Italian philosopher and political theorist
Costanzo Preve (14 April 1943 – 23 November 2013) was an Italian philosopher and a political theoretician.
Preve is widely considered one of the most important anti-capitalist European thinkers and a renowned expert in the history of Marxism. His thought is based on the Ancient Greek and idealistic tradition philosophy under the influence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. He is author of many essays and volumes about philosophical interpretation, communitarianism and universalism.
Biography
Born in Valenza, Preve studied philosophy, political science and ancient and modern Greek in Turin, Paris and Athens. He worked as a high school teacher from 1967 to 2002 and was engaged first in the Italian Communist Party (PCI). He then got close to Proletarian Democracy, a party created in 1975 which opposed to the historic compromise between the PCI and the Christian Democracy. After the dissolving of the PCI following the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Preve undertook a critical review of his own positions held in the precedent decades. He gave lectures for and took part in some of the cultural activities of the Anti-Imperialist Camp, a union of international leftist anti-imperialist activists who have received much attention from the media because of their critical stand against American imperialism and Zionism. Since 2005, he wrote for geopolitical journal Eurasia.
Preve was initially influenced by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser before turning himself towards Georg Lukács. He rejected the important workerism current (or autonomist Marxism) during the 1960–1970s. In the 1990s, Preve returned to Althusser and criticized economism and orthodox Marxism based on a teleological philosophy of history inspired by Hegel. As did Althusser in his latter work on "random materialism" (matérialisme aléatoire), Preve insisted on the place of contingency in history and considers the class contrast between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat to be a historical passing form specific to a certain period of the capitalist mode of production. Preve conceived of the 1960s as a rupture in history in much the same way that the appearance of the proletariat in the 19th century had been as capitalism entered a new phase. However, Preve insists against Althusser on the young Marx's theory of alienation and on his theory on human nature and provocatively considered Marxism as the last phase of German idealism. Preve has also insisted on the unprecedented power of the sole hyperpower, that is the United States, warning against cultural imperialism. He criticized Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire (2000).
Preve assigned four masters to Marx, namely Epicurus (to whom he dedicated his thesis, Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus, 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which come his idea of egalitarian democracy; Adam Smith, from whom came the idea that the grounds of property is labour; and finally Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Preve was an atheist.[1] On 23 November 2013, Preve died in Turin, where he lived.[2]
