Economic liberalism and revolution. Commenting a recent volume on Antonio Gramsci

This study deals with two crucial aspects of Gramsci political views: the "liberal" component that characterizes his economic outlook until the end of the First World War and the combination of a leninist revolutionary perspective with universalistic motives of humanistic derivation. The A. firstly reconstructs young Gramsci’s position on economic liberalism, from 1915 up to his final rejection of Einaudi’s "utopia", showing how that position - exceeding Marx’s confutation of "State socialism", rooted as it was also in early Twentieth Century idealism and "meridionalist" claims - found its polemical target not in the "state" as such, but in the "state" subdued to the interests of monopoly capital. Secondly, he suggests that in Gramsci’s view the rupture with bourgeois state would actually realize the supreme ideals of European culture, favoring the emancipation of every single individual through a statehood no longer conditioned by class bias. Yet in the A.’s opinion this fundamental passage of Gramsci’s thought appears to be the most problematic as regards political theory.

Keywords: Antonio Gramsci, economic liberalism, revolution, First World War, bourgeois state, humanistic culture

Salvatore Cingari, Liberismo e rivoluzione. Note a margine di un recente volume su Antonio Gramsci in "ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA" 267/2012, pp 277-290, DOI: 10.3280/IC2012-267004