Stefano Petrucciani
Università degli Studi di Roma, “La Sapienza” (stefano.petrucciani@uniroma1.it; orcid: 0000-0002-4283-2396).
Abstract: The article reconstructs the complex intertwining between Marxism and Kantian philosophy. After an initial phase in which Marx, following Hegel, criticizes Kantian moral formalism, late nineteenth-century attempts at reconciliation emerge, as in the neo-Kantian socialism of Bernstein, Vorländer, and Adler, who emphasize the categorical imperative and the communal dimension of conscience. In the early twentieth century, Lenin reads Kant as an intermediate position between materialism and idealism, though criticizing the unknowability of the thing-in-itself. Later, Lukács interprets Kant as a stage in overcoming the fracture between subject and object. In the postwar period, both Galvano della Volpe and the Frankfurt School recognize the importance of Kantian epistemology: in particular, the thesis is advanced that, for both Marx and Kant, the world of experience is constituted through the activity of the subject, without this exhausting an objective reality that remains partially irreducible.
Keywords: Marxism; Kantian Philosophy; Neo-Kantianism; Subject-Object; Epistemology.