Abstract

The influence exercised by Antonio Gramsci on the young Nicola Matteucci’s mindset is neither episodic nor marginal. In this essay we try to reconstruct, for the first time, the main lines of Matteucci’s original reading of Gramscian work. For this purpose, his two dissertations will be mainly examined, the first in Law (1948), still unpublished, dedicated to Croce’s juridical thought, and the second one in Philosophy (1950), in which he measures himself directly with Gramscian historicism. What emerges from these pieces of work and from Matteucci’s subsequent writings on Gramsci is a reading that, inspired by a sort of pietas towards him, would have induced the Bolognese scholar to counterpose, for over twenty years, the Marxist heterodoxy of the Sardinian philosopher to the theoretical-political line of the PCI.