Newsletter - International Gramsci Society

From science Gramsci goes on, through “The Logical Instruments of Thought” to
Section V of Notebook 11 on the “Translation of Scientific and Philosophical Languages,”
where here “scientific” is, on the whole, to be regarded in the broad sense. Although neartotally
neglected, it seems to me that these are some of the most important paragraphs of all
the prison writings, for he expresses, at the level of theory, what underlies his wholesale
approach to the development of Marxism. Societies at a given similar stage of economic
development give rise to broadly similar currents of thought, although these may be
expressed in different languages, according to the predominant national culture (e.g. classical
German philosophy, British classical political economy, French politics and literature). There
is naturally a certain approximation in this since, as he asks, “what language is exactly
translatable into another?” (Notebook 11, §48); for him “only in the philosophy of praxis is
the ‘translation’ organic and thorough-going” (Notebook 11, §47). What he means by this
comes out in the terms that he himself, as is well known, borrows from other thinkers, usually
from intellectual traditions different from and often hostile to Marxism: historical bloc
(Sorel), intellectual and moral reform (originally Renan), civil society, Jacobinism, hegemony,
and so on. The transformation of terms—in other words, “translations”—sometimes by
keeping the same word but infusing it with new meaning, is for Gramsci part and parcel of
what has been called his “living Marxism”: through this process—the reinterpretation in
Marxist terms and subsequent incorporation into Marxism of the highest points reached in a
country’s philosophical and cultural trends—he shows how Marxism can be, as was by him,
renewed.
It is by no means coincidental that his notes on translation were written at the same
time as his major work on Croce, for it is here perhaps most of all that he puts these ideas into
practice. (This theme is represented in Further Selections by Chapter VI—Notebook 10, I, in
its entirety—and Chapter VII—the Notebook 10, II notes on Croce, alongside others from
elsewhere that, together, coincide in so far as has been editorially possible with the aim
Gramsci expresses in Notebook 10, I, §1 of examining: “1) Croce’s historicism . . . his
philosophy tout court; 2) his dissent from Gentile and from actualism; 3) his dissent from
historical materialism, hand in hand with his obsession with it.”) The notes on Croce are of
course of interest in themselves as a critique of the major Italian idealist intellectual figure of
the time, with interests spanning aesthetics, literary theory, historiography and philosophy (as
the methodology of historiography). They are, however, of more interest than this in that it is
to a large extent through his critique of Croce that Gramsci expresses certain basic tenets of
his own outlook, or restates and refines certain aspects of established Marxist positions, and
opens up the way for others to carry out future explorations. One such example is the
philosophy-ideology nexus; whereas Croce considers ideology, as an instrument of
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