This article focuses on the concepts of crisis and critique through which, in the Discorrendo, Labriola highlights problematic aspects of historical materialism and at the same time reconstructs them, showing how they should be correctly understood. Labriola’s main purpose is to illustrate the use of the genetic method for understanding historical and social reality by means of the discovery of neoformations, the identification of their structural relationships, their morphology and its variants. The result is a conception of historical and social reality as an artificial environment in which both the object and the subject are formed according to specific types; they take on a role which, understood in the light of the theory of value and the evaluations that the form of value production gives rise to, is regulated both by the immanent dialectic of history and by the subjective capacity to guide the action of transforming reality.

Neoformation, Genetic method, Type, Variants, Value

To be fully understood, Labriola’s Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia must be carefully situated within its historical and intellectual context, in particular within the debate on the so-called “crisis of Marxism” which began in 1896 with Bernstein’s articles in Die Neue Zeit. In the Discorrendo – a text that should be read alongside the letters and other political and theoretical writings from the years 1897-1899 – Labriola elaborates a conception of Marxism of considerable philosophical depth, where the perspective of “critique” is developed in opposition to that of “crisis,” pointing to a direction for the progressive development of Marxism within historical reality that can still be of great interest today.

Labriola, Marxism, Philosophy, Socialism, Dialectics

This contribution examines how Antonio Labriola’s historical materialism engages with the subjective nature of its object, particularly addressing how meaning can be conferred upon history while maintaining the scientific rigor of historical study. It argues for the necessity of philosophy in historical research and explores the role of interpretation in attributing meaning to historical data. To establish the role and necessity of historical meaning in Labriola’s framework, the analysis presents his distinctive conception of historical determinism and his understanding of knowledge itself as labor. Finally, the article briefly demonstrates how these theoretical insights find concrete application in both historical research and political practice.

Meaning of history, Historiography, Monism, Labor, Determinism

The article focuses on the connection between pedagogy, society and socialism in Antonio Labriola’s Marxist period. Starting from the distinction between «liberal democracy» and «socialist democracy» outlined by Labriola in his famous letter to Ettore Socci, two different models of political pedagogy are outlined: alongside the liberal one, there is the socialist one, which builds specific forms of training activities for militants alongside the party. To explore this theme in depth, the article examines the cases in which Labriola focuses on the first nucleus of associations from which the Communist League would emerge, moments considered important by the philosopher, who regarded them as the genetic nucleus of the subsequent political activity of social democracy.

Antonio Labriola, Pedagogy, Education, Politics, Socialism

This paper aims to deal with the opposite interpretations of the metaphysical meaning of Historical Materialism outlined, respectively, by Labriola and Gentile. According to Labriola, “philosophy of praxis” consists in an anatomical exposition of the objective contradictions from which the capitalist society emerges, ultimately resolved in the dialectic between capitalistic bourgeoisie and revolutionary proletariat. Therefore, the proletarian class appears as the historical-universal agent of the revolutionary mission to overturn capitalist domination, as an internal counterreaction to the dynamics of capital’s self-valorization. Gentile, for his part, formulates a powerful objection to Labriola: the immediate and unilateral conversion of the socio-economical facts into an absolute reality, entails a form of inverted Idealism which, as such is unfounded, as it eliminates the Hegelian dialectical-processual correlation of subject and object.

Antonio Labriola, Giovanni Gentile, Historical Materialism, Philosophy of History, Idealism

The author undertakes a comparative examination of the philosophies of Antonio Labriola and György Lukács, focusing on the centrality of the category of «dialectical totality» as the shared theoretical core of their Hegelian Marxism. The notion of «totality» is analyzed in relation to two key dimensions of their work: the conception of labor and the attention devoted to ideal production and the forms of consciousness. Proceeding from their common opposition to a reductionist and schematic Marxism, the article aims to demonstrate that the category of «totality» constitutes the condition of possibility both for understanding philosophical theory in its function as historico-ontological praxis and for articulating the problem of historical subjectivity.

Labriola, Lukács, Hegelian Marxism, Totality, Ontology

The contribution examines the original synthesis through which Antonio Labriola brings together the nineteenthcentury concern for the historicalsocial totality with the new twentiethcentury centrality of the revolutionary subject. Through the notion of the philosophy of praxis, Labriola develops a dynamic conception of the relationship between theory and transformation, grounded in the role of living labor and class consciousness. The essay also analyzes his dialogue with Lukács, his distance from Sorel, and the impact of the philosopher’s political biography on the definition of historical materialism.

Labriola, Marxism, Philosophy of Praxis, Historical Totality, Autonomy of Marxism