CONCEPT
Philosophy of Praxis
Gramsci's name for his own theoretical orientation — deployed partly to evade the fascist censor but primarily to name the recursive discipline of testing analysis against practice and revising both in light of the encounter.
Gramsci used "philosophy of praxis" in the Prison Notebooks as a euphemism for Marxism, which the fascist censor would have suppressed. But the phrase outgrew its tactical origin. It came to name Gramsci's specific intellectual orientation: the conviction that theory must be submitted to practice, that practice must be analyzed through theory, and that the transformation of either requires the transformation of both. The Gramsci volume's epilogue invokes this discipline directly: "The book provides the map. The march provides the territory. And the relationship between the two — the recursive discipline of testing analysis against practice and revising both in light of the encounter — is the philosophy of praxis."
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The phrase was Gramsci's way of naming what distinguished his thought from both mechanical Marxism and idealist philosophy. Mechanical Marxism treated theory as a deterministic science that predicted outcomes independent of human agency. Idealist philosophy treated theory as the