Antonio Gramsci was leader of the Italian Communist Party and Italy’s leading Marxist theorist. While jailed by fascism he filled 29 notebooks with fragmentary comments on many subjects.
Gramsci was provoked by Bukharin’s Historical Materialism was: A Popular Textbook of Marxist Sociology which stated that historical materialism was sociology,thus departing from the Marxist-Leninst orthodoxy, that sociology was simply a bourgeois science and relying heavily on the sociological masters, particularly Pareto’s equilibrium theory. Gramsci critiqued this theory and the converse views of Henri de Man. He developed an understanding of sociology and its limits, denied that historical materialism is a sociology and yet intimated that it might contain one.
Asking “What is sociology” Gramsci stated that it had been an attempt to create a scientifie method for explaining history and politics based