Il giovane Marx tra Spinoza e Gramsci

Gramsci does not explicitly mention Spinoza in his own writings: yet a number of scholars have highlighted several similarities between their thought, particularly related to their shared view of radical immanentism. Spinoza was carefully studied by the young Marx as well. The latter produced an extract from Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus where he tried to focus on the democratic instances of the work by abridging all theological references. Such a behaviour shows interesting similarities, and surprising indeed, with the way Gramsci behaved in his Quaderni di traduzioni, particularly when dealing with brothers Grimm’s fairy tales (i.e. he abridged excerpts about religion) and with an anthology of texts by Marx himself (i.e. the way he cut off or moved some passages).