This article explores the presence of Honoré de Balzac in the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci dealt with the literature relating the content of the work with its intellectual and political context of production, without subtracting the importance of artistic creation and innovation from Balzac. There is a treatment of the author as intellectual, in the terms defined by Gramsci himself, in which the role of cultural direction exerted by Balzac is emphasized. Its production is treated as an important (...) element of French culture of the nineteenth century, spread beyond the territorial limits of that country and its own historical time. From this perspective, Gramsci considers the possibility that Balzac was a source of Marx. Balzac 's study, as a concrete intellectual approached by Gramsci, allows us to know the organic connection that he proposed between literature, politics and philosophy, being the articulation between diverse languages, one of the main characteristics of philosophy of praxis - denomination that Gramsci gave to the thinking of Marx and Engels. (shrink)

Although in comparison to other key Gramscian concepts, ideology has not been among the most studied, this is beginning to change. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a diffuse and variegated usage of the term in the Prison Notebooks, as well as an innovative extension of the concept, which is articulated around a network of closely correlated terms and concepts. Nevertheless, debates remain over how to understand its meaning in Gramsci’s carceral discourse, with some arguing that his distinctive conception of (...) ideology has a “neutral”, and arguably, also “positive” meaning, while others contend that it is neither “neutral”, nor “positive”, but a critical concept. This essay argues that Gramsci’s conception of ideology is neither neutral nor positive, but rather, an eminently critical and differentiated analysis of the diverse ideological forms of consciousness through which the popular masses are enveloped within the web of a class’s hegemony through the mediation of the philosophers’ philosophies, the fruit of his attempt to rethink philosophy politically. In short, understanding Gramsci’s conception of ideology in the full sense can only be ascertained by following the threads of his philosophical investigations in their shifts and re-elaborations. (shrink)

The article analyses the concept of common sense in Gramsci, fundamentally in its relation with politics and philosophy. Common sense is analysed in the ambivalence and heterogeneity with which Gramsci characterizes it, in order to think about the problem of its criticism and overcoming. Common sense and philosophy are part of the “ideological approach to the world”, but philosophy constitutes a coherent and critical record of the passivity inherent in common sense. The article dwells especially on the importance of politics (...) as a moment of rupture between common sense and philosophy, fostering a reflection on the implications of this rupture, that is, the relationship between the elements that are preserved and the novelties that are produced. (shrink)

This article deals with Antonio Gramsci’s reflection on the categories of “common sense” and “good sense”, from the pre-prison writings onwards. If in the Gramscian journalistic articles these terms are employed in a loose way, in line with the early twentieth-century usages, a significant reflection can be retraced in the Prison Notebook. On the background of the French and notably Italian discussion on the topic in 1930s, Gramsci develops in his carceral notes an original conception of “common sense” and “good (...) sense”, that illuminates also the notions of philosophy and folklore. The categories are problematicised already in Q 1 and receive a first, provisional sistematisation in 1930-1931. 1932 represents a turning point in the reflection in the categories: on the one hand, there is a reading of common sense that describes the generic middle way between folklore and philosophy ; on the other hand, Gramsci isolates the more specific concepts of “good sense” and “common sense”, where the quotation marks signal their specific semantic value. In this second meaning, “good sense” is pivotal to understand Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, as also later occurrences testify. (shrink)

In this essay we set off on the quest for “translation-translatability” leitmotiv, remembering that Gramsci was “a revolutionary, a historicist” and, at the same time, a student with a solid background in glottology at the University of Turin. A first starting point, long before the prison years, is the debate on Esperanto, in which Gramsci took part in January 1918. Parallel to this, as from 1919, revolutionary political action came more and more to be presented as a form of translation. (...) At the theoretical level, the thought of Labriola was one of the other important sources for the centrality of the idea of translation in Gramsci. Gramsci’s account consideration is also based on certain texts of Marx’s, and was developed in a particularly thoroughgoing way in October and November 1930. 1932 was the year of the further and last detailed development of the notion. In the end, translatability appears as the instrument that allows one to think the unity of theory and practice that, for Gramsci, belongs typically to the thought of Marx and which is the foundation of the superiority of the philosophy of praxis over any other philosophy. (shrink)

This article aims to reconstruct the development of the category of ‘ideology’ in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks between June 1929 and November 1930. In this survey, I will consider not only the occurrences of “ideology” but also the broader “conceptual cluster” ideology is part of. That includes categories such as “superstructure”, “philosophy”, “conception of the world”, “religion”, “common sense”, “folklore” For Gramsci, ideology is first of all a superstructure. As any other Marxist of his time, Gramsci uses initially the term ideology (...) both in a negative sense, both in a neutral, descriptive sense. By passing through provisional formulations such as “material structure of the superstructure” and “ideological structure”, he gradually expands the semantic spectrum of the concept of ideology, by developing a multi-layered theory of knowledge that combine together different aspects of his reflection on ideological superstructures. (shrink)

The unitary approach, developed in the Prison Notebooks, to the study of ideology, superstructures and language can be considered one of the most important and original contributions made by Gramsci to Marxist theory. With the definition of the gnoseological function of the superstructures/ideologies, and of the intrinsic link between ideology and language, Gramsci establishes a network of relations between “truth” and “politics”, with the mediation of the “translatability of languages”, which redefines in a substantial way both these spheres and, in (...) this way, also the notion of “universality”. (shrink)

This text analyzes how it is that Gramsci, through the category of hegemony and the expanded conception of the State, explains the reciprocal relationship between civil society and political society and accounts for the passage from private interest-the economic-corporate-to the general. That is, the transition from the economic to the political, highlighting the understanding of the ideological-cultural elements as aspects of a central methodological and strategic importance; in which language, seen as Weltanschauung, manifests itself as one of the privileged forms (...) of the exercise of consensus. Language as the concrete space of hegemony; as a decisive dimension of the political-cultural stratification of the class system that traverses and defines the forms of social thought -from common sense to scientific theories of reality-,that is, it stands as the concrete space of hegemony. (shrink)

The interpretation of the philosophical thought of Karl Marx given in the second half of the twentieth century canonically distinguishes between the works of the youth period and those of the maturity. Even if only a few interpreters have supported the thesis of the existence of “two Marx”, one opposed to the other, the attention given to some posthumous writings inevitably led to neglect the writings of the younger Marx. However, the years spent in Berlin are decisive, both for the (...) experience gained alongside the young Hegelians and for the discovery of philosophy and philology. It is precisely from the preparatory work of the doctoral dissertation that Marx's great interest in classical philosophy and philology emerges. The concept of Selbstbewußtsein, inspired by Epicurus and his philosophy of the nature, allows us to recover the centrality of the human being in all phases of Marx's production and in his approachs to philosophy, sociology, political economy. (shrink)

This essay connects Antonio Gramsci’s expanded concept of Marxian ideology to his training in linguistics and, broadly understood, philosophy of language in order to advance a hypothesis regarding Gramsci’s views on literary criticism and aesthetic judgment. This hypothesis can be summed up in the following way: aesthetic judgment, including literary criticism, maintains a unity of form and content while rejecting facile attempts to reduce the global meaning of a “political” work of art to its ideological content, where ideology is understood (...) in the sense of a series of theoretical propositions about the world, which reside in the realm of traditional Marxist superstructure. As a result, there is no recourse to either a scientific objectivity or a relativistic emphasis on subjectivity in the evaluation of works of art; instead, priority is given to an immanent, contextual interpretation of works of literature and culture. Such a methodology is intimately related to Gramsci’s reworked concept of ideology and therefore deserves further consideration. (shrink)

By capitalising on his interpretation of historical materialism in terms of “philosophy of praxis”, Gramsci elaborates an original theory of modernity – modernity is neither “humanistic” nor “nihilistic”, but is founded on the issue of the “state-nation”. The concept of “national-popular” is the most appropriate expression of the “democratic” connection of “reason” and “life”, i.e. of intellectuals and people. This connection takes place in a territory that constitutes the essence of modern state. Machiavelli, the Jacobins and Hegel are key-figures of (...) the birth and development of the bourgeois hegemony. The “organic crisis” of this hegemony is caused by the split between the nationalism of politics and the cosmopolitanism of economy. Neither “americanism” nor the USSR can offer an effective solution to this crisis. (shrink)

The rejection of sociology is a Leitmotiv of Gramsci’s writings. According to him, sociologyis abstract, naturalistic and dogmatic conception of knowledge that arose in the framework of the socialist positivism. However, Gramsci is not against any development within social sciences. Indeed, the philosophy of praxis aims to connect practice and theory in order to establish a successful political action. Given that, religion is an excellent example of the way in which Gramsci describes the political meaning of knowledge. The Catholic Church, (...) in particular, embodies an ideology that is immanent and functional to an organised collectivity. Unlike positivists, Gramsci does not approach religion as the “empire of the irrational” but as the very essence of society. The political thought of the Prison Notebooks is based on an anti-deterministic interpretation of Marx, rather than on an anti-religious reading of Marxism. Religion is not suspicious as such; Gramsci is rather polemical against any theory that is not anchored into social life and that not represent, so to say, a political “translation” of it. (shrink)

In this work we seek to analyze the way in which Gramsci approaches the problem of the imaginative dimension of collective action, in order to problematize how this dimension is constituted as a fundamental field in which the struggle for the constitution of a collective will unfolds in history. In this sense, we propose an approach through the work of the Italian communist to analyze, first of all, some juvenile writings in which this dimension is thought around the concept of (...) political myth, of obvious Sorelian roots; therefore, we turn to consider the Quaderni del carcere, where the problem of imagination and myth is re-signified in the context of a non reductionist theorization of the concept of ideology, the deployment of the category of hegemony and a critique of economicist conceptions of the crisis. It is from the framework provided by these categories that, we consider, the problem of the political myth finds a place in the political reflection of Gramsci, insofar as it allows him to take distance both from the spontaneism of Sorel and from the “disenchanted” and “rationalizing” versions of Marxism, constituting in this sense one of the features that give an irreductible singularity to his perspective. (shrink)

Pope Alexander III committed himself, in an almost frenetic manner, to the reorganization of the matrimonial institute. Starting from the tradition of the Fathers, of the different laws and of canonists, he used the new instrument of canon law to give strength to his dispositions. If until that moment there wasn’t clarity about some characteristics of marriage, and if ecclesiastical or lay courts had jurisdiction over it, Alexander, strong in his canonical competence,, made it an exclusively ecclesiastical matter and that (...) every aspect of marriage, from engagement to minimum age, from divorce to consent, from abortion to the rat, was "positivized", making it law. Starting from the analysis of the primary sources and the historiographic debate it can be understood how Alexander certainly encountered some difficulties in establishing a single judgment; in fact, the social context influenced the decisions, so much so that at times he was accommodating at other times, instead, he imposed his decision. He was one of the most productive popes in terms of the number of decrees that have reached us through the various collections of the following centuries. The legislative contribution of Alexander in matrimonial matters was of fundamental importance, to the point that until the Council of Trent his norms remained in force without modification, and afterwards they inspired the many canonists who followed one another over time, up to the Code of Canon Law of 1929. (shrink)

The article deals with a set of concepts, which interconnected determine the extent of the a conception of ideology and an absolute historicist and humanistic perspective of the construction of the subject, knowledge and political praxis, in the of Gramsci’s optic. We are interested in understanding the complexity and degrees of distinct developments that express the dialectic between these formulations in the delineation of social relations and in the construction of hegemony. The analysis that Gramsci developed on the historical moment (...) in which he lived would not be possible without the elaboration of concepts that determine the understanding of how reality is configured, including from the point of view of human formation and the constitution of knowledge, senses and action practice. Thus, with the gnosiological and philosophical renewal undertaken, Gramsci’s contribution is understood in the improvement of a historical materialist interpretation of social reality and, therefore, of the concrete possibility of a change from theoretical and political practice to social transformation. (shrink)

To understand the original way of thinking about “real democracy” in Gramsci it is necessary to reconstruct two “sequences” strictly connected: the sequence of the “theory” of the relations of force that depict the present hegemony as a form of unstable equilibrium; the sequence of the “philology” of the functional ideological schemata that, deriving from the different forms of common sense, turn into the philosophy of praxis. Moreover: Gramsci as a politician translates himself into Gramsci as philosopher and vice versa. (...) This original, internal self-translation is the form of its absolute and immanent historicism. The non-stability of the two sequences derives from the core issue of Gramsci’s investigation, i.e. the problem of “time of history” – how to understand regularity, law, automatism, necessity: that is the crux of philosophies and naturalistic sciences. Gramsci opens up the path for a new type of “science” that bind together continuity, development and strategy, that means political will. In this framework, dialectics is a transforming and developing form of knowledge and not a closed one. Real history cannot be conceived of as an already-made history, but as a developing process, as a “structure in abyss”. (shrink)

In the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century, Lucio Colletti developed a requisition against Hegel and against those elements of his philosophy that had penetrated into Marxism. The main thesis is simple and clear: the more Marxism is contaminated with Hegelism the more it loses scientific consistency. This thesis ends up investing the judgment on the work of Lenin too. The essay in question will show the opposite: the concepts that the Russian revolutionary will find in Hegel’s Logic provide (...) him the tools usefull to avoid the ideological deviations of his time and to identify the theoretical errors committed by Trotsky and the exponents of the Second International, both prisoners of the abstract intellect and of mechanistic ways of thinking. This judgment also belonged to Gramsci, who was not by chance a reader and a profound admirer of Hegel. Both Gramsci and Lenin often accuse Trotsky and the Second Internationalists of not having been able to internalize the dialectical logic, with very serious and dangerous political repercussions. (shrink)

This article disputes the prevailing thesis according to which the Soviet revolution represented an irreparable rift in the Western cultural tradition and even a form of destruction of universal culture. The revolution of the Bolsheviks was inspired on the theoretical level by the dialectical method elaborated by classical German philosophy and by Marxism, which constituted the historical continuation of that philosophy. Despite the great contradictions that accompanied it, and which can be explained by the very severe political struggles on the (...) internal and the international level with which it was forced to measure itself, the era of revolution was characterized by a great flowering of political rights, economic and social and inspired a broad cultural renewal movement that has influenced historical processes even beyond Soviet Russia. (shrink)

Con un approfondimento sul termine “Arbeiter” e con la segnalazione di sviste e alternative di traduzione.

Soviet Diamat and historical materialism are based on an anthropology of scarcity, according to which the real nature of human beings is primarily a physical-corporeal one, fundamentally generic and aimed at taking possession of the natural world through human work, in order to satisfy our primary needs. Communism is consequently understood in theory and practice as a social organization in which the criterion of equality constitutes the primary and supreme value, while the criterion of difference and inequality constitutes the negative (...) value par excellence. This led to a radical contraposition between a new humanity, characterized by the practice of the "common", and the old bourgeois-liberal humanity, characterized by the exaltation of the "private" and individual subjectivity. Writing The German Ideology and the Parisian Manuscripts of 1844, Marx and Engels removed the dialectical anthropology of Hegel but fell into a new anthropological deficit whose consequences still reach us today. On the other hand, thanks to this removal, the mature Marx will give us a non-anthropomorphic and non-abstract conception of capital, as a merely quantitative factor of systemic integration in a society in which people are worth masks, personifications of economic categories and incarnation of certain relationships and class interests. (shrink)

One hundred years after the October Revolution, we can try to make an assessment of its outcomes and heritage. But if we just focus on the construction of a post-capitalistic society, of socialism, our evaluation will be partial, incomplete and unable to allow an understanding of the past and the current times. So, we have to tackle this issue from a double perspective: looking to the construction of socialism but looking also to the struggle against colonial domination, against imperialism. The (...) result of a reflection on these two levels is on one side that the movement started from the October Revolution led to the vanishing of the colonial classic system, and on the other side that the construction of socialism is a troubled process of political, economical and intellectual apprehension that is unavoidably full of contradictions. This process is still in progress – in China, for instance. On the other hand, today neocolonialism carries on the tradition of exploitation and domination, generating the premises of a new large-scale war. The construction of a post-capitalistic society is once again strictly connected with the cause of peace. (shrink)

The aim of my contribution is to show how Eric Weil tried to re-propose a systematic thought capable of problematizing the relationship between history and philosophy, reality and discourse, particularity and universality. In the first part I’ll analyze the essential structure of Weil's most significant work, the Logique de la philosophie; in the second one, I’ll present the essential contents of De l’intérêt que l’on prend a l’histoire – a text where was already problematized the relationship between the universality of (...) the historical-philosophical discourse and concrete particularity. Finally in the third and last part through analyzing Valeur et dignité du récit historiographique, we will see how Weil gave essential importance to the positive function of historical narratives, inexhaustible sources of meaningful images for the philosopical discourse. (shrink)

The present essay reflects on the complex link that exists between literature and revolution particularly in the twentieth century, and therefore he briefly touches on some decisive passages of the way in which this link has been solved: that is in a clash between power and the desire for freedom which is an essential existential condition in the writing of poetry.

In this interview, André Tosel recalls the most important phases of his scientific commitment. He focuses on the different aspects of his theoretical experiences: the left-wing Catholicism, his meeting with Althusser, his discovery of Gramsci’s role in the Marxist historicism. Tosel emphasizes the differences between Althusser and Gramsci, recognizing the Italian Marxist – an author not sufficiently studied in France – as a point of reference for the elaboration of a critical analysis of the structure of the contemporary capitalism. Of (...) course, according to Tosel, such an appreciation of Gramsci’s work does not exclude critical evaluations of his contribution. (shrink)