Cesare Luporini, dal materialismo storico alla Pedagogia critica

The chapter retraces Cesare Luporini’s theoretical trajectory, focusing on the relationship between historical materialism and critical pedagogy. Through an analysis of Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach and a dialogue with authors such as Althusser, Balibar, and Papi, it highlights a conception of education that cannot be reduced either to teleology or to historicism, but is instead understood as a historically situated process of subjectivation. Human essence, conceived as the ensemble of social relations, thus becomes a central pedagogical category, opening a reflection on freedom, on material and symbolic constraints, and on the role of the educational setting. What emerges is a critical vision that rejects any naturalization of the human and conceives education as a field of collective transformation and the production of subjectivity.