Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought

by Maurice A. Finocchiaro

• ISBN13: 9780521892698
• ISBN10: 0521892694
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is an interpretative and evaluative study of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the founding father of the Italian Communist Party who died in 1937 after ten years of imprisonment in Fascist jails. It proceeds by a rigorous textual analysis of his Prison Notebooks, the scattered notes he wrote during his incarceration. Professor Finocchiaro explores the nature of Gramsci's dialectical thinking, in order to show in what ways Gramsci was and was not a Marxist, as well as to illustrate correspondences with the work of Hegel, Croce, and Bukharin. The book provides a critical reappraisal of Gramsci as a thinker and of the dialectical approach as a mode of inquiry.

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: An Approach to Gramsci	1	(7)
Gramsci's Crocean Critique of Croce's Philosophy	8	(20)
Croce and Marxism	8	(3)
Marxism and theology	11	(7)
Marxism as a philosophy	18	(2)
History and politics	20	(5)
Criticism and dialectic	25	(3)
Croce and the Theory and Practice of Criticism	28	(40)
Croce, critic par excellence	29	(4)
The general problem of criticism	33	(3)
Toward a general theory of critical understanding	36	(4)
The criticism of philosophical theories	40	(4)
The methodological conception of philosophy	44	(3)
Historicism	47	(3)
Literary criticism for logicians	50	(7)
Toward an aesthetics of logic	57	(7)
Theory versus practice in criticism	64	(4)
Gramsci's Methodological Criticism of Bukharin's Sociology	68	(26)
Bukharin and Marxism	69	(3)
Pedagogical criticism	72	(3)
Philosophical criticism	75	(1)
Methodological criticism	76	(10)
Marxist-rhetorical criticism	86	(2)
Philosophy of praxis	88	(6)
Bukharin and the Theory and Practice of Science	94	(29)
Philosophical and political import of Bukharin's sociology	94	(2)
Criticism of Gramsci	96	(4)
Criticism of Lukacs	100	(4)
Mechanism and sociology in Bukharin	104	(12)
Dialectic in Bukharin	116	(7)
Gramsci's Dialectical Interpretation of Machiavelli's Politics	123	(24)
Machiavelli's politics	125	(8)
A concept of politics	133	(8)
The problem of dialectical politics	141	(6)
Gramsci's Political Translation of Hegelian-Marxian Dialectic	147	(34)
Dialectic and classical European culture	149	(6)
Logic and dialectic	155	(3)
``Dialectical materialism''	158	(1)
The ``dialectic of nature''	159	(3)
Dialectic and centralization	162	(1)
Dialectic and revolution	163	(3)
Dialectic and reformism	166	(10)
The ``dialectic of distincts''	176	(3)
Two Gramscian concepts of dialectic	179	(2)
Hegel and the Theory and Practice of Dialectic	181	(50)
The dialectic and its interpreters	182	(10)
Defining the dialectic: negative versus positive dialectic	192	(2)
The history of the dialectic: subjective versus objective dialectic	194	(3)
The dialectic of philosophy: metaphilosophy versus dialectical theory	197	(14)
The dialectic of dialectic: laws of thought versus determinations of reflections	211	(17)
Hegel's and Gramsci's dialectic	228	(3)
Gramsci and the Evaluation of Marxism	231	(12)
The problem of the evaluation of Marxism	231	(2)
Marxism and method in Gramsci's criticism	233	(5)
The synthesis of theory and practice	238	(5)
CONCLUSION: DIALECTICAL METHODOLOGY AND TEXTUAL CRITICISM	243	(6)
Dialectical methodology: historical examples	244	(1)
The hermeneutics of negative evaluation	245	(4)
Appendix: Concordance of critical edition and English translations	249	(5)
Notes	254	(38)
Bibliography	292	(13)
Index	305