Epilogue

Hobsbawm has written that Gramsci is probably the most original Marxist theorist of the twentieth-century West.¹ Indeed, his thought is predominant in contemporary Italian social thought and is gradually rising to prominence within Western social thought. We have analyzed and expounded in this study on Gramsci’s most original concepts within the context of a macroscopic, historicist and dialectical conception of the historical development. It can be said that in the history of Western sociological thought Gramsci represents and articulates the Marxist response to the criticisms levelled by the most prominent bourgeois classical social theorists, Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, Michels and Mosca, to Marx’s theory. Gramscian thought is at the same time a critique and transcendence of bourgeois sociologies still under the influence of Durkheimian and Weberian ideas. Gramsci took Marxism seriously, but maintained toward it a critical stance and did not hesitate to incorporate into it the most positive achievements of past philosophical systems and conceptions. A critical frame of mind, he writes, is the only fruitful stance in scientific research.²

In the formulation of historico-critical problems it is wrong to conceive of scientific discussion as a process at law in which there is an accused and a public prosecutor whose professional duty it is to demonstrate that the accused is guilty and has to be put out of circulation. In scientific discussion, since it is assumed that the purpose of discussion is the pursuit of truth and the progress of science, the person who shows himself most ‘advanced’ is the one who takes up the point of view that his adversary may well be expressing a need which should be incorporated, if only as a subordinate aspect, in his own construction. To understand and to evaluate realistically one’s adversary’s position and his reasons (and sometimes one’s adversary is the whole of past thought) means precisely to be liberated from the prison of ideologies in the bad sense of the word – that of blind ideological fanaticism. It means taking up a point of view that is ‘critical,’ which for the purpose of scientific research is the only fertile one.