BOOK REVIEW Futile Enquiry Maurice A Finocchiaro, G-RAMSCJ and the History of Dialectical Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 313, Price £ 30. A self-confessed 'excessively pedantic style of exposition* is deterrent enough for the reader. When however it is reflective of an excessively pedantic analysis the futility of the attempted enquiry is difficult to conceal. It is more than evident that Finocchiaro's work falls into the latter category. Gramsci is without doubt a major theoretician of the twentieth century, and since the fifties, the source of an important stream of research, including Marxists, non-Marxists, and even anti-Marxists. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the enormous body of Marxist literature lay in his capacity to exhibit the role of 'partisanship', in the widest sense of the term, as an integral component in the dialectical process of 'making history but not exactly as one pleases*. Marx's distinctive concept of practical-critical activity found powerful explication in areas ranging from philosophy, politics, economics, history, and culture as Gramsci traced the comprehension of the historically novel in the process of its social creation. His analysis of the 'intellectual function' in social history is unparalleled. Opposition to mechanistic versions of the 'philosophy of praxis' centred on the tendency, encouraged by such attempts, to undermine 'the basis of vital actions'. Finocchiaro's book, therefore, surprises one when it 'suggests' that Gramsci's 'point is that the dialectician makes his choice with the awareness of all sides; his commitment is presumably to his synthesis of the many aspects of the situation. . . the dialectic would then have that much more content, although it would not determine a choice.' Almost to emphasise the distance between this 'intellectualist' approach and Gramsci's own, Gramsci is quoted a couple of pages earlier, asserting that, 'to create a new culture does not mean only to make individually some 'original' discoveries, . . . That a mass of men is led to think coherently and in a unified manner about reality, is a 'philosophical' fact of much greater importance and 'originality' than the discovery by a philosophical 'genius' of a new truth that remains the property of small intellectual groups.'