Philosophy of praxis entered Italy through Labriola and united theory with 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. Labriola’s ideas, particularly on the interpretation of history, were extremely influential, but mainly in intellectual circles and often in a distorted form which accentuated their latent idealism at the expense of their materialist base. The phrase “philosophy of praxis” in particular entered into the parlance of a specifically anti-materialist tendency of which the major exponents were Rodolfo Mondolfo and, in a marginal way, Giovanni Gentile. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 45

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the genealogy and original meaning of ‘philosophy of praxis’ — Labriola’s materialist-Hegelian synthesis that Gramsci later adopted and transformed.
• XREF: This intellectual genealogy anticipates how later Islamophobia scholars trace concept lineages — how a key term carries contested idealist/materialist baggage into a new field.
• QUESTION: The claim that ‘philosophy of praxis’ also functioned as a euphemism to deceive the prison censor — worth noting how Gramsci’s own category of ‘hegemony’ travelled under disguises in constrained political conditions.