The Crocean Impact: How Benedetto Croce Shaped Gramsci’s Civil Society

To understand how Antonio Gramsci arrived at his theory of cultural hegemony, you have to look at the thinker he argued with most: Benedetto Croce. Croce was the dominant intellectual figure in early twentieth-century Italy, an idealist philosopher who had once flirted with Marxism and then declared it intellectually dead. Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison cell, treated Croce less as an enemy to be dismissed and more as a sparring partner whose insights had to be absorbed and turned around. The result was one of the most influential reworkings of Marxist theory in the twentieth century. This post traces how a liberal idealist shaped a revolutionary’s understanding of culture, intellectuals, and civil society.

Who was Benedetto Croce 🔗

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was an Italian philosopher, historian, and politician who dominated his country’s intellectual life for decades. He drew heavily on Hegel and engaged seriously with Marx before turning away from both. A political liberal who distinguished between liberalism and laissez-faire economics, Croce exercised an enormous pull on Italian intellectuals across the political spectrum, from Marxists like Gramsci to fascists like Giovanni Gentile.

His core philosophical commitment matters here. Croce emphasised the human spirit, culture, and ethics as the driving forces of history. This put him at odds with the cruder versions of Marxism circulating at the time, which reduced everything to economics and treated ideas as a mere reflection of material conditions. For Croce, history was the story of liberty unfolding through human consciousness, not the automatic outcome of economic laws.

Croce and the “death of theoretical Marxism” 🔗

Croce did not stay a sympathiser for long. He came to argue that Marxism had no genuine philosophical content of its own. In his reading, once Marx’s thought was passed through the filter of idealist philosophy, what survived was not a science of history but at most a practical guide to action. As one account of Italian Marxism puts it, Marxism reinterpreted in this way becomes what is left of Marxism after idealism has liquidated it – a theory of will and action rather than a self-standing philosophy. Croce declared the “death of theoretical Marxism” and downgraded it to a set of useful research rules rather than a worldview.

This was the challenge Gramsci inherited. He could either accept Croce’s verdict or build a version of Marxism robust enough to answer it. He chose the second path.

Gramsci’s critical engagement with Croce 🔗

Gramsci’s relationship with Croce was complicated. In his youth he was strongly drawn to Croce’s idealism, and traces of that attraction never fully disappeared. Yet by the time he was writing the Prison Notebooks, he saw Croce as a rival to be overcome on the terrain of ideas. A close study of his prison writings notes that Gramsci often regarded himself not only as a student of Croce but as his arch-rival in the politics of culture and civil society.

What Gramsci took from Croce was the refusal to reduce history to economics. He was impressed by Croce’s emphasis on the political-ethical moment of history against the economic-reductionist approach. Where mechanical Marxists treated revolution as the inevitable product of economic crisis, Gramsci insisted that ideas, values, and consciousness were active forces that shaped outcomes. That conviction came straight out of his engagement with Croce.

From idealism to the philosophy of praxis 🔗

Gramsci’s answer to Croce was a renewed Marxism he called the philosophy of praxis. The label was partly a way to slip past prison censors, but it also captured a real intellectual aim: to free historical materialism from mechanical and deterministic readings. Gramsci described it, in the words preserved by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as an absolute historicism and the complete secularisation of thought.

Crucially, the philosophy of praxis was meant to build on Croce’s insights rather than ignore them. Gramsci accepted Croce’s focus on the ethical and cultural dimension of history but rejected the way Croce used it. He argued that Croce wrote about periods of consensual, liberal hegemony while erasing class conflict – the violence and struggle that actually brought bourgeois society into being. A philosophy of praxis would keep the attention to “ethico-political” history but restore the conflict that Croce had quietly removed. In effect, Gramsci absorbed Croce’s emphasis on culture and turned it into a tool for analysing class power.

How Croce’s own influence taught Gramsci about hegemony 🔗

One of the most striking things Gramsci learned from Croce was not an argument but an example. Croce himself was a living demonstration of how ideas come to dominate a society. Through his journals and publishing, Croce had shaped the assumptions of an entire generation of educated Italians. Gramsci noticed this and asked a sharp question: how does one point of view come to feel like simple common sense?

Gramsci appreciated Croce’s skilful use of the scholarly journal and the press to, in effect, saturate Italian intellectual life with a single culture and so bring about gradual ideological change. In the cultural dominance of this liberal idealist, Gramsci discovered the techniques by which any group establishes a ruling culture in the minds of its contemporaries. This is the seed of his theory of cultural hegemony: the idea that a dominant class rules not only through force but through a “common sense” that the ruled come to accept as natural.

The role of intellectuals 🔗

If hegemony is built through ideas, then the people who produce and circulate ideas become central to political struggle. Here too Croce was a model. Gramsci distinguished between traditional intellectuals – priests, professors, established writers who imagine themselves above class interest – and organic intellectuals, who emerge directly from a social class and articulate its worldview.

Gramsci argued that a class struggling for dominance must work to assimilate and conquer the traditional intellectuals while developing its own organic intellectuals. The capitalist class produced its own deputies – engineers, managers, civil servants, teachers – who help maintain its rule. For Gramsci, the working class needed to do the same: cultivate intellectuals from within its own ranks who could challenge the dominant common sense and build an alternative.

Civil society and revolutionary strategy in the West 🔗

Gramsci’s reflections on culture and intellectuals fed directly into his analysis of where and how revolution could succeed. He drew a famous contrast between Russia and Western Europe. In Russia, he argued, the state was everything and civil society was weak, so a sudden frontal assault on state power could work. In the West, by contrast, there was a powerful and resilient civil society – a dense network of schools, churches, newspapers, associations, and cultural institutions that cushioned the state and won active consent for the existing order. An IGNOU study unit on the elements of civil society notes that Croce played a decisive influence on Gramsci precisely as Gramsci worked out how the proletariat could gain hegemony in the West.

War of position versus war of manoeuvre 🔗

From this analysis came Gramsci’s strategic distinction. A war of manoeuvre is a direct, frontal attack on state power, like the storming of the Winter Palace. A war of position is a long, patient struggle waged within civil society itself to build a rival set of values before any seizure of power. As one analysis explains, in advanced societies the class struggle shifts from a war of manoeuvre to a war of position fought on the cultural front. The conquest of hegemony comes before the conquest of the state. For students of Indian politics, this framework has been widely used to analyse how dominant ideologies – and movements that contest them – operate through education, media, and everyday institutions rather than through force alone.

Why the Crocean influence still matters 🔗

The lasting irony is that a liberal philosopher who announced the death of Marxism helped produce one of its most creative renewals. By insisting on the autonomy of culture and the human spirit, Croce forced Gramsci to take ideology seriously as a field of struggle. By demonstrating his own intellectual hegemony, Croce showed Gramsci how cultural dominance is actually won. And by writing class conflict out of history, Croce gave Gramsci a clear target to write it back in.

The concepts that emerged – cultural hegemony, organic intellectuals, the war of position, the centrality of civil society – were not borrowed from Croce wholesale. They were produced through critical engagement, the act of taking an opponent’s strongest insights and turning them to new ends. That is why scholars still debate whether Gramsci was unduly influenced by Croce or whether he genuinely refounded Marxist thought. The honest answer is probably both at once.

What do you think? Was Gramsci right that lasting political change requires winning the battle for “common sense” within civil society before seizing power, or does that overstate the importance of culture relative to economic and material conditions? And if cultural hegemony can be built by a dominant class, what would it actually take for a subordinate group today to build a genuine counter-hegemony?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedetto_Croce
2. https://viewpointmag.com/2016/10/03/between-dialectical-materialism-and-philosophy-of-praxis-gramsci-and-labriola-1959/
3. https://monoskop.org/images/9/9e/Adamson_Walter_L_1987_Gramsci_and_the_Politics_of_Civil_Society.pdf
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232851822_Gramsci's_philosophy_of_praxis
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
6. https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/croces-hegemony-how-win-minds
7. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/theoretical-review/1982301.htm
8. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/63470/2/Unit-2.pdf
9. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137334183_6