Antonio Gramsci’s Contribution to a Critical Economics

Historical Materialism 19 (3):63-105 (2011)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

According to conventional wisdom, Antonio Gramsci is a political philosopher lacking in, and who avoids, a serious interest in political economy. That is a serious misrepresentation of Gramsci’s works and thought. Equally wrong is the widespread view that anything Gramsci had to say about political economy is to be found in his scattered notes on ‘Americanism and Fordism’. On the contrary, a careful rereading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks shows that Marx’s great and unfinished project of the critique of political economy plays a crucial rôle for Gramsci’s efforts to come to grips with the basics of a critical social science that could live up to the aspirations of a ‘scientific socialism’. As Gramsci was fully aware of the everyday battles of ideas in capitalist societies to be fought about the notions and tenets of popular or vulgar political economy, he did the best he could in order to understand and clarify the bases of a ‘critical’ and ‘scientific’ political economy. A political economy that was and still is urgently needed in order to fight the strongest of the strongholds of bourgeois hegemony - the ideas of vulgar economics in everybody’s heads.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 104,804

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The organization of balance and equilibriumin Gramsci's hegemony.Mark McNally - 2008 - History of Political Thought 29 (4):662-689.
The law of value and the analysis of underdevelopment.John Weeks - 1997 - Historical Materialism 1 (1):91-112.
An introduction to Antonio Gramsci: his life, thought and legacy.George Hoare - 2015 - New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc. Edited by Nathan Sperber.
Political creativity: Antonio Gramsci on political transformation.Sakari Hänninen - 2024 - Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-10-11

Downloads
90 (#248,659)

6 months
18 (#169,748)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?