Gramsci's Historicism

A Realist Interpretation

Esteve Morera

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317829454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1990, this book is a comprehensive study of Gramsci's Quaderni, and gives the reader a penetrating account of the structure of Gramsci's thought. The author draw on many materials and sources, making accesible to the English-speaking reader a wide range of texts otherwise only available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Catalan. His book sheds light on Gramsci's basic philosophical and methodological principles, and will be useful as an introduction to Gramsci for students of political science, sociology, social science, history, and philosophy, as well as to scholars in the field.

Chapter One

Historicism

Introduction

In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci claims that Marxism is an ‘absolute historicism’.¹ There are several possible interpretations of this claim, for the term ‘historicism’ has been used in different senses. Often, historicism is associated with epistemological or moral relativism. In general, historicism is thought to be essentially an idealist philosophy. There is no doubt that the origins of historicism are idealist; they are to be found in the works of Vico, Kant, and Hegel. Moreover, most historicists, such as Croce, Dilthey, Rickert, or Windelband, are clearly associated with either Hegelian or neo-Kantian philosophical schools. Thus, taking Gramsci’s claim at face-value, as Althusser seems to do, one would be obliged to conclude that Gramsci is either a neo-Rantian or a Hegelian Marxist In general, Gramsci is thought of as a member of the Hegelian Marxist group of thinkers which included Lukács and Korsch. His Marxism, like western Marxism in general, is an attempt at reinterpreting Marxism with the aim of transcending economism, the theoretical positions of the Second International and, above all, of absorbing the lessons of Lenin’s contribution as well as the events of the Russian revolution.

The western Marxism that originated out of those experiences seems to have emphasized the subjective element of historical materialism: class consciousness in Lukács, hegemony in Gramsci. As Alex Callinicos has pointed out, Hegelian Marxism, especially that of Lukács, attempted ‘to reintroduce the concept of a transcendental subject into Marxism’.² Of course, this subject became a class, rather than a pure ego. Nevertheless, the Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, with its emphasis on the concept of the identity of subject and object, proved unable to overcome idealism for it reduced social relations ‘to forms of consciousness’, at the same time that it gave primacy to ideological struggle in the strategy for overthrowing capitalism.³ Clearly, Gramsci seems to fit this pattern quite well. His historicism might be interpreted as the doctrine that asserts ‘that scientific theories … have not truth-value independent of the circumstances of their formulation’.⁴ The transcendental subject, in Gramsci’s case, is historicized, but it nevertheless acquires the status of a philosophical category. Seen in this light, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is the equivalent of Lukács’ concept of class consciousness. Gramsci’s other general claim, namely, that Marxism is an absolute humanism,⁵ seems to confirm this interpretation of his thought.

If we take this interpretation of Gramsci as a credible one, then the emphasis commentators place on his philosophy of praxis as the activity of the will to solve historical problems seems justified. In this case, Gramsci’s Marxism is rightly construed as the theory of the primacy of political action, and in particular, a theory of the cultural aspects of that action. In short, seen in this light, Gramsci’s reconstruction of Marxism is an anti-determinist, perhaps voluntarist, reduction of Marxism to a humanism in which the political action of groups to preserve or to assume hegemonic status takes the form of the activity, both theoretical and practical, of a historicized transcendental subject. His ‘historicism’, in essence, is no more than the recognition that the transcendental subject is not a fixed, immutable entity, and that, as a consequence, all activity, both practical and theoretical, will reflect the historicity of the subject. One could go further than that, and claim, as Gramsci does at one point, that the object of both practical and theoretical activity is not independent from the subject.⁶

This historicized transcendental subject, however, poses a conundrum, for how are we to understand the process of the historicization of the subject of history? Does the subject have an essence that is itself historical and whose development determines the historical process? If this is the kind of theory of history that Gramsci espoused, how could he have maintained the primacy of the transcendental subject and claim at the same time that ‘human nature is the ensemble of the historically determined social relations, which is an ascertainable historical fact’?⁷ An analysis of Gramsci’s use of the term historicism suggests a very different theory. Gramsci uses ‘historicism’ in several senses; one can, however, isolate four distinct, but interrelated, uses of this term in the Prison Notebooks. It seems that many interpretations of Gramsci emphasize but one such use, that of historicism as humanism. In the following pages I shall attempt to present the groundwork for a new interpretation of Gramsci’s historicism. To do this, I shall first give a descriptive account of the roots of historicism and its two main schools, the German historical school on the one hand, and that of Croce on the other. Second, I shall analyse Gramsci’s use of the term ‘historicism’. This analysis will immediately disclose the vast differences between Gramsci’s thought and the philosophy of other historicists.

Varieties of Historicism

Today, due to the great influence of logical positivism on the social sciences, historicism is not a popular theory. Even within western Marxism, historicism seems to be firmly rejected by such influential writers as Althusser.⁸ It has been conceived, by both its defenders and its detractors, as an anti-scientistic theory of history. Its origins are to be found in the reaction against both rationalism and empiricism as it developed during the Enlightenment and after. More recently, it has also been opposed to some aspects of positivism, as is well exemplified by Croce’s thought as well as that of Collingwood, William Dray, and Michael Scriven. The philosophical seeds of historicism, or rather, of the various currents which are usually referred to as historicism, were sown by Vico and Kant.

In his Principles for a New Science, Vico set out to establish the foundations of a scientific history that would investigate ‘the common nature of nations’.⁹ The nature of nations, however, was not understood in terms of some immutable elements or final essence that would underlie the variety of existing nations, but in terms of their genesis. ‘The nature of things’, Vico wrote, ‘is none other than their origin in a certain time and in a certain manner’.¹⁰ The method of the new science could not be thought of as a geometry of nations, taken as aggregates of simple natures; rather, this method had to establish the principles for the study of ‘nations in their progress, states, decadence, and end’.¹¹

The foundation of the genesis and development of nations, Vico contended, was to be found in the human mind. His principles were intended to produce a history of human ideas which in turn would provide the elements for a ‘metaphysics of the human mind’.¹² To fulfil this project, Vico proceeded to study myths and legends, which he believed contained real descriptions of the past cast, however, in the language of imagination. Myths are the first form taken by the human mind; they contain ‘civil truths, and for this reason they are the history of the first people’.¹³ Myths are cast in what Vico called ‘imaginative universals’,¹⁴ which are precursors of the true universals of philosophy and science. The interpretation of myths would therefore furnish the first materials for the study of ‘modifications of our own minds’.¹⁵

The results of the history of the modification of the mind would in turn furnish the materials for a deeper study. The aim of the new science is to unravel the apparent disorder and to penetrate the amorphous mass of historical detail in order to bring to light ‘an ideal eternal history’.¹⁶ Vico’s grand design, then, was aimed at understanding history, in particular at understanding the thread of necessity underneath the apparent accidental occurrence of historical events. In a passage that anticipates Adam Smith’s concept of the hidden hand, or Hegel’s cunning of reason, Vico argues that ‘men love mainly their own utility’, but Providence uses the self-interest of individuals to preserve human society.¹⁷ The deeper sense of history, the ideal eternal history, is the history of Providence which ‘so ordered things human according to this eternal order’.¹⁸ It is appropriate, then, to think of the new science of history as ‘a rational civil theology of divine providence’.¹⁹

The science of history, is, for Vico, superior to any other science, including geometry.²⁰ The reasons for this claim are to be found in his epistemology. Both in his Delia Antichissima and in his New Science, Vico stresses the identity of verum and factum. This identity is based on a distinction between inlelligere (understanding) and thinking, where the former is far superior to the latter. Vico compares intelligere to ‘reading perfectly’, for in the same way that reading is the gathering of words and the ideas signified by them, ‘understanding is the gathering of all the elements of a thing in order to form a perfect idea of the thing’.²¹ But gathering the elements of things is the same as making the things, and hence the perfect knowledge of a thing can only be had by he who makes it, or, what is the same, by he who constructs the thing out of its elements. Hence, the truth of things is known by their maker and it is to be found in the making or genesis of them.

For Vico, this means that God alone, as creator, can understand the nature of all things. Human beings must be satisfied with thinking about the world. Thinking is also a gathering of the elements of things, but it is considerably limited. As maker of things, God can understand both the internal and the external elements of things,²² whereas human beings can only read the external elements and cannot hope to gather the internal ones. For this reason, human beings cannot attain understanding of the nature of the universe, they cannot have a science of nature. Unfortunately, Vico does not give any precise analysis or definition of the external and internal elements of things. However, in the New Science, he claims that understanding of history is possible because man makes history or, more precisely, because the genesis of history, its internal elements, are to be found in the human mind.²³ This allows the historian to penetrate beyond the appearances, the manifold events and accidents of history, and to tap the modifications of the mind that are the inner essence, the creative power which alone explains history. Vico’s claim to the scientific character of his historiography is based on this contention that the historian can know the modifications of the mind which are the inner aspects of history. Knowledge of them is clearly superior to knowledge of the external aspects, and since the study of nature cannot ever reach the inner aspects of natural things, historical knowledge is superior to the natural sciences. In this, we can already see the beginning of what was to become a crucial point for a school of historicists, namely, the distinction between Natuvurissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften.

There seems to be an inconsistency in Vico’s thought between his claim for human agency in history and the metaphysics of Providence he espouses. Nevertheless, three essential points of his thought played an important role in the development of historicism: first, the distinction between the internal and external elements of things; second, the belief in the ideal nature of history, with the consequent emphasis on cultural and intellectual history; third, the doctrine that the nature of things is to be found in their genesis. Support for the first two theses was drawn from the philosophy of Kant. The distinction between noumena and phenomena, and the analysis of the third antinomy, provided an interpretation of the distinction between the internal and external elements of history that proved essential in the development of German historicism.

On the traditional interpretation, Kant’s solution of the third antinomy, the conflict between freedom and causality, relies on his distinction between the intelligible world, or noumena, and the spatio-temporal world, or phenomena. Causality is the category that regulates the temporal succession of events, hence it belongs wholly to the phenomenal world. Freedom, or the causality of freedom as he calls it, is the sphere of spontaneous action, and it is intelligible in this creation.²⁴ Freedom belongs to the world of noumena. An action, seen from the point of view of its effects in the sensible world, must be ‘in conformity with all the laws of empirical causality’.²⁵ But from the point of its origin, it ‘is not to be looked for in the causally connected appearances’,²⁶ for it ‘has in its noumenon certain conditions which must be regarded as purely intelligible’.²⁷

Kant himself, in his writings on history, considered human action from this double perspective. He considered human actions to be determined by universal laws in so far as they were the appearances of the freedom of the will.²⁸ History, in so far as it is the narration of these phenomena, seeks to find the laws of human action. However, in so far as the actions themselves are an expression of freedom, the drama of history is time charged with moral significance. This conception of history became the basis of the anti-naturalist doctrine of the separation of the method of the natural sciences from that of the cultural sciences. The historicist’s emphasis on the distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Giestestvissenschaften, which Iggers thinks is ‘the core of the historicist outlook’,²⁹ is thus the culmination of a process of thought whose essence is the understanding of history as a moral rather than a natural process. The German historical school tended to ignore Kant’s dual analysis of history, as both noumena and phenomena, and to emphasize the inner meaning, or the noumena as the essence that historical knowledge was to capture.

Two main features characterize the German historical school: the first is the critical method developed by Ranke; the second is historicism. The critical method, which Ranke taught in his seminars at the University of Berlin, was essentially a canon for rigorous empirical research. The emphasis of this method lay in the careful study of documents, their authentication and criticism, and the interpretation of the findings. Its motto is to be found in the Preface to Ranke’s Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations. He wrote that the task of the historian is not to judge the past, but to show how it really was (wie es eigentlich gewessen). This aspect of the German historical school has constituted a positive contribution to historiography. At times, however, it has been interpreted as the view that history should dispense with philosophical or theoretical considerations, and focus on the narration of a carefully researched and well established mass of details. The temptation of empiricist narrative was always close to the German historicist.

The second characteristic of the German historical school was historicism. From Humboldt to Dilthey, Rickertand Meinecke, the painstaking accumulation of facts was viewed as a necessary but external aspect of historical writing: it was concerned with the phenomena of history. Interpretation, unders...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Historicism
• 2. A General Interpretation of Gramsci’s Historicism
• 3. History and Politics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index