Gramsci attacked empiricism and positivism masked as materialism in Bukharin’s Manual

Evidence

The title is “Theory of Historical Materialism”, and the sub-title “A Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology”. Gramsci goes on to argue below that only the sub-title is in any way an exact description of the content of Bukharin’s work, and even then only “on condition that one gives an extremely restricted meaning to the term ‘sociology’ ”. It should be noted that Gramsci himself vacillates slightly in his notion of what sociology is. His main targets would appear to be empiricism and positivism applied to the science of society, and the reflection of these doctrines, in the guise of “materialism”, in Bukharin’s Manual . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2714

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Frames Gramsci’s critique of ‘materialist sociology’ as actually targeting positivism and empiricism dressed up as materialism.

Related

• Bukharin’s 1921 manual was the canonical text of vulgar-materialist Marxist orthodoxy. (similarity 0.86)
• Sociology attempts an exact positivist science of social facts (similarity 0.84)
• Gramsci rejected any Marxism that separated knowledge from how it is acquired (similarity 0.83)
• Positivist sociology borrows natural-science criteria and lacks the dialectical principle (similarity 0.79)
• Splitting praxis into sociology and metaphysics erases the dialectic. (similarity 0.78)