The interpretation of the notes on Croce, Bukharin, and Machiavelli was motivated by Gramsci's confession about the polemicaldialogical character of his intellectual life, by the philological fact that they play a crucial function in the composition and structure of the Notebooks, and by the theoretical importance and thematic interrelatedness of the problems they deal with. It is different with his thoughts on the topic of the dialectic. The need to examine them stems directly out of our previous discussions, most obviously the one in Chapter 5. It systematized Gramsci's notes on Machiavelli as an attribution to the Florentine of a concept of dialectical politics along with an exemplification (by Gramsci's own critical practice) of dialectical interpretation, and such Machiavellian politics seemed to involve a kind of moderation that Gramsci elsewhere wants to reject as undialectical. My analyses in preceding chapters have also led to the question of the nature of dialectic.

Up to now I have shown that Gramsci's critique of Bukharin's sociology is right insofar as it is grounded on a valid concept of what it means to be scientific, but wrong insofar as it fails to perceive the dialectic inherent in Bukharin's sociological practice and sees only the positivism of his philosophical theory. This raises the question of whether Gramsci failed to see Bukharin's dialectic-inpractice because he did not pay sufficient or sufficiently direct attention to Bukharin's concrete sociology or because he had a different conception of the dialectic.