Columbia University Press's multivolume _Prison Notebooks_ is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, _Quaderni del Carcere_, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters. This set includes notebooks 1 (...) through 8 with all attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) was one of the most original political thinkers in Western Marxism and an exceptional intellectual. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom, yet he wrote extensive letters while incarcerated, rich with insight into the physical and psychological tortures of prison. In meticulous detail, Gramsci records how political prisoners, himself included, contend with the fear of illness and death and the rules and regulations that (...) threaten to efface their individuality. Forming an incomparable link between Gramsci's intellectual passion and his emotional vulnerability, _Letters from Prison_ shows a man reconstructing his life while being separated from it, struggling to recapture the primary relationships that once defined his identity. Frank Rosengarten divides more than four hundred Gramsci letters into two companion volumes, complete with a chronology of the thinker's crucial life experiences, biographical notes on his correspondents, and a bibliography of works cited in his letters. (shrink)

Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce.

§ 74. Giulio Bertoni and linguistics. In view of the attitudes expressed in his latest writing, a critique easily could be written that cuts the legs out from under Bertoni's linguistics. It could be easily demonstrated that Bertoni has succeeded neither in providing a general reformulation of Bartoli's innovations in linguistics, nor has he understood these innovations along with their practical and theoretical import. In an article published some years age dealing with linguistic studies in Italy, Bertoni completely fails to (...) distinguish Bartoli from the run of the mill linguists. Instead, by subde ambiguities, he relegates him to a secondary position, unlike Casella who emphasizes Bartoli originality. (shrink)

James A. Diefenbeck, Wayward Reflections on the History ofPhilosophyThomas R. Flynn Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Volume 1:Toward an Existential Theory of HistoryMark Golden and Peter Toohey Inventing Ancient Culture:Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient WorldZenonas Norkus Istorika: Istorinis IvadasEverett Zimmerman The Boundaries of Fiction: History and theEighteenth‐Century British Novel.

O ensaio roteiriza e analisa a fortuna crítica de Il Principe, de Machiavelli, inscrito sob a tradição humanística do gênero specula principum, - fortuna, antecipadamente, circunscrita por quinze livros do gênero, escritos entre 1402 e 1505, em Itália -. Na sequência, agencia apontamentos acerca da fortuna crítica do livrinho maquiaveliano de Gentillet até Gramsci, com destaque para a sua presença em França, Inglaterra, Holanda, Alemanha, Itália. Ao final, o ensaio analisa a recepção brasileira a Machiavelli.

This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time (...) of retreat from Marxist positions on the postmodern left. Antonio Gramsci is distinguished by its range of philosophical grasp, its depth of specialized historical scholarship, and its keen sense of Gramsci's position as a crucial figure in the politics of contemporary cultural theory. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci and the Question of Religionprovides a new introduction to the thought of Gramsci through the prisms of religious studies and comparative ethics. Bruce Grelle shows that Gramsci's key ideas - on hegemony, ideology, moral reformation, "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals - were formulated with simultaneous considerations of religion and politics. Identifying Gramsci's particular brand of Marxism, Grelle offers an overview of Gramsci's approach to religion and applies it to contemporary debates over the role (...) of religion and morality in social order and social change. This book is ideal for students and scholars interested in Gramsci, religion, and comparative ethics. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process (...) of disalienation, that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

Although Gramsci's notions of hegemony and subalternity may seem outdated in this 21st century, a critical examination of the literature shows that these concepts apply in this global pandemic and political context. Racialization is a form of structural violence. In this paper, I also explore Gramsci's’ notion of engaged intellectuals to support the idea of social and political activism in nursing. Nurse scholars call for the decolonization of the discipline. Gramsci's philosophical approach to hegemony can be extended (...) to racialization in nursing. Gramsci's notions of civil society and state can help nurses to see the structures that create racism in nursing and society. (shrink)

Including articles translated from the Italian for the first time, this unique set is the first systematic collection of critical commentary on this influential figure. Reprinting some thirty years of Gramsci criticism, the collection features individual volume introductions as well as a general overview introduction. The thematically-organized volumes include: * Volume I: Life, Context and Intellectual Development * Volume II: Marxism, Philosophy and Politics * Volume III: Revolution, Praxis and the Party * Volume IV: Contemporary Applications.

El presente artículo comienza reconstruyendo la recepción textual y el interés por Maquiavelo a cargo de Antonio Gramsci. A continuación, las dos partes que componen el trabajo buscan ofrecer una exposición del modo, originalidad y consecuencias según las cuales Gramsci interpreta a Maquiavelo, por un lado, en su especificidad histórica, y, por otro, como un teórico político que ofrece aplicaciones tácticas y estratégicas. A través de diversos temas, como la formación del Estado-nación, el precoz jacobinismo de Maquiavelo, (...) la relación entre clase dirigente y masas o las consideraciones sobre la constitución económica de la URSS, mostramos las formas en que Maquiavelo aparece en la obra de Gramsci, qué significa la presencia de florentino en diferentes momentos de la misma y cómo dialoga con el resto del universo conceptual gramsciano. (shrink)

A partir de la fórmula revolución pasiva, el artículo aborda teóricamente la cuestión educativa en los Cuadernos de la Cárcel. Central en los nuevos estudios gramscianos, la fórmula revolución pasiva no ha tenido un papel significativo en las indagaciones educativas de los escritos de Gramsci. En lugar de aislar el tópico educativo de la trama conceptual de los Cuadernos, se busca articular la cuestión pedagógica con nudos temáticos centrales del corpus gramsciano a luz del oxímoron revolución pasiva. En esta (...) línea, se asume la revolución pasiva como una fórmula heurística, es decir, como una perspectiva general que organiza (en diferentes sentidos y tiempos) la investigación carcelaria en torno a la crisis de hegemonía y recomposición del orden. Luego de interpretar una serie de conceptos gramscianos, tales como hegemonía, clases subalternas, Estado integral e intelectuales bajo el prisma de la revolución pasiva, se aborda el análisis de la reforma educativa de Giovanni Gentile (1922-23) en los Cuadernos. Se considera, a modo de hipótesis, que en la reflexión gramsciana, esta reforma opera como el capítulo educativo del análisis del fascismo como intento de revolución pasiva. Entre las conclusiones, se esgrime que de la complejidad analítica de la reforma gentiliana en los Cuadernos es posible derivar un criterio de interpretación histórico-educativo de reformas educativas. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci - mit diesem Namen assoziieren wir zunächst ein philosophisches Modell, sprach- und kulturtheoretische Analysen, Gesellschaftskritik, emanzipatorische Politikvorstellungen. Weniger bekannt ist die pädagogische Grundlinie, die sich durch die gesamte theoretische und praktische Tätigkeit des italienischen Philosophen zieht. Die vorliegende Studie erschließt die pädagogische Vorstellungswelt und die Bildungsmodelle Gramscis sowohl im Sinne einer geschichtlichen Rekonstruktion, als auch im Hinblick auf ihre Gegenwarts- und Zukunftsrelevanz. Analysiert werden Gramscis pädagogische und bildungspolitische Überlegungen vor der Inhaftierung sowie die in den Gefängnisschriften (...) und -heften vorgenommenen erziehungs- und bildungstheoretischen Reflexionen. Zugleich wird die Frage aufgegriffen, wie Gramscis Bildungs- und Erziehungsvorstellungen heute weiterzudenken wären und welche Bereicherung in seinem Denken für eine emanzipative Erziehungswissenschaft liegt. - Armin Bernhard, Jg. 1957, ist Professor für Allgemeine Pädagogik am Fachbereich Bildungswissenschaften der Universität Duisburg-Essen, Standort Essen. Forschungsschwerpunkte: Allgemeine Pädagogik, Erziehungs- und Bildungstheorie, Geschichte der Pädagogik. (shrink)

This paper, drawing on original sources, provides an overview of and a discussion on those writings and ideas, in Antonio Gramsci's huge corpus of work, that are relevant to the education of adults. This should provide a fitting tribute to this major social theorist of the 20th century on the 70th anniversary of his death. Among the topics discussed are those of adult education for industrial democracy, adult education and cultural preparation, adult literacy, prison education, adult education and (...) the Southern Question with specific reference to immigration, and, most important of all, adult education in the context of an intellectual and moral reform. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci is one of the major social and political theorists of the 20th century whose work has had an enormous influence on several fields, including educational theory and practice. Gramsci and Education demonstrates the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's thought for contemporary educational debates. The essays are written by scholars located in different parts of the world, a number of whom are well known internationally for their contributions to Gramscian scholarship and/or educational research. The collection (...) deals with a broad range of topics, including schooling, adult education in general, popular education, workers' education, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, multicultural education, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary society. (shrink)

This intellectual biography provides an organic framework for understanding Antonio Gramsci’s process of intellectual development, paying close attention to the historical and intellectual contexts out of which his views emerged. The Gramsci in Notebooks cannot fully account for the young director of L’Ordine Nuovo, or for the communist leader. Gramsci’s development did not occur under conditions of intellectual inflexibility, of absence of evolution. However, there is a strong thread connecting the “political Gramsci” with Gramsci (...) as a “cultivated man.” The Sardinian intellectual’s life is marked by the drama of World War I, the first mass conflict in which the great scientific discoveries of the previous decades were applied on a large scale and in which millions of peasants and workers were slaughtered. In all of his theoretical formulations, this dual relation, which epitomizes the instrumental use of “simpletons” by ruling classes, goes beyond the military context of the trenches and becomes full-fledged in the fundamental relations of modern capitalist society. In contrast with this notion of social hierarchy, which is deemed natural and unchangeable, Gramsci constantly affirmed the need to overcome the historically determined rupture between intellectual and manual functions, due to which the existence of a priesthood or of a separate caste of specialists in politics and in knowledge is made necessary. It is not the specific professional activity (whether material or immaterial) that determines the essence of human nature: to Gramsci, “all men are philosophers.” In this passage from Notebooks, we find the condensed form of his idea of “human emancipation,” which is the historical need for an “intellectual and moral reform”: the subversion of traditional relations between rulers and ruled and the end of exploitation of man by man. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

This insightful book explores the life and ideas of Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, and argues his work has considerable contemporary relevance when re-considering educational leadership in today's age of crises. This volume will be of pivotal interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduates in the fields of educational leadership, the sociology of education, and education policy and politics. Practitioners interested in educational leadership and social theory, and those active in social movements, may also find the book of use.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process (...) of disalienation, that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

Through its social and political activism goals, postcolonial feminist theoretical approaches not only focus on individual issues that affect health but encompass the examination of the complex interplay between neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and globalization, in mediating the health of non-Western immigrants and refugees. Postcolonial feminism holds the promise to influence nursing research and practice in the 21st century where health remains a goal to achieve and a commitment for humanity. This is especially relevant for nurses, who act as global citizens and (...) as voices for the voiceless. The commitment of nursing to social justice must be further strengthened by relying on postcolonial theories to address issues of health inequities that arise from marginalization and racialization. In using postcolonial feminist theories, nurse researchers locate the inquiry process within a Gramscian philosophy of praxis that represents knowledge in action. (shrink)