El Marx de Gentile. Retroceso de la filosofía de la praxis a la vieja “praxis” de la filosofía [Artículo evaluado por pares]

Abstract

This article aims to provide a critical outlook on the two contributions of Giovanni Gentile to the debate on historical materialism which marked the beginning of Italian theoretical Marxism in the last five years of the nineteenth century. That debate, in which Antonio Labriola, Benedetto Croce, Georges Sorel and other authors participated too, revolved around the question of the relation between historical materialism and philosophy. Unlike other authors, Gentile states from the beginning the philosophical and even metaphysical nature of Marx’s theory, which he always interprets from a Hegelian perspective. Thus, positive  considerations of historical materialism as “philosophy of history” (in the first essay) and as “philosophy of praxis” (in the second one) are only due to a self-recognition of Hegelianism, that naturally finds its critical limit in the impossibility of understanding the practical materialism introduced by Marx.