Giovanni Gentile produced one of the most distinctive and unorthodox readings of the young Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism that appeared in the late nineteenth century. While this interpretation stood out for its originality when it was first developed, its real significance lies in how it came to underpin Gentile’s mature philosophy and supplied a philosophical foundation for the fascist state. Gentile portrayed Mussolini’s regime as the concrete historical community in which the Italian individual could realize a shared destiny. What follows reconstructs that intellectual lineage in full, drawing on every element present in the original analysis.

Gentile’s first published work on Marxism appeared in 1897 under the title Una critica del materialismo storico. That early piece remained limited in both scope and influence. Two years later he produced a far more substantial study titled La filosofia della prassi. Written at a time when several of Marx’s most important manuscripts were still unavailable in complete form, the 1899 essay already demonstrated unusual penetration. The two texts were eventually brought together in the volume known in English as The Philosophy of Marx, which forms volume XXVIII of Gentile’s collected works. The discussion that follows relies primarily on the 1899 study. Giovanni Gentile, the thinker remembered as the “philosopher of Fascism” and a principal exponent of Italian idealism.

In La filosofia della prassi, Gentile took up Antonio Labriola’s writings on historical and dialectical materialism with the explicit aim of dismantling the deterministic interpretation then dominant among Marxists. That interpretation claimed that once the productive forces came into contradiction with existing relations of production, proletarian consciousness would arise automatically and capitalism would collapse of its own necessity. Gentile rejected this picture outright. He argued that Marxism does not rest on discoverable laws of social development whose outcome is already predetermined. No such rigid laws, he maintained, can be found.

Any claim to scientific knowledge, whether in the natural or social sciences, depends on an active human intervention rather than on the passive contemplation of facts. Facts only become intelligible inside a prior framework that already determines what will count as relevant data. Scientists necessarily select variables and bring to that selection a set of values and intellectual purposes. Explanations and predictions therefore make sense only when human beings, equipped with intentions, translate them into empirical realities. Gentile’s central contention was that every scientific or cognitive act rests upon a prior act of human valuation, an act that cannot itself be reduced to the scientific theories it makes possible. From this he concluded that the determinist interpreters of Marxism had failed to understand either Marx or the very structure of scientific understanding:

“Human values cannot be explained by historical materialism because historical materialism is an attempt to explain and predict what is part of man’s cognitive act and, as such, rests on a set of implicit human values.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

This line of argument also reflected Gentile’s broader opposition to the positivism that dominated Italian intellectual life at the time. What was needed, he insisted, was a return to the decisive move Marx had made against Hegelian idealism. Marx had refused the contemplative materialism that cast individuals as mere observers of natural and social processes. He presented them instead as active participants in a dialectical historical movement that both shapes them and is shaped by their own activity — by praxis. Gentile was among the earliest writers to recover Marx’s debt to Ludwig Feuerbach at a moment when the Theses on Feuerbach were still largely unknown. He obtained them through Labriola, who had received them from Engels. Gentile’s reading of Marxism therefore turns on the revolutionary praxis that Marx developed out of his critical engagement with Feuerbach.

In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach had inverted the Hegelian claim that philosophy and religion are ultimately reconcilable. He argued that God does not create humanity; humanity creates the idea of God in order to satisfy a deep psychological need. Gentile retraced this argument as the necessary step toward Marx’s own materialism:

“What is, in fact, for man, his own individual essence? In a continuous satisfaction of his own organic needs. And he wants to find this in God. The selfish feeling, unsatisfied with the finitude of real life, leads man to sublimate himself in an infinite power, which is divine power, omnipotence to satisfy all his needs. Man, therefore, through religion does not recognize himself, as spirit, as absolute, as universal, in God; but this absolute and universal spirit must, on the contrary, recognize itself in the particular individual, who as a physical organism lives through the incessant vicissitudes of the emergence and satisfaction of needs. Therefore, the truth of the individual is not in the universal, but the universal truth is that which is in the individual. Matter is not realized in spirit, but spirit in matter. Hegelian idealism was turned upside down.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

By reducing religion to a human projection rooted in concrete bodily needs, Feuerbach removed metaphysics from legitimate inquiry and left only the empirical world of matter. Social facts, on this view, had to be explained through the needs of individuals as members of specific societies. Feuerbach summarized the point in the aphorism that a human being is nothing other than what he eats.

Marx accepted Feuerbach’s inversion but refused to stop there. He rejected the idea that the individual’s essence could be treated as a fixed natural given. Instead, he located that essence in the activity through which needs are met—the activity he called praxis or sensuous human activity. This activity always involves social relations and the means used to satisfy needs. Gentile therefore emphasized that, for Marx, the isolated individual is not the basic reality; the social individual is. Society itself is the original reality within which the individual exists:

“According to Marx, the individual as such is not real; real is the social individual. What amounts to affirming the original reality of society, in which the individual, the basis of Marx’s materialist vision, is inherent to it.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

Marxist praxis therefore situates the individual in a dialectical relation with society: society is both produced by individual activity and the force that shapes the individual in return. The social essence of human beings emerges from this ongoing dialectical-material process. Gentile’s most distinctive move was to recognize that Marx had transferred the dynamic, self-developing character once ascribed to Spirit onto matter. He had given matter the same active, dialectical quality Hegel had reserved for thought:

“Marx does nothing but replace thought with matter; but a matter endowed with the same activity, formerly considered the privilege of thought.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

The decisive point lies in understanding praxis as the original unity of doing and knowing. In producing the object that satisfies a need, the subject simultaneously produces knowledge of that object and of himself. Subject and object, action and thought, are internally related from the beginning. Gentile could therefore attribute to Marx a consistently subjectivist position: the human being is not the passive product of external conditions but an active participant whose thought and judgment help constitute the historical process. Because the individual’s essence is formed through social activity aimed at satisfying needs, thought and action cannot be separated without collapsing into either solipsism or mechanical determinism. Individuals make their own history in a substantial sense.

Variables conventionally labeled “economic” or “material” stand in a dialectical and immanent relation to those labeled “ethical” or “philosophical.” Gentile expressed this circular movement by noting that “the effect reacts upon the cause and their relationship is inverted; the effect becoming cause, which becomes effect while remaining cause, so that a synthesis of cause and effect occurs.” In other words, while individuals produce the social world that meets their needs, they are themselves transformed by that world. Marx captured the point when he observed that the coincidence of changed circumstances and changed human activity can be grasped only as revolutionary practice:

“And thus Marx observed that the coincidence of the change of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived as practice that subverts itself (nur als umwälzende Praxis).”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marc

Gentile therefore presented the young Marx as both inheritor of the older materialist tradition and its most original continuer. Earlier materialists had assumed that human beings are shaped by their environment and that changing the environment would therefore change human nature. Marx approached the problem dialectically: the environment is itself a product of human action. Cause and effect form a circle in which practice continually inverts itself. Individuals recognize themselves in their own social products and, through ongoing criticism and transcendence of those products, transform both themselves and their circumstances. Gentile insisted that this dialectical insight owed everything to Marx’s Hegelian formation — an inheritance that never left him.

Gentile was well aware of the literary and conceptual difficulties in Marx’s surviving writings. Nevertheless he concluded that the dialectical materialism of the young Marx cannot be read as the economic determinism later codified by the orthodoxy of the Second International. That orthodoxy had focused almost exclusively on changes in the material base; “productive forces” and “relations of production” — while treating the superstructure as a dependent variable. Engels himself had already described such one-sided formulations as little more than “rubbish.” Gentile argued that this emphasis missed the central insight of revolutionary praxis: far from constituting a one-way determination from base to superstructure, the process is genuinely dialectical. The superstructure must also act back upon and reshape the base if the dialectic is to move forward.

Within this interpretation, the only element that can be described as necessary is the internal form of praxis itself, the ongoing relation of subject and object, action and thought. No fixed “laws of social development” can be read off from the material base alone, because the human judgment that selects and interprets the relevant variables constitutes an irreducible presupposition of any scientific claim. The material content of history therefore remains open in a way that strict determinism cannot accommodate. What Marxist orthodoxy presented as automatic and inevitable, Gentile presented as a methodological insight into the rhythm of historical becoming, an insight whose concrete applications always depend on the subjective element orthodoxy had tried to eliminate.

This reading was possible for Gentile precisely because he had access to the still-unpublished manuscripts of The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach. Most Marxists of his generation did not. Once the subjective moment of thought and judgment is restored to its proper place inside the dialectic, revolutionary consciousness can no longer be treated as a simple reflex of material contradictions. Orthodox Marxism had expected consciousness to arise automatically once the productive forces outgrew the relations of production. Gentile showed that such automaticity is incompatible with the dialectical character of praxis itself. The subject must actively participate; thought and judgment are not external additions but constitutive elements of the production of the object that satisfies needs.

Gentile’s interpretation therefore converged in important respects with the concerns of the revisionists; Bernstein, Woltmann, Sorel, and others — who had been pushed to the margins by official Marxism. These thinkers had sensed that a genuinely revolutionary philosophy required a clearer account of the psychological and subjective conditions of revolutionary consciousness. Their “return to Kant” can be read, in light of Gentile’s work, as an unwitting return to the young Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach. The revisionist current drew heavily on elitist sociology (Pareto, Mosca, Le Bon) precisely because orthodox Marxism had failed to supply an adequate theory of how class consciousness actually forms and spreads.

Gentile’s early essays thus anticipated, from within Marxism itself, the problems that later drove many socialists toward more voluntarist and national conceptions of revolutionary action (Marxism-Leninism). Yet Gentile also recognized the limits of what could be extracted from the surviving texts. Even the young Marx never fully spelled out how the subject, in producing the object, is simultaneously produced by it. Concrete historical examples remain difficult to construct, especially on an international scale. Some revisionists suspected that the mature Marx had himself been unable to apply his method consistently to capitalist society — an unfinished project whose ambiguities persist.

Nevertheless Gentile drew one firm conclusion: once the social character of the individual is taken seriously, any rigid opposition between “base” and “superstructure” dissolves. If individuals and the revolutionary class itself belong to the productive forces, then the motives, judgments, and forms of consciousness animating their activity are not secondary effects but integral parts of the productive process itself. The relation between economic conditions and cultural or political expressions becomes one of mutual dependence rather than unidirectional determination.

From this follows the second major implication of Gentile’s reading: the inherently social and communal nature of the individual. Marx had already rejected Feuerbach’s abstract, isolated individual. For Marx the human being is social from the outset because the satisfaction of needs occurs through cooperative production and the division of labor. Gentile summarized the point:

“The man who works is the social man, society. Where is this man determined by social circumstances, if not in society? In truth, the man we know is social man.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

Because praxis is always social praxis, the individual’s essence is realized only within and through communal relations. Society is not an external constraint but the very medium in which individuality becomes concrete. Gentile later restated the same idea in his mature interpretation of Marx:

“Marx correctly observes that this [individualist] interpretation is an abstraction, and that, in truth, society exists first and that individuals exist only as an organically related part of the whole.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

The practical consequence is that any political order claiming to embody the Marxist insight into human sociality must be judged by how successfully it enables individuals to realize their social essence through shared activity. Orthodox Marxism had located that realization in an international proletarian community that would eventually abolish national distinctions. Gentile’s interpretation opened a different possibility: the national community itself could be understood as the concrete historical form in which the social individual achieves full realization.

In the Fascist conception that Gentile helped articulate, the state is not an alien power standing above society but the ethical organization of the national community, the institutional expression of the shared historical destiny through which individuals recognize and develop their social being. The dialectic of praxis thereby receives a determinate national content without abandoning the insight that human essence is created through collective, transformative activity. The international proletarian community envisioned by Orthodox Marxism remained, in Gentile’s eyes, an abstraction; the Fascist national community represented the attempt to give the social essence of the individual a living, historical embodiment. This line of thought did not require Gentile to abandon the young Marx’s dialectics. It represented what he took to be the most consistent development of that framework once the subjective and social moments internal to praxis were fully acknowledged. The result was a philosophical justification of the Fascist state as the actualization, under modern historical conditions, of the communal character of human existence that Marx had identified but left largely undeveloped.

The dramatic emphasis placed by Marxism on revolutionary consciousness as class consciousness stems directly from its judgment that the national variable carries little weight within the movements of dialectical materialism. Yet what if the revisionists were correct not only in their critique of supposed determinism but also in their insistence on the need for empirical investigation into the actual conditions under which revolutionary consciousness emerges? The Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer had already observed that “national character,” at the beginning of the 20th century, was not dissolving in favor of an international proletarian community. On the contrary, it was intensifying, dividing the world into nations and groups of nations possessing their own distinct interests that transcended any specific class motivation. It is noteworthy that perceptive figures such as Enrico Corradini, a nationalist operating on the margins of the socialist movement, had already discerned the incongruence of Orthodox Marxist conclusions and had promptly advanced new interpretive categories — most notably the notion of an international struggle between proletarian nations and plutocratic nations, thereby gradually shifting revolutionary consciousness away from a narrowly defined social class and toward nationalism.

The rediscovery of the nation as a community of destiny by the Italian revolutionary syndicalists and by Benito Mussolini himself during the First World War was not an unexpected conservative turn by former socialists seeking revenge against the Marxists of the Italian Socialist party. It was, rather, a comprehensible updating of the revolutionary movement, now seeking to adapt itself to the concrete peculiarities of national tradition. Revolutionary consciousness, Gentile had already demonstrated, could arise within dialectical materialism only when the judgment and values of the subject of praxis were taken into account in consonance with that subject’s social essence, an essence that, as both producer and product of the dialectical movement, remains indissolubly linked to its community.

Revolutionary consciousness is therefore the consequence of a fortunate alignment in which a collectivity acts historically to realize its social essence by constructing a community consistent with that same essence. There is no doubt that, for the embryonic circle of intellectuals who would later become leading figures in Fascism, the First World War demonstrated that revolutionary consciousness is a national revolutionary consciousness — a consciousness of a people seeking to build its own community of destiny in order to realize, in the Italian case, a social essence intimately bound up with the overcoming of a long historical alienation.

In this respect Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg were correct to warn that the revisionist current within Marxism would lead to the discovery of the revolutionary proletarian nation as the new revolutionary agent of the 20th century. Yet she was mistaken in supposing that this development constituted a negation of dialectical materialism. For if one takes seriously Gentile’s interpretation of the methodology of the young Marx, the historical conditions of the epoch necessarily pointed toward a conjugation of national sentiment with the revolutionary impulse, variables indispensable to the very process of historical materialism.

This conclusion corresponds exactly to the intellectual creation of Fascism as a form of national and revolutionary socialism. Throughout its existence the Fascist regime invoked as one of its principal justifications and sources of legitimacy the claim that it was constructing a community based upon a mode of association consistent with the social essence of the Italian people. This positioning derived in large measure from Gentile, who in one of his final writings affirmed that “at the bottom of every I there is a We, which is the community to which he belongs and which is the basis of his spiritual existence.” It is often overlooked that Gentile acquired this social — or, as he sometimes termed it, “political” — conception of the individual directly from Marx, a debt the philosopher himself acknowledged in the preface to the 1937 reissue of The Philosophy of Marx:

“And I heard here and there voices that never extinguished in me; and something fundamental in which I still recognize myself and in which others perhaps better than I could recognize the first seeds of thoughts that matured later.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

The dialectical materialism of the young Karl Marx therefore constituted an essential element in the Fascist philosophy elaborated by the principal philosopher of Fascism, Giovanni Gentile.