The ‘materialist’ label largely misrepresents the actual founding of Marx’s philosophy
Evidence
It could be said, schematically, that what has happened is this. One starts from the dogmatic presupposition that historical materialism is straightforward traditional materialism slightly revised and corrected (corrected by the “dialectic”, which therefore becomes absorbed as a chapter of formal logic and not as a logic of its own, that is a theory of knowledge); and one then studies in Lange what traditional materialism was, and concepts of this materialism are represented as the concepts of historical materialism. So that it could be said that the major part of the corpus of concepts that goes under the label of historical materialism have as their founder and fountainhead none other than Lange. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1616
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Clarifies how a conventional label (‘materialism’) misleads once its originating context is forgotten — key to Gramsci’s broader point about terminology and cultural sources.
- XREF: Connects forward to Said’s Orientalism and the broader Islamophobia field on how inherited labels/concepts carry concealed origins that later readings treat as given.
Related
- Early Institute authors presented materialism as pioneering rather than established doctrine (similarity 0.80)
- Gramsci distinguishes Marx’s rational dialectic from a merely materialist inversion of Hegel (similarity 0.79)
- Historical materialism requires no metaphysical-materialist foundation (similarity 0.79)
- Tracing how Marxism got absorbed into other philosophies requires delicate analysis of hidden connections. (similarity 0.78)
- Marxist orthodoxy allied chiefly with traditional materialism over Kantianism (similarity 0.78)