Prison Notebooks Research Articles

The silent escape: three thousand days in Romanian prisons

'I have lived, alone, in a cell, 157,852,800 seconds of solitude and fear. Cause for screaming! They sentence me to live yet another 220,838,400 seconds! To live them or to die from them' - from Silent Escape. Victim of Stalinist-era terror, Lena Constante was arrested on trumped-up charges of 'espionage' and sentenced to twelve years in Romanian prisons. Silent Escape is the extraordinary account of the first eight years of her incarceration - years of solitary confinement during which she was tortured, starved, and daily humiliated. The only woman to have endured isolation so long in Romanian jails, Constante is also one of the few women political prisoners to have written about her ordeal. Unlike other more political prison diaries, this book draws us into the practical and emotional experiences of everyday prison life. Candidly, eloquently, Constante describes the physical and psychological abuses that were the common lot of communist-state political prisoners. She also recounts the particular humiliations she suffered as a woman, including that of male guards watching her in the bathroom. Constante survived by escaping into her mind - and finally by discovering the 'language of the walls', which enabled her to communicate with other female inmates. A powerful story of totalitarianism and human endurance, this work makes an important contribution to the literature of 'prison notebooks'.

Gramsci on Civil Society

In order to avoid cumbersome footnotes, I have indicated in the text the titles of Gramsci's articles from which I quote and have provided the date of publication of the newspaper in which they first appeared. These articles are easy to locate in the following volumes of the critical edition of Gramsci's pre-prison writings, where they are reproduced in chronological order: Cronache torinesi: 1913-1917, ed. S. Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1980); La citta futura: 1917-1918, ed. S. Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1982); //II nostro Marx: 1918-1919, ed. S. Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1984); L'Ordine Nuovo: 1919-1920, ed. V. Gerratana and A. Santucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1987); Socialismo e fascismo. L'Ordine Nuovo: 1912-1922 (Turin: Einaudi, 1966); and La costruzione del Partito comunista: 1923-1926 (Turin: Einaudi, 1971). Gramsci's letters are also chronologically ordered and hence easy to locate, in either the Italian or the (more complete) English-language critical edition-see Lettere dal carcere, ed. E. Fubini and S. Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1965); and Letters from Prison, 2 vols., ed. F. Rosengarten (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). For the extracts from the Prison Notebooks, I have provided the pertinent notebook and section numbers that would enable the reader to locate them quickly in the Italian critical edition, Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols., ed. V. Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), and, in the case of the first two notebooks, in Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, ed. J. A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

Late Modern

The Impact of Western Nationalisms. Edited by Jetauda Reinharz and George L. Mosse Liberal Nationalism. By Yael Tamir National Histories and European History. Edited by Mary Fulbrook The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective. Edited by Joel Mokyr Schroders: Merchants and Bankers. By Richard Roberts The Family Romance of the French Revolution. By Lynn Hunt Benjamin Constant: A Biography. By Dennis Wood Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870. By Clare Midgley Britain's Persian Connection 1798–1828: Prelude to the Great Game in Asia. By Edward Ingram The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815–1914. By Dominic Lieven Defence and Diplomacy: Britain and the Great Powers, 1815–1914. By C.J. Bartlett From Palmerston to Balfour: Collected Essays of Mayir Vereté. Edited by Norman Rose Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London. By Geoffrey Tyack Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Perception and Prejudice 1848–1923. By Bruno Naarden The European Experience of Declining Fertility: The Quiet Revolution 1850–1970. Edited by John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly and David Levine The English Musical Renaissance 1860–1940: Construction and Deconstruction. By Robert Stradling and Meirion Hughes The Age of Disraeli 1868–1881: The Rise of Tory Democracy. By Richard Shannon The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929. By G. R. Searle The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals, and the Quest for Unity 1884–1939. By David Blaazer Charity Rediscovered: A Study of Philanthropic Effort in Nineteenth‐Century Liverpool. By Margaret Simey Mr Charles Booth's Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered. By Rosemary O'Day and David Englander London in the 1890s: A Cultural History. By Karl Beckson Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass‐Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905. By Charters Wynn Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe 1917–1920. Edited by Chris Wrigley Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, Volume I. Edited with an introduction by Joseph A. Buttigieg Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR 1923–1934. By George O. Liber Capitalism in Crisis. International Responses to the Great Depression. Edited by W.R. Garside Invergordon Scapegoat: The Betrayal of Admiral Tomkinson. By Alan Coles Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defense, 1934–1937. By Gaines Post, Jr. British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement, 1935–39. By R. J. Q. Adams Appeasing Fascism: Articles from the Wayne State University Conference on Munich after Fifty Years. Edited by Melvin Small and Otto Feinstein Reappraising the Munich Pact: Continental Perspectives. Edited by Maya Latynski Ribbentrop. By Michael Bloch The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. By David Welch The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology. By Nicholas Goodrick‐Clarke The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution. By Christopher R. Browning Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941–1943. By Ronald Headland Antisemitism in the Third Reich. By Hermann Graml 199 Days: The Battle for Stalingrad. By Edwin P. Hoyt Durban 1942: A British Troopship Revolt. By Gerry R. Rubin What Difference did the War Make? Edited by Brian Brivati and Harriet Jones Labour's War: The Labour Party During the Second World War. By Stephen Brooke Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood. Edited by Günter Bischoff and Stephen E. Ambrose Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction. By David W. Ellwood The Origins and Development of the European Community. Edited by David Weigall and Peter Stirk The Welfare State in Britain since 1945. By Rodney Lowe British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–51. Edited by Richard J. Aldrich The Frontier of National Sovereignty: History and Theory 1945–1992. By Alan S. Milward, Frances M. B. Lynch, Ruggiero Ranieri, Frederico Romero and Vibeke Sørensen The Wilson Governments 1964–1970. Edited by R. Coopey, S. Fielding and N. Tiratsoo Beyond the Cold War: New Dimensions in International Relations. Edited by Geir Lundestad and Odd Arne Westad My Life in Politics. By Willy Brandt The Irish Troubles: A Generation of Violence 1967–1992. By J. Bowyer Bell

Philology and Politics: Returning to the Text of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

Philology and Politics: Returning to the Text of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

Gramsci and the Italian state

Biographical outline. Part 1 Political apprenticeship: the politics of militant idealism the syndicalist challenge the impact of the Russian Revolution. Part 2 The Biennio Rosso, 1919-20: the internal commissions councils and the unions councils and the Party towards a workers' democraacy. Part 3 The Italian Communist Party and the fight against fascism, 1921-26: the Livorno congress and its aftermath the PCd'I and the Communist International the Matteotti crisis and the Lyons theses. Part 4 The prison notebooks I - historical materialism and Crocean historicism: historical materialism Crocean historicism the philosophy of Praxis a successful synthesis?. Part 5 The prison notebooks II - hegemony, and party: state and civil society - Hegel, Marx and Gramsci the new Machiavelli - intellectuals, the party and the creation of a revolutionary hegemony hegemony and historical materialism. Part 6 The prison notebooks III - making Italians - the Risorgimento and the New Order: the dialectic of force and consent in the Italian theory of the State - from Gioberti to Mosca Gramsci and Italy's passive revolution the New Order - a progressive totalitarianism?.

Gramsci's democratic theory: contributions to a post-liberal democracy

An in-depth study of Antonio Gramsci?s prison notebooks (Quaderni del carcere) and his specific contributions to radical democratic theory. The book encompasses English, Italian, and French debates on the subject as well as political and philosophical discussions concerning the limitations of liberal and socialist democratic theory.

Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 151 that Russell is not a modern logician if"modern" has some connection with "contemporary ." What Russell really was now requires an exercise in historical recovery, and in these sections Hylton succeeds splendidly in giving us a Russell who is both remote and compelling. DOUGLAS P. LACKEY Baruch Collegeand the Gradute Center,City Universityof New York Maurice A. Finocchiaro. Gramsciand the History ofDialecticalThought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xi + 313 . $44.5o. The critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks gives occasion to Maurice Finocchiaro's book, and several purposes unify it. First, the book complements the critical edition with a meticulous study of the notebooks. Finocchiaro has worked painstakingly to rein in 235o unruly pages and produce a coherent monograph. (An appendix provides a useful concordance relating the critical edition to English translations .) Second, Finocchiaro's siftings find in dialectic that which binds the notebooks. As the title indicates, he assesses Gramsci as a dialectical thinker: does Gramsci do for politics what Hegel did for philosophy and Marx for economics? Third, the sway of Gramsci's countryman Benedetto Croce is shown to be so strong that Finocchiaro can write of Gramsci's "Crocean Marxism"--with which Finocchiaro appears to identify. Fourth, Finocchiaro finds in Gramsci's thinking about religion, science, and politics a suitable basis for making a general, and largely sympathetic, evaluation of Marxism. Fifth, Finocchiaro persistently checks on Gramsci and others to see if their practice matches their theory. This is an exceptionally conscientious book. Finocchiaro comes to Gramsci by way of Croce, and it shows. The characteristically Crocean theses that religion can be affirmed secularly as a world-view with an associated morality, that philosophy is criticism, and that philosophy takes up the problems history delivers it (absolute historicism), are among the most compellingly expounded points in the book. The book is thus at least as likely to interest the reader in Croce as in Gramsci; I take it this would please Finocchiaro. In structuring the book around Gramsci's critiques of Croce, Bukharin, and Machiavelli, Finocchiaro relies on Croce's definition of philosophy . Gramsci's notes on these three men are examined in separate chapters and are correlated with the topics of religion, science, and politics, respectively. These chapters lead into a direct treatment of Gramsci's scattered notes on dialectic. Because Finocchiaro is determined to evaluate Gramsci's criticisms and his conception of dialectic, and because he insists that negative criticisms must be held to a more stringent standard than positive ones--positive ones have value in their own right whereas negative ones are pointless when unjustified--Finocchiaro includes substantial chapters on Croce, Bukharin, and Hegel's dialectic. Machiavelli gets no special chapter, so positively does Gramsci view him. The results of these seven chapters are as follows. Gramsci's critique of Croce's "liquidationist" dismissal of Marxism proves sound--"vulgar" Marxism has legitimacy as a secular religion and philosophical Marxism cannot be tossed aside as vulgar--but quite Crocean in its own principles. "Perhaps no critic has ever been greater than 152 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30: ~ JANUARY ~992 Benedetto Croce" (29), writes Finocchiaro, yet even he was liable to contradict his theory in his practice. Gramsci caught him at it. Gramsci rightly attacks Nikolai Bukharin 's deterministic materialism and scientism, but wrongly presumes that they fatally infected Bukharin's actual sociology. Against Gramsci and Luk:lcs, Finocchiaro even depicts Bukharin's sociological studies as dialectical exercises. Gramsci plays Machiavelli against conventional Marxism's reductive attitude toward politics by insisting on the "autonomy of politics" and the distinctiveness of "political imagination." Gramsci's effort to theorize a dialectical politics stumbles on the recognition that the concept applies retrospectively, not prospectively, where it would have bite. Taking Hegel as the plumb-line for dialectic, Gramsci's "primary" conception of dialectic as the mental activity of finding unity in diversity and difference within unity (or avoiding onesidedness ) is preferable to his "official" view that dialectic is a real process of development from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. This preferred concept of dialectic serves Finocchiaro as a hermeneutical standard , and he regularly calls attention to his own dialectical proceedings. But...

Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing "Materialism" Back into Feminist Cultural Studies

metalanguage or a violent closure of meaning, we need to reunderstand theory as a historical critique of the politics of intelligibility. By this I mean theory is most effectively understood in resistance postmodernism not in an idealist (theory as metalanguage) but as an explanatory critique of the ways in which meanings are materially formed and social reality is constructed in relation to various strategies of power. This reunderstanding of theory enables us to acquire a historical knowledge of social totalities and the relations of power, profit, and labor rendering certain forms of daily practices legitimate (meaningful) and marking others as meaningless. Theory, in this sense, is a double operation: it is both the frame of intelligibility through which we organize and make sense of reality, and the critical inquiry into and contestation over these modes of meaning making. Practice is inscribed in theory as I am articulating it here. Thus theory is not simply a cognitivism but a historical site of social struggle over how we represent reality, that is, over how we construct reality and the ways to change it.7 Theory, in other words, is a political practice and not simply a metaphysical abstraction or discursive play. This means that even such a seemingly natural and nontheoretical practice as common sense (as Gramsci argues in Prison Notebooks) is a frame of intelligibility, a theory, but one that conceals its mode of knowing, representing it as the way things are. Theory, then, is not opposed to experience but is the necessary supplement of experience (to use Derrida's term in order to deconThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 06:02:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Antonio Gramsci: architect of a new politics

Dante Germino's biography of the Italian communist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci offers a major reassessment of this important twentieth-century thinker. Germino analyses Gramsci's remarkable life as well as his extensive oeuvre, from the early Turin articles to the meditative Prison Notebooks. Gramsci saw society as composed of a small but powerful political center and a large body of emarginati, marginalized people at the periphery of society who are denied access to traditional positions of power. That vision led Gramsci to concentrate on the significance of the common as he developed his theory of the political organisation of society. The persistent theme in Gramsci's work is how the ordinary man thinks, feels, and endures, and how the course of political institutions is shaped by the efforts of the marginalized to erode the boundaries of the center. Gramsci's approach is perhaps best expressed as a reunion of philosophy and experience and a revaluation of the quotidian. Gramsci's new politics of inclusion anticipated by well over a half-century the recent epoch-making developments in the USSR and in Eastern Europe. His antiauthoritarian leadership style as secretary of the Italian Communist party in the 1920s prefigured Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost. Gramsci's insistence on the international Communist movement's openness to new social formations at the grass roots is supremely relevant to developments in Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland, where forces hitherto kept at the margins of political life by ossified Communist-party structures have burst on the scene with unprecedented vitality. Gramsci refused to revere Marx as a shepherd with a crook. Equating history with the rhythm of liberty, he emerges as a prophetic voice in the desert of a bureaucratic and dogmatic communism. The dramatic recent changes in the Italian Communist party under Achille Ochetto also owe their ultimate inspiration to this diminutive, hunchbacked theorist-practitioner from Italy's periphery. Germino's compelling study of Gramsci's personal life and intellectual development offers fresh insights into Gramsci's work that will be of interest to all students of cultural and political theory. Of particular interest is his extensive consideration of the preprison writings both in their own right and for the light they cast on the Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought.

This is an interpretative and evaluative study of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the founding father of the Italian Communist Party who died in 1937 after ten years of imprisonment in Fascist jails. It proceeds by a rigorous textual analysis of his Prison Notebooks, the scattered notes he wrote during his incarceration. Professor Finocchiaro explores the nature of Gramsci's dialectical thinking, in order to show in what ways Gramsci was and was not a Marxist, as well as to illustrate correspondences with the work of Hegel, Croce, and Bukharin. The book provides a critical reappraisal of Gramsci as a thinker and of the dialectical approach as a mode of inquiry.

Figures of Colonial Resistance

Figures of Colonial Resistance Jenny Sharpe (bio) The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is "knowing thyself" as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. -Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks As an Ethics of Reading That Began by Excavating the colonial past stratified in Western forms of knowledge, colonial discourse theory is currently contending with the problem of articulating resistance.1 Because Western authority over the representation of its colonies involves the narrative containment of anticolonial insurgency, an attention to native disruptions and restructurings of eurocentric discourses is now recognized as crucial to any critical investigation of colonialism. Edward Said's Orientalism, a pioneering study of the power/knowledge relations in a "disciplining" of the Arab-Islamic world, remains a paradigmatic text for the nascent field of colonial discourse theory. However, Said has also come under criticism for over-estimating the success of Orientalism in confining the whole East to a theatrical staging of "the Orient."2 Are the colonized [End Page 137] indeed passive actors of a Western script? It might well be argued that studies expounding the domination of dominant discourses merely add to their totalizing effects, for they show the colonizers to have a power that even they were incapable of enforcing. Yet the correction of such readings with the simple presentation of native voices can equally impose a Western authority upon non-Western texts. Benita Parry's recent review of colonial discourse theory, which offers native transgressions of colonial authority as a corrective to discourse analysis, is symptomatic of a tendency to presume the transparency of the intellectual who transmits narratives of resistance.3 Questioning the political efficacy of attempts to displace eurocentric textual systems through the deconstruction of colonial texts alone, Parry takes colonial discourse theory to task for its unwillingness to articulate a more oppositional politics. Hence she criticizes Homi Bhabha for reading resistance as the mere questioning of colonial authority, and she faults Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for restricting the subaltern woman4 to the silent space of her planned disarticulation (Parry 34-35). Parry ultimately favors Bhabha's writings over Spivak's, for "his readings of the colonialist text recover a native voice" and suggest in a way Spivak's cannot that "the subaltern has spoken" (40). By assuming that the native in Bhabha's work is necessarily "the subaltern," Parry collapses the heterogeneous signification of the colonized into the unifying category of "a native voice." In her eagerness to hear the native speak, Parry ends up effacing the subaltern. For the tropes of "mimicry," "sly civility," and "hybridity" that Bhabha deploys to stage what he identifies as the ambivalence of colonial discourse are all derived from the colonial production of an educated class of natives.5 Spivak's work not only addresses the overdetermination of the colonial scene by race, class, and gender differences, but it also accounts for the subaltern woman as one who cannot be simply reduced to her class or caste position.6 When Parry writes that "it should be possible to locate traces and testimony of women's voice on those sites where women inscribed themselves as healers, ascetics, singers of sacred [End Page 138] songs, artisans, and artists, and by this to modify Spivak's model of the silent subaltern" (35), she fails to consider that Spivak's work charts the difficulty of such a retrieval and, through that difficulty, discloses subalternity itself as a tropological move that threatens to silence the subaltern.7 By claiming that the subaltern has spoken through tropes derived from a discourse on the class-native, Parry in fact reproduces the primary ideological effect of the British civilizing mission-which was to substitute metonymically the educated colonial for the native as such. In the absence of a critical awareness of colonialism's ideological effects, readings of counter-discourses can all too easily serve an institutional function of securing the dominant narratives. None of us escapes the legacy of a colonial past and its traces in our academic practice. It is perhaps telling that, although Said's Foucauldian excavation of Orientalist discourse...

Gramsci, la religion et les systèmes socio-économiques

This reading of the "Prison Notebooks" begins with the hypothe sis that the Gramscian theory of religion is harmonized around two distinct perspectives. Gramsci envisages, on the one hand, religion as one of the ideological superstructures of a given social formation. On the other hand, he considers it as imbricated in the socio-economic structure upon which rests, finally, the entire superstructural edifice of the society. It is under this double aspect that this article analyses social practice and religion in general, and the Catholic Church, of which he studies the ecclesiastical system and the magnificence of the mass, most particularly.

Religion and Politics in Gramsci: An Introduction

Little has been printed in English on Gramsci's sociology of religion, despite considerable work done in European languages, particularly Italian. Yet Gramsci wrote extensively on the subject as well as on the link of religion to hegemony, the best known of his concepts. The main aim of the article is to supply English readers with an introduction to the topic. This is done with direct reference to Gramsci's writings, particularly The Prison Notebooks, but also with the aid of the main French and Italian commentators. Gramsci's understanding of religion is bound up with the principal concern of his work: to understand the dynamics of power in society both in the past as well as in the present, with an aim to bringing about a socialist “intellectual and moral reformation.” The article examines this key term and its link with religion in Gramsci's outlook, before proceeding to the key concepts for analyzing religion: the common sense, the religion of the people, philosophy, the religion of the intellectuals, folklore and hegemony. Gramsci's analysis of history as a study of the interplay between religion and social structure is then outlined. Finally, the writer concludes that there is much to be learned from Gramsci's method and conceptual framework if one is seeking to re-discover the link between religion and politics in social-structural analysis.

Hegemony and Cultural Politics: The Praxis of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

(1987). Hegemony and Cultural Politics: The Praxis of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 35-53.

A New Look at the Young Gramsci

During the past twenty years the outlines of Antonio Gramsci's life before and during incarceration have gradually become clearer. Giuseppe Fiori's biography was perhaps the single work which best exposed, even if it was rather hagiographical, the political, cultural and psychological ingredients comprising the Sardinian's tormented life2 More academically inspired productions dissected the political and cultural importance of his journalistic writings and the Prison Notebooks. One need only mention Leonardo Paggi's unfinished intellectual biography or the more specialised accounts of Gramsci's key concepts-hegemony, passive revolution, intellectuals, fordism etc.-by Gerratana, Bobbio, De Felice, Salvadori, Badaloni, Anderson, ShowstackSasson, Mouffe, Femia, Buci-Glucksmann and dozens of others; or the

Gramsci's "Little Discovery": Gramsci's Interpretation of Canto X of Dante's Inferno

Gramsci did not attempt to work out a theory of literary criticism, but he did on occasion have things to say about various texts that have some important theoretical implications. One such occasion was his reading of Canto X of Dante's Inferno, the and main features of which I shall trace in this essay1 I say development because of the fact that Gramsci's interest in Canto X spans a period of more than twenty years, from his student days at the University of Turin on the eve of the first World War to the early 1930's, when he occupied a cell in the prison for the infirm and disabled in Turi di Bari and was composing the 2848 manuscript pages that eventually comprised the Prison Notebooks.

Introduction to Gramsci's "Notes on Language"

Abstract One reason that Gramsci's writings are becoming ever more studied in the English-speaking world is their non-reductive approach. Today, the fact that a general theory of language informs Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is increasingly being recognized. While some parts of the writings on language have been translated into English, so far only the Italian editions have allowed an evaluation of the significance and role of linguistic issues in Gramsci. The following will seek to reconstruct the connections between die theory of language and the more familiar elements of Gramsci's thought. In the translated Selections from the Prison Notebooks several passages suggest the centrality of linguistics in Gramsci's overall project.

Gramsci, Eurocommunism and the Comintern

This paper discusses the problematics of Eurocommunism and neoGramscianism and after comparing them discusses their relation to the central concepts of the Prison Notebooks. These are elaborated at some length before being located in relation to the views of the Comintern on a variety of political issues. It is argued that Gramsci's prison writings are only meaningfully to be seen as a solution to some problem of politcal strategy of the 1920s, which Gramsci had alrady approached in a more orthodox way before. The type of solution offered by Gramsci in the Notebookswas basically a historicist one, with few of the implications later interpreters have claimed to find in it.

Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations : An Essay in Method

Some time ago I began reading Gramsci's Prison Notebooks . In these fragments, written in a fascist prison between 1929 and 1935, the former leader of the Italian Communist Party was concerned with the problem of understanding capitalist societies in the 1920s and 1930s, and particularly with the meaning of fascism and the possibilities of building an alternative form of state and society based on the working class. What he had to say centred upon the state, upon the relationship of civil society to the state, and upon the relationship of politics, ethics and ideology to production. Not surprisingly, Gramsci did not have very much to say directly about international relations. Nevertheless, I found that Gramsci's thinking was helpful in understanding the meaning of international organisation with which I was then principally concerned. Particularly valuable was his concept of hegemony, but valuable also were several related concepts which he had worked out for himself or developed from others. This essay sets forth my understanding of what Gramsci meant by hegemony and these related concepts, and suggests how I think they may be adapted, retaining his essential meaning, to the understanding of problems of world order. It does not purport to be a critical study of Gramsci's political theory but merely a derivation from it of some ideas useful for a revision of current international relations theory.

American Socialist Pedagogy and Experimentation in the Progressive Era: The Socialist Sunday School

Described by one unsympathetic observer in Buffalo as Schools of Nonsense and by one ardent participant in Milwaukee as rebel factories, the movement to establish Socialist Sunday schools (S.S.S.) in the United States during the early twentieth century is perhaps one of the best kept secrets of American socialist and educational historiography.' This essay attempts to rectify that situation by analyzing an educational movement that falls outside of the traditional and progressive educational camps of the early 1900s. During these years numerous working-class radicals provided their children with a formal, weekend education that lacked the strong capitalistic biases dominant in the public schools. The Socialist Sunday schools represent the most obvious, formal, and widespread educational activity for children ever undertaken by American Socialists. The development of these schools testified to the activism of grassroots radicals who flourished during an era of progressive change. Moreover, their efforts are particularly noteworthy in light of the theoretical writings of Antonio Gramsci, in particular his Prison Notebooks of 1929 to 1935. Gramsci's formulation of the war of position, in which working-class institutions and culture gradually surround the bourgeois State apparatus with a counter hegemony, and of the importance of the working-class creating its own organic intellectuals, gives to this fledgling, ultimately unsuccessful Sunday school movement added historical and theoretical significance.2 Whichever view one takes-that they taught nonsense or rebellion-the Socialist Sunday schools deserve serious attention as among the