Gramsci’s Marxism: The ‘Philosophy of Praxis’

Abstract

In the Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci proposes the distinctive notion of a ‘philosophy of praxis.’ The interpretation of the significance of this suggestive formulation has constituted a fertile field of discussion both of Gramsci’s approach to philosophical questions in his prison writings and, more broadly, the nature of Marxist philosophy. Indeed, in the early years of the reception of the Prison Notebooks, the notion of a philosophy of praxis was sometimes understood as a merely formal device to evade prison censorship, or a ‘code word’ by means of which Gramsci disguised his true references.¹ This reading marked both the early years of the Italian debate (following the publication of a thematically organized edition of the Prison Notebooks in the late 1940s and early 1950s) and then the Anglophone and subsequently international debate in the wake of publication of Selections from the Prison Notebooks in 1971. According to this interpretation, the notion of a philosophy of praxis could be ‘deciphered,’ or perhaps even effectively ‘replaced,’ by the term ‘Marxism’; in its turn, ‘Marxism’ was assumed to be a more or less stable body of doctrine in accord with the main lines of the version of Marxist orthodoxy that emerged in the later years of the Third International.² Gramsci’s proposal of a philosophy of praxis was thus argued to signal his fundamental allegiance, in however modulated a form, to the ‘actually existing’ Marxism that dominated the official communist parties throughout much of the twentieth-century.