was the notion of an accomplished philosophy in which practical activity and theory mirrored each other—with action being freed of the ‘verbal’ trappings of the past and springing from a free and self-conscious will. Gramsci insisted that this was a ‘process’ that had to be seen as ongoing and would be continually beset by the reemergence of division.24 He underlined, above all, that these dynamics of hegemony were to be taken as an open theoretical problem, not a readily applied recipe. The ‘fundamental problem,’25 as he called it, resided in the

22 Idem, pp. 1385–1386 (Q11, 16bis; SPN , pp. 333–334). 23 Idem, p. 1387 (Q11, 17bis; SPN , p. 335). 24 See, ibid., pp. 1386–1387 (Q11, 17; SPN , pp. 333–334). 25 Idem, p. 1380 (Q11, 13bis; SPN , p. 328).

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separation between the intellectuals and the people, between the originators of criticism and the ‘simple,’ who were to be raised to the ‘the most advanced thought in the world.’ The ‘immanentist philosophies’ (as he called them, meaning idealism) had foundered on that point and reenacted a Renaissance without Reformation, upholding a conception they could not divulge to the people.26 The question of criticism and common sense took concrete form as the ‘fundamental problem’ of the ‘ideological unity between the bottom and the top, between the “simple” and the intellectuals.’27 Up to a point, the terms of the question were the same as in the later analyses of Gioberti, whose Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia featured a circular relation of the ‘populace’ with ‘ingenuity’ as the constitutive premise for democratic thought. Criticism of this order was not to be conducted in outward and abstract form but should bring to maturity some of the seeds contained in the practical activity of common sense, making explicit what was already implicit and spontaneous in practical activity, and realizing the historical stage of self-consciousness. What was necessary, he wrote at one point, was ‘to produce élites of intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset’28 ; and shortly afterwards envisaged the figure of ‘a great individual philosopher,’ come out of the bosom of the masses, almost in the guise of ‘a collective thinker.’29 Philosophy (meaning ‘politics, hegemony’) was to elevate common sense from the inside (and not ‘only from without,’ as Lenin had famously declared in What is to be done?),30 removing the dross of folklore through a process of inner transformation, arising from the movement itself of practical activity. Gramsci insisted on the question of consensus, on a cultural transformation that was not imposed from the outside, was not a form of domination, and was not, therefore, in any way perceived as an abstraction. Still, Gramsci also had the strong, intensely felt awareness that the circle of the high and the low, that the connection between philosophy and the masses, between the intellectual class and common sense would 26 See, ibid., pp. 1381–1382 (Q11, 14-14bis; SPN , p. 329). 27 Idem, p. 1381 (Q11, 14; SPN , p. 329). 28 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1392 (Q11, 20; SPN , p. 340). 29 Idem, p. 1392 (Q11, 20-20bis; SPN , pp. 340–341). 30 V. I. Lenin, Opere Complete, Vol. 5, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1958, p. 389.

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be discontinuous, always at risk of breaking down, and that the revolutionary process, regarded from the angle of the superstructures, presented serious difficulties. In the ‘preliminary references’ portion of the text, the danger of aporia emerged twice at least. Firstly, when, pondering on what he had written, he explained that the ‘rational form’ of philosophy failed to be ‘decisive,’ to really be capable of driving common sense, and therefore had to assume the forms of representation, religion, and even faith. That was a markedly Hegelian (and Crocean) move, but also an acknowledgment of the fact that moral and intellectual reform, in order to be realized, would have to bow to the non-rational rule of faith, and would thus preserve, by way of such simplification, the distinction and separation between the conception of the intellectual élites and that of the popular masses: The rational and logically coherent form, the exhaustive reasoning which neglects no argument, positive or negative, of any significance, has a certain importance, but is far from being decisive. It can be decisive, but in a secondary way, when the person in question is already in a state of intellectual crisis, wavering between the old and the new, when he has lost his faith in the old and has not yet come down in favor of the new, etc. […] One can conclude that the process of diffusion of new conceptions takes place for political (that is, in the last analysis, social) reasons; but that the formal element, that of logical coherence, the element of authority and the organizational element have a very important function in this process immediately after the general orientation has been reached, whether by single individuals or groups of a certain size. From this we must conclude, however, that in the masses as such, philosophy can only be experienced as a faith.31

Secondly, looking at the example provided by religions, he observed that ‘to raise the intellectual level of ever-growing strata of the populace, in other words, to give a personality to the amorphous mass element,’ ‘repetition’ would be necessary as ‘the best didactic means for working on the popular mindset.’32 The separation between philosophy and popular mindset was at once criticized and rejected, but also maintained in a set

31 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1390 (Q11, 19; SPN , pp. 338– 339). 32 Idem, p. 1392 (Q11, 20; SPN , p. 340).

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of figures, such as ‘faith’ and ‘repetition,’ which ultimately confirmed its rationale. Fundamentally, all of Gramsci’s theorization revolved around the central point of the relation between theory and practice, which also emerged as the touchstone of his examination of recent Soviet philosophical debate, which ranged from Bukharin’s Handbook to the cultural policy of Stalin and reached further back to Lenin himself.33 Around the summer-autumn of 1931 Gramsci was able to read an excerpt of an article by Moscow correspondent Mikhail S. Farbman that had been printed anonymously in The Economist, which gave him an overview of the debate surrounding Soviet planning.34 More importantly, he had read the accounts by Dmitri Petroviˇc Svjatopolk-Mirskij (Prince Mirsky) in the Labour Monthly,35 remarking on the ‘great impression’36 this ‘résumé’ made on him. Mirskij’s articles gave him reason to claim that ‘One can see from this that a change has taken place from a mechanistic and purely external conception to one which is activist and, as has been pointed out, closer to a correct understanding of the unity of theory and practice, although it has not yet attained the full synthetic meaning of the concept,’37 and a few pages on, again with reference to Mirskij’s reports, that ‘The fading away of “fatalism” and “mechanicism” marks a great historical turning-point.’38 It is possible that in the current debate in the USSR he saw glimpses of a turning point, with planning policies being inspired by different principles than economic determinism. The chief argument, however, moved in the opposite direction, spelling out a radical critique of the ‘most recent developments of the philosophy of praxis,’ which were ‘at an early stage,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘still economic-corporative,’ in

33 See G. Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century,

Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (CH) 2021, pp. 141–142 and pp. 218–220. 34 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 893 (Q7, 72bis). See Tatiana’s letter dated July 26, 1931 (A. Gramsci, Lettere del carcere, Einaudi, Torino 1965, p. 449, note 1). 35 See N. De Domenico, Una fonte trascurata dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’ di Antonio Gramsci: il «Labour Monthly» del 1931, ‘Atti della Accademia Peloritana dei Pericolanti,’ 1991, pp. 1–65 (of the excerpt), to which we refer the reader for further details. 36 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1395 (Q11, 21bis; SPN , p. 343). 37 Idem, p. 1387 (Q11, 17bis; SPN , p. 336). 38 Idem, p. 1395 (Q11, 21bis; SPN , p. 343).

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which theory was seen ‘as a “complement,” or an “accessory” of practice, or as the handmaid of practice.’39 Fatalism and determinism still went unchallenged, denying ‘theory’ any other role than as an accessory of praxis. The overturning which Marx saw as the essence of the revolutionary process, in his third thesis on Feuerbach, remained a distant vision. In the ‘preliminary references,’ Gramsci described fatalism and mechanicism as ‘drugs’ that had a ‘stupefying effect,’ capable of stirring energies when there was no spark to action and human will lay ‘shamefaced’; but followed that by saying that it soon became a ‘cause of passivity, of idiotic self-sufficiency,’40 and that the time had come to pronounce their ‘funeral oration’ and bury them with ‘all due honors,’41 reinstating human intelligence and action to their proper function. In his criticism of the determinism that did away with theory, regarding it as an accessory to practical activity, and so reproduced the ‘Hauptmangel,’ the flaw, of all prior materialism, Gramsci took a determined stand against the entire tradition of Russian Marxism, despite the fact that, in Lenin, the opposite view of hegemony was implicit, though left undeveloped. The Bolshevik revolution had the insight, bringing itself initially into line with Marx’s early doctrines, but had then failed to follow through with the premises; in this regard, Bukharin’s Manual symbolized a broader and more disturbing involution. But Gramsci was also aware that the philosophical task of according theory its proper distinction was difficult and required the elaboration of original categories. It was, he wrote, ‘an aspect of the political question of the intellectuals.’42 More precisely, it was a question of outlining ‘a dialectic between the intellectuals and the masses’ as the ‘historical’ counterpart of the nexus of theory and practical activity. The determinist notion that theory was the ‘handmaid’ of practical activity had to be countered with ‘the creation of an élite of intellectuals.’ A ‘group of people “specialized” in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas’43 was needed, who could act as a ‘conduit,’ as he put it, for the translation of the conception that lay implicit in

39 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 1386–1387 (Q11, 16bis-17; SPN , p. 335). 40 See pp. 1388–1389 (Q11, 17bis-18; SPN , p. 337). 41 Idem, p. 1394 (Q11, 21bis; SPN , p. 342). 42 Idem, p. 1386 (Q11, 16bis; SPN , p. 334). 43 Ibid.

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practical activity into a ‘critical self-consciousness,’44 and could develop as theoretical expression (conceptual, philosophical) what was embodied, but in a contradictory and disjointed form, in practical conduct. The circle of theory and practice thus defined itself as the reciprocal genesis of the two moments, with theory rising above practical activity to make its implicit content consistent, only to again merge with it as the figure of a reformation that was at once intellectual (as the bearer of a worldview, of a philosophy) and moral (as expressing an adequate ‘norm of conduct’). But this circle, which he defined ‘dialectic between the intellectuals and the masses,’ also defined the task of political parties in a modern democratic society, in which the ‘quality-superstructure’ was ‘organically formed.’45

2

Intellectuals

From this vantage point, we are now in a better position to assess the divergence between Rodolfo Mondolfo’s philosophy of praxis and Antonio Gramsci’s. Mondolfo represented practical activity as capable of overturning the objective conditions it had itself produced, by virtue of its constitutive active component. In a conception that may be defined, with Norberto Bobbio, ‘humanistic historicism,’46 the inherent energy of the subject perpetually deconstructed and reconstructed reality. Things stood differently with Gramsci. In and of itself, practical activity was the seat of a contradiction. As such, it could not produce the overturning immediately, but required a particularly robust mediation which extended over the entire domain of the superstructures. Practical activity was, in fact, a complex structure in which an implicit drive toward the transformation of reality coexisted with a worldview that was inherited from the past and uncritically accepted: the principle of practical activity was constitutively enveloped, that is, by an anachronistic consciousness. In a decisive passage, Gramsci had written that ‘the active man-in-the-mass […] has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites

44 Idem, p. 1387 (Q11, 17bis; SPN , p. 335). 45 Idem, p. 1387 (Q11, 17; SPN , p. 335). 46 Bobbio, Introduzione, in R. Mondolfo, Umanismo di Marx. Studi filosofici 1908–

1966, Einaudi, Torino 1975, p. xvi.

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him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.’47 This state of affairs of conflicting consciousnesses could theoretically produce an outcome of total inertia, as indeed appeared to be the case with Marxism in Russia, which had discovered, with Lenin, the principle of the ‘practical transformation of the real world,’ only to shroud it in the ‘idiotic self-sufficiency’ of ‘primitive’ materialism which could not fail but become the ‘cause of passivity.’48 In the first instance, the principle of practice required the active mediation of the intellectual to emerge—a figure Gramsci envisaged as having to be defined by two peculiar features. First of all, contrary to the tradition, the intellectuals ceased to be separated from the masses because their task was not to generate ‘arbitrary constructions’49 nor to criticize current worldviews from the outside, but to unify and elevate to a level of theoretical consistency the vital core of practical activity that was implicit in common sense: intellectual work (theory) was therefore not external, but internal to praxis. In Hegelian terms, the rationality of theory was identical with the rationality of the real. Secondly, because the outcome of intellectual work was not an ‘arbitrary construction,’ it acquired in Gramsci’s perspective the nature of a collective, communal process: the intellectual, that is, was ‘organic’ and promoted his worldview by means of the modern political parties. This again led to the question of hegemony, which Gramsci understood not as a class-defined point of view, as perspective of the proletariat, but as ‘the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world.’50 The value of this expression must be understood in all its implications because it stood to indicate the task of ‘modern cosmopolitanism,’ which in Gramsci’s 1930s analysis came to definition in his considerations on Americanism, culminating in the work on Notebook 22. For Eugenio Garin, the problem of the intellectuals ‘was the point around which all of the analysis came to revolve’51 : 47 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 1385 (Q11, 16; SPN , p. 333). 48 Idem, pp. 1388–1389 (Q11, 18; SPN , p. 333). 49 Idem, p. 1393 (Q11, 20bis; SPN , p. 341). 50 Idem, p. 1376 (Q11, 11bis; SPN , p. 324). 51 E. Garin, Gramsci e il problema degli intellettuali (1967), in Id., Intellettuali ital-

iani del xx secolo, cit., p. 327. Giuseppe Vacca, on the evidence of further analysis, has defined the theory of intellectuals as ‘the dynamic nucleus of Gramsci’s thought’ (G. Vacca, Alternative Modernities. Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, cit., p. 36).

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Gramsci regarded the intellectuals as agents of the mediation required to create the conditions for the overturning, which is to say the constitution of the political subject. These thoughts were developed in a set of entries in Notebook 12, written around the same time as §12 in Notebook 11,52 reworking ideas expressed in Notebook 4,53 and dating back to 1930, to which he gave greater breadth and depth. From the first line, Gramsci addressed the crucial question of whether intellectuals (and therefore also their defining feature, the intellect) were ‘an autonomous and independent social group, or does every social group have its own particular specialized category of intellectuals?’54 The general terms of the answer were consonant with Gramsci’s previous analyses: in Marxian terms, the intellectual was a specific articulation of the structure. This point had to be understood extensively and in its most radical interpretation, in that all productive figures, starting with the capitalist entrepreneur55 and the factory worker,56 had their own distinctive intellectual capacity and technical skill, without which they could not perform their economic function. As he had said, and now repeated, ‘all men are intellectuals, one could therefore say,’57 and were organic to the structure, of which they represented the internal specializations. If, on one level, the capitalist entrepreneur was already an intellectual per se, who had a specialized technical skill and further had a general skill for social organization, intellectuals stricto sensu were the development and articulation of that function, which they brought to civil society in its entirety. Still, Gramsci’s opening consideration that the class of the intellectuals found its genesis on the level of the structure was insufficient to exhaust 52 See G. Francioni, L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei «Quaderni del carcere», cit., pp. 109–115 and, in summary form, p. 144, where the notes of Notebook 12 are dated ‘between May and June (?) 1932.’ 53 See A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 474–488 (Q4, 11-21bis §48-49-50; PN Vol. 2., pp. 199–215). 54 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1513 (Q12, 1; SPN , p. 5). 55 Idem, pp. 1513–1514 (Q12, 1; SPN , p. 5). 56 Idem, p. 1516 (Q12, 2; SPN , p. 8). 57 Ibid.

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the matter. It was the task of intellectuals to detach themselves from the structure and transcend it in different ways. ‘The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying degrees, “mediated” by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the “functionaries”.’58 More than being mere ‘deputies’ of dominant groups in the exercise of hegemony,59 the intellectuals were the agents of a complex, historically variable mediation (first of all, vis-à-vis national variables), which extended to all of civil society and political power. Gramsci, therefore, proposed an interpretation whereby intellectuals were not separated from their social group but could nonetheless detach themselves from it. This represented a specific problem for the theory of hegemony. As in Notebook 11, the question of tradition again came to the fore. The intellectuals, Gramsci explained, not only were placed in a vertical relationship with the structure and social groups; there was also their horizontal relationship with the cultural tradition, their ‘uninterrupted historical continuity’ which allowed them to ‘put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group’60 and emerge as a specific class. As was the case in Notebook 11, the genetic link with the structure remained implicit because of an overt, durable lineage of thoughts and ideas capable of qualifying intellectual activity as a specific level of society that could not be fundamentally reduced to the structure. For that very reason, besides, ‘any group that is developing towards dominance’ first of all had to ‘assimilate’ the ‘traditional intellectuals’61 and enter the cultural sequence from which the intellectual class derived its stability and worldviews derived their durability. More specifically, Gramsci outlined two ways of conceiving intellectual functions in relation to the world of production. On the one hand, he deemed it possible ‘to establish a gradation of [intellectual] functions and of the superstructures from the bottom to the top (from the structural

58 Idem, p. 1518 (Q12, 2a; SPN , p. 12). 59 Idem, p. 1519 (Q12, 2a; SPN , p. 12). 60 Idem, p. 1515 (Q12, 1a; SPN , p. 7). 61 Idem, p. 1517 (Q12, 2; SPN , p. 10).

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base upwards)’ and ‘fix two major [superstructural] levels’: the level of the private organisms of civil society and that political society, of the State, corresponding to the functions of hegemony and domination, consensus building and state coercion. The intellectuals could act as ‘deputies’ of the dominant groups of civil society for the elaboration of ‘spontaneous consent,’ but also be the executors of the coercive legal order of the political institutions, in ‘anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed.’62 An inverse sequence could also be conceived, however, which ran in the opposite direction. Distinguishing intellectual activity ‘in terms of its intrinsic characteristics’63 and moving from superstructures toward the structure, Gramsci highlighted the ‘overturning’ that theoretical elaboration can operate on the whole of the structure and on the dominant social groups: ‘at the highest level,’ in fact, ‘would be the creators of the various sciences, philosophy, art, etc.,’ whereas ‘at the lowest ’ were the ‘divulgators ’ of ‘accumulated intellectual wealth,’ acting as ‘administrators’ of a worldview created at higher levels. The question of the intellectuals had to be understood within the circle of the sequence that went from the structure to the superstructures and of the descending sequence that went from the superstructures to the structure. In theoretical terms, the function of the intellect stemmed from economic practice (from the entrepreneur and the laborer, so, in short, from productive labor) but then detached itself from it, becoming a distinct function that could in turn act on economic practice by creating the appropriate ideological forms. This analysis, however, failed to apply in one notable domain. The ostensible model for the analysis seemed to be the modern Fordist factory structure and the urban life that represented its synthesis and its setting, where it might be the case that the ‘instrumental masses’ (the laborers) exercised a decisive influence on the ‘factory technicians’ that could extend to the intellectual classes.64 But things were rather different when one looked at the rural classes of the countryside, the backward regions, in Italy and worldwide, in which another order of complexity related the intellectuals to the masses. The situation was, in fact, reversed. Diverging radically from the pattern that generated the urban intellectual, the ‘mass

62 Idem, pp. 1518–1519 (Q12, 2a; SPN , p. 12). 63 Idem, p. 1519 (Q12, 3; SPN , p. 13). 64 Idem, p. 1521 (Q12, 3a; SPN , p. 15).

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of the peasantry,’ while performing an essential function in the world of production, ‘does not elaborate its own “organic” intellectuals, nor does it “assimilate” any stratum of “traditional” intellectuals.’65 Due to the absence of their own organic class of intellectuals, Gramsci clarified, the agrarian classes lived in ‘effective subordination to the intellectuals,’66 conformed to a model of existence that was not born from their own productive function and was imposed on them by ‘traditional’ conceptions.67 Traditional, let us note, meant neither derived from the urban productive structure nor from the ‘creators’ of the sciences, philosophies, and arts, but inherited from the unbroken line of the past. There was no hegemony, that is, of the city over the countryside, no bloc between these domains of society, but domination by a distinct class of intellectuals, that was neither organic nor had any counterpart in the productive structure of either industry or agriculture. Gramsci repeatedly underlined that ‘in the modern world the category of intellectuals, understood in this sense, has undergone an unprecedented expansion,’68 lending such weight and degree of autonomy to the sphere of superstructures as had no parallel in all previous epochs. Because of the implications of the Fordist factory model (but also of the archaic collocation of the agrarian classes), the question of the intellectuals had become central to the interpretation of contemporary reality. That was the crux of what theoretical Marxism called transition, a concept that had lent itself to the interpretation of a fated occurrence, but which Gramsci saw as the work of reformation: intellectual, because capable of affirming its own worldview, and moral, because capable of translating it into an adequate ‘norm of conduct.’ The place where the activity of the intellectuals could work toward ‘moral and intellectual reform’ was the ‘modern political party,’69 which Gramsci radically reconceived in the distinctive guise of the ‘collective intellectual.’ Intellectual was, first of all, the function of taking ‘its own component parts’70 beyond the order of the economic and productive structure, beyond the corporatist 65 Idem, p. 1414 (Q12, 1; SPN , p. 6). 66 Idem, p. 1521 (Q12, 3a; SPN , p. 15). 67 Idem, p. 1520 (Q12, 3; SPN , p. 14). 68 Ibid.; SPN , p. 13. 69 Idem, p. 1522 (Q12, 3a; SPN , p. 15). 70 Ibid.; SPN , p. 16.

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trade union phase, to the construction of a general vision of reality, so as to become ‘qualified political intellectuals’: ‘In the political party the elements of an economic social group get beyond that moment of their historical development and become agents of more general activities of a national and international character.’71 Collective, on the other hand, meant not only ‘organic’ (in its relation to a progressive social group), but capable of raising the theoretical aim above ‘arbitrary constructions’ to the level of ‘the most advanced thought in the world.’72 The political party, that is, had the truly formative and intellectual function (dependent on the key concept of hegemony) of the creation of consensus in civil society and in the sphere of the superstructures. As well as bringing the construction of a new theoretical Marxism to a crucial theoretical turn, the analysis of intellectual groups also afforded new perspectives in historical interpretation that were unknown to the orthodox economic school, which relied solely on the analysis of the social class structure, and to idealism, which instead isolated the cultural moment. In Notebook 12 (before he applied his method to the Italian Risorgimento and Americanism), Gramsci gave an extraordinary example of the critical resources that the ‘history of intellectuals’ could lend to historical research. In just a few pages, he gave a comparative outline of the chief national histories based on the hermeneutical principle of ‘a dialectic between the intellectuals and the masses.’ France, for instance, was a model of the ‘harmonious development’ of national energies and intellectual categories, in which (unlike Italy, but also England) no ‘essential compromises with the old classes’ and the earlier culture had been made, and these had instead been subordinated to the emergent national interest, allowing the country to exercise, for a long time, ‘a function of international and cosmopolitan outward radiation.’73 The central analysis, however, was devoted to Russia. One aspect of present-day Russia that struck Gramsci was its analogy with the rise of the United States, whose development had not been hindered by the ‘checks’ (‘moral, intellectual, political, economic’) which limited progress in Europe, and where, instead of ‘the need to fuse together the organic intellectuals with the traditional,’ as in Europe, the need was ‘to fuse together in a single

71 Idem, p. 1523 (Q12, 4; SPN , p. 16). 72 Idem, p. 1376 (Q11, 11a; SPN , p. 324). 73 Idem, p. 1524 (Q12, 4a; SPN , p. 18).

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national crucible with a unitary culture the different forms of culture imported by immigrants of differing national origins.’74 The analysis of Russia itself, instead, was based on notes from Notebook 4 written around November 1930.75 Isolating the defining aspects of its cultural history, Gramsci had remarked on Russian assimilation of Norman and Byzantine influences, and then of European influences, and on the subsequent emigration of Russian intellectuals to the most advanced countries of the West, which had been the real cause of the revolution: ‘Having thus performed its intellectual apprenticeship [the intellectual élite] returns to its own country and compels the people to an enforced awakening,’ as ‘an energetic reaction of Russia to her own historical inertia.’76 In Notebook 12, however, Gramsci made the additional observation that the action had been carried out by ‘skipping historical stages in the process.’77 Writing in 1932, he deemed it appropriate to underline the acceleration that an intellectual élite could impress on the rhythm of history, in comparison with the course taken by other revolutions: a ‘war of movement,’ as he would say elsewhere, compared to the perspective of the ‘war of position.’ The chief tenets of the interpretation from Notebook 4, however were unchanged: the revolution had been sparked by the friction between the European culture assimilated by the emigrated intellectual élites and ageold Russian inertia. Essentially, the ‘energetic reaction’ had outside causes: it had come from the decisive influence of Western intellectual groups, whose ideas, once imported, could strike into shape the ‘protoplasm of Russian history.’ Italian history too was to be read in the light international phenomena: ‘As far as Italy is concerned,’ he wrote, ‘the central fact is precisely the international or cosmopolitan function of its intellectuals, which is both cause and effect of the state of disintegration in which the peninsula remained from the fall of the Roman Empire up to 1870.’78 The 74 Idem, pp. 1525–1526 and 1527–1528 (Q12, 4a and 5-5a; SPN , p. 20). 75 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 479–480 (Q4, 14bis-15; PN

Vol. 2, pp. 206–207). 76 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1525 (Q12, 4a; SPN , p. 20). See Id., Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 479–480 (Q4, 14bis-15). 77 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1525 (Q12, 4a; SPN , p. 20). Italics added to mark the additional wording in Notebook 12 compared with Notebook 4. 78 Idem, p. 1524 (Q12, 4a; SPN , p. 18).

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notion was then enlarged upon in 1934, in Notebook 21 foremost, where Gramsci underlined the split (which was also linguistic) between the ‘national’ and the ‘popular’ components and the failure, within both the secular and Catholic camps, to build a ‘national-popular culture’: ‘Italian intellectuals are distant from the people, which is to say from the “nation” and feel bound, instead, to a traditional caste allegiance, which was never broken by a strong popular or national political movement coming from below.’79 The question was further articulated at other places, such as in Notebook 19, where he discussed the ‘interpretations of the Risorgimento’ proposed by Mario Missiroli and others, all equally insufficient. With the backing of arguments from Labriola, Croce, and Omodeo, Gramsci dismissed the notion that Italy would have been less backward if the Protestant Reformation had taken hold of the country, since ‘intellectual and moral reformation’ in the modern world, he wrote, had occurred because of the French Revolution, first, and then the philosophy of praxis80 ; the question was of explaining how and why this authentic ‘reformation,’ not the imaginary one, had not produced in Italy the same effects as in the great European nations. Reworking ideas from Notebook 981 into the conclusion of §5, he proposed a connection between the ‘cosmopolitan tradition’ of the Italian people (epitomized by Mazzini and Gioberti, as well as Cavour) and the new figure of ‘man as labor,’ suggesting it could provide an opposite ‘outlet’ to nationalism, ‘militaristic imperialism,’ and the tradition that distinguished France. While traditional cosmopolitanism was at the root of Italian backwardness, a ‘modern cosmopolitanism’ could instead open up new avenues to the urban factory worker and the southern peasant alike. The passage in which Gramsci represented this position is one of the most significant in his reflection on the intellectuals: Traditional cosmopolitanism in Italy ought to become cosmopolitanism of a modern kind, to ensure that the Italian man-as-labor, wherever in the world he may be, enjoys the best opportunities for development. No more a citizen of the world inasmuch as he is civis romanus, or a Catholic, but because he is a maker of civilization. It can be argued, that is, that the Italian tradition is continued dialectically among working people and their 79 Idem, p. 2116 (Q21, 17). 80 Idem, p. 1985 (Q19, 40). 81 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 1190–1191 (Q9, 93).

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intellectuals, not the traditional citizen and traditional intellectual. Italians are, among peoples, the ones who ‘nationally’ have the greatest interest in a modern form of cosmopolitanism. Not only the factory worker, but the peasant and especially the southern peasant. Contributing to rebuild the world economically in a unified way belongs to the tradition of the Italian people and to Italian history, not to dominate it hegemonically and appropriate the fruit of the work of others, but in order to exist and to develop as a people: it may be shown that Caesar is at the origin of this tradition. French-style nationalism is an anachronistic excrescence in Italian history, typical of people whose heads are turned backwards like the damned in Dante. The ‘mission’ of the Italian people lies in the renewal of Roman and medieval cosmopolitanism, but in its most modern and advanced form.82

3

The Modern Prince

The central concept of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, the principle uniting all of the strands of his reflection, was hegemony: ‘civil hegemony,’ more precisely. In the terms of that concept, the notion of the overturning of praxis disclosed its full significance (while in its original formulation, in the third thesis on Feuerbach, it had rather puzzled its interpreters). It also provided a profoundly altered model of revolution, which, departing from the entire Marxist tradition, came to indicate a process of progressive reform under new categories. Departing from Marx, and from subsequent Marxism especially, Gramsci rethought the idea of revolution in relation to the high points of actual historical development. The concept of hegemony was the culmination of Gramsci’s entire political and intellectual existence and had a long and tortuous intellectual process behind it, though its main sources came down to four authors. The first was Hegel, who considerably influenced Gramsci’s perception of ‘the position […] ascribed to the intellectuals,’ in that ‘with the advent of Hegel, thinking in terms of castes and “states” started to give way to thinking in terms of the “State,” and the aristocrats of the State are precisely the intellectuals. […] Unless one takes into account Hegel’s “valorization” of the intellectuals, it would be impossible to understand anything (historically) about modern idealism and

82 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., pp. 1988–1989 (Q19, 43–44).

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its social roots.’83 The second author was Gioberti (and Cesare Balbo, in part), who was greatly revalued by Gramsci in his prison years and who had described as ‘hegemony’ the function of Piedmont, under the Savoy monarchy, during the Risorgimento. Thirdly there was Benedetto Croce, to the extent that Gramsci interpreted Croce’s ‘ethico-political history’ as the history of the moment of hegemony84 ; to Gramsci’s understanding, ‘the juxtaposition of the two terms “ethical” and “political” is in fact the exact expression of the exigencies that frame Croce’s historiography. Ethical history is the aspect of history that is related to “civil society,” to hegemony. Political history is the aspect of history related to state-governmental activity and coercion.’85 Moreover, from Hegel and Croce (or rather, from Hegel as revised and corrected by Croce), Gramsci drew the idea that the distinction between civil society and the State was ‘methodological’ and not ‘organic,’ because in ‘actual reality,’ he explained, they ‘are one and the same.’86 Far more complex was Gramsci’s relation to the fourth and final source for his conception of hegemony. The expression as such came from

83 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1054 (Q8, 59; PN Vol. 3, p. 343). 84 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1223 (Q10, 45a). 85 Idem, p. 1302 (Q10, 21; PN Vol. 3, p. 161). And therein, p. 1211 (Q10, 41a):

‘Ethico-political history is therefore one of the canons of historical interpretation that must always be borne in mind in the study and detailed analysis of history as it unfolds if the intention is to construct an integral history rather than partial or extrinsic histories.’ 86 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1590 (Q13, 510a; SPN , p. 160).

Cf. A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 460 (Q4, §38; PN Vol. 2, p. 183): ‘in reality, the distinction [between civil society and political society] is purely methodological and not organic; in concrete historical life, political society and civil society are a single entity.’ The essential source, here, was B. Croce, Per la storia della filosofia politica. Noterelle, in Id., Etica e politica, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1981, pp. 213–216 (PN , pp. 73–74); Croce’s text is worth citing, as it had not been previously identified by Gramsci critics: ‘What we have called political life and State in the narrow or true sense of the world corresponds more or less to what Hegel called the “civil society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft ). It included not only the economic activity of men, the production and exchange of goods and services, but also the law and administration or government by laws. It was not, therefore, without reason that later on Marx, starting with this concept, considered the juridical and political order a simple “superstructure,” as it actually is, economic in substance. This partial truth led him into the error of considering even morality and all the rest a superstructure. But Hegel did not realize that the State, understood in the narrow sense, is precisely the formation which he had encountered and christened a mere “civil society”’ (ibid., p. 213).

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Lenin and Russian Bolshevism; it was first used by Gramsci with reference to the world order in a couple of articles from 1920,87 and was then again encountered by him around 1924, in Zinov’ev’s introduction to the first volume of his own works (which Gramsci had used for the short biography of Lenin he published in the first issue of L’Ordine Nuovo), and in Lenin’s Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. One must bear in mind, though, that, whereas Lenin understood hegemony in the sense of ‘political direction,’ in the general Soviet debate it meant ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ over the ‘mass of poor peasants,’ which is exactly the interpretation Gramsci began to challenge as of the 1926 article on the southern question. In parallel with his studies of Zinov’ev and Lenin, Gramsci was, in fact, also reasoning on the differences between conditions in Russia and central and western Europe, where the ‘political superstructures’ were ‘complicated’ by ‘the greater development of capitalism,’ requiring, as he wrote to Togliatti and Terracini, ‘a strategy and tactics altogether more complex and long-term than those which were necessary for the Bolsheviks.’88 The analysis culminated in the 1926 article on the southern question, which questioned the Komintern line and Lenin’s legacy itself. The problem of the ‘intellectuals’ was stated precisely: ‘the southern farmer is bound to the big landowner through the mediation of the intellectual.’89 In the article and in his correspondence with Togliatti that October, Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony can be seen to move further and further away from the notion of ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ and, in its application to the reality of Italy and central and western Europe, to assume a universal political meaning. Before his arrest, that is, Gramsci had formed the conviction that the sequence of the two revolutions in Russia, which had occurred in February and October 1917, could not be taken as a general paradigm: conditions in Italy made it so that the revolution could only take the form of an ongoing molecular process, characterized by hegemony in a new meaning. This position inaugurated the theory of the ‘war of position,’ 87 We refer to A. Gramsci, La relazione Tasca e il congresso camerale di Torino (1920),

in Id., L’Ordine Nuovo (1919–1920), edited by V. Gerratana and A. A. Santucci, Einaudi, Torino 1987, p. 541 and Id., La Russia, potenza mondiale (1920), idem, pp. 616–618. 88 P. Togliatti, La formazione del gruppo dirigente del Pci nel 1923–1924, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1969, p. 197. Gramsci, SPW 1921–1926, pp. 199–200. 89 A. Gramsci, Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale (1926), in Id., Scritti politici, Vol. 3, edited by P. Spriano, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1973, p. 259. SPW 1921–1926, p. 456.

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which, in combination with the doctrine of hegemony, was to designate the specific form of the transition not just after the Russian revolution specifically (as the last instance of a ‘war of movement’) but in the order of modernity generally. It follows that, after the tenth Plenum of the International and the ‘turning point’ of 1930, which Gramsci rejected, these reflections became more radical and came into full definition in the notes written in prison after 1932. In 1932, Gramsci began to rework his notes on Machiavelli and to define the main strands of his overall conception of hegemony (these entries largely occupy Notebooks 13 and the shorter Notebook 18). At the opening of Notebook 13 Gramsci identified the chief headings of the intended work as ‘the formation of a national-popular collective will’ and as ‘intellectual and moral reform,’90 and then explained how Machiavelli had responded to a state of affairs that now ‘repeated’ itself for the philosophy of praxis.91 Apart from rating the Prince an outstanding political treatise, and possibly the work he most valued, Gramsci’s evaluation of its present importance owed to the analogies of historical conditions: just as Machiavelli had mused on Italian fragmentation in the light of the rise of the European nation-states, so the philosophy of praxis had to address the Italian situation with a new principle in force, that of the crisis of the nation-state and emergence of a modern cosmopolitanism. While the contents and actors on stage were changed, the rise of the nation-states in the sixteenth century and their decline in the twentieth could be regarded as mirror images of each other and be approached by the same method. Reasoning on the examples of ‘strong territorial unity’ achieved by France and Spain, Gramsci argued, Machiavelli had made an ‘“elliptic comparison” (to use Croce’s expression)’ and deduced ‘the rules for a strong State in general and a strong Italian State in particular.’92 At a time of disintegration, Machiavelli had upheld an ideal of Italian unity (this was the essential point), and had extrapolated the ideal from outward dynamics which he saw as embodying the spirit of the time. He had failed, of course, in that his idea of politics and morality had not ‘succeeded in becoming “common sense”’ and ‘the public and manifest form of the national culture.’93 But while Machiavelli’s defeat had also

90 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1561 (Q13, 2a; SPN , p. 133). 91 Idem, p. 1601 (Q13, 14; SPN , p. 136). 92 Idem, p. 1572 (Q13, 5a; SPN , p. 140). 93 Idem, p. 1599 (Q13, 13a; SPN , p. 134).

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meant the defeat of Italy, his method had shown the merit of seeking to replicate the most advanced situations in the world within the national element, which was what the philosophy of praxis proposed to do. Luigi Russo’s short introductory work to the Prince 94 presented it as a ‘treatise on dictatorship,’ and the Discourses as a ‘treatise on hegemony.’95 Gramsci rectified this position, not only recognizing the distinct presence of the moment of hegemony in the Prince as well (which was the key text, for him), but also how the Art of War and Florentine Histories were to be regarded as integrations to the Prince.96 The crucial issues were, again, the political instruction of ‘those who are “not in the know,”’97 and the undependability of the companies of fortune and the need for the urban classes to ‘base themselves on the mass of the peasants,’98 which, in essence, defined the ‘Jacobin’ moment of Machiavelli’s thought—by which was meant, as he explained, the ability to arouse and organize ‘a national popular collective will’ as the founding force of the modern nation-states.99 These are famous theses, that are frequently discussed and not infrequently misunderstood by critics who seek philological exactitude in categories that were inspired by Gramsci’s urgency to understand his own time. From the seclusion of prison and in the chronic dearth of adequate sources, Gramsci could not aspire to the rigor and strictures of philological inquiry: the pressing question was, rather, how to replicate, in the era of modern cosmopolitanism, what Machiavelli had masterfully accomplished at a time in which Italy was undergoing a crisis as the great nation-states were instead on the rise. In a dense passage (based on notes from Notebook 8 and placed at the beginning of Notebook 13), Gramsci called the Prince a ‘live work,’ in which, ‘in the dramatic form of a “myth,”’ are merged elements of ‘utopia’ and of the ‘scholarly treatise.’ The Prince was a work that gave ‘imaginative and artistic form’ to the symbol of the ‘collective will,’ which came to be represented in the shape of a ‘condottiere’ that was, at once,

94 L. R usso, Prolegomeni a Machiavelli, Le Monnier, Firenze 1931 (especially pp. 44–

48). 95 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1564 (Q13, 3a; SPN p. 125). 96 Idem, p. 1573 (Q13, 6; SPN , p. 141). 97 Idem, pp. 1600–1601 (Q13, 14; SPN , p. 135). 98 Idem, p. 1573 (Q13, 6). See, idem, p. 1560 (Q13, 2a; SPN , p. 141). 99 Idem, pp. 1559–1560 (Q13, 2; SPN , p. 123).

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‘rational’ and ‘ideal,’ not a ‘historical figure’ but a force, nonetheless, that ‘really exists.’100 This synthesis of the ideal and the real, of action and utopia (a realistic utopia, that in the instances of France and Spain coincided with the rationality of the world) was to be the exact method of political science and the proper understanding of the ‘myth’ of the Prince. For Sorel, who had failed to grasp this synthesis, the matter resolved itself in the terms of the economic and corporatist moment, that could not rise to the moment of concrete utopia, to the rational ends that were outlined in the trends of world development. Within this framing of the Prince as ‘myth’ were implied the synthesis of the universal and of the particular, of cosmopolitanism and the nation that qualified hegemony as a method, and these were the terms in which Gramsci countered the ‘passive activity’ (that yet failed to be ‘active and constructive’) of the general strike theorized by Sorel.101 In Gramsci’s interpretation, Machiavelli’s Prince outlined the ‘ideal condottiere’ as a mythical image and the paragon of ‘the real condottiere who is to incarnate him historically,’102 as the Jacobin moment of the emergence of a collective will at the time of the institution of the nationstates. Under present conditions, with nation-states no longer rising but facing a crisis, only a collective will, and not the ‘concrete individual,’ could adequately interpret the ‘modern’ prince—and the seat of such a collective will was the political party: the modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party—the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total.103

100 Idem, pp. 1555–1556 (Q13, 1; SPN , pp. 125–126). 101 Idem, pp. 1556–1557 (Q13, 1a; SPN , p. 127). 102 Idem, p. 1555 (Q13, 1; SPN , p. 125). 103 Idem, p. 1558 (Q13, 1a; SPN , p. 129).

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The political party, understood as ‘collective intellectual,’ was for Gramsci the true subject of a modernity that presented itself as a ‘unified’ world104 in which democracy had stretched itself to the point of its current crisis and the ‘superstructures of civil society’ had become pervasive to an unprecedented degree in all of ‘the most advanced States.’105 It emerged as the subject of a transformed world in which the long hegemonic cycle of the bourgeois revolutions, which had unfolded between 1789 and 1870–71, had spent itself, and the myths of the ‘war of movement’ and of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ had run their course, ushering in the era of the ‘war of position’ and of slow, relentless struggle in the ‘trenches’ of civil society.106 To mark the disruptive import of his analysis, Gramsci adopted the expression ‘civil hegemony’ to distinguish his position not only from the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ advocated by Zinov’ev, by Lenin, and in the Soviet debate, but also from his own more restricted use, in the other Notebooks, of ‘political,’ ‘economic,’ or ‘social’ hegemony.107 In Notebook 8 (February 1932), he had expressed himself in these terms: Also, the question of so-called permanent revolution, a political concept that emerged around 1848 as a scientific expression of Jacobinism, at a time when the great political parties and economic trade unions had not yet come into existence—a concept that would subsequently be absorbed and superseded by the concept of ‘civil hegemony.’ The question of the war of position and of the war of movement, as well as the question of arditismo, insofar as they pertain to political science; in politics, the 1848 concept of the war of movement is precisely the concept of permanent revolution; in politics, the war of position is the concept of hegemony that can only come into existence after certain things are already in place, namely, the large popular organizations of the modern type that represent, as it were, the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the war of position.108

104 Idem, p. 1618 (Q13, 19). 105 Idem, p. 1615 (Q13, 18a; SPN , p. 235). 106 See, ibid., pp. 1581–1583 (Q13, 8-8a; SPN , p. 243). 107 For the concept of ‘political hegemony,’ we limit ourselves to the following passages:

A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., p. 41 (Q1, 30bis); idem, p. 461 (Q4, 71bis); A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 914 (Q7, 43bis). 108 Idem, p. 973 (Q8, 20; PN Vol. 3, p. 267).

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But, in Notebook 13, he revised his wording, bringing into sharper relief the concept of ‘civil hegemony’: In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change: the internal and international organizational relations of the State become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of ‘civil hegemony.’ The same thing happens in the art of politics as happens in military art: war of movement increasingly becomes war of position, and it can be said that a State will win a war in so far as it prepares for it minutely and technically in peacetime. The massive structures of the modem democracies, both as State organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely ‘partial’ the element of movement which before used to be ‘the whole’ of war, etc.109

‘Civil hegemony’ (not ‘political,’ ‘economic,’ or ‘social’ hegemony alone) was to be the province of the ‘modern prince.’ Behind the concept were Gramsci’s new insights regarding cosmopolitanism and the interrelation of the national dimension with the international dimension. The proper meaning of ‘concrete political action,’ as the ‘sole activity productive of historical progress,’ explained Gramsci, resided in the ‘continuous effort to separate out the “international” and “unitary” element in national and local reality.’110 His notions of ‘democratic centralism’ (which he opposed to ‘bureaucratic centralism’) and of hegemonic political practice were also to be understood in this light, as the ability to ‘separate out’ the universal rhythm of history in a particular national setting, exactly as Machiavelli had done in the period of the affirmation of the nation-states. And yet, a crucial change had occurred since Machiavelli’s time: under the present conditions of cosmopolitanism and of the total unification of the world, the current exercise of hegemony or dominion by one State over the others could no longer be properly understood in terms of the same category of ‘hegemony’ that applied of old. Properly speaking, one could speak of the exercise of ‘initiative’—no longer of

109 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., pp. 1566–1567 (Q13, 4; SPN , p. 243). 110 Idem, p. 1635 (Q13, 25; SPN , pp. 189–190).

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‘primacy’ or ‘hegemony.’ The issue was posed in the form of a question, occurring first in Notebook 9 and then reformulated in Notebook 13: is the cultural hegemony of one nation over others still possible in the modern world? Or is the world already so unified in its socio-economic structure that if a country may still take the initiative of an innovation ‘chronologically,’ it cannot, however, maintain the ‘political monopoly’ of that innovation and therefore use this monopoly as grounds for hegemony? What can be the meaning of nationalism today? Is it not the case that it may still be feasible as economic and financial ‘imperialism’ but no longer in the form of civil ‘primacy’ or political and intellectual hegemony?111

The concept of ‘civil hegemony’ emerged in response to this difficult question. Since the end of the age of the nation-states in 1870–71, the category of the ‘world hegemony’ of one nation over all others (of its ‘primacy’ or ‘preeminence’) had become inadequate to describe a ‘unified’ situation in which the fate of any given people was inextricably bound with the fate of all other peoples. While no longer pertinent on the plane of international relations (even when it came to Soviet Russia’s standing vis-à-vis the Western powers, as his analyses of Americanism showed), the principle of ‘hegemony’ reemerged in the new guise of ‘civil hegemony’: it reemerged, that is, as a category of the greatest relevance in framing a ‘civil society’ that was now substantially unified, in which the dialectic was no longer a dialectic of states but one of ‘conceptions of the world.’ It was on this new level of dialectic relations that the ‘modern prince’ was to strive for hegemony. Two obstacles that stood in the way of the modern prince were singled out as particularly pernicious: one was bureaucracy, ‘the most dangerously hidebound and conservative force,’ with its strong tendency to constitute ‘a compact body … independent of the mass of [party] members’ and to make ‘the party … anachronistic’112 ; the other was economism, against which ‘the struggle can and must be carried on by developing the concept of hegemony.’113 These were insidious enemies, since the former

111 Idem, p. 1618 (Q13, 19-19a). See A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., pp. 1192–1193 (Q9, 94). 112 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1604 (Q13, 15; SPN , p. 211). See, idem, pp. 1632–1635 (Q13, 23a-25). 113 Idem, pp. 1595–1596 (Q13, 12a; SPN , p. 165).

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destroyed the vitality of the political subject while the latter prevented the political subject from even becoming formed. As Albert Mathiez had documented for the French Revolution,114 Gramsci also ruled out ‘that immediate economic crises of themselves produce fundamental historical events’: the revolutionary break of 1789, he wrote, ‘did not occur as the result of direct mechanical causes—i.e. the impoverishment of the social group,’ but ‘in the context of conflicts on a higher plane than the immediate world of the economy.’115 By and large, historians agreed in their rejection of mechanical and purely economic explanations, unlike such political theorists as Sorel. It was the critique of Sorel’s positions that had clarified the fundamental reason to reject economism, and that reason was the need for the political subject to break out of the economic-corporative sphere and embrace its universal function, understanding and renewing the essential interrelations of the national and international spheres. To develop this theme, Gramsci refined his understanding of the ‘relation of forces’ and came to a full description of the genesis of the modern prince, from the economic premises to its hegemonic character. Developing the two principles stated in Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Gramsci distinguished three ‘moments or levels.’ First, there was the level of the structure, providing objective, quantifiable data of an economic nature, that made it ‘possible to discover whether in a particular society there exist the necessary and sufficient conditions for its transformation—in other words, to check the degree of realism and practicability of the various ideologies which have been born on its own terrain.’116 There followed, on those grounds and at the second level, the formation of the political subject as ‘intellectual and moral unity,’ leaving behind corporative positions to become ‘the motor force of a universal expansion’; this being, he wrote, ‘the most purely political phase, [which] marks the decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures,’ until, finally, ‘the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups’ is established ‘on a “universal” plane.’117 The third level was the ‘relation of military forces’: the

114 A. Mathiez, La Révolution française, Colin, Paris 1922 (followed by a threevolume 2nd edition in 1928). 115 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1587 (Q13, 10; SPN , p. 184). 116 Idem, p. 1583 (Q13, 8a; SPN , pp. 180–181). 117 Idem, p. 1584 (Q13, 9; SPN , pp. 180–182).

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war of position, that is, the dialectical confrontation of conceptions of the world and the conflict, within the trenches of civil society, between progress and conservation. In essence, he wrote, ‘historical development oscillates continually between the first and the third moment, with the mediation of the second,’118 which was the moment of the ‘modern prince,’ of the constitution of political subjectivity that breaks away from the structure in order to exercise its hegemonic function. This theory of power relations was the most consequent development of the ‘overturning of praxis’: in Gramsci’s original interpretation of the third thesis on Feuerbach, the circle of the structure and superstructures was necessarily mediated by the function of hegemony, and that function described the scope for a ‘modern prince’ to act as the ‘motor force of a universal expansion.’ The theory of hegemony indicated the process that led to the constitution of the modern political subject at the intersection of ‘international relations’ with the ‘internal relations of nation-states.’119 But while that was its general form, it also had to account for the catastrophic crisis of democracy and world order that defined the very dark times in which it was elaborated. One may readily see how the theory enabled Gramsci to discard conventional Marxist readings, based on the canons of imperialism or social fascism. The ‘crisis’ deeply engrossed Gramsci, suggesting several lines of reflection that were not wholly convergent with the positions he had held until 1926; but in Notebook 13 he was able to provide an interpretation that was consistent with the new concept of ‘civil hegemony’ and involved three closely interlinked stages. Firstly, from an entry in Notebook 4,120 he derived the concept of an ‘organic crisis’ affecting the relatively stable ‘organic movements’ of the structure and giving rise to ‘occasional’ movements. ‘Organic phenomena’ were those that ‘give rise to socio-historical criticism, whose subject is wider social groupings’; but when these came to a crisis, ‘sometimes lasting for decades,’121 conservative forces would naturally attempt to remedy those ‘incurable structural

118 Idem, p. 1585 (Q13, 9a; SPN , p. 183). 119 Idem, p. 1585 (Q13, 9; SPN , p. 182). 120 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 455–456 (Q4, 67). 121 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1579 (Q13, 7a; SPN , p. 178).

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contradictions’ to ‘defend the existing structure.’ Those attempts generated the ‘occasional,’ which could only curb the crisis of the structure and give rise to a prolonged, generalized situation of stasis. A few pages further into the Notebook, the dynamics of an ‘organic crisis’ were represented in terms of a rift between the groups that formed a society and the parties that traditionally represented them: as the contrast between ‘represented and representatives’ that led to ‘the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony,’ which became immediately dangerous, because it paved the way for the ‘charismatic leader,’ not as an organic but as an ‘occasional’ solution to the crisis.122 Here too, the crisis was configured as a ‘static equilibrium’ between progress and reaction; but at this stage, a real hegemonic crisis occurred, which stemmed from the ‘occasional’ movement of the rift between social groups and their representative parties, and allowed the ‘charismatic leader’ to emerge. There was, therefore, a fundamental difference between Machiavelli’s prince and the modern prince: the ‘ideal leader’ as envisaged by Machiavelli was anachronistic, but also a threat; modernity, instead, was in need of the political party as the seat of a collective will. The ‘charismatic leader’ represented only a prelude to the category of ‘Caesarism,’ which Gramsci recovered from Notebook 9 to indicate the salient feature of the organic crisis. The ‘static equilibrium’ of which he had spoken previously now became ‘catastrophic,’ because the balance between conflicting forces was such ‘that a continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction.’123 Under such circumstances, a ‘charismatic leader’ could assume ‘the task of arbitration,’ but in the dynamic sense of championing one of the antithetic forces, and therefore constitute a progressive Caesarism or a reactionary Caesarism. ‘In the modem world,’ he wrote, ‘the equilibrium with catastrophic prospects occurs not between forces which could in the last analysis fuse and unite— albeit after a wearying and bloody process but between forces whose opposition is historically incurable and indeed becomes especially acute with the advent of Caesarist forms.’124 Caesar and Napoleon I, had represented one outcome, as progressive leaders, whereas Napoleon III and Bismarck had been reactionaries. The explicit reference to Fascism and to

122 Idem, pp. 1602–1604 (Q13, 14a-15; SPN , pp. 210–211). 123 Idem, p. 1619 (Q13, 19a; SPN , p. 219). 124 Idem, p. 1622 (Q13, 20a; SPN , p. 222).

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Mussolini,125 however, stood to indicate the currency of the theory in the context of the present moment, and to account for the lasting power of that dictatorship. Under certain conditions, however, an organic crisis could give rise to ‘a Caesarist solution […] even without a Caesar, without any great, “heroic” and representative personality.’126 Gramsci gave the instances of the Labour governments led by James Ramsay MacDonald, and of the initial phase of Fascism, concluding with the observation (not present in Notebook 9) that ‘Every coalition government is a first stage of Caesarism, which either may or may not develop to more significant stages,’ whereas ‘common opinion,’ he added, held the opposite view, believing that coalition governments ‘are the most “solid bulwark” against Caesarism.’127 In his analysis, broad coalition governments (such as the Labour-Conservative coalition in Britain, or Mussolini’s first coalition government with the Popular party in Italy) arose when none of the forces was in a position to govern on the strength of its own program—a situation that was entirely similar to that which gave rise to Caesarism, governed by a precarious ‘static balance’ without real progress. This is not to say Gramsci was insensitive to the merits of democratic ‘compromise,’ which, on the contrary, played an important part in his conception of hegemony. An intransigent attitude toward ‘compromise,’ he explained, always implied the ‘fatalistic belief’ that ‘favorable conditions are inevitably going to appear’; but compromise relied on the constructive capacity of the political subject to foster ‘the union of two forces’ when it was ‘necessary in order to defeat a third’ without resorting to violence: ‘The only concrete possibility,’ he wrote, ‘is compromise. Force can be employed against enemies, but not against a part of one’s own side which one wishes rapidly to assimilate, and whose “good will” and enthusiasm one needs.’128 The edifice of Gramsci’s conception of praxis culminated in the figure of the ‘modern Prince,’ and that figure was to be identified with the political parties as the subjects of modernity. It was in the form of the action of the party that political action could be realized as something

125 Idem, p. 1620 (Q13, 19a; SPN , 126 Idem, p. 1619 (Q13, 19a; SPN , 127 Idem, p. 1620 (Q13, 19a; SPN , 128 Idem, p. 1613 (Q13, 17a; SPN ,

pp. 219–220). p. 220). p. 220). p. 168).

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distinct from the immediate element of the structure; Gramsci, indeed, regarded political action as the ‘first level’ of the superstructures,129 in the circle that united the superstructures with the structure (to form the historical bloc) and, in another regard, united the distinct figures of the sphere of the superstructures. There was a significant divergence, here from the reading Croce and Russo had proposed of Machiavelli. Gramsci acknowledged the principle of the autonomy of politics, and in some respects actually proposed a reinforced version of it, but he could also see its limitations and potentially dangerous implications. On this subject, Gramsci took issue with Croce’s notion of ‘politics as passion,’ because it unilaterally reduced politics to the practical and economic moment and severed it too radically from the sphere of ethics. The modern Prince, as a concept, embodied not only economic volition, but also the principle of that which ‘ought to be,’ which brings ethics to bear on reality. Chiron, the centaur in Machiavelli’s Prince, was part animal and part human,130 which was a metaphor for the ‘dual perspective’ of violence and civilization, of force and consensus, of authority and hegemony that was an integral part of political work, not outside it. In his discussion of Paolo Treves’ article Il realismo politico di Francesco Guicciardini,131 Gramsci observed that in Machiavelli one found not only the conception of ‘politics as passion,’ but also a sense of what ‘ought to be,’ of the future regarded from the ethical angle, that was based on a firm grasp of what the ‘effective reality’ was.132 Just like in Machiavelli’s Prince, the ‘modern Prince’ was to have the virtues of the centaur and unite in itself the economic and the ethical perspectives. This was, let us repeat, a nonabstract understanding of ethics, residing in the making of history as the ability to aim for and realize in concrete action ‘the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world.’133 This explains why, in one of the most debated and controversial passages in the Notebooks, Gramsci made reference to the ‘divinity’ and the ‘categorical imperative.’ The ‘modern Prince,’ his argument went, was to discern not only the ‘useful’ from the

129 Idem, p. 1569 (Q13, 4a). 130 Idem, p. 1576 (Q13, 7). 131 In Nuova Rivista Storica, 1930, no. 6, pp. 525–537. 132 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., pp. 1577–1578 (Q13, 7-7a; SPN ,

pp. 170–172). 133 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 2, cit., p. 1376 (Q11, 11bis; SPN , p. 324).

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‘harmful,’ which were economic categories, but also the ‘virtuous’ from the ‘wicked,’ which is to say, good from evil, which were moral categories that tradition had identified with the gods, or with the concept of a universal imperative of moral consciousness. But those were terms of reference belonging to the tradition, given as illustrations. In Gramsci’s terms, the unity of the economic and ethical moment represented ‘the basis for a modern laicism and for a complete laicization of life and of all customary relationships.’134

134 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3, cit., p. 1561 (Q13, 2a; SPN , p. 133).

Index

A Adam, 195 Adler, Max, xiii Adler, Victor, 4 Agamemnon (Greek mythology), 232, 234, 235 Ainslie, Douglas, xxvi Alberti, Leon Battista, 226, 234 Alfieri, Vittorio, 219 Alighieri, Dante, 49 Amabile, Luigi, 62 and of Rousseau, 123 Aquinas, Thomas, St., 175 Arangio Ruiz, Vladimiro, 218 Ardigò, Roberto, 153, 157, 158, 162 Arias, Paolo Enrico, 231, 233 Aristotle, 96, 242 Attisani, Adelchi, 64

B Badaloni, Nicola, 188 Balbo, Cesare, 300

Barbi, Michele, 216, 218 Barth, Paul, 67 Basile, Luca, 6 Basso, Lelio, 149 Bava Beccaris, Fiorenzo, 50 Bellezza, Vito A., 95, 115 Bergami, Giancarlo, 153, 155 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 175, 194, 195 Bernardini, Bernardino, 209 Bernstein, Eduard, 23, 34, 35, 54, 61, 253, 263 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von, 310 Bobbio, Norberto, 134, 142, 154, 185, 220, 290 Boccardo, Carlo, 155 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen Ritter von, 68 Boothman, Derek, xxiv Bordiga, Amadeo, 160 Borghese, Lucia, 177 Bresciani, Antonio, 250 Bruno, Giordano, 19, 41, 95, 126, 132

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72559-4

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316

INDEX

Bukharin, Nikolaj Ivanoviˇc, 167, 168, 171, 185, 188, 192–195, 288, 289 Busino, Giovanni, 74 Buttigieg, Joseph A., xxiv, xxvi C Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges, 103 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 299, 310, 311 Calogero, Guido, 253 Calosso, Umberto, 219–221 Camis, Mario, 199 Campanella, Tommaso, 60–62 Cantoni, Carlo, 58 Capograssi, Giuseppe, 179 Caprioglio, Sergio, 260 Carella, Angela, 83 Carena, Attilio, 155 Carlotta (Charlotte Augusta Matilda, princess), 168 Cassandra (Greek mythology), 222, 224 Cassani, Cinzia, 51, 59, 91, 94 Castellani, Cecilia, 51, 59, 91, 94 Castiglione, Salvatore J., xxvi Cavalcanti, Cavalcante, 214, 235 Cavalcanti, Guido, 220, 221 Cavour, Camillo Benso (Count of), 298 Ceva, Bianca, 199 Chalcas (Greek mythology), 234 Chiappelli, Alessandro, 96 Ciccotti, Ettore, 99, 129 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 234 Cieszkowski, August von, 3 Colotes of Teos, 234 Colucci, Tullio, 124 Compagni, Dino, 219 Comte, Auguste, 170 Corneille, Pierre, 237 Cosmo, Umberto, 215, 216, 218, 219, 236

Cospito, Giuseppe, 156, 166, 167, 176, 177, 188, 280 Craig, Edward Gordon, 232 Croce, Benedetto, 4–6, 34–36, 38–40, 47–87, 89–97, 101, 103–105, 114, 115, 119, 127, 137–142, 144, 145, 151, 152, 158, 170–176, 180, 182–184, 186, 187, 189–191, 195, 196, 201, 202, 206, 209–211, 213–216, 218–220, 222, 223, 228–230, 232, 235–242, 244, 245, 247, 250–260, 262–270, 272–276, 278–280, 283, 298, 300, 302, 312 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 259 D Darwin, Charles Robert, 5, 7 Dazzi, Manlio Torquato, 226 De Domenico, Nicola, 99, 288 De Giovanni, Biagio, 173 Del Lungo, Isidoro, 219, 220, 228 Del Noce, Augusto, 153 De Man, Paul, 222, 261 De Martino, Ernesto, 84 De Ruggiero, Guido, 150 De Sanctis, Francesco, 51, 62, 216–218, 228, 229, 235–237, 240 Diambrini Palazzi, Sandro, 125, 157 Di Carlo, Eugenio, 130, 139, 179 D’Ors, Eugenio, 223 D’Ovidio, Francesco, 58, 59 Drahn, Ernst, 176, 178 Durkheim, éÉmile, 6 E Engels, Friedrich, 4, 6, 7, 10, 15–18, 20, 27, 34, 47, 49, 65–68, 89, 94, 96–99, 101, 103, 128, 129,

INDEX

133, 136–140, 142, 147, 151, 152, 156, 158, 172, 175, 178, 184, 185, 197, 208, 261, 273 Epicurus, 225 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 173 Euripides, 233

F Farbman, Mikhail S., 288 Farinata degli Uberti, 214, 216–222, 224, 225, 228, 229, 232, 235, 243 Farnese, Ranuccio, 49 Farquharson, Alexander, 23 Felici, Giovanni Sante, 62 Ferrari, Giuseppe, 157 Ferraris, Carlo Francesco, 67 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, 38, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100–102, 108, 109, 122, 123, 128, 130–134, 136–139, 141, 149, 177, 178, 184–187, 193, 208, 211, 261, 269, 273, 281, 289, 299, 309 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 104, 108 Fiorentino, Francesco, 100 Fischer, Kuno, 87 Formiggini, Angelo Fortunato, 152 Fortunato, Giustino, 265 Francioni, Gianni, 156, 165, 166, 176, 177, 248, 249, 257, 280, 281, 292 Frascino, Salvatore, 236 Fröbel, Friedrich Wilhelm August, 100 Frosini, Fabio, 166, 167

G Galasso, Giuseppe, 79 Galilei, Galileo, 41 Gargàno, Giuseppe, 228

317

Garin, Eugenio, 127, 149–151, 155, 291 Gentile, Giovanni, 37, 38, 51–55, 57– 60, 62, 65, 69, 70, 73, 74, 87, 89, 91–123, 127–132, 136–140, 170, 175, 176, 178–180, 182, 184, 185, 193–196, 198, 201, 238, 239, 244, 254, 264–268 Gerosa, Pietro, 215 Gerratana, Valentino, 4, 50, 51, 94, 105, 156, 157, 167, 168, 215, 222, 250–252, 280, 301 Giammattei, Emma, 215 Giasi, Francesco, 156, 252 Gilson, éÉtienne, 237 Ginsberg, Morris, 23 Ginzburg, Carlo, 126 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 268, 279, 286, 298, 300 Giordani, Pietro, 168 Giuliano, Balbino, 125 Gobetti, Piero, 155, 219, 266 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 227, 237 Goya, Francisco José de, 223 Gramsci, Antonio, 3, 70, 105, 124, 126, 146, 147, 153–162, 165–245, 247–313 Gramsci, Carlo, 228 Graziadei, Antonio, 182 Guastella, Cosmo, 58 Guzzo, Augusto, 231

H Halévy, Daniel, 188 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15, 19, 65, 69, 80, 82, 86, 91, 92, 95, 97, 101, 102, 104–106, 108–112, 115, 128, 130, 133, 138, 139, 170, 175, 184–187, 193–195, 198, 201, 202, 209,

318

INDEX

253, 259, 260, 267, 268, 279, 299, 300 Hélvetius, Claude-Adrien, 103 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 8, 17, 18, 20, 23, 30, 31, 48, 66, 70, 170 Hesiod, 233 Hess, Moses, 3 Hoare, Quintin, xxvi, xxvii Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry de, 63

I Imbriani, Vittorio, 49 Iphigenia (Greek mythology), 232–234, 236

J Jaja, Donato, 58–60, 95 Jason (Greek mythology), 214, 217, 231 Jaurès, Jean Léon, 153

K Kant, Immanuel, 41, 66, 77, 78, 95, 110, 111, 114, 116, 140, 196, 211 Kautsky, Karl, 34, 35, 54, 61, 174 Kerr, Charles H., 281 Keynes, John Maynard, 148 Korsch, Karl, 23

L Labica, Georges, 99 Labriola, Antonio, 3–30, 32–45, 47–74, 76, 77, 87, 89–97, 99, 100, 105, 108, 109, 119, 123–129, 131, 137, 142, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157, 159, 166, 168–172, 174–176, 180, 182,

183, 197, 204, 209, 254, 255, 298 Labriola, Arturo, 128, 129, 148 Lafargue, Lara, 129 Lafargue, Paul, 60, 61, 126, 129 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 99, 126, 153 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 175 Lenin (Uljanov), Vladimir Il’iˇc, 127, 147, 148, 150, 153, 155, 158, 172, 175, 176, 181–183, 209, 211, 258, 263, 274, 279, 286, 288, 289, 291, 301, 305 Leopardi, Giacomo, 84, 227 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 217, 231 Levi, Alessandro, 157 Liguori, Guido, 166 Locke, John, 144, 146 Loescher, Ermanno, 34, 36 Loria, Achille, 10, 50, 51, 63, 66–69, 170 Lovecchio, Antonino, 157, 169 Lukács, Georg (György), 172 Lunaˇcarskij (Lunacharsky), Anatolij Vasil’eviˇc, 215 Luther, Martin, 173 M MacDonald, James Ramsay, 311 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 69, 73, 75, 97, 124, 126, 161, 169, 180, 181, 224, 226, 227, 250, 251, 268, 276, 279, 302–304, 306, 310, 312 Malagodi, Giovanni, 188 Manzoni, Alessandro, 219 Marchioli, Ettore, 124, 139 Marramao, Giacomo, 142 Marx, Karl, 3–5, 7–11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, 31, 38, 47, 50, 54, 64, 65, 67, 69–73, 80, 89–114, 118, 122–126, 128, 130–144, 146, 147, 150–153, 155, 156,

INDEX

158, 170–172, 174–187, 189, 190, 200, 208, 211, 261, 263, 264, 266, 268, 271, 273, 278, 280, 281, 289, 299, 300, 308 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue, 55 Masci, Filippo, 58, 60 Mastroianni, Giovanni, 126, 155 Mathiez, Albert, 308 Matteucci, Nicola, 154, 159, 161 Mayer, Gustav, 136 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 153, 188, 298 Mazzoni, Guido, 59 Medea (Greek mythology), 214, 217, 231–234 Mehring, Franz, 130 Menelaus, (Greek mythology), 234 Meredith, Christabel M., xxvi Merlino, Francesco Saverio, 96 Miccolis, Stefano, 4, 36, 49, 55 Michelet, Jules, 126 Mirskij (Prince Mirsky), Dmitri Petroviˇc, 288 Missiroli, Mario, 148, 298 Mocchi, Walter, 127 Moleschott, Jacob, 193 Momigliano, Felice, 153 Mondolfo, Rodolfo, 123–162, 179, 281, 284, 290 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de, 103 Monti, Augusto, 148 Morello, Vincenzo, 214, 228, 229 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 31 Mussato, Albertino, 226 Mussolini, Benito, 23, 311

N Napoleon I, 267, 310 Napoleon III, 267, 310 Nardi, Bruno, 237

319

Nicolini, Fausto, 48, 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 221 Niobe (Greek mythology), 231–233 Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 59, 148

O Omodeo, Adolfo, 250, 298 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 233 Owen, Robert, 98, 103

P Paci, Enzo, 84 Pantaleoni, Maffeo, 51, 67, 75 Panunzio, Sergio, 151 Pareto, Vilfredo, 55, 72, 74–76 Pastore, Annibale, 155 Pesce, Niccolò, 49 Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter), 19 Pindar, 233 Pirandello, Luigi, 232 Plato, 61 Platone, Felice, 160, 167, 168, 221 Plekhanov, Georgij Valentinoviˇc, 63 Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus), 231, 233, 234 Poggi, Alfredo, 179 Pontano, Giovanni, 215 Portelli, Hugues, 188 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 209, 211 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 178, 186

Q Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 234

R Racca, Vittorio, 73 Ragionieri, Ernesto, 170

320

INDEX

Rajna, Pio, 228 Renard, Georges François, 4 Renouard, Jules, 126 Riboldi, Ezio, 225 Ricardo, David, 144, 182, 183 Rjazanov, David Borisoviˇc, 179 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 211 Romani, Fedele, 228 Rosmini, Antonio, 114–116 Rosselli, Carlo, 145 Rossi, Angelo, 173, 223 Rossi, Pietro, 185 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 103, 151, 152 Russell, Bertrand, 197, 199 Russo, Luigi, 216–218, 228, 231, 236–240, 303 Russo, Vincenzio, 51, 61

S Sansone, Mario, 228 Santarelli, Enzo, 153, 154, 159 Santucci, Antonio A., 4, 50, 51, 94, 155, 214, 215, 248, 301 Sapegno, Natalino, 221 Savorelli, Alessandro, 4, 11, 55 Sbarberi, Franco, 6, 100, 126 Schmidt, Conrad, 142 Schucht, Tatiana, 214 Shakespeare, William, 75, 227, 233, 237 Shaw, George Bernard, 218, 232 Sicardi, Enrico, 228 Simmel, Georges, 66 Socrates, 17, 100, 104 Sorani, Aldo, 232 Sorel, Georges, 3–6, 12, 16, 18, 23, 34, 35, 54, 55, 61, 62, 66, 96, 126, 143, 158, 175, 188, 189, 253, 263, 304, 308

Spaventa, Bertrando, 5, 10, 13, 48, 53, 62, 86, 89, 94, 102, 110, 210, 211 Spaventa, Silvio, 48, 223 Spinoza, Baruch, 5, 19 Spriano, Paolo, 146, 225, 301 Sraffa, Piero, 215, 216, 218–222, 224, 225, 250–252 Stalin (D ugašvili), Iosif Vissaronoviˇc, 149, 162, 288 Stammler, Rudolf, 105

T Tamburrano, Giuseppe, 159, 160 Tanner, John, 218, 232 Tarantino, Maurizio, 75, 283 Tasca, Angelo, 154, 155 Terracini, Umberto, 301 Thomas, P.-Félix, 153 Timanthes of Cythnus, 231–234 Tiresias (Greek mythology), 222 Tocco, Felice, 58–60 Toesca, Pietro, 217, 231, 233 Toffanin, Giuseppe, 227 Togliatti, Palmiro, 167, 170, 219, 220, 222–226, 258, 301 Treves, Claudio, 170 Treves, Paolo, 312 Trivulzio, Cristina, 126

U Ulysses (Greek mythology), 234 Untermann, Ernest, xxv

V Vacca, Giuseppe, 161, 166, 168, 223, 225, 288, 291 Vailati, Giovanni, 209, 211 Varchi, Benedetto, 234 Varisco, Bernardino, 58

INDEX

Vico, Giambattista, 5, 19, 20, 23, 37, 72, 73, 90, 91, 95, 100, 104, 116, 124–126, 132, 267, 268 Viglongo, Andrea, 155 Volpicelli, Luigi, 240 Vossler, Karl, 231, 236, 238 W Wagner, Richard, 221 Wahle, Richard, 9 Warburg, Aby, 233, 235

Werder, Karl, 87

Z Zanardo, Aldo, 209 Ždanov (Zhdanov), Andrej Aleksandroviˇc, 162 Zeller, Eduard, 5 Zinov’ev (Apfelbaum), Grigorij Evseeviˇc, 301, 305 Zucàro, Domenico, 155

321