Language and Visions of the Future: the Praxis of Inheritance in Gramsci

This article argues that by linking Gramsci’s pre-carceral critiques of left-utopianism to his later work on language found in The Prison Notebooks, a coherent and consistent articulation of the demands of future-oriented praxis can be worked out. On this account, Gramsci argues that actions must be aimed at inheritable, universal, and transformable principles rather than the instantiation of particular factual details that appear necessary or desirable from the perspective of the present. This is both because such details are overly contingent in their achievability across time and because the context in which future generations will inherit our actions will have shifted such that these particular concrete details may not motivate future generations to act at all. As such, future-oriented action is better thought, for Gramsci, as universal in and through the possibility of its principles being translatable and transformable.