Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 151 that Russell is not a modern logician if"modern" has some connection with "contemporary ." What Russell really was now requires an exercise in historical recovery, and in these sections Hylton succeeds splendidly in giving us a Russell who is both remote and compelling. DOUGLAS P. LACKEY Baruch Collegeand the Gradute Center,City Universityof New York Maurice A. Finocchiaro. Gramsciand the History ofDialecticalThought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xi + 313 . $44.5o. The critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks gives occasion to Maurice Finocchiaro's book, and several purposes unify it. First, the book complements the critical edition with a meticulous study of the notebooks. Finocchiaro has worked painstakingly to rein in 235o unruly pages and produce a coherent monograph. (An appendix provides a useful concordance relating the critical edition to English translations .) Second, Finocchiaro's siftings find in dialectic that which binds the notebooks. As the title indicates, he assesses Gramsci as a dialectical thinker: does Gramsci do for politics what Hegel did for philosophy and Marx for economics? Third, the sway of Gramsci's countryman Benedetto Croce is shown to be so strong that Finocchiaro can write of Gramsci's "Crocean Marxism"--with which Finocchiaro appears to identify. Fourth, Finocchiaro finds in Gramsci's thinking about religion, science, and politics a suitable basis for making a general, and largely sympathetic, evaluation of Marxism. Fifth, Finocchiaro persistently checks on Gramsci and others to see if their practice matches their theory. This is an exceptionally conscientious book. Finocchiaro comes to Gramsci by way of Croce, and it shows. The characteristically Crocean theses that religion can be affirmed secularly as a world-view with an associated morality, that philosophy is criticism, and that philosophy takes up the problems history delivers it (absolute historicism), are among the most compellingly expounded points in the book. The book is thus at least as likely to interest the reader in Croce as in Gramsci; I take it this would please Finocchiaro. In structuring the book around Gramsci's critiques of Croce, Bukharin, and Machiavelli, Finocchiaro relies on Croce's definition of philosophy . Gramsci's notes on these three men are examined in separate chapters and are correlated with the topics of religion, science, and politics, respectively. These chapters lead into a direct treatment of Gramsci's scattered notes on dialectic. Because Finocchiaro is determined to evaluate Gramsci's criticisms and his conception of dialectic, and because he insists that negative criticisms must be held to a more stringent standard than positive ones--positive ones have value in their own right whereas negative ones are pointless when unjustified--Finocchiaro includes substantial chapters on Croce, Bukharin, and Hegel's dialectic. Machiavelli gets no special chapter, so positively does Gramsci view him. The results of these seven chapters are as follows. Gramsci's critique of Croce's "liquidationist" dismissal of Marxism proves sound--"vulgar" Marxism has legitimacy as a secular religion and philosophical Marxism cannot be tossed aside as vulgar--but quite Crocean in its own principles. "Perhaps no critic has ever been greater than 152 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30: ~ JANUARY ~992 Benedetto Croce" (29), writes Finocchiaro, yet even he was liable to contradict his theory in his practice. Gramsci caught him at it. Gramsci rightly attacks Nikolai Bukharin 's deterministic materialism and scientism, but wrongly presumes that they fatally infected Bukharin's actual sociology. Against Gramsci and Luk:lcs, Finocchiaro even depicts Bukharin's sociological studies as dialectical exercises. Gramsci plays Machiavelli against conventional Marxism's reductive attitude toward politics by insisting on the "autonomy of politics" and the distinctiveness of "political imagination." Gramsci's effort to theorize a dialectical politics stumbles on the recognition that the concept applies retrospectively, not prospectively, where it would have bite. Taking Hegel as the plumb-line for dialectic, Gramsci's "primary" conception of dialectic as the mental activity of finding unity in diversity and difference within unity (or avoiding onesidedness ) is preferable to his "official" view that dialectic is a real process of development from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. This preferred concept of dialectic serves Finocchiaro as a hermeneutical standard , and he regularly calls attention to his own dialectical proceedings. But...