LABRIOLA, ANTONIO (1843–1904)

LABRIOLA, ANTONIO (1843–1904)

Labriola was born in Cassino near Naples on 2 July 1843 in a modest middle-class family (his father was a high-school teacher). After obtaining a degree in philosophy at the University of Naples he taught for a while and dabbled in journalism while seeking an academic appointment. His early essays on Hegel and on Plato, and the support of his university tutor, the great Hegelian scholar Bertrando Spaventa, got him a position at the University of Rome in 1874.

Labriola is generally regarded as the founder of Italian Marxism, but he became a Marxist only towards the end of his life. In his later correspondence with Engels he gave himself a curriculum more in keeping with that of Marx himself: first the encounter with Hegel, followed by the overcoming of Hegel and finally the commitment to historical materialism.

In reality for most of the 1870s and 1880s he was a ‘bourgeois’ moderate, committed to a secular culture, to the separation between Church and state, and above all to the expansion of education to the working classes. It was in recognition of his educational concerns that in 1877 he added to his chair the job of director of the Museo dell’istruzione e di Educazione—a state appointment he owed to the reform-minded minister of education Ruggero Bonghi.

Labriola was one of a rare breed of people who, with age, moved to the left. By 1886 ‘moderate’ was no longer adequate a description for someone who had become critical of liberalism, espoused the extension of the suffrage, advocated welfare support for the poor and the disabled, and promoted mass schooling. Like most of the (left) Italian intelligentsia he was also an enthusiastic ‘social’ imperialist, and believed that the conquest of Libya would enable Italy to catch up with the other European countries. He became increasingly involved in political agitation, which included addressing steelworkers on ‘Le idee della democrazia’—the text has unfortunately gone lost. By the end of the 1880s he had produced his main work: Saggi intorno alla concezione materialistica della storia (1895) (Engl. title: Essays on the Materialist Conception of History ). Engels’s positive verdict (‘Alles sehr gut’—It’s all very good) and their publication in French in the journal Le Devenir social edited by Sorel enhanced his wider fame. In fact, he had become one of the first academic Marxists in Europe.

His mode of exposition contained many of the virtues and defects of subsequent Italian Marxism: a rejection of dogmatism, a disdain for the overarching summa so loved by German socialists such as Kautsky and a refusal to see the connection between the

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economic base and the political and ideological superstructures as automatic. At the same time the opaque prose, the lack of precision and the absence of systematic analysis of the subject matter made it difficult to use his ‘genetic’ (a term he favoured over the fashionable ‘dialectical’) method for solidly grounded empirical analyses. These remained the prerogative of positivist sociologists. His relationship with the Italian Socialist Party and particularly with its leader, Filippo Turati, was often fraught and he was disappointed by Croce’s idealist turn against Marxism. He died of cancer in 1904 in Rome. Later in the twentieth century he was championed by both Gramsci and Togliatti but remained little known outside a narrow circle of academic specialists.