L’universale incompleto. Questione liberale ed emancipazione = L’universel incomplet : la question libérale et l’émancipation = The incomplete universal: the liberal question and emancipation

Giovanni Fresu

2022-01-01

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Abstract

In defining his particular conception of the philosophy of praxis as absolute historicism, Gramsci intertwines certain fundamental themes of political philosophy, primarily the relationship between civil and political society in the dialectic of freedoms. He conceives the process of human emancipation as a continuation/reversal of the universal values immanent to bourgeois revolutions. According to Gramsci, the transition from liberalism to socialism was historically situated in this passage from incomplete universality to complete emancipation,. The young Sardinian intellectual’s anti-protectionist polemics and his particular way of viewing the Southern Question—understood as a paradigmatic linkage of the organic contradictions inherentin the formation of Italy as a nation—fit into this vision. He did not become aware of the parasitic and regressive function of protectionism in Einaudian academic circles in Turin, but in Sardinia, where this phenomenon occurred at the end of a long historical process of passive modernisation which, in many ways, anticipated the post-unification Southern Question.