Antonio Gramsci reviewed in Socialist Studies [PDF]

Socialist Studies

Reviewed by Adam Hilton, York University

The fortunes of Antonio Gramsci as a Marxist thinker and Communist Party leader have been so curious it is worth foregrounding their recent past within academic and intellectual circles.1 Particularly in the English-speaking world, Gramsci’s popularity has undoubtedly only increased since the fall of the Soviet bloc, the advance of neoliberalism and the deeper disorganization of the Left. Such a phenomenon leaves us asking why it is that this Marxist revolutionary has been spared the same fate as Marx and Engels, who either have continued to be held in disrepute or, worse, been relegated to irrelevance. In this case, however, the exception proves the rule. The growth of the “Gramsci industry” in the past few decades has been due mainly to the fact that he is not typically read as a Marxist and a Communist. Indeed, as a “theorist of the superstructures” Gramsci is frequently promoted as an alternative to the crude economism of the Marxist tradition. In part due to the earlier instrumentalizations by the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) official postwar “Gramscianism,” as well as the later academic interpretation of Gramsci’s perspective as rooted in the trenches of a non-political “civil society,” the Italian Communist thinker ultimately found a warmer reception in cultural studies than he did in either political science or sociology. Peter D. Thomas’s fresh reassessment of the Prison Notebooks and the late Antonio A. Santucci’s recently translated biography serve as important correctives to this non-political, “cultural studies” Gramsci.

Both Thomas and Santucci are emblematic of the “philological turn” steadily gaining momentum in Gramscian studies since the 1975 Italian publication of Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. His enhanced sensitivity to the literary construction of Gramsci’s texts has done much to reverse the initial historical reception of his work. Following the end of the Second World War, Gramsci’s prison writings were transported back from their wartime haven in the Soviet Union to Italy where, under the guidance of the PCI, they were thematically reorganized, repackaged and published as a completed work in six massive volumes. Gerratana’s republication of the notebooks as they were actually written allows the reader to trace the formation and progression of Gramsci’s categories as a work in progress. Since then, Gramsci’s work, both before and during his incarceration, has been subject to careful reconstruction and elaboration, providing a more accurate depiction of the Communist leader and his thought….

Read the entire review in Socialist Studies [PDF]