The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon) / quote 18 of 18
Gramsci's philosophy of praxis
Although in very poor health and initially forced to share a cell with five other prisoners, Gramsci’s brain kept working and he produced the posthumously published Prison Notebooks which offer a powerfully consequent critique and reconstruction of the basic concepts of Marxism. Gramsci described his position as a ‘philosophy of praxis’, which meant the unity of theoretical reflection with practical life in the way described above in Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. In Gramsci’s hands, Marxism is not reduced to some sort of historical determinism where all aspects of life have to be explained in terms of their economic causes. On the contrary, conceived as a philosophy of praxis, Gramsci’s Marxism expands to take into consideration the spheres of politics, ideology, religion and culture in the broadest sense.