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Los Cuadernos antes de la cárcel

2020

Abstract

Gramsci "before prison" not only constitutes the content, but also the form of the Notebooks. On the one hand, if only the “late” Gramsci will provide his own solution to the quintessential philosophical dilemma (dualism) through a radical historicization of philosophy as politics (theory of hegemony), on the other, the Notebooks can be considered an autobiography, de-personalized, brought to the level of conceptual elaboration. My work investigates the roots of Gramscian Marxism as Philosophy of Praxis, following the strict relations between the development of a methodological horizon and the historical vicissitudes in which Gramsci found himself not only submerged, but also chose to be partisan. My general intention was to return to the “classics” so that to rescue a method. I tried to substitute an abstract and theorist approach with an historical and political horizon, so that to highlight the extreme originality of Gramsci’s theoretical proposal. To this end, the thesis examines Gramsci's proposals in relation to the Italian and international labor movement, both considered in the long historical period and at the time when they re-defined their own political identity as part of a larger crisis, that of the liberal State and its complex cultural expressions. Focusing upon the struggle for socialism and democracy, I read it as a contradiction between the national and the international relation of forces that, being constitutive of the State in its “integral” form, it reveals itself as such at crucial moments in the same history of Marxism, the latter understood as a political and cultural praxis contested, disputed, and in this sense, permanently in crisis.