Abstract

158 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34: ~ JANUARY 199 6 philosophical differences between Gramsci and himself could have been "easily" re- solved if they had only had the chance to talk them over. But if the prison letters left Croce with the impression that Gramsci was, in short, a good Crocean, the subsequent publication of the prison notebooks would soon dispel it. After reading the volumes of prison notebooks published in 1948 and 1949, the first of which to appear was II materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Croce revised his earlier assessment, stating that "Grarnsci could not create a new form of thought and bring about the [intellectual] revolution attributed to him because his intention was simply to found in Italy a political party, an activity that has nothing to do with the dispassionate search for truth. TM Yet it was precisely the Crocean distinction between politics and philosophy that Gramsci had called into question in his prison notes on Croce and on philosophy more generally. And if the prison letters are less explicit on this point, they neverthe- less constitute a vivid documentation of both the political and personal context in which Gramsci pursued his philosophical and other..