Prison Notebooks Research Articles

Antonio Gramsci's Sociology of Literature

Until 1975, with the publication of Valentino Gerratana's critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's Quaderni del carcere (prison notebooks), there was no authoritative text with which to assess Gramsci's notes on literature and culture in general. The Einaudi volume entitled Letteratura e vita nazionale was first published in 1950 and for twenty-five years this popular edition, which arbitrarily isolated Gramsci's reflections on literature and related topics from their original context, served as the basis of scholarly investigations on Gramsci's contribution to the sociology of literature.'

Gramsci's Interpretation of Fascism

In the six years before his 1926 arrest by Mussolini's police, Gramsci wrote some 250 pages on the peculiar new political phenomenon of fascism. Prison officials later did their best to prevent the further development of this analysis, but there are nonetheless many passages in the Prison Notebooks which deal with it sub rosa and reveal subterranean connections between his understanding of fascism and the formulation of his larger theoretical standpoint. Although nearly every serious work on Gramsci makes at least passing allusions to this writing, no one has yet subjected it to a careful analysis. Here I propose to document the emergence and development of Gramsci's attitude towards, and understanding of, fascism within the more general context of his political ideas. I shall then show how much of the conceptual universe of the Prison Notebooks was invented to come to grips with the nature of fascist rule, and indeed, with the entire history of Italy's failed revolutions from 1848-1920 to which fascism was the tragic epilogue. It is in this ironic sense that fascism made Gramsci the great twentieth-century political theorist of Marxism.

Ideologie und Macht: Eine Analyse von Antonio Gramscis "Quaderni" (review)

488 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Robert Heeger. ldeoiogie und Macht: Fine Analyse yon Antonio Gramscis "'Quaderni." Uppsala Studies in Social Ethics 3. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Uppsalensis, 1975. Pp. 233. In the past several years there has been a widening interest in the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Long well known in Italy, his works are now appearing in translations in other countries , and critical writings dealing with them are rapidly materializing. The recent publication in English of a collection of Gramsci's early writings (History, Philosophy, and Culture in the Young Gramsci, ed. Paul Piccone and Pedro Cavalcante [St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975]), as well as two major reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books, suggests the deepening of the critical work. Robert Heeger's book is to be welcomed by this growing Gramsci scholarship, for it is an exhaustively detailed inquiry into the major writings contained in the Quaderni, or prison notebooks, composed by Gramsci during the period from 1929 until his untimely death in 1937. These notebooks are difficult of access for two major reasons; first, Gramsci was without research materials while in prison and was obliged to write in what amounted to a code in order to preserve his work from the prison censor. Secondly, Gramsci's thought is highly complex. Heeger's book is a major service to Gramsci scholarship and to Marxian scholarship in general, for it seeks to clarify by systematic analytic inquiry the major political and ideological implications of Gramsci's major works. Heeger's method of analysis is thus of central importance and involves a systematizing of Gramsci's thought around issues identified as central in contemporary political theory of Marxists and non-Marxists alike. Heeger's emphasis is to provide tools for analysis of Gramsci that will enable that writer's most difficult thought to enter into a dialogue with representatives of contemporary political and sociological theory (p. 15). This is precisely what is needed for a widening approach to Gramsci. The first of the book's four parts is entitled "The Concepts of Ideology." Its first section is devoted to providing, through a survey of contemporary writings on ideology, a definition of ideology. With this synthetic definition Heeger proceeds to inquire into Gramsci's use of the term "ideology." He suggest that Gramsci's meaning is that of a "partial" concept of ideology . Heeger asserts the existence of a metatheoretical conflict between Gramsci's position and the analytical position Heeger himself manifests. One possible criticism of Heeger's methods is to point out the perhaps overly argued formal constructs by which the thought of Gramsci is made to appear acceptable to the framework Heeger uses. I am not sure whether this formalist aspect of Heeger's methodology is, in fact, an actual flaw, for the tightness of the arguments is certainly appreciated by those who have wrestled with the apparent imprecision of some of Gramsci's writing. But that same formal tightness revealed so clearly at the outset is a reminder that what Heeger refers to in his introduction as the "Umbildung" (perhaps "reconstruction ") of Gramsci's thought may indeed be going on. In the second part, Heeger offers a similar methodological analysis of the concepts of power and hegemony. Chapter 3, Power Concepts in Political Theory, offers a survey of historical and contemporary definitions of power. The analysis leads Heeger to the investigation of Gramsci's use of the power concept "hegemony," the substance of the fourth chapter. This chapter and the next, Program and Theory of Hegemony, are the central focus of Heeger's inquiry. Gramsci is seen as perceiving two basic types of power concept: the one is dominio ( = herrschen, or rule), and the second is egemonia ( =fahren or lead). The two are described as follows: "(i) Direct rule [Herrschaft] is a relationship between A and B such that B experiences A's behavior as the exercise of compulsion, and (ii) hegemony is a relationship between A and B such that B responds consensually to A's behavior" (p. 89). The discussion of the differences between these two concepts is exhaustive as Heeger seeks continually to offer a precise and clear phrasing of...

Towards the Prison Notebooks: The Evolution of Gramsci's Thinking on Political Organization 1918-1926

Political theory based on Marxist principles has been the object of growing interest in recent times. The shift of focus from the economic to the political implications of Marx's teaching has led American and British theorists to the thought of Antonio Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist party, especially to the Prison Notebooks, the best known of his writings. For a proper understanding of the Notebooks Adamson turns to Gramsci's political theory and practice during the decade preceding his arrest in 1926 and seeks to disentangle his changing conceptions of political organization and the effect on political education. A table in the article shows the shifts in Gramsci's politics prior to 1927.

Gramsci, the Via Italiana, and the Classical Marxist‐Leninist Approach to Revolution

IT IS NOW COMMON (AND QUITE CORRECT) TO PRAISE ANTONIO Gramsci as the first Marxist theorist to understand that the revolution in Western Europe must deviate sharply from the strategic path taken by the Bolsheviks in Russia. With characteristic disdain for old and rigid formulae, he pointed to the crucial differences between advanced capitalist countries and the Russian Empire of 1917, and he attempted in his prison notebooks (Quaderni) to develop criteria of orientation and action appropriate to modern circumstances. What he offered was a new What is to be done? for the developed West, a fundamental reassessment and revision of the accepted Marxist approach to revolution. The nature of this enterprise has prompted many – critics and admirers alike – to lay emphasis on the tie between Gramsci and Togliatti-ism. Gramsci put forward ideas, it is claimed, whose logic is manifest in the ‘Italian (read “constitutional”, “parliamentary”, “democratic”, “pacific”) road to socialism’. It is now casually assumed in many circles that he was the ideological progenitor of what has come to be known as Eurocommunism, the increasingly influential body of doctrines that purports to marry liberalism and Marxism. In the following pages, this assumption, and other related ones, will be closely examined and evaluated.

Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary

Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891, became the leader of the Italian Communist Party in his early thirties, was arrested by Mussolini's police in 1927, and remained imprisoned until shortly before his death ten years later. The posthumous publication of his Prison Notebooks established him as a major thinker whose influence continues to increase. Fiori's biography enlarges upon the facts of Gramsci's life through personal accounts, and through Gramsci's own writings to relatives and friends. In relating Gramsci's growth as a political leader and theorist to his private experience, it offers acute insights into his involvement in the factory councils movement. It examines his relationship with political opponents, including Mussolini, and with his comrades within the Communist Party before and during Gramsci's imprisonment. It is an approach which seeks to explicate, as well as underscore, the substantial achievement of one of the most important figures in western Marxism.

Prison Notebooks

Abstract In his prison notebooks Gramsci refers to Marxism as “the philosophy of praxis.” Sometimes, because of prison censorship, he could not write the word “Marxism.” Yet, the expression he used instead is not just a euphemism: it indicates the very essence of Gramsci's interpretation of Marxism. His Marxism, his Marxist philosophy, is an original interpretation of Marx which differs from all previous conceptions. Gramsci did not simply correct the errors of the Marxism of his epoch, as several of his interpreters maintain, while making errors himself. Gramsci is an original thinker. Marx is his point of departure and he interprets him without wishing to “complement” Marxist philosophy with any other system: he is an orthodox Marxist.

Reviews: The Morals of Markets. An Ethical Exploration, La Pensee Politique D'edmund Burke. 1972, Hegel's Development: Toward, The Sunlight, 1770–1801, Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, New Studies in Hegel's Philosophy, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Social Anarchism, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology, The Spread of the Russian Revolution. Essays on

Reviews: The Morals of Markets. An Ethical Exploration, La Pensee Politique D'edmund Burke. 1972, Hegel's Development: Toward, The Sunlight, 1770–1801, Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, New Studies in Hegel's Philosophy, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Social Anarchism, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology, The Spread of the Russian Revolution. Essays on

Gramsci and the Italian Communist Party

WITH THE RECENT PUBLICATION OF A SUBSTANTIAL PART OF THE ‘Prison Notebooks’, Gramsci studies may safely be said to have ‘come in from the cold’. While Isaac Deutscher goes too far in his claim for ‘the oblivion to which Gramsci's memory was consigned during the Stalin era’, considerable parts of his political career remained obscure, and evidence of his disagreement with many of the orthodoxies of his time, and with PCI decisions associated with them, has only recently been forthcoming. Publication of his writings has had in general to wait for the ideological relaxation which followed the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. Publication of his work in the Soviet Union itself was initiated in 1957, and a three-volume selection eventually appeared. In Yugoslavia, a Selected Works appeared in 1959. Yet it was evident that even in an era of declared de-Stalinization, Gramsci's writings could remain something of an embarrassment to communist orthodoxy.