Gramsci rejected Croce’s dialectic for ignoring real class conflict in history

Evidence

The substance of Gramsci’s mature critique of Croce’s philosophy relates to the latter’s reduction of historical movement from a struggle of opposites to a merely conceptual dialectic, the “dialectic of distincts”. While, Gramsci contended, such a schema might have its place in the philosophy of a society in which real conflicts had been eliminated and where the unity of knowledge and being, impossible in a class society, had finally been achieved, it was unable to offer an account of the actual concrete character of a history fundamentally determined by the class struggle. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Crocean ‘dialectic of distincts’ that Gramsci’s whole philosophical critique is built against.
• XREF: This ground-clearing of idealist philosophy from Marxism carries directly into the reader’s toolkit on hegemony and how Gramsci relocates struggle in the material/concrete.