ABSTRACT
In early 1898, a young German scholar suffered nervous collapse: 'an evil something out of the subterranean unconsciousness ... grasped him by its claws.' 1 Thirteen years later, an even younger Sardinian scholarship student at the University of Turin tottered on the brink of mental disintegration. Later he recalled that winter of 1911 when he had been seriously ill 'as a result of cold and exhaustion.' 'I used to be obsessed by the vision of a colossal spider which would come down from its web every night while I was asleep, and suck out my brains.' 2
Incessant agonizing battles for mental stability were shared by Antonio Gramsci and Max Weber. 3 Both men were strongly puritanical, impatient with shoddy workmanship and did not suffer fools or windbags. They were outstanding polymaths and not a little difficult. Both belonged to a breed of irregulars who foresaw how specialization and rationalization were destroying the sociological conditions for the generation of further cohorts of generalist humanists. 4 They had in common a classical education, a firm grounding in political theory and philosophy, and a thorough immersion in Italo-German historicism. If Weber in his early maturity was an economist, historian, philosopher and self-educated theologian, Gramsci was qualified to teach linguistics, philosophy, history of literature and history. Weber came from the Bildungsbiirgertum and Gramsci from its 'democratic' confrere, the classe dei colti (educated middle classes). Weber, like Gramsci's obsession, Benedetto Croce, lived as a rentier-scholar; the Sardinian came from the lower echelons of the intelligentsia. Gramsci was born into a rural Southern bureaucratic family, which to the unfamiliar eye might appear to share the same misery as its peasant neighbours. But the ability to read and even to send one's son to liceo and possibly to university and to a legal career, made them the object of envy and resentment. 'He is the greatest of Western Marxists', Tom Nairn writes of Gramsci, 'but it cannot be without some significance that he was also a product of the West's most remote periphery, and of conditions which, half a century later it became fashionable to call "Third World". No comparable Western intellectual came from such a background. He was a barbed gift of the backwoods to the metropolis, and some aspects of his originality always reflected this distance.' 5 During their lives Gramsci and Weber never achieved consistent success. Gramsci, the maestro manque, sought to turn the Italian Communist Party into a pedagogic institution, and his final testament, the
Prison Notebooks, were written as private theoretical reflections on how Marxism might be taught and then 'spontaneously' incorporated into the everyday philosophies of working-class people. His greatest position of power, however, had been achieved not through moral suasion, but through the very mechanical process of Comintern co-option. Weber, who like Gramsci dreamt of advising the Modern Prince, could not hold his own among the caucus politicians. Furthermore, their intellectual genius was never fully appreciated before their deaths, owing in part to the unusual quality of their texts.
