ABSTRACT
The concepts and methods of natural science became those of the science of history and society. This chapter analyses Gramsci's historicism and then attempts to expound upon the problems of science and objectivity. One of the political consequences of materialism was the rendering of men passive before reality and nature. The problem of objectivity has not been seriously analyzed in Marxist literature. Marx and Engels, to be sure, spoke of the relative nature of knowledge, but, they ceased to be interested in this problem once classless societies were created. Following Marx, Gramsci reinterprets historicism as a concrete philosophy of historical development, as the self-realization of concrete man, struggling to change concrete historical situations. For Gramsci, this philosophical dualism leads to philosophical realism, and in the last analysis to a new form of metaphysics and mysticism typical of traditional religion, which posits the existence of the natural world outside and prior to the cognizing man.
