"Un principio schietto di etica comunistica”. Antonio Labriola lettore di Spinoza

The article reconstructs Antonio Labriola’s relationship with Spinoza, showing how his early reflection on the passions in the Ethics influences his later adherence to historical materialism. Unlike Gentile and Spaventa, Labriola does not interpret Spinoza as a forerunner of Hegelianism, but as the founder of an ethical naturalism grounded in necessity. In The Origin and Nature of the Passions According to Spinoza’s Ethics (1866), he emphasizes the connection between knowledge, affectivity, and praxis, re-evaluating the geometrical order as a model of natural necessity. For Labriola, freedom consists in the adequate knowledge of affective and social causes. The Spinozist influence re-emerges in Discourse on Socialism and Philosophy (1898), where Spinozan virtue is evoked as a principle of communist ethics. Alongside Marx, Spinoza thus appears to Labriola as a decisive figure in the formation of a philosophy of praxis rooted in the historical and natural understanding of representative forms.