On Fri, 3 Sep 1999 10:33:12 +0100 (BST) "Mr P.A. Van Heusden"
<pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk> writes:
>On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>
>> I agree with you that Gramsci didn't think of the question of
>intellectuals
>> in the same manner as Marx or Lenin had; his thoughts are
>reflections of
>> his historical times and different national conditions. That said,
>it may
>> not be tenable to argue that Gramsci's conceptions of the Party, the
>> intellectuals, the masses, etc. differed so much from Lenin's as to
>> constitute a significant break.
>
>Indeed. Gramsci was a Leninist (his 'code phrase' for Lenin was 'the
>greatest exponent of the philosophy of practice'). His understanding
>of
>philosophy, though, was not identical to Lenin's, reflecting not only
>different national conditions, but also a different philosophical
>heritage
>(Italian Marxism in the early years of the century was quite different
>from 2nd International Marxism of Kautsky and Plekhanov). This is
>maybe
>best illustrated by the bits of the Prison Notebooks where Gramsci
>attacks Bukharin's 'Popular Manual'.
Italian Marxism was much more in touch with its Hegelian roots than was the Marxism of Kautsky or Plekhanov. The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola had come to Marxism after already having been a Hegelian philosopher. His best known pupil was Benedetto Croce who after a youthful flirtation with Marxism opted for bourgeois liberalism. But Croce's neo-Hegelian writings were read with profit by the young Gramsci. Gramsci was also influenced by the neo-Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who also had a youthful flirtation with Marxism (but subseqently moved rightwards eventually becoming Mussolini's education minister). Anyway given this background it is not surprising that Gramsci should have been much more sensitive to the Hegelian heritage of Marxism.
>
>While Sorel did have an effect on Gramsci, I think, to dispel the myth
>that Gramsci was some kind of Sorel-ian, it is useful to note
>Gramsci's
>attack on Sorel (in the Prison Notebooks somewhere).
Sorel certainly had an influence on Gramsci but he also had significant differences with him as well. For one thing Gramsci never swallowed Sorel's Bergsonian-Nietzschean irrationalism which was of course incompatible with any conception of Marxism as being scientific. It might be interesting to compare Gramsci in this regard with the Peruvian Marxist Jose Mariategui who strike me as having been a more enthusiastic Sorelian than Gramsci. Sorel did have an interest in the writings of the American pragmatists and indeed he even wrote a book on William James. Some of this interest in pragmatist thought seems to have rubbed off on Gramsci. Thus in some of Gramsci's writings he seems to advance a consensus theory of truth (i.e. as an ideal asymptomatically approached in history but only realized under communism) which is more than a little reminiscent of C.S. Peirce's consensus theory.
Jim Farmelant
>
>Peter
>--
>Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available
>'The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs
>is the
>demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.' - Karl
>Marx
>
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