Abstract

The premise of the dissertation is that for a variety of reasons marxism entered the twentieth century as a revolutionary theory without an adequate theory of revolution. Despite the fact that the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a new, classless society relied upon the class consciousness and collective action of the proletariat, marxists had done very little thinking about the complexity of the social elaboration of consciousness or its consequences in conflicting motivations and obstacles to solidarity. The first part of the dissertation considers the attempts of Bernstein, Sorel, Lenin, and Lukacs to cope with the troublesome multiplicity of sociological consciousness without understanding it. ;Because of his unusually strong commitment to collective liberation and willed community, Antonio Gramsci was driven to push beyond this sociological shortcutting. The second part of the dissertation considers Gramsci's participation in the Italian socialist movement and his exposure to the intellectual tradition of machiavellian republicanism. These general experiences enabled Gramsci to develop his distinctive sensitivity to the need for revolutionary theory to account substantively for the sociological reality of collective motivation and action far from any single standard of rationality . ;The third part of the dissertation seeks to avoid the customary insularity of marxism studies by using Gramsci as the point of reference for an exploration of a more general problematization of rationality in early twentieth-century Europe. Gramsci treated the formation of class consciousness and the emergence of socialist political culture as complex problems of contingent social construction rather than as natural products of historical development. Comparison of his resulting revolutionary theory with the similar insights and divergent conclusions of 'bourgeois' social theorists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber reveals the tension, ambivalence, and struggle of the best minds of the early twentieth century to cope with the diversity and contingency of social knowledge, motivation, and action in a practical, reasonable fashion, at a time when both liberal and socialist certainties that any simple set of understandings or solutions was possible had collapsed