'Gramsci 4.0' and the reconnaissance of neoliberal order

Coutinho's is the more abstract study.4 After providing a fairly standard account of Gramsci's revolt against the Second International, Coutinho defines what many will see as the sphere of the political as redefined by Gramsci 4.0: 'In the broad sense, politics is identified with liberty, with universality, or, more precisely, with all forms of praxis that go beyond the mere passive reception or the manipulation of immediate facts from reality ... and that are, on the contrary, consciously directed to the totality of objective and subjective relations' (Coutinho 2012: 55-56). Losurdo more iconoclastically proposes that Gramsci 'begins as a liberal, in a certain way' (Losurdo 2006:18).5 Gramsci initially admired Benedetto Croce's dialectical sensibility and his anti-militarism, but he came to be repelled by the anti-democratic elitism Croce shared with so many other 19th-century partisans of 'aristocratic liberalism' (Kahan 1992; Gramsci 1995: 355; Q10I§11) and ultimately developed, against Croce, his own version of dialectical thought.6 Losurdo's Gramsci is not an 'anti-liberal' but a 'post-liberal', someone trying to think through the antinomies of liberal reason to develop the presuppositions and preconditions of radical democracy.\n His was Marxism shorn of its pseudo-religious certainties and its 'falsely heroic' characteristics (cited in Boothman 1995: lxxxvii), one that presented a plausible, grounded account of the possibilities of liberty in the 20th-century world.