Haug, Wolfgang Fritz

Gramsci's "Philosophy of Praxis"

«Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks have become a beacon - -albeit an often shrouded one - -for those on the Left who have been dissatisfied with a narrowly political approach to class struggle. A key in the notebooks is the meaning of the concept of "praxis." In his seminal essay, W.F. Haug, analyzes the context in which Gramsci first uses the phrase "philosophy of praxis." Referring both to the notebooks themselves and to the circumstances of their writing, he takes strong issue with the view that Gramsci intended this phrase as mere camouflage for the subversive word "Marxism." Citing both Marx and Gramsci's Italian forerunners, Haug sees praxis rather as a core philosophical concept used by Gramsci to distance himself from the objectivist-materialist strand of Marxism which prevailed among Communists under the then daunting aura of the Soviet party leadership. That approach, which drew from Lenin's epistemology, sat uneasily in Gramsci's eyes, with the praxis-oriented posture of Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach." The principal defenders of the "camouflage thesis" have been motivated, Haug argues, by the wish to claim Gramsci for a tradition that he was rejecting. For Gramsci, in Haug's view, the phrase "philosophy of praxis" incorporates the notion that the world of ideas, of literature and philosophy, of the arts and sciences - -in short,the area of human activities frequently designated by Marxists as "superstructural" - -is a constitutive "structural" feature of the totality of social practice, and as such must not be relegated to a secondary and derivative role. Gramsci, like Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, C.L.R. James and others, struggled to integrate art, literature, and philosophy into a cohesive synthesis of thought and action, of subjective agency and objective circumstances. Of particular interest in Haug's exposition is the evidence that Gramsci was closer in this respect to Marx than were many of Marx's other successors». [From the Editors' Introduction].

Language	eng
Names	[author] Haug, Wolfgang Fritz
Subjects	Filosofia della Praxis Philosophy of praxis