Labriola originated the philosophy of praxis as the unity of theory and practice.

Evidence

The term “philosophy of praxis”, best known today in connection with Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, in which it is used partly for its own sake and partly as a euphemism to deceive the censor, was introduced into Italy by Antonio Labriola, the only Italian theoretical Marxist of any consequence before the first world war. Labriola, who died in 1904, was a philosopher and historian who had come round to Marxism and to participation in the socialist movement fairly late in life, bringing with him distinct traces of a Hegelian intellectual formation. He saw the essence of Marxism in the unique nexus it established between theoretical and practical activity, and maintained the unity of philosophy and history; he distinguished himself from the Hegelian school mainly by his insistence on the primacy of concrete relations over consciousness. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 45

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes what ‘philosophy of praxis’ means and its lineage before Gramsci’s use of it in the Prison Notebooks.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s toolkit: this intellectual lineage underpins later Gramscian concepts like hegemony and common sense that Islamophobia readings draw on.