A brief commentary on the Hegelian-Marxist origins of Gramsci’s ‘Philosophy of Praxis’

Abstract

There has been a great deal of speculation about the ‘integral and original philosophy’ which Gramsci here names the ‘philosophy of praxis’. As Haug has suggested (2000, several functions are potentially united in Gramsci’s use of the phrase. Not only does it serve a pragmatic purpose as a linguistic camouflage to appease the prison censor: more importantly, it functions in a metaphorical fashion as a ‘substantive programmatic concept’ to inaugurate Marx’s own distinctive form of thought. With regard to this latter role, Haug claims that what it ushers in is a ‘coherent but nonsystematic thinking’ which not only ‘grasps the world through human activity’ but also ‘addresses the whole’ from below ‘with a patient attention to particularity’.