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Antonio Gramsci pp 97–117Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Gramsci’s Marxism: The ‘Philosophy of Praxis’

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Part of the Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought book series (CEPT)

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.

Keywords

  • Code Word
  • Historical Materialism
  • Philosophical Reflection
  • Philosophical Practice
  • Party School

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Notes

  1. On the history of the reception of the Prison Notebooks, see Guido Liguori, Gramsci conteso. Storia di un dibattito 1922–2012 (Rome: Editori Riuniti University Press, 1996).

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  1. Peter D. Thomas
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of the West of Scotland, UK

    Mark McNally (Lecturer in Politics, School of Media, Culture and Society) (Lecturer in Politics, School of Media, Culture and Society)

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© 2015 Peter D. Thomas

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Thomas, P.D. (2015). Gramsci’s Marxism: The ‘Philosophy of Praxis’. In: McNally, M. (eds) Antonio Gramsci. Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137334183_6

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