Historical materialism superseded subjectivist philosophy by posing its questions historicist terms

Evidence

But if common sense finds it funny, the philosopher of praxis should all the same look for an explanation both of the real meaning which the conception has and of the reason why it was born and became diffused among the intellectuals, and also of the reason why it is found laughable by common sense. Without doubt the subjectivist conception is proper to modern philosophy in its most achieved and advanced form, in that it gave birth to, and was superseded by, historical materialism, a philosophy which, in its theory of superstructures, poses in realistic and historicist terms what traditional philosophy expressed in a speculative form. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1570

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the genealogy linking idealist subjectivism to historical materialism — a key scaffold for how Gramsci positions the philosophy of praxis against both idealism and positivism.
• XREF: connects to: Historical materialism inherits and historicizes idealism’s claim that reality is a human creation — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1570; Historical materialism refutes empiricism’s compartmentalizing thought, not German idealism’s speculative totalizing — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 193; Materialist historiography alone resists the dehistoricizing of canonical texts — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1149