Elements for a Theory of Democracy: Gramsci and Common Sense

I examined in a previous article another reductionism, distinct from the economic, to which Marxism has been prone and which has been equally damaging to the elaboration of a theory of politics (see Nun, 1982). Such a reductionism goes well beyond the analysis of the determination of structures or behaviour to affect the way in which social practices are interpreted, that is, by reference to a single rationality which is supposed to give them meaning. Its traces have a long history: if it is true, as Mondolfo (1956: 26) asserts, that the problem of knowledge was at the centre of Marx's philosophical concerns, it is no less true that his epistemology was insolubly linked to his faith in reason and, in the end, to his social utopia (see Kolakowski, 1981: 176). According to this, communism would be charged with carrying out, at one and the same time, the Enlightenment ideal of the absolute autonomy of the subject and the romantic ideal of the essential harmony of human development; the union of humanism and naturalism in a world of liberty which would emerge fully rational and where the opacity, division and disorder of collective life would be finally superseded.