Gramsci's philosophy: a critical study.

As with all holist philosophies, Gramsci's philosophy of praxis poses a hermeneutical problem. We cannot say everything at once, and yet each part of the whole cannot properly be understood removed from the whole. Thus just as the end presupposes the beginning, so too does the beginning presuppose the end. This hermeneutical circle forces us to mention, sometimes repeatedly, what has gone before as well as what is yet to come. The problem is only compounded in the case of a thinker like Gramsci who left behind a fragmentary system lacking even a definitive ordering of its given parts. We, of course, could pay lip-service to the now common complaint that all interpretation is time-bound. While this is especially true with regard to Gramsci, more often than not such a position is an excuse for lack of serious. scholarship.

The reader of the following pages will quickly notice the absence of any mention of most recent English-language secondary literature on Gramsci. The reason for this is not the present author's unfamiliarity with it so much as its almost uniform lack of depth. Most of the literature in English and, in fact, also a good deal of it in Italian is a mere paraphrase of the Notebooks. The French-language literature, by and large, is an attempt to recruit Gramsci to some particular line in a contemporary political debate. It is too often the case that writers on Gramsci come to their study with a political axe to grind and with little or no background in philosophy, in particular that of Italian Idealism. Even in Italy this is still a common phenomenon. Suffice it to say that without a prior knowledge of Croce and Gentile one cannot understand anything of Gramsci's philosophy. Undoubtedly the more one studies the thoughts of Gramsci's illustrious predecessors, the more light will consequently be thrown on Gramsci's often cryptic remarks.