Science, History and Ideology in Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) made his notes on science within his Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) written between 1929 and 1935, while imprisoned by the Italian fascist regime. This overview focuses mainly on three themes: 1) the Gramscian criticism of the idealist (Croce) and materialist (Bukharin) conceptions of science and, in particular, his criticism of the alleged “objectivity of reality”; 2) the historical and ideological nature of scientific knowledge and the relationship between history of science and history of technology; 3) the interrelation between science, politics and society in the framework of Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis”.