The Hegelian Marxism of the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács and Italian Communist Party (PCI) leader Antonio Gramsci heralded the renaissance in Marxism that followed the Russian Revolution. Alongside many other Marxist thinkers at the time, Lukács and Gramsci returned to the Hegelian roots of Marx's theory in order to rethink its conclusions. Dissatisfaction with orthodox Marxism's combination of evolutionary gradualism and scientific socialism was widespread. Speaking for many, Gramsci described the Bolshevik insurrection as a “revolution against [Marx's] Capital” (rather than capital!). Tis formulation meant, for Gramsci, the rejection of politically fatalistic determinism and vulgar economic reductionism. A theoretical renaissance involves taking the fundamental principles of a research programme and systematically varying one of them. In the case of Hegelian Marxism, that meant retaining praxis and history while varying structure. For both Lukács and Gramsci, Marxist theory was meaningless outside political activism in the class struggle, so instead of a scientific theory of social structure, Marxism was a philosophy of praxis.

Arising from a materialist radicalization of Hegelian dialectics, Marxism as a philosophy of praxis locates the source of the impasses of philosophy in the contradictions of social life. Te consequence is that the transcendence of philosophical limitations can take place only through the practical resolution of these real contradictions.