In the 19th century, the father of Italian Marxism was Labriola, who corresponded with Engels and Plekhanov. After the formation of the Third International, its historical centre became Gramsci. Both were in different ways profoundly influenced by the Hegelian tradition which had become naturalized in Italy after the Risorgimento. It is therefore a paradox that after the Second World War, the most important philosophical school to develop within Italian Marxism has been markedly hostile to the influence of Hegel and relatively untouched by the influence of Gramsci. The founder and inspirer of this current was Galvano Delia Volpe, who was born in Imola in 1897 and died in 1968.

The direction of Della Volpe’s work, like that of Lukács, was much influenced by his early pre-Marxist formation and development. He began his career at Bologna University with a study entitled Hegel Romantico e Mistico (1929), which deliberately went against the mainstream of Italian academic philosophy of the time, by emphasizing Hegel’s relation to Eckhardt, Holderlin, Schiller, Schelling and other irrationalist and romantic sources of German culture. The approach of this early work was to be taken up and developed 40 years later by Della Volpe’s most gifted pupil, Lucio Colletti, in his recent attack on Lukács’s interpretation of the young Hegel (Il Marxismo e Hegel). Where Lukács sought to emphasize the secular and rationalist aspects of Hegel’s thought, indeed claiming that he was virtually a protomaterialist in his youth, Della Volpe and later Colletti were concerned to show Hegel’s place in a specifically Christian tradition of romantic bourgeois thought. The young Hegel becomes for them not an unconscious atheist, but a theological novice concerned with essentially pietistic themes. A very different assessment of Hegel’s relation to Marx necessarily followed.

Thus, when during the Liberation Della Volpe acceded to Marxism, he began his new phase of development by explicitly rejecting the idea that the Marxist dialectic is merely the Hegelian idealist dialectic ‘stood on its feet’. Dismissing Marx’s remark that he had ‘flirted’ with Hegel’s terminology in Capital, he squarely stated that Marx’s dialectic had nothing to do with Hegel, because it was indistinguishable from the establishment of scientific laws of social formations. Della Volpe thus anticipated one of the central themes of Althusser’s work some two decades later. In a second text written in the immediate post-war years,footnote1 he made a novel analysis of Marx’s 1843 Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrecht, which focussed on Marx’s attack on the Hegelian hypostasization of the State. In doing so, Della Volpe probably overestimated the originality of Marx’s argument (similar political ideas were widely current among the left Hegelians), but he undoubtedly established the central point that Marx denounced Hegel not merely for idealism, but also for empiricism: it was the combination of the two that produced a mythical overt entity whose covert and mundane referent was the sordid existing machine of bourgeois domination. Again, this theme of the unity of idealism/empiricism was later to be developed extensively by Althusser and others in France.