GRAMSCI: Ethical problems in The Notebooks

Abstract

To address the ethical problems that can be found in Gramsci's work as a whole (and I am referring to either the general areas of the elaboration related to the ethics-politics thematic complex, or to some specific aspects of Gramsci's reflection on concepts such as will, spontaneity, subject, etc.) it is necessary to refer to what can be considered the two fundamental theoretical devices that are at the base of his thinking: criticality and historiocity. If in Marxism itself it has been possible to introduce non-secondary elements of correction of mechanistic and dogmatic approaches, and if the link between ethics and politics has acquired a role as relevant as that between politics and economics, this is due to the capacity manifested by Gramsci to always keep constitutively open the tension between the criticality of the processes of control and modification of praxis by social intelligence and the non-rigidly finalist and linear-evolutionary vision of history.