Bobbio interprete di Gramsci

The reconstruction of Gramsci's political theory carried out by Norberto Bobbio focuses on the notion of civil society. According to Bobbio, one of the most original features of the Prison Notebooks is encapsulated in the innovative interpretation that Gramsci gave of civil society as part of the superstructure rather than, as Marx had argued, as an aspect of the substructural base. Starting from this conception of civil society, new light could be shed on some of the themes that characterized Gramsci's reflection: the distinction between "hegemony" and "direct domination", the importance of ideologies, the function of the intellectuals. In short, Gramsci gave priority to the superstructure over the base as the determinant causal factor of historical change. In this article I argue that Bobbio has always maintained that Gramsci's departure from "scientific" Marxism does not mean that he does not belong to the marxist tradition and that the author of the Notebooks is not a liberal but a revolutionary thinker. I show that, although Bobbio underestimated the influence of Gentile's philosophy on Gramsci's thought and did not draw all the implications inherent in the liquidation of Marx's materialistic sociology, his interpretation proves, after more than fifty years, to be exemplary in terms of rigor and depth.