Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
No national Marxist culture after World War II was as rich and vital as
that which emerged from the ashes of Mussolini's Italy. Drawing on the
popularity it had gained as a leading force in the partisan movement, especially in the north, the Italian Communist Party, seemingly shattered in
1926 when Gramsci and most of its other leaders were imprisoned, reco,nstituted itself as a powerful political force after 1944. 1 Gramsci's old
Turinese comrade, Palmiro Togliatti, who had escaped jail to spend the
fascist years in the Soviet Union, returned from exile to direct the Party's
rapid rebirth. Although outwardly faithful to Stalin's domination-he
had ruthlessly banished dissenters like Angelo Tasca and Ignazio Silone in
the late 1920s for questioning the official Party line-Togliatti subtly introduced a new note into Italian Communism, which led it increasingly
away from the Russian model. Anxious to avoid repeating the disasters of
the pre-Mussolini era, which he attributed to the Party's maximalist rigidity under the leadership of Bordiga, he rejected an exclusively ouvrierist
approach in favor of a more broadly based alternative. Open to coalitions
with other parties and willing to play the parliamentary game, Togliatti
promulgated a national strategy that would build on bourgeois democracy rather than seek to undermine it. Intent on showing his commitment
to moderate means, he served as Minister of] ustice in the postwar government of Alcide De Gasperi and helped write the new republican constitution after the fall of the monarchy, which the Communists in fact never
vigorously sought. A specifically "Italian road to socialism,"2 he insisted,
1. For a discussion of the pel during the Mussolini era, see Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini's Enemies: The Anti-Fascist Resistance (Princeton, 1961).
2. For an early use of this phrase, see Palmiro Togliatti, "La nostra latta per 1a democra-
424
Scientific Marxism in
Postwar
Italy
425
celerated. In Party journals like Rinascita, II Contemporaneo, and Societa, theoretical and methodological issues were thrashed out with
greater candor than anywhere else in the Communist movement. 6 Nonaffiliated periodicals like Aut Aut and Quaderni Rossi also played a critical role in opening the Italian Left to new ideas. The rediscovery of the
young Marx coincided with an openness to stimuli from heterodox Marxists abroad that meant Italian Marxism lost its provinciality much earlier
than many of its counterparts in other countries.
Some Italian Marxists like Antonio Banfi, Enzo Pad and Pier Aldo
Rovatti in Milan were attracted to existentialism and phenomenology and
tried, like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, to turn them in a material direction.
Others like Mario Spinella, Gian Enrico Rusconi and Giuseppe Vacca
promoted and quarrelled over the significance of Karl Korsch, whose
Marxism and Philosophy and Karl Marx were translated into Italian in
1966 and 1969 respectively.7 Interest in Lukacs, initially confined to his
aesthetic works, soon turned to his philosophical writings, especially after the translation of History and Class Consciousness in 1971. Mario
Vacatello and others found ways to assimilate him to the humanist Marxism sponsored by the Party, while Alberto Asor Rosa followed Goldmann
in probing Lukacs' links with bourgeois culture in crisis be~ore World War
I. 8 At the same time, gifted younger scholars like Gian Enrico Rusconi,
Giacomo Marramao, and Furia Cerutti began introducing the Frankfurt
School's Critical Theory into ltaly.9 Cesare Luporini, Maria Antonietta
Macciocchi and others were no less industrious in presenting the work of
Althusser and his structuralist colleagues, even if in several cases their
enthusiasm soon waned.1
Many of these intellectuals were at one time or another members of the
PCI, but in the 1960s an increasing number of Italian Marxists found it
easier to remain outside its walls. As in France in the years leading up to
1968, a wide variety of New Leftist, Trotskyist and anarchist groups set
6. See, for example, the essays collected in Franco Cassano, ed., Marxismo e Filosofia in
7. For a good survey of the Italian reception of Korsch, see Giacomo Marramao,
"Korsch in Italy," Telos 16 (Winter 1975--76).
8. For a treatment of Lukacs in Italy, see Franco Fortini, Verifica dei Poteri (Milan,
1974).
9. For surveys of the Italian response to the Frankfurt School, see Enzo Rutigliano,
"Qualche nota sulla recezione itaiiana della scuo13 di franco forte" in Lo sguardo de/l'angelo
(Bari, 1981), and "I.:influenza della teoria critica sulla sociologia italian a," Temi di storia
della socioiogia (Trento, 1983). The reception of the Frankfurt School actually began as
early as 1954 with Renata Solmi's translation of Minima MoraNa.
10, For a survey of the early Italian literature on Althusser, see Sergio Pieri, "Althusser in
ltalia," Aut Aut 135 (.May-June 1973).
426
427
428
429
accepting limitations to the political implications of debate, without sacrificing doctrinal pluralism."21 In 1958, Della Volpe's challenge to the
humanist, historicist and Gramscian orthodoxy ofthe Party's mainstream
theorists finally surfaced through an exchange of public letters between
Valentino Gerratana and Colletti over the extent and significance of
Lenin's Hegelianism in his Philosophical Notebooks. 22 An awareness of a
distinct Della Volpean school soon followed, as Colletti and Pietranera
joined their mentor as editors of Societa.
Despite Della Volpe's own conformist inclinations, his followers soon
gained a reputation for rejecting the Party's line from a leftist perspective,
and in 1962, Societa was discontinued. Nonetheless, in the review Citta
Futura and in several student organizations taken over by Della Voipeans,
the criticism of the Party deepened, as many of the same arguments used a
few year's later by the radicalized Althusserians against the PCF were directed against <'rightist" versions of de-Stalinization. In 1964, Colletti,
who was among the most politically vocal Della Volpeans, went so far as
to leave the PCI because the break with its semi-Stalinist past was leading
in what he called "a patently rightw'ard direction."23
Della Volpe himself remained a loyal Party member until his death in
1968 at the age of73. The legacy he left, in the tradition of Western Marx
ism as a whole, was far more theoretical than political. In addition to his
Logic, which went through another edition in 1956 and was reissued
posthumously in 1969 under the slightly revised title Logic as an Historical Science, his major works were Rousseau and Marx and Critique of
'Taste, each of which also went through several different editions. 24 Together they represented a boldly ambitious attempt to defend a viable
Marxist epistemology and methodology on strictly scientific grounds,
which would also have implications for political and aesthetic theory.
The full extent of Della Volpe's labyrinthine and frequently revised phi
losophy cannot be recapitulated here, but insofar as it bears on the question of totality, the following general observations must be made. As in the
case of Althusser, it is first necessary to establish his credentials as a legitimate participant in the Western Marxist tradition, even if a heterodox
one. Insofar as the Della Volpeans themselves generally employed the
21. Fraser, pp, 35-36.
22. Reprinted in Cassano, Marxismo e Filosofia in ItaNa, p. 79f.
23, CoUetti,p.319.
24. Rousseau e Marx went through four editions from 1957 to 1964; it was translated
by John Fraser as Rousseau and Marx and Other Writings (London, 1978). Critica del gusto
went through three editions from 1960 to 1.964; it was translated by Michael Caesar from
the third edition in 1978 as Critique of Taste (London, 1978).
430
43]
toed the line on political issues, he was clearly opposed to the Zhdanovite
cultural policies of more orthodox Communist theoreticians. Fifth and
finally, the Della Volpeans, although not their leader himself, followed a
typically Western Marxist path in growing increasingly impati~n~ with
Leninism, at least as it was practiced in the Soviet Union and In Its affiliated parties.
,
Nonetheless, despite these similarities, it is clear that Della Volpe and
his school were deeply at odds with the critical wing of the Western Marxist tradition. Rejecting with almost fanatic intensity the alleged indebtedness of Marx to any Romantic, irrationalist or anti-scientific traditions of
thought, they staunchly d~fended his scientific credentials against the
charge that in so doing they were obscuring his differences with bourgeois
scientism. Disregarding Lukacs' and Gramsci's strictures against Bukharju, they insisted that Marxism was much closer to sociology, the science of society, than to philosophy.28 Hostile to the putative distinction
between the cultural and natural sciences, they claimed that there was
only one true scientific method, which Jvlarx shared with Galileo and
other genuine scientists. Marx's "moral Galileanism,"29 as Della Volpe
liked to call it was neither the idealist pseudo-science of Dialectical Materialism nor the positivism of bourgeois empiricists. Instead, it followed a
method of "determinate abstraction," which avoided the extremes of a
priorism or a posteriorism. Modeled more on Hume and Kant than on
Hegel or Spinoza, Marxist science was genuinely materialist in its appreciation of the disparity between thought and its object. And concomitantly, it employed a concept of totality that in no way echoed either Hegel's or Spinoza's metaphysical holism.
To grasp what they considered the correct Marxist concept of totality
requires some understanding of the substance of Della Volpe's <'logic of
positive science" and its application by Colletti to the relationship b~
tween Hegel and Marx. Such an understanding will also reveal certam
unexpected convergences between their critique of Lukacs' initial Western
Marxist paradigm and those made by later Western Marxists, most notably Adorno. What makes these parallels so surprising is that the Della
Volpeans were unremittingly contemptuous of all other Western Marxists, in particular the Frankfurt School, which they identified entirely with
that irrationalist and Romantic repudiation of science they were at such
28. See, for example, Della Volpe, Logic as a Positive Science, p. 209; and Rousseau and
I Id f h'
d
Marx, p. 39.
29. Della Volpe, Logicasa Positive Science, p. 127. "Moral" is used in t le 0 - as lOne
sense of pertaining to the social world.
432
433
As far as I can tell, Della Volpe avoided the implications of these remarks.
36. Colletti, introduction to Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and
Gregor Benton (London, 1975), p. 19.
37. Della Volpe, Logic as a Positive Science, p. 184.
38. Petitio principii means assuming in the beginning that which was set forth to be
proved, or, to put it more colloquially, begging the question.
434
was not simply inductive in the manner of naive positivism; but because
it began with the concrete before it introduced those abstractions, it
was even less like the speculative dialectic of the idealists. In Della
Volpe's words,
We thus turn yet again to the same central point: the reciprocal functionality of
induction and deduction, of matter and reason, of fact (or "accidental") and hypothesis (or "necessary"). It is the twofold functionality, required by the scientific
dialectic, that produces determinate or historical abstractions and therebv laws in
the materialist sense; it is symbolized by the methodological circle of ~oncrete
abstract-concrete expounded by Marx in his J 857 introduction and applied with
maximum rigor and success in Capital. 39
435
'judgment, coincides exactly with the "real" foundation, the "thinkable given." In
other words, it coincides with existence, with its characteristic staticness-contemplativeness of "disinterested" feeling, the ultimate foundation of all judgments,41
436
In
A materialist view of history thus did recognize some logic to the whole,
but not with the certainty of a priori dialectical metaphysics:
History, understood materialistically, i.e., as what it truly is, is indeed an histoire
raisol1nee. It is, though, very different from the Hegelian kind which is too de~
nuded of historical "accidents" ~ "disturbances", certainly, of any preconceived
rational order like that of the Hegelian dialectic which, however, claimed nonethe~
less to be the historical order as well. Note that Engels is often ensnared in this
difficulty of Hegelianism, and that, for example, the article on Dialectics in
the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is still inspired by this Engels, while Marx was
seriously and fruitfully troubled by the problem of the relation of "logical"
and "historical."48
ThatDella Volpe was himself troubled by this same relation was clear, as
demonstrated by the significant shift in the title of his Logic from one
edition to another. But the status of his own histoire raisonnee was never
terribly clear; Western Marxism would have to wait umil Habermas'
more systematic attempt to "reconstruct historical materialism" before it
would have a non-Hegelian concept of longitudinal totality worth consid~
ering seriously.
If Della Volpe rejected the expressive and longitudinal notions of totality that inspired the earlier Western Marxists, and scorned the accompa~
zu Hegel he praised in Logic as a Positive Science, pp. 183-84. Bloch's experimentalism,
however, was a far cry from that of the Galilean tradition appropriated by Della Volpe
for Marxism.
46. Althusser misleadingly jncl uded him in the historicist camp. See Louis Althusser and
Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1970), p. 314. Della
Volpe, to be sure, rejected the strictly anti~historicist views of structuralist Marxism. See his
critique of Althusser in "Una impostazione 'strutturale,''' Rinascita 11 (1968).
47. Della Voipc, Rousseau and Marx, p. 64-65.
48. Ibid., p. 65.
437
438
of totality that was directed not only against moderate social democrats
like Mondolfo and Bobbio, but also against the more utopian 'Western
Marxists who, extrapolating from Marx's controversial essay "On the
Jewish Question," had hoped that Communism would usher in a realm of
perfect harmony and wholeness in which the splits between man as bour~
geois and man as citizen, economics and politics, would be entirely
healed. Communism, Della Volpe warned, would need to preserve some
form of legality, not reabsorb it into an antinomian kingdom of ends, an
ethical paradise in which the coercive power of external laws would no
longer be necessary. Although the socialist society of the future would
"exist as a popular sovereign body, strongly unitary and authoritative,
sufficiently so that it can prevent any centrifugal movement by individH
uaIs, groups, or parasitic classes,"sl it would nonetheless permit legal redress against abuses from above. Marx himself Della Volpe admitted
had been lax in spelling out just how importan't such legal guarantee~
would be after the revolution. Although rigorously exposing the fallacies
of bourgeois justice, "he never concerned himself to the same degree with
stressing the necessity of extending in the same socialist state the juridical,
constitutional guarantees of each person-citizen."52
The '''two souls" of modern liberty, civil and egalitarian, were thus not
as completely opposed as many Marxists had assumed. Although ComH
munist society "by definition is beyond classes, and beyond their corresponding antinomies and historical-intellectual deficiencies "53 its form
would be very much like a tauto-heterQlogical identity in whi~h multiplicity and difference were preserved, if in a non-antagonistic manner, rather
than spuriously overCOme in a hypostatized pseudo-reconciliation. "So
long as there is a state," he wrote, "even a proletarian state, Momesquieu's
is still a true and compelling warning, inspired by the absolute monarchical government of his time, and one which can be extended. , . to any
political power, even working-class power. He warned that 'it is of SOvereign importance not to destroy or degrade human nature,"'54
Such caution from a stalwart of the pel might be seen as covert criticism of its Stalinist residues, but unfortunately Della Volpe undercut its
critical force by his absurd contention that it was in the contemporary
Soviet Union that socialist legality was being fully realized. Basing his
argument on the Soviet Constitution of 1936, as updated in 1960, and
drawing On the learned commentaries of such "dispassionate" observers
as A. Y. Vishinsky, he neglected to compare Soviet rhetoric with its actual
51. Ibid., p. 96.
53. Ibid., p. 95.
439
440
trends. It was also erroneous to equate it with pure images bereft of intellectual content, as Romantic aestheticians and supporters of aft for art's
sake had done. All art had a realistic, socially derived referent and thus
like science, had cognitive as well as affective value, but it differed frol~
science in the way it produced knowledge.
To characterize the differences, Della Volpe turned to linguistics, in particular the glossematics of Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School. 58
In ways too technical to spell out now, he sought to use Hjelmslev's development of Saussurean linguistics in the service of a scientific semantics compatible with historical materialism. The result was not, however, equivalent
to structuralism in the French sense of the term, because he refused to privilege langue over parole, or signifiers over signified. 59 In fact, he emphasized
the necessity of recognizing their interpenetration, as he did the importance
of understanding as the non-identical convergence of matter and thought.
Science, to be sure, shared these characteristics with art, both being discourses with a common stake in concrete reason. But there was a crucial
difference between them. As he put it in Logic as a Positive Science,
The work of art is an object endowed with a concrete rational structure (matterreason, image-concept, etc.), exactly like the work of science or historiography.
Nevertheless, it presents characteristics of its own not gnoseologicallv abstract
but gnoseological-technical, i.e. semantic (inhere~t in its actual constr~ction and
therefore indispensable to its real, cognitive-practical value). 60
In more specific terms, the basic distinction between science and art (or
at least poetry) was not that the former was abstract and the latter concrete, but rather that the language of science was univocal and "omnicontextual/' whereas that of art was polysemic and "organically contextuaL"61 In other words, scientific concepts have fixed meanings that are
applicable in any context, while the meanings of art arc multiple and
defined by their specific context. Poetry in particular is grounded in metaphor, which should be understood as a dialectic of heterogeneities, one of
whose elements was -intellect. Romantic aestheticians were thus wrong in
defining metaphor as an immediate intuition of a unity. Both science and
58. What Della VOlpe found attractive in Hjelmslev was his biplanar concept of language, which dIvided "glo5semes" (or linguistic forms) into elements which form content
(pler.ematemes) and eleme~ts which form expression (cenematemes). Insofar as language
consIsted of both of these kmds of elements, it was like a tamo-heterologieal identity.
5.9. Della Volpe, Critique of Taste, p. 101. Della Volpe's more general critique of structuralIsm can be found in his essays "Marxismo COntro strutturalismo" and "Il caso LeviStrauss ovvero la grande vacanza che continue," both in Opere 6. See also his essay, "Settling
Accounts with the Russian Formalists," New Left Review 113-114 (january-April 1979).
60. Della Volpe, Logic as a Positive Science, p. 207.
61. Della Volpe, Critique of Taste, p. 117.
441
Second, all Marxist aestheticians who held to the idealist belief that
art could achieve such a unity of opposites were wrong. Lukacs, for example, was mistaken in his attempt to establish a realistic canon of art in
contrast with naturalism or modernism because he grounded the former
in an a priori telos of perfect wholeness,65 which rea'Iistic art allegedly
prefigured. Quoting Lukacs, Della Volpe scornfully wrote:
62. Ibid., p.132.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., p. 199.
65. Forgacs thus seems in error in his otherwise very informative essay on Della Volpe's
aesthetics when he attributes to him the belief that "what distinguishes the overall structure
of a literary text from that of a scientific is its 'organic' quality, its closure" (p. 98). Instead,
Della Volpe invokes what the deconstructionists will later call intertextualirywhen he writes
in Critique o(Taste that to understand the truth of a text,
The text-context ha, to be taken at the very least in a relation of inter.dependence with many other textcontexts-and not just "ideas"-which existed before it, and the respective historical experiences expressed in them. (po 115)
442
"Art makes us intuit sensibly" the "dynamic unity" of the universal, particular
and individual (the categories of Hegelian logic ever with us!), while science resolves this unity "into its abstract elements and seeks to conceptualize the interaction of these elements."66
Thus Erich Auerbach, according to Della Volpe, was right against Lukacs
and Engels to include Zola among the realists, because the Marxists'
definition of realism was too narrow. It was also incorrect to seek too
perfectly homologous a fit between a work of art and the social reality it
reflected, as Goldmann was wont to do. 67 An idealist annihilation of
terogeneity was at work here. No less suspicious, Della Volpe contended,
were attempts like that of Walter Benjamin to contrast a perfect Ursprache in which name and thing were one with their current allegorical
disjunction; here too a "romantic mysticism"68 could be detected.
The third implication of Della Volpe's aesthetics was, in fact, that no
standard of implicit or potential wholeness could be i.ntroduced to differentiate "good" from "bad" art. For all art was inherently realistic and
referred in some way to the world outside of it; all art combined ideas and
concepts with forms and images; all art was a tauto-heterological identity
of intellect and matter. Even music, Della Volpe contended, shared these
qualities. Arguing for a musical grammar of note intervals, he wrote:
he-
We cannot accept that "music does not constitute a system of signs." ... The
theme-idea or series-idea, in other words what the music savs (Adorno: das
gesagte), can be separated from the music (contrary to the opinion of Adorno
and others). 69
Finally, Della Volpe's insistence that all art contained a social moment
was related to his larger claim that language was also inevitably intertwined with society. This truth, he claimed, had been ignored in Stalin's
celebrated critique of the reductionist linguistics of Marr,70 who had
made language part of the superstructure. Althusser, it will be recalled,
had cited Stalin's critique to legitimize his defense of a decentered totality
with relatively autonomous individual levels. For Della Volpe, language,
art, and science, like all culture in general, had to be understood as less
completely autonomous, as parts of a tauto-heterological unity that was
neither entirely homogeneous and centered nor fragmented into entirely
unrelated components magically tied together by a "last instance" that
never came.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
443
444
Lucio Colletti was born in Rome, the son of a bank clerk! in 1924.
Initially trained in the idealist philosophy that dominated postwar Italian
culture, he wrote his doctoral dissertation in Rome on "The Logic of
Benedetto Croce,"75 His dissertation director was Carlo Antoni, the distinguished author of two influential Crocean works! From History to Sociologyand The Struggle Against Reason. 76 But Colletti seems quickly to
have distanced himself from his mentor, in part because of a growing attraction to Marx. Unlike many other Italian intellectuals, however, he was
not drawn to Marxism because of the links forged by Gramsci with Crocean idealism. Instead, he was converted by Lenin's work, especially that
most anti-idealist of polemics, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Despite his studies with Antoni, he felt more sympathetic towards the "empirical realist" moment in Kant's critical philosophy, which he saw as
compatible with Lenin's reflection theory of knowledge, than towards rationalist historicism.
When the Korean War began, Colletti decided to join the PCI because
he concluded that it was necessary to take sides in the global confrontation then on the horizon. Reflecting on his Party experience many years
74. Vigorell!, p. 99.
75. In contrast to all of the other figures discussed in this study, Colletti has yet to be
the object of a sustained analysis in English or Italian. The biographical data that follow
come from scattered sources, most notably his 1974 interview in the New Left Review,
and from my correspondence with Professor Colletti, in which he graciously responded to
my questions.
76. Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology, trans. Hayden V. White (Detroit, 1959)
and La lotta contro La ragione (Florence., 1942).
445
later, Colletti claimed that he had had no illusions about who had attacked whom in the war, nor was he really attracted to Stalin and the type
of party he sponsored. In fact, he seems to have experienced Stalin's death
and Khrushchev's 1956 speech as "an authentic liberation,"77 which
would permit Communism to fulfill its long-denied promise. Nonetheless,
like Ahhusser at approximately the same time, he was uncomfortable
with the philosophical implications of de-Stalinization, which tended to
reduce Marxism to a version of Hegelian humanism. Although never as
dogmatically anti-humanist as Althusser, he returned to Marx's texts
looking for a scientific version of socialism commensurate with Lenin's
politics and philosophy.
The most convincing reading of those texts seemed that of Della Volpe,
whose Logic he read in 1950. Impressed in particular by its appropriation
of Kant's epistemology for Marxist purposes, he began identifying himself
with Della Volpe's position in print in 1954.18 Three years later, Colletti,
along with Giulio Pietranera, joined Della Volpe on the editorial staff of
Societa. It was from this forum that he first began to attract widespread
attention as a leader of a leftist faction within the PCI, more outspoken in
its political views than Della Volpe himself. Although never identifying
themselves with the Maoist opposition to Soviet leadership of the Communist movement,19 the Della Volpeans shared many of the arguments
advanced at a slightly later date by Althusser's Maoist followers in France.
In a succession of debates in Passato e presente, Rinascita, Societa and
elsewhere,80 Colletti extended Della Volpe's critique of Hegelian Marxism
back to Soviet thinkers like E. V. II' enkov and indeed to Lenin himself, at
leastthe Lenin of the Philosophical Notebooks."
The general hostility within the Party provoked by his abrasive chal77. Colletti, "A Political and Philosophical Interview," p. 136.
78. See his article "Il metoda dell'economica politica," Critica economica (June, 1954),
in which he discusses Marx's 1857 introduction in Della Volpean terms.
79. Colletti, "A Political and Philosophical Interview," p. 332. In Logic as a Positive
Science, Della Volpe does credit Mao with understanding the importance of the problem of
tauto-heterologica! identity (p. 201), but he generally ignores his work.
80. In 1958, he had a debate with A. Giolitti in Passato e presente over the nature of
labor in Marx, Giolitti arguing for an historicist understanding of it as a concrete reality, and
Colletti responding that it should be understood as a determinate abstraction. hI 1960, he
debated Valentino Gerratana in Societa over the issue of the constitutional state, which he
felt had already been achieved in Italy and therefore ought not to be understood as an objective of PC I policy. In 1962, he had a confrontation with Cesare Luporini in Rillascitaoverthe
relationship between Hegel and Marx, in which he defended the Della Volpean position on
this question.
81. See his introduction to E. V. Il'enkov, La diaLettica dell'astratto e del concreto riel
Capitale di Marx (Milan, 1961), and his introduction to Lenin, Quaderni filoso{ici in the
first volume of It marxismo e Hegel (Milan, 1958). Della Volpe, it should be noted, had
already attacked Il'enkov; see Logic as a Positive Science, p. 196.
446
lenge to Togliattian orthodoxy led in 1964, the year Khrushchev fell from
power, to Colletti's quiet departure from its ranks. As he recall~,,1 ten
years later:
In one sense, the process of renovation for which I had hoped after the Twentieth
Party Congress had failed to occur-but in another sense it had occurred, in a
patently rightward direction. I slowly came to realize in the period from 1956 to
1964 that both the Soviet regime itself, and the Western Communist Parties, were
incapable of accomplishing the profound transformation necessary for a return to
revolutionary Marxism and Leninism. It had become structurally impossible for
either the CPSU or the Western Parties to undergo a real democratization-in
other words, not in the sense of a liberal or bourgeois democracy, but in the sense
of revolutionary socialist democracy, of workers' councils. 82
Colletti remained, however, an orthodox Della Volpe an, at least until the
late 1960s. 'With an eloquence that his mentor was never able to attain, he
defended the view of Marx as the "Galileo of the historical-social world"
in such essays as "Marxism as a Sociology," written in 1958 and republished a decade later in From Rousseau to Lenin. 83 But by 1967, a subtle
new theme began to emerge in his work, which in retrospect allowed Colletti to speak of a "second period" in his intellectual development beginning at that time. 84 That new theme was the role of the concept of alienation in Marx's writings, which he first addressed in an essay on "Bernstein
and the Marxism of the Second International," also included in From
Rousseau to Lenin. Focussing on Marx's theory of value, Colletti realized
its essential dependence on the concept of fetishism that classical economics lacked. What Marx had called the abstraction of labor in capitalism, he now understood, could only be grasped in relation to his theories
of alienation and reification. In the second volume of Marxism and Hegel
(his introduction to Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks had been published
as the first), which appeared in 1969, and the extensive introduction he
wrote for the Pelican Library edition of Marx's Early Writings in 1971,85
Colletti emphasized the centrality of Marx's critique of alienation for all
of his work.
In so doing, however, he still resisted the implication that this critique
was in any way indebted to Marx's Hegelian provenance. Unlike Althusser, he claimed that there was no epistemological break in Marx, who was
as much a scientist in 1844 as he was in 1867. Determined to stem the
82. Colletti, "A Political and Philosophical Interview," p. 319.
83. Colletti, Ideologia e societa (Bari, 1969), in English as From Rousseau to Lenin:
Studies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Mcrrington and Judith White (London, 1972).
84. Letter from Colletti to the author, Rome, May 23,1982.
85. See note 36. Colletti reports that the introduction was written in 1971.
447
Hegelian Marxist tide in Italy, then cresting with the growing popularity
of the Frankfurt School, Colletti doggedly insisted on the scientificity of
Marxism, still in Della Volpe an terms. Although he now permitted himself to chastise Della Volpe for failing to go far enough in his critique of
value and of the state (both of which Della Volpe had maintained would
endure even under socialism), 86 Colletti remained very much in the Della
Volpean camp.
The only significant public indication of Colletti's incipient uneasiness
with his mentor's position appeared in his political statements. While he
defended Marx's scientific credentials, as Della Volpe had established
them, he also strongly insisted that the revolutionary side of Marx's work,
which Della Volpe rarely stressed, must not be forgotten. 87 However
much he may have quarrelled with the Hegelian confusions in Lenin's
Philosophical Notebooks, he looked to Lenin's politics) even after he left
the PCI, as a guide to revolutionary practice. Arguing against the Togliattian attempt to represent Gramsci as a supporter of a gradualist popular
front and demanding that Lenin's State and Revolution be taken seriously
as an iavocation not merely to seize state power, but also to destroy it,88
Colletti directly challenged the PCl's policies, which he contended had
never fully outgrown their Stalinist origins. Although like Della Volpe a
professional philosopher, teaching at Rome and Salerno, Colletti was far
more directly involved in political affairs than his mentor, even if his involvement was that of an outsider unattached to any party or sect.
By the mid-1970s, it became increasingly clear to Colletti that his attempt to square Marx's theory of alienation with his scientific pretensions
was not working. Nor was he satisfied with his formulation of Marxism as
both an analytic science and a revolutionary ideology. In 1973, he reread
one of Kant's pre-critical works, his Attempt to Introduce the Notion of
Negative Qualities into Philosophy of 1763, and realized that any theory
claiming scientificity had to purge itself of all remnants of dialectical reasoning, most notably its concept of contradiction. Even more important,
he now faced the unpleasant fact that Marx's theories of alienation and
value were, alas, dependent on just such a dialectical foundation. The attempt to ignore this dependency had led to the troubling eclecticism of his
86. Colletti. From Rousseau to Lenin, p. 92. For Colleni, value, the objectification
of human lab()~-power, was an example of the fetishism Marx thought would end with
the revolution.
87. See, for example, his essay" Marxism: Science or Revolution?" in From Rousseau to
Lenin and his introduction to If ma1'xismo e ii' crollo' del capitaltsmo (Rome, 1975).
Colletti "Lenin's State and Revolution" in F1'Om Rousseau to Lenin, and" Antonio
Grams'ci and th~ Italian Revolution," New Left Review65 (January-February 1971).
88
448
In a series of articles and short books that soon followed, Colletti attempted to work through his confusion. Marxism and the Dialectic,"
written hurriedly in a week as a pendant to the Italian translation of the
interview,90 was still filled with hesitation and uncertainty.
He now conceded that Della Volpe's attempt to interpret Marx as a
consistent scientist, which had been the inspiration of his own earlier
work, had been based on a misreading of Marx's writings. A fresh look at
them had led him to some new and disturbing conclusions:
It began to dawn on me that the theory of value was entirely at one with the theory
of alienation and fetishism. "Abstract labor," or that creating "value," was alienated labor itself. Thus an intuition of mine many years earlier reasserted itself, ..
that the processes of hypostatization, the substantification of the abstract, the
inversion of subject and predicate, far from being in Marx's eye modes of Hegel's
logic that were defective in reflecting reality, were in fact processes that he located
(or thought he located-the difference is unimportant for the moment) in the
structure and mode of functioning of capitalist society.91
Admitting that Della Volpe had never been able to make sense of Marx's
concept of fetishism because of his insistence that Marx was a Galilean,
Colletti now acknowledged that those dialectical contradictions he and
his mentor had consigned to the world of Hegel's mystifications were in
fact "attributed by Marx-however embarrassing this viewpoint may
be-to the reality of capital itself, not the concept of it formulated by the
economists."92 Engels, therefore, had not been the sole villain in distort~
89. Letter from Colletti to author, Rome, May 23,1982.
90. Colletti, "Marxism and the Dialectic," New Left Review 93 (September-October
1975).
91. Ibid., p. 20.
92, Ibid., p. 21.
449
ing Marx's views and creating the illegitimate pseudo-science of Dialectical Materialismj Marx himself had to share some of the blame:
The contradictions of capitalism-from the contradiction between capital and
wage~tabor to all the others-are not, for Marx, "real oppositions" (as I too, following Della Volpe, believed until yesterday), i.e. objective but "non-contradictory" oppositions, but are dialectical contradictions in the full sense of the word. 93
The upshot of this discovery was that Colletti now regretfully acknowledged that Marx had two faces, that of the scientist and that of the
Hegelian philosopher. Such a recognition may have been an advance over
his earlier position in terms of historical accuracy,94 but it left Colletti
both confused and dismayed. "I do not know whether the existence of
these two aspects is fatal or advantageous," he frankly admitted at the end
of his article. "What is not at issue is the fact that our task now is to find
out whether and how they can be reconciled. It is one we must take seriously. It is not to be solved with any verbal subterfuge."95
In the work he completed after 1974, most notably Between Marxism
and No, The Twilight of Ideology and Divided Socialism (a debate with
Alberto Asor Rosa, Massimo Salvadori and Paolo Spriano),96 Colletti
came to a decisive conclusion about the implications of Marx's ambiguities. They were, he now acknowledged, fatal rather than advantageous.
Forced to choose between Marxism and science, as he understood it, he
chose the latter.. Turning the arguments of anti-Hegelians like F. A. Trendelenburg, Hans Kelsen and Karl Popper against Marx,97 he ruefully concluded that Marxism was a pseudo-science that had to be abandoned.
Along with Colletti's theoretical shift went a no less fundamental politicalone. As a still faithful Italian Marxist, Sebastiano Timpanaro, put it,
Once he finally realized that the dialectic was present in the work of Marx as well,
he drew the conclusion that communism was a utopian dream at best; any attempt
93. Ib;d., p. 23.
94. For an extended defense of the internal contradictions in Marx, see Alvin W.
Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York, 1980). Gouldner refers to Colletti's New Left Review interview several
times with approvaL
95, Colletti, "Marxism and Dialectic," p. 29. For an attempt to solve it by asserting thar
dialectical contradictions do appear in reality, bur only in specifically human reality, see Roy
Edgley, "Dialectic: The Contradiction of Colletti," Critique 7 (Winter 1976-1977). Colletti
specifically rejects this contention in Tramonto dell'ideologia (Bari, 1980), p. 94.
96. Colletti, Tra marxismo e no (Bari, 1977); I1 socialismo diviso, ed. Paolo Mieli (Bari,
1978); Del 1968 a oggi: Come siamo e come eravano (Eari, 1980); and Tramonto dell'ideologia.
97. Trendelenburg and Popper are invoked in the essay "Contraddizione dialettica e
non-contraddizione" in Tram.onto, which also contains a piece on "Kelsen e la critica del
marxismo." For Colletti's further reflections on Popper, in which he expresses concern about
the abuse of his ideas by his disciples, see "Popper tradito da Popper," L'EstJTesso 18, 20
450
The radical leftist critic of the PCI of the 19605 had indeed by the 19805
become the moderate social democrat concerned more about the links
between Marxism and the Gulag Archipelago than between Marxism and
the end of alienation. In fact, drawing on Kelsen's argument that Marxism's dream of an end to alienation was a form of anarchism, he repudiated his earlier defense of Lenin's State and Revolution and pointed to
the contradiction inherent in its assumption that the maximization of
state control could lead to the abolition of the state. He thus quietly returned to Della Volpe's less utopian political theory, even as he was repudiating his mentor's attempt to reconcile that theory with Marxism.
Colletti's third period, as he came to call it, was stimulated by more
than theoretical considerations. He now read the lessons of history in a
more sober and disillusioned way than before. Pessimistically contending
that the proliferation of Marxist currents in the twentieth century meant
the decomposition of its theoretical coherence rather than, as some have
argued, its continued vitality, and connecting that decomposition with a
more general crisis that began as early as 1923,99 Colletti admitted that
history had refuted Marx's predictions about the collapse of capitalism.
Rather than insisting that Italy be understood in'the general context of
that putative collapse, as he had in his more Della Volpe an phase's" he
conceded that Italy was, in fact, an exceptional case that needed to be
treated solely in its own terms. Even Eurocommunism, he concluded, was
a stillborn attempt to salvage the legacy of Leninism by trying to make it
compatible with bourgeois democracy. Other efforts, like that of Perry
Anderson in Considerations on Western Marxism, to forecast a new alliance of radical theory and revolutionary practice were equally ill-conceived and self-deluding. lOo In short, despite his continued hostility to the
Frankfurt School, 101 his statements about the possibilities of radical transformation made Colletti sound more and more like an exponent of their
politics of tempered despair. Talking of the "twilight of ideology," he fell
(May 23,1982). The contemporary philosopher of science with whom Colletti most identifies is Mary B. Hesse.
98. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner (London, 1975),
p.257.
99. Colletti, llsocialismo diviso, p. 8l.
100. Colletti, Tra marxismo e no, p. 144. When Anderson wrote Considerations he
identified closely with many of Colletti's positions, but cautiously noted, "There is no reason to assume that he would assent to many of the particular arguments or judgments of
this essay" (p. 42). Colletti's review, reprinted in Tra marxismo e no, shows the wisdom of
this disclaimer.
101. Letter from Colletti to the author, Rome, June 18, 1982, in which he maintains
that the Frankfurt School must be understood as an "episode in German romanticism."
451
452
453
themselves) outside of the mind could avoid the pitfalls of a priori hypostatization. Although Marx himself had never really clarified his debt to
Kant (as he had also failed to do with Rousseau), he nonetheless was far
more a Kantian than a Hegelian. 1lO
Hegel, in fact, was the antithesis of Marx in virtually every respect.
Except for his recognition of the importance of work and productive activity, which had eluded Kant,l11 Hegel represented more an obstacle to
Marx than a modeL Dialectical reason with its idealist concept of an allinclusive totality was in fact the denial of true science, which was
grounded in the intellect's insistence on the disparity between subject and
object. No practical or intellectual mediation could fully transcend that
distinction, which science had to register if it wanted to be true to reality.
To make his case against Hegel, Colletti, following Della Volpe, emphasiz.ed what he claimed were the roots of his thought in four non-scientific traditions. The earliest of these was ancient scepticism or Pyrrhonism,
which was suspicious of the evidence given by our senses of an external,
material world. Marxism, if it was sceptical at all, directed that scepticism
towards reason, not the existence of a material world provided by the
senses. Hegel, on the other hand, had begun the Phenomenology by dem~
onstrating the falsity of immediate sense knowledge; like the sceptics of
old, he annihilated the reality of matter. 1l2 The critical remarks he directed against scepticism in later sections of the Phenomenology were really aimed, so Colletti argued, against its modern versions, which denied
the reality of thought, not-of matter. The second tradition influential on
Hegel was that of Christian mysticism, which Colletti detected in the concept of the Absolute Spirit. Arguing against the anthropomorphic reading
of that concept in the work of Lukacs, Marcuse and Kojeve, he emphasiz.ed its roots in theology instead. Here too there was a hostile attitude
towards matter and sensation, which drew on the neo- Platonic origins of
Christian thought.
The third tradition to which Colletti pointed was Spinozism, which he
called a form of "absolute immaterialism,"1l3 in which finitude was dissolved into the infinite absolute. Contra Althusser, there was no way to
110. There is another alternative left unexplored by Colletti: that Marx was indebted
more to eighteenth-century materialists like Diderot and Holbach than to either Kant or
Hegel. This position is defended by Timpanaro against Colletti. See his On Materialism, p.
79. Colletti's general response to Timpanaro's naturalist materialism can be found in his
"Political and Philosophical Interview," p. 327f.
111. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 219f.
112. Ibid., chapters 5 and 6.
113. Ibid., p. 30. For Colletti's more general critique of Althusser's attempt to marry
Marx and Spinoza, see" A Political and Philosophical Interview," p. 332f., where he details
his progressive disHlusionmentwith Althusser's politics as well as theory.
454
The profound sympathy that Colletti discerned between orthodox Dialectical Materialism and the earliest versions of Western Marxism was due to
their common Hegelian heritage. Engels, Lenin in his more Hegelian
moods, Lukacs, Sartre, the Frankfurt School all expressed a common con~
tempt for Kantian intellect that marked them as anti~scientific idealists.
Colletti thus found trivial the distinction between following the Hegel of
the Phenomenology and the Hegel of the Logic, which some commentators used to distinguish between Western Marxism and its orthodox predecessor. 116 Because all neo-Hegelians emphasized dialectical reason and
denigrated intellect, they were inherently anti-scientific. Indeed, they betrayed a covert sympathy for irrationalism because of the similarities between Vernunft and sceptical intuition. A straight line could be drawn
from the Lebensphilosophie ofthe late nineteenth century, most notably
Bergson, to the critique of reification in Lukacs, who, as Goldmann perceptively demonstrated, was saying the same thing (if in different form) as
the frankly anti-scientific Heidegger.
114. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 147.
115, Ibid., p. 34.
116. See, for example, Russell Jacoby, "The Inception of Western Marxism: Karl Korsch
and the Politics of Philosophy," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3, 3 (Fall
1979), p, 7. For another recent rejection of the distinction between the twO Hegels, see Rudiger Bubner, Modem German Philosophy, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge, 1981), p. 158,
Although Bubner's perspective is by no means like Colletti's, he shares his qualms concerning the division of Hegel's work into two distinct phases.
455
The'most poisoned fruit of this corruption of Marxism was the Frankfurt School, against whom Colletti, like Della Volpe before him,117 could
not contain his wrath. Charging that its members attributed alienation
and reification solely to the effects of science and technology rather than
social relations, he damned them as reactionary Luddites, "the most cO.nspicuous example of the extreme confusion that can be reac.hed .by 1S taking the romantic critique of intellect and science for a sO~lO-hlst~ncal
critique of capitalism,"118 Dialectic of Enlightenment 111 partlcular
aroused his fury; its main virtue, he sarcastically claimed,
n:
is that-since they lacked any real analysis, even of a purely philosophic kind, and
reduced the relevant categories to mere empty sophistry or person~l bav~rda~e
they give us a sort of Summa of all the "horrors" and idiosyn~raCles which he at
the basis of philosophical production over many decades, Without the effort of
.
l' K . , 119
decipherment required to read Heldegger, or even Husser s rtStS,
With scarcely concealed contempt (and some confusion about their ages
when they wrote the book), he condescendingly concluded, "These are
the last 'flowers of evil' of the old spiritualism and of its impotent desire to
destroy things: the swansong of two old gentlemen, slightly nihilistic and
demodes, in conflict with history,"120
Marcuse's Reason and Revolution, with its distinction between negative and positive thought, was no less of a scandal, expressing the same
spiritualist and romantic distaste for the finite world that caused Sartre's
existentialist "nausea." Marcuse's bankrupt politicS of the "Great Refusal" followed from his inept philosophy; it was an ahistorical "total
negation of the existing,"121 Rather than a true revolutionary, Marcuse
. IIsm "122 w hose "tty
was really "a fierce critic 0 Marx and 0 f SOCIa
pe bourgeois anarchism"123 was little more than a resurrection of the ethical
socialism of Bernstein.
Colletti conceded that the Frankfurt School, like Western Marxism in
general, had been correct in calling for some theory of holism in opposition to positivist atomism, but they had gotten it all wrong. Marx's
"whole is a totality, but a determinate totality; it is a synthesis of distinct
. 0 f heterogeneous part s,"124 Pu t more'
elements, it is a unity, but a umty
specifically, the key to Marx's holism was his concept of the social r.elations of production, which was first developed in the 1844 Manuscrtpts,
117, See note 30.
118. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 175.
119,lbid.,p.173.
.
120. Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, p. 137, Horkheimerwas forty-nme and Adorno
forty-one when they completed the book in 1944. .
121. Ibid,
122. Ibid" p, 140.
123. Ibid., p. 233.
124. Ibid., p, 14.
456
In that work, Marx introduced the concept of man as, a "g~neric natural
being," which had two essential meanings:
First, that man is a "natural being," i.e. that he is a part of nature, and therefore
that he is an objective being among other objective natural beings upon whom he
depends and by whom he is conditioned; in short, he has his raison d'are (causa
essendi) outside himself.... Second, that man is a thinking being, i.e. that what
differentiates him from all other natural beings and constitutes his specific characteristics, is not a thing, i.e. a species of nature itself, but is thought, i.e. the universal, what is general or common in all things. This explains why man's specificity is
not that of being a species, but that of being the genus of all empirical genera, i.e.
the unity or overall totality of all natural species.12S
Because Marx always held this dual concept of man, he never turned reason into a subject, as did Hegel and the Hegelian Marxists. Instead, he
recognized that whereas man's specificity was to be generic (that is, the
totalizer of all reality through his universalizing reason), his naturalness
meant he was outside of the generic totalization produced by that reason.
According to Colletti, Marx recognized two basic principles: the dialectical one that conceived man as a generic totalizer and
the anti-dialectical or materialist principle that contradiction does not eliminate
non-contradiction (the principle of reason as a predicate rather than a subject)in short, the principle of existence as an extra-logical element. Two principles
which, if reconsidered in their organic connection, lead us back to the central
theoretical postulate of this study, i.e. to tauto-heterological identity or "determinate abstraction."126
With this conclusion, it is clear how much the early Colletti was indebted to Della Volpe. His elaboration of his mentor's ideas had its force,
especially in underlining the continuities between orthodox and earlier
Western Marxism, in both its Hegelian and Spino zan forms. But in many
ways it proved vulnerable to criticism. First, Colletti's attempt to reduce
Hegel to a religious, romantic, anti-scientific irrationalist did not conform
to the interpretation of him in most contemporary Hegel scholarship,
Marxist or otherwise. Many commentators, for example, stress the importance of his critique of Jacobi, rather than their similarities as critics of
Kant. 127 Nor do most other interpreters support Colletti's contention that
125. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 234. For a somewhat clearer version of the same
ideas, see "A Political and Philosophical Interview," p. 328.
126. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 244.
127. See, for example, Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1975); Walter Kaufmann,
Hegel: A Reintetpretation (Garden City, New York, 1965); and Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore, 1981). Insofar
as Jacobi wanted to turn VernUltftinto irrational intuition, it is arguable that he was closer to
Kantwith his desire to limit reason to make room for faith than to Hegel.
457
458
Thus, despite his intentions, the argument of Colletti's work, as Ben Agger
had correctly noted, "converges implicitly with the Frankfurt attack on
Hegel's identity theory,"131 and, it might be added, with its critique of
expressive notions of totaliry as well.
Colletti generally ignored these similarities because of his inclination,
very much like Della Volpe's, to homogenize discrete positions into uniform general tendencies.1 32 Thus, for example, by yoking together idealism, irrationalism and intuitionism into one basic anti-scientific position,
he lost sight of the internal dynamics of each. The result, as Paul Piccone
has argued,133 was reminiscent of Lukacs' crude polemic in The Destruction of Reason, with the crucial difference that the destruction mourned
by Colletti was that of Verstand, not Vernunft. Typical of Colletti's
method was his assertion that all dialecticians were of the same positive,
identitarian kind, which may have described certain Western Marxists,
but was clearly inadequate for others. It was especially inappropriate for
Adorno, who not only argued for a negative dialectics without closure,
but also claimed that even within idealism there were certain tendencies
leading in this direction. To take one example, whereas Colletti contended
that infinity and totality were at one in idealism, Adorno daimed:
130. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973), p. 26.
131. Ben Agger, review of Marxism and Hegel, Telos 24 (Summer 1975), p. 191. In his
letter of June 18, 1982, Colletti rejects this comparison, stressing the eclectic character of
Adorno's work in which Hegelian Vernunftstill plays a role. Adorno's distance from Colletti
is captured in his insistence that "If one contaminates by association dialectics and irrationalism then one blinds oneself to the fact that criticism of the logic of non-contradiction does
not suspend the latter but rather reflects upon it." Adorno, "Introduction," The Positivist
Dispute il1 German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London, 1976), p. 66.
132. In an interview Colletti gave to Ril1ascita entitled "Marx, Hegel e la Scuola di
Francoforte," in May, 1971., he spoke admiringly of the recognition in the work of Alfred
Schmidt and Jurgen Habermas of a certain similarity between Marx and Kant. But he neglected to perceive their debt on this issue to the older mem bers of the Frankfurt School. The
interview is reprinted in Cassano, ed., Marxismo e Filosofia in italia, where his appreciation
for Schmidt and Habermas appears on p. 294f.
133. Piccone, "The Future of Eurocommunism," Theory and Society 10, 5 (September
1981), p. 728.
459
The antinomy of totality and infinity-for the restless ad infinitum explodes the
self-contained system, for all its being owed to infinity alone~is of the essence
of idealism.
It imitates a central antinomy of bourgeois society. To preserve itself, to remain
the same, to "be," that society too must expand, progress, advance its frontiers,
not respect any limit, not remain the same. 134
If Colletti could be insensitive to the internal complexities of the traditions he attacked, he sometimes was no less so to the one he tried to
defend. There was, for example, an inherent tension in his own work between his Kantian epistemology, with its agnosticism about things-inthemselves, and his materialist ontology, which gave substantive content
to those objects outside of human consciousness. As a recent defender of
Lenin's reflection theory of epistemology has put it,
Lenin's remarks on Kant in his Materialism and Empirio-Cl'iticism seem equally
applicable to Colletti's Kantian interpretation of Marx .... In his imitation of
Kant, Colletti's views have that same unresolved tension betvofeen materialist or
realist ontology and idealist epistemology. Either we take his epistemology seriously, and go down the idealist road with Hegel and the latter-day Hege1ians, or
we take the materialist ontology seriously and travel the materialist road, replacing or supplementing Colletti's epistemology with something like the much despised Wiederspiegelungstheorie, suitably refined and made plausible. 135
460
461
Della Volpe an school in the late 1970s, most acutely registered in Colletti's apostasy, demonstrated the dangers latent in so restrictive a definition
of Marxism. For once Colletti realized that Marx failed to conform to his
increasingly narrow definition of legitimate science, he felt compelled to
abandon the tradition entirely.
The reconstruction of Marxist holism would thus have to await someone who would avoid the pitfalls of nco-Hegelianism, drawing on the
strengths of its various critics without, however, allowing their criticisms
to undermine his allegiance to Marxism per se. It would need a theorist
who was not hostile to natural science, but who would recognize its limited role in both creating and analyzing the social whole. It would likewise
need someone who could appreciate the contributions bourgeois sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists could
make to our understanding of a totality that was in part like a natural
object. And concomitantly, it would reguire someone open to the insights
that structuralist and systems~theoretic analyses might offer to Marxism,
without, however, accepting unquestioningly their anti-subjectivist, antihumanist bias.
But such a reconstruction would also require someone sensitive to the
still latent possibilities for creating a normative totality that would overcome the pseudo~naturalist structure of contemporary society. Rather
than seek those possibilities where the earlier Western Marxists had) in a
meta~subject able to totalize society and recognize its totalization as a
reflection of itself, it would have to focus on the intersubjective, dialogic
linguistic communities whose promise we have already Doted in the work
of Gramsci and Merleau~ Ponty. And finally, it would need a theorist who,
for all of his holistic, synthesizing inclinations, would pay heed to the
warnings against identity theory in the work of the Frankfurt School and
their unexpected aIlies in the scientific Marxist camp.
The figure who embodied all of these characteristics, and thus provided the only potentially plausible salvation of Marxist holism to emerge
from the wreckage of the Western Marxist tradition, was the German
philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas. If the narrative we have
been emplotting in a tragic mode is to have a less somber end, we must
turn to Habermas' Promethean effort to reconstruct Marxist holism on
boldly new grounds.