Gramsci between Machiavelli and Marx: from negative determination of human to ontonegative determination of politics

Abstract

In one of his central categories, Gramsci establishes a connection between the Machiavellian and Marxian political conceptions, in a manner that each one writes to the revolutionary class of their time. Nevertheless, a more rigorous critic at Marx’s propositions unveils to us that the proletarian class isn’t just the progressist class of his time, in the same manner that the bourgeois was in the Iluminism, like Gramsci thinks, but it is, actually, the universal sphere and the only one qualifi ed to accomplish a human emancipation. Consequently, the connection between Machiavelli and Marx does not exist, once Marx conceives the ontological work as the central attribute of humanization, and conceives the politics as temporary; while Machiavelli conceives the politics as the founder act of all sociability.