Antonio Labriola

Dzieła

• 1896Eseje o materialistycznym pojmowaniu dziejów

  Eseje z lat 1895–96 przedstawiające materializm historyczny jako metodę badania złożonej struktury społeczeństw, a nie system przyczyn ekonomicznych.

• 1898Rozmowy o socjalizmie i filozofii

  Listy do Georges’a Sorela o filozofii marksizmu, w których Labriola mówi o „filozofii praxis” i odrzuca zarówno pozytywistyczne, jak i idealistyczne odczytania.

Stanowisko

Labriola is on the map as the founder of Italian Marxism and as a link between Engels’s generation and Gramsci. Against the positivist Marxism of the Second International, which saw history as the working of economic laws, he read historical materialism as a method: the economic structure explains a society only through the many mediations of law, the state, morality and ideas, and these have to be studied historically, case by case. Marxism is for him neither a materialist metaphysics nor an ethical idealism but a “philosophy of praxis”, in which thinking and doing, nature and history meet in human labour. Engels valued his work; Croce and Gentile developed their early studies of Marx in dialogue and in disagreement with him; Gramsci took up the term “philosophy of praxis” in the prison notebooks; and Leszek Kołakowski described his position as an attempt at an “open orthodoxy”. Labriola remained an isolated figure without a school or a party base, and his essays are occasional rather than systematic. In an interview of 1902 he took a favourable view of Italian colonialism in Africa and hoped for an Italian colonisation of Tripolitania, today part of Libya; Gramsci criticised these views sharply, together with a remark on the Papuans reported by Croce, and they belong to the critical assessment of his thought.

Życie i kontekst

Antonio Labriola was born on 2 July 1843 in San Germano, today Cassino, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. From 1861 he studied in Naples, where he became a pupil of the Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa; an early essay defended Hegel against Eduard Zeller’s call for a return to Kant. After years as a schoolteacher and a study of Socrates (1871), he was appointed professor of moral philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Rome in 1874 and later also taught the philosophy of history there. In these years he followed Herbart’s ethics and psychology and was at first a moderate liberal in politics. From the late 1880s he turned to socialism, took part in the Roman workers’ movement and from 1890 corresponded with Friedrich Engels. Benedetto Croce, who had attended his lectures in Rome, saw to the printing of his first Marxist essay in 1895; further essays followed in 1896 and 1898, and French translations, one with a preface by Georges Sorel, brought them into the international debate. Labriola kept his distance from party discipline and criticised the reformist course of the Italian Socialist Party. He died in Rome on 12 February 1904.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Doctrine of Socrates according to Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle (La dottrina di Socrate secondo Senofonte, Platone ed Aristotele, 1871)
• In Memory of the Communist Manifesto (In memoria del Manifesto dei comunisti, 1895)
• Historical Materialism: A Preliminary Clarification (Del materialismo storico. Dilucidazione preliminare, 1896)
• Socialism and Philosophy (Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, 1898)