Abstract

Writing in prison under his warden's careful scrutiny, Gramsci had to resort to using a code for whatever may have betrayed the profoundly political nature of his concerns. But the articulation of Marxism as “the philosophy of praxis” was more than merely a convenient paraphrase. It was an accurate characterization of his theoretical perspective as part of a long-standing tradition opposed to positivist, naturalist and scientistic deformations of Marxism. This tradition traced back not only to Antonio Labriola, who first vindicated historical materialism as a “philosophy of praxis” and a "philosophy of life” against his positivist contemporaries in the Socialist Party, but to that broader nineteenth century Neapolitan neo-Hegelianism which, after an initial major impact during the Risorgimento in the 1850s and 1860s, was briefly eclipsed for a couple of decades by the positivism that is usually uncritically associated with rapid industrialization and scientific progress, only to explode again at the turn of the century to overwhelmingly dominate twentieth century Italian culture.