Gramsci for historians

Abstract

This essay presents the reflections of Antonio Gramsci as a theoretical development that, though dealing with Politics, is fundamentally oriented towards History and the historiographical practice. For Gramsci, the philosophy of praxis was the absolute or realistic historicism. The Gramscian concepts, or canons of historical and political methodology and interpretation, as he put it, are worked out based on the analysis of historically determined situations and epochs, namely Italy in the 19th Century, in particular, and Modern Europe, in general. Therefore, they are historical concepts developed for and from a historiographical practice. To assert this point, Gramsci argues against the mechanicism and determinism of the Communist International, exemplified in The theory of historical materialism: a popular manual of Marxist sociology, by Nikolai Bukharin, and the idealism of the philosophical and historiographical writings of Benedetto Croce.