ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the theoretical question of the relationship between sociology and Marxism. Among Marxist theoreticians, Antonio Gramsci is one of the few to lament the theoretical degeneration of Marxist theory and predict its final demise resulting from its intellectual capitulation to the canons of Western positivism. It can be said that Alvin Gouldner's warning of the coming crisis of Western sociology and Marxism, as functionalism continues its victorious march to the East, had already been given and forecast more than forty years earlier by Gramsci in his 'Il Materialismo Storico', written in a much different general intellectual, cultural and political context. Sociology and Marxism, in the view of Gramsci, have reached a state of intellectual stagnation. The few sociologists who have studied and analyzed the sociological aspects of Gramsci's theory have pointed out that Gramsci's rejection of bourgeois sociology does not entail a rejection of the possibility of the existence of sociology within a Marxist perspective.
