Background
Labriola was born in Cassino (then in the Papal States), the son a schoolteacher.
philosopher university professor
Labriola was born in Cassino (then in the Papal States), the son a schoolteacher.
University of Naples.
In 1861, he entered the University of Naples. Upon graduating, he remained in Naples and became a schoolteacher. During this period, he pursued an interest in philosophy, history and ethnography.
The early 1870s saw Labriola take up journalism and his writings from this time express liberal and anticlerical views.
In 1874, Labriola was appointed as a professor in Rome, where he was to spend the rest of his life teaching, writing and debating. He died in Rome on 2 February 1904.
Although an academic philosopher and never an active member of any Marxist political party, his thought exerted influence on many political theorists in Italy during the early 20th century, including the founder of the Italian Liberal Party, Benedetto Croce and the leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga. Although he had been critical of liberalism since 1873, his move towards Marxism was gradual, and he did not explicitly express a socialist viewpoint until 1889. He saw Marxism not as a final, self-sufficient schematisation of history, but rather as a collection of pointers to the understanding of human affairs
These pointers needed to be somewhat imprecise if Marxism was to take into account the complicated social processes and variety of forces at work in history. Marxism was to be understood as a "critical theory", in the sense that it sees no truths as everlasting, and was ready to drop its own ideas if experience should so dictate. His description of Marxism as a "philosophy of praxis" would appear again in Gramsci"s Prison Notebooks.
Labriola subscribed in his early years to Hege" lianism, then to Herbart. He discovered Marxist*! in about 1890, corresponding at length w,t Engels. His articles on Marxism, published b> Croce and Sorel, were the first exposition ° Marxism as a philosophy by an academic an have a supposed purity of interpretation that has been invoked as a model, as when Grants^1 advocated ‘the return to Labriola’. Labrio wished not so much to develop Marx as expound the philosophy he found there. ** denied that historical materialism is designed to capture the infinite variety of historical even under a philosophy of history, wishing to liberate history from the imposition of any metaphys,c structure, so that even the law of progress must be preserved from any taint of teleology. Historical materialism is not philosophy but a new method for researching history. The novelty of Marx insists not in unprecedented ideas but in his clear recognition of the proper method of proceeding. Historical materialism as a method and socialism as a practical activity are not to be distinguished, mr historical materialism is the truth of socialism, •here are idealistic and voluntarist overtones in Labriola’s Marxism, for example in his belief in a cultural and sociological rather than an economic case for the notion of class consciousness. Labriola marks a significant development in the history of Marxism, partly because of his determined elTorts to free it from any residue of Hegelian metaphysics, partly because of his influence on Croce and Sorcl and on Gramsci, and partly because he introduced into Italy one of the most Pervasive features of its intellectual culture.