During the past year a number of books, collections of essays, and articles on Gramsci have been brought to our attention or sent to us by members of the International Gramsci Society. We are providing here a description of these publications.
Antonio Gramsci: Letters from Prison, 2 vols., ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
This two-volume critical edition is the most comprehensive collection of Gramsci's prison letters that is available in any language. The edition contains an introductory essay that places the letters in historical perspective and examines the human and political relationships that underlay Gramsci's rather extraordinary intellectual vitality in prison. Other features of this edition are detailed explanatory notes, photographs, and an analytic index. In his Preface to the edition, Frank Rosengarten provides the following description of its contents:
This edition of Gramsci's Letters from Prison has a number of other features that should be noted. First, all the printed letters of the 1965 and 1988 Italian editions have been checked against the originals, and mistakes that were inevitably made in editing and printing the manuscripts have been corrected. These include wrong words, misspelling of words and proper names, paragraphs in incorrect order, errors in punctuation, incorrect dates of letters, and missing postscripts and sentences or in a few instances even paragraphs. Many of these mistakes had already been found by Elsa Fubini and Sergio Caprioglio but not yet been made known in a new Italian edition. In all, 117 of the printed letters were found to have mistakes of some sort, mostly minor, but in some cases of such a nature as to misrepresent Gramsci's intended meaning.
Second, this edition contains two groups of letters never before published in book form in any language, including Italian. (Some of these did appear previously in various magazines and newspapers.) The first consists of 20 letters that I came across in 1991 and 1992 while pursuing my research at the Gramsci Institute. That brough the total of personal letters to family and friends to 476. The second is a group of letters written to Mussolini and to various medical and prison authorities by Gramsci during his eleven-year [END PAGE 27] prison ordeal. They concern matters that were of vital concern to Gramsci, who sought to avail himself of whatever opportunities the Italian criminal code allowed to political prisoners to obtain better treatment for his many illnesses and, above all, to read, study, and write in prison in as productive a manner as possible. With these, the total number of letters in this edition is 486. One of the 20 letters not yet published in book form has indeed never been published anywhere: it is letter written from Milan's San Vittore prison to a Communist comrade, Virginio Borioni, on May 7, 1928. The letter, only a portion of which is legible, had lain all these years in a folder marked "Letters to Berti, to Bianco and others," the victim of an oversight that haunts the consciousness of all researchers who work with these kinds of materials. Third the footnotes of this edition are based on a thorough review of existing documentation in preceding editions published in many different countries. Wherever existing notes were unclear or inaccurate, an attempt has been made to correct or to clarify them. Many new notes have been added (pp. ix-x).
Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schecter: Gramsci and the Italian State (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993)
In their "Introduction" the authors describe the purpose of their study as follows:
Why add another book to the voluminous literature on Gramsci . . .? Almost inevitably, most earlier studies--both in Italian and in other languages--sought to emply the study of Gramsci as part of an ongoing debate concerning the nature and tasks of Marxism in the present. As a result, his writings were often manipulated to apply to concerns and ideas far removed from his original preoccupations. Whilst it is ineviatble that a major thinker's theories will take on a life of their own in this way after his death, such creative developments by others as frequently detract from and diminish their significance, as contribute to their true value. For whilst Gramsci did theorise the nature of democratic struggles within western societies far more adequately than most other writers within the Marxist tradition, it must nevertheless be borne in mind that his ideas took shape in conditions that are fundamentally different to those that confronted western communist parties in the post-World War II period. We accordingly believe that the abiding interest in Gramsci can only be discovered by returning him to his historical context.
The purpose of this book is to examine an important aspect of his work that has been relatively neglected--namely the influence of the Italian [END PAGE 28] political tradition and social and institutional structures on his thinking. Our aim has been deliberately to shift the emphasis away from Gramsci's contribution to and engagement with western Marxism, and to concentrate on how his arguments were shaped by the contemporary debate on the nature of the Italian State. We shall show that Gramsci's attraction to and interpretation of Marx's conception of a future self-governing society of producers stemmed from a more particular concern with the social as well as the political unification of Italy. In contrast to the majority of studies surveying his whole career, this project has involved giving as much attention to his early writings as to the Prison Notebooks. The result of this exercise is to make us Gramsci's contemporaries rather than the other way round. We would suggest that this historical approach reveals the true and enduring worth of his life and work (pp.xiv-xv).
Table of Contents:
1. Political apprenticeship The politics of militant idealism
The Syndicalist challenge
The impact of the Russian Revolution
2. The biennio rosso, 1919-20
The Internal Commissions
Councils and the unions
Councils and the party
Towards a workers' democracy
3. The Italian Communist Party and the fight against Fascism, 1921-1926
The Livorno Congress and its aftermath
The PCd'I and the Communist International
The Matteotti crisis and the Lyons Theses
4. The Prison Notebooks I: historical materialism and Crocean historicism
Historical materialism
Crocean historicism
The philosophy of praxis
A successful synthesis?
5. The Prison Notebooks II: hegemony, State and Party
'State' and 'civil society'
The 'new Machiavelli': intellectuals, the Party and the creation of a revolutionary hegemony [END PAGE 29]
Hegemony and historical materialism
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
Johanna Borek, Birge Krondorfer, and Julius Mende, eds., Kulturen des Widerstands. Texte zu Antonio Gramsci (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1993) This volume, which grew out of the international symposium "Gramsci Oggi" held in Vienna in June 1992, contains an Introduction by Johanna Borek and fourteen essays some of which deal directly with Gramsci's work, while others address a wide range of major socio-cultural and political issues from a Gramscian perspective. The authors and the titles of their contributions are:
Kaspar Maase: "'Antiamerikanismus ist lächerlich, vor allem aber dumm.' Über Gramsci, Amerikanisierung von unten und kulturelle Hegemonie."
Rolf Schwendter: "Subkulturen und 'breiter organisierte Gegenmacht.' Notizen zur zeitgenössischen Hegemoniekritik."
Thomas Metscher: "Zivilgesellschaft und Kultur."
Verena Krieger: "Gramscis 'Zivilgesellschaft'--ein affirmativer oder ein kritischer Begriff?"
Hans Heinz Fabris: "Intellektuelle als Zugvögel? Zur Aktualität von Gramscis Intellektuellen-Konzept am Beispiel der EG-Diskussion in Österreich."
Sabine Kebir: "Gramsci und die zivilgesellschaftlichen Potentiale im Maghreb."
Julius Mende: "Traditionelle Bildung--Radikale Organisationsreform. Schulpolitische und pädagogische Vorstellungen bei Gramsci."
Peter Jirak: "Food-Power und Entmündigung."
Birge Krondorfer: "Antonio Gramsci: Ein Mangel in der feministischen Diskussion? Antiquarisches--Akquiriertes--Aktuelles."
Alice Pechriggel: "Politische Eintracht, zivile Vielfalt, privater Zwiespalt: die Sphären der Gesellschaft und ihre Geschlechtlichkeit."
Gerda Ambros: "Gerüst und Bau. Zu Heterogenität und Homogenität in der Schreibweise Antonio Gramscis."
Johanna Borek: "Der Verstand und die Gefühle. Eine Träumerei."
Birgit Wagner: "Die Methode ist ein Politikum. Thesen zu Gramscis 'lebendiger Philologie.'" [END PAGE 30]
Joseph A. Buttigieg: "Philologie und Politik. Zurück zum Text der 'Gefängnishefte' von Antonio Gramsci."
Benedetto Fontana: Hegemony and Power: On the Relation Between Gramsci and Machiavelli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
The following extracts from Benedetto Fontana's introductory chapter may help provide some indications concerning the general orienation and purposes of his study.
The purpose of this book is twofold: it will argue that the Gramscian interpretation of Machiavelli as the "democratic philosopher" and the "Italian Luther" is the vehicle through which he elaborates a fundamental and radical critique of bourgeois and liberal thought as expressed in Italy by the idealist philosophy of Benedetto Croce; and it will further argue that such an interpretation identifies Machiavellian thought as an "anticipation" or "prefiguration" of Gramsci's notion of hegemony.
. . .
My aim is to understand the relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli in a novel and more fruitful way. Instead of looking at the Gramsci-Machiavelli relation in terms of the traditional and accepted perspective (which locates Gramsci's reading of Machiavelli within a problematic circumscribed by the well-known and well-argued discussions centred on the nature of the political party--debates that tend to reproduce, and thus never escape, the liberal and bourgeois assumptions that underlie the relation between those who rule and those who are tuled, and between "those who know" and "those who do not know), what this study proposes is to redirect the analyses of Gramsci and Machiavelli into an inquiry into the relation between Machiavelli's political thought and Gramsci's concept of hegemony as the unity of knowledge and action, ethics and politics, where such a unity, through its proliferation and concretization throughout society, becomes the way of life and the practice of the popular masses.
. . .
In effect, by focusing on Machiavelli, Gramsci is focusing on the question regarding the nature of politics, the role it plays, and the scope and boundaries that define it in the modern world. Gramsci's interpretation of Machiavelli therefore serves a double purpose: by presenting his version of Machiavelli, Gramsci is at the same time presenting a critique of opposing and contemporary interpretations of Machiavelli. Gramsci attempts to fashion a [END PAGE 31] revolutionary Machiavelli in opposition to the liberal one. Thus a study of Machiavelli is also a critique of Italian politics and Italian history. Gramsci is able to use Machiavelli in order to construct a political and theoretical discourse whose purpose is simultaneously to uncover the established liberal contemporary interpretations of the Florentine secretary as rationalizations and justifications for the existing power structure, and to recover through such a critique the radical and revolutionary kernel of Machiavellian thought as a means by which a new conception of politics, both democratic and realistic (that is, humanly possible), might be formulated. This project is carried forward through the presentation of a basically Crocean and liberal interpretation of Machiavelli whose critical elaboration leads Gramsci to imagine the outlines of a counterinterpretation (pp. 1, 5, 11-12).
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Gramsci and Machiavelli
2. Croce and Gramsci: From Philosophy to Politics
3. Renaissance and Reformation
4. Power and the State: Croce and Gramsci on the Nature of Machiavelli's Politics
5. Hegemony and Virtù: Moral and Intellectual Reform in Gramsci and Machiavelli
6. Machiavelli and the Democratic Philosopher: The Relation between Machiavelli's "New Modes and Orders" and Gramsci's Hegemony 7. The Constitution of the People as a Political Force: Hegemony, Virtù Ordinata and the Citizen Democracy
8. Conclusion: Hegemony and Power.
Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
This volume is described on the back cover of its paperback edition thus:
The essays collected here relate the writings of Antonio Gramsci and others to the contemporary reconstruction of historical materialist theories of international relations. The contributors analyse the contradiction between globalising and territorially based social and political forces in the context of past, present, and future world orders, and view the emerging world order as undergoing a structural transformation, a 'triple crisis' involving economic, political and socio-cultural change. The prevailing trend of the 1980s and early 1990s toward the marketisation and commodification of social relations leads the contributors to argue that socialism needs to be redefined away from [END PAGE 32] totalising visions associated with Marxism-Leninism, towards the idea of the self-defence of society and social choice to counter the disintegrating and atomising effects of globalising and unplanned market forces.
In his introductory essay, Gramsci and Global Politics: Towards a Post-Hegemonic Research Agenda," the editor of the volume, Stephen Gill, writes:
As there is no single school of Marxism (Marx himself denied he was a Marxist) so too there is no single Gramscian or 'Italian' school. Nor is there any consensual interpretation of Gramsci's fragmentary and often contradictory thoughts concerning social theory. Instead, there are clusters of scholars working in ways that address some of the questions raised and posed in Gramscian terms, across different disciplines, in a large number of countries. These scholars have begun to communicate, and to participate in joint conferences, and have thus begun to form the embryo of a global research community. Some research is of practical consequence in so far as it is linked in different ways to supporting the activity of socialist and progressive political parties and social movements.
Some initial work from the neo-Gramscian perspective has entailed a constructive dialogue with, as well as a critique of, different perspectives, including the prevailing, or in Gramscian terms, hegemonic theorisation in the fields of political economy and international relations . . . The need for this is, in my view, occasioned by at least two important factors. First, whilst Marxism has alwaysered an integrated approach, in large part because of the orientation and predominance of American theory in the field, historical materialism has tended to become marginalised from many of the major debates in international studies. This marginalisation is occasioned in no small part by the limitations of a rather mechanical and ahistorical application of many Marxist ideas and theories, some of which are linked to a fundamentalist tendency to generate 'ever-increasing expectations of the collapse of capitalism' (whereas Gramsci argued pointedly that there was no necessary relationship between economic and political crisis, or vice versa).
. . .
Most of Gramsci's substantive work focused upon the analysis of national social formations in particular historical periods, particularly Italy. Gramsci argued that this was the initial level at which the state and civil society (and its anatomy, the political economy) should be analysed, and where the foundations of social hegemonies were built. This national focus [END PAGE 33] predominates in Gramsci scholarship in not only Japan and Latin America but also in Western Europe, as reflected in the work of the Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies . . . and in the ongoing debates in New Left Review and Socialist Register on the nature of culture, ideology, the state, civil society and hegemony in capitalist society. There have also been many discussions in left-wing journals over the question of imperialism, although these have usually been couched in terms of theories of ultra- and super-imperialism, rather than posed in Gramscian terms.
Table of Contents:
Stephen Gill: "Gramsci and global politics: towards a post-hegemonic research agenda"
Part I: Philosophical and Theoretical Reflections
Stephen Gill: "Epistemology, ontology, and the 'Italian school'"
Robert W. Cox: "Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: an essay in method"
Mark Rupert: "Alienation, capitalism and the inter-state system: toward a Marxian/Gramscian critique"
Stephen Gill & David Law: "Global hegemony and the structural power of capital"
Part II: Past, Present and Future
Enrico Augelli and Craig N. Murphy: "Gramsci and international relations: a general perspective with examples from recent US policy toward the Third World"
Giovanni Arrighi: "The three hegemonies of historical capitalism"
Barry Gills: "The hegemonic transition in East Asia: a historical perspective"
Otto Holman: "Internationalisation and democratisation: Southern Europe, Latin America and the world economic crisis"
Der Pijl: "Soviet socialism and passive revolution"
Robert W. Cox: "Structural issues of global governance: implications for Europe"
Sue Golding, Gramsci's Democratic Theory. Contributions to a Post- Liberal Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992)
A succunct description of the contents of this volume is provided on its flyleaf:
The prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci serve as the foundation for Sue Golding's in- depth study of Gramsci's contribution to radical democratic theory. Her analysis encompasses English, Italian, and French debates on the subject, as well as political and philosophical discussions on the limitations of liberal and socialist democratic theory.
Golding explains how Gramsci arrives at the conclusion that a fundamentally pluralistic 'post-liberal' democracy--that is to say, one that is [END PAGE 34] 'open,' fluid, and based on an immanent and heterogeneous will of the people--is not only possible and preferable, but actually obtainable. The consequences of his analysis are dramatic: on the one hand, Gramsci is able to provide a conception of the structure which is no longer static or reducible to a formal economic moment; it is, instead, profoundly political, since it becomes both the repository and expression of change as well as the terrain upon which a better society can emerge. On the other hand, he is able to incorporate as fundamental to a post-liberal democratic theory a number of concepts often overlooked in the theoretical discussions of socialist democracy.
Gramsci demonstrates that if one is to take seriously historical materialism and the kind of democratic society to which it points, one will necessarily be faced with a clear choice. One can either accept a flawed but strategically powerful methodology based on dialectics of a philosophy of praxis or, more to the point, take as a given the profundity of the political and the radical diversity this implies, and search for a new logic. In the concluding chapter, Golding takes a look at the possible resolutions offered by way of a discursive (or what has come to be known as postmodern) philosophy outlined in part by the surrealists and further developed in the work of Laclau, Mouffe, Foucault, and Derrida.
In his Foreward to the book, Ernesto Laclau singles out three aspects of Golding's "original contribution to Gramsci's scholarship":
First, she locates Gramsci's work within the literature concerning democratic theory, in relation to both the limits of liberalism and what might be considered the best areas to be retrived and strengthened. . . . Second, she clearly points out the relevance of Gramsci's work for contemporary debates--such as deconstruction or radical pluralism and the question of contingency--debates that for so long have been considered very distant from her subject matter. . . . Finally, the wide historical canvas within which Golding inscribes her subject makes her acutely aware of the unresolved tensions in Gramsci's thought and the incompatible elements he tried--unsuccessfully--to combine. In this respect the book is more than a mere exercise in intellectual history: the contours of a post-liberal conception of democracy, which are presented in the last chapter, are a very promising contribution to political theory. [END PAGE 35]
The following extracts from Sue Golding's Preface to her book may help convey a general sense of the basic outline of her complex and detailed discussion and of her stimulating central arguments:
it would not be over-stating the case to say that, in Gramsci's prison notebooks, we are given a series of vital and challenging concepts, which, taken together, begin to articulate the basis of what has come to be known as a 'post'-liberal democracy. His is a theory about democracy that incorporates the central premiss that society, and indeed, 'the people,' must be understood not simply as entailing a specific historicity--without a natural order or essence--but as necessarily born out of and sustained by an open, creative, and immanent intellectual as well as practico-political 'will.' His theory takes this 'will,' itself diversified and fractured, as both the ground and the horizon--as both the 'is' and the 'ought'--of a democratic possibility.
And yet this focus on a subjective will is neither innocent nor without its consequences: for not only does it challenge certain liberal and idealist assumptions, it rethinks the entirety of marxism itself. Questions around objectivity and science and truth are reinscribed to include, indeed to privelege in a certain sense, the subjective moment. In turn this provides not only a fundamental rewrite of dialectics as historicized immanence, but grounds political agency in a radical pluralism and fluid diversity of the social structure itself.
This book delineates what is entailed in Gramsci's provocative proposition. It tries to show why a 'radical' openness, diversity, and contingently formed consent must become the integral basis for a post-liberal democracy, and why, in becoming that basis, a kind of social ethics, which Gramsci quite simply calls 'progressive,' can be established. Moreover, it tries to do so by following the methodological and theoretical route Gramsci took, the dilemmas he encountered, and the resolutions he finally offered. But it also discusses how, in the end, he is caught in a trap from which he cannot escape.
. . .
. . . now we come to the troubling difficulty: in relying on a notion of the social order as a totality, dialectical or otherwise, Gramsci becomes caught in a kind of gordian knot from which he is unable to escape. For, while he wants to argue that any democracy configured as a 'real democracy' must emerge from the organic and heterogeneous Sittlichkeit of a specific 'the people,' he [END PAGE 36] wants also to argue that that specificity must be linked to and expressed by the working class. That is, he wants to pose the working class as, ipso fact, the bearer of this radical totality; and he wants to press that argument forward not simply on the basis of strategic or practical political grounds, but in terms of a precise analytic necessity.
Insisting that the working class must be the inheritors and standard bearers of historical truth means, in part at least and despite his attempts to avow the contrary, to accept as necessary an already given communal ethicality teleogically unfolding prior to the political moment. For, in order to 'ground' the ethical content of this radical vision, Gramsci is forced to accept, among other problems, a priveleging of an originating and trascendental political subjectivity, now cast somewhere 'outside' the structure. . . . Instead of an immanent and contingent social order sutured by hegemonic struggle and all that this has implied, we find the notion of a totalized and statically 'objective' system taking precedence over and against the notion of an 'open link' as the fundamental requirement for a democracy empowered by the will of the people.
Does this mean that Gramsci's work for a post-liberal democratic theory is for naught? The short answer is no. And, in the concluding remarks of chapter 6, Gramsci's contributions and the possible choices we can in light of the more recent debates by Foucault and Derrida are set out and assessed (pp. xii-xiii, xvii-xviii).
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Setting the Problem
Clarifying the 'limits' to liberalism
The second impasse
The Hegelian interpretation and attempted resolution of the impasse
Chapter 2: Gramsci's Epistemological Eclecticism: What he Borrows from Vico and Croce and, Why
Against 'external realities' or dualisms of any kind
The contributions of Vico: Science as knowledge and history
Why Croce
Chapter 3: Science, Immanence, and the 'Real' Dialectic:A Question of the Political The 'political' moment
The problem (and importance) of science
Rational and real in the 'real' dialectic [END PAGE 37]
Chapter 4: The Understated Importance of the Concept of the Will
Will as the basis of a philosophy of praxis
'Ethico-political' as an expression of collective will
The dilemma of a 'totalized social' immanent in its expression
Chapter 5: Investigating the Base/Superstructure Dilemma: What Gramsci Does to Change It. The 'base' versus the 'superstructure' dilemma
The 'economic' as 'structure' (or the so-called problem of 'quantity')
Into the structure and what Gramsci finds there
From hegemony in the structure to the ethico-political state
Chapter 6: Gramsci's Contribution to a Post-Liberal Democratic Theory: Concluding Remarks
Gramsci's contribution
The continuing search
David Harris: From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure. The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies (London & New York: Routledge, 1992)
This book does not deal with Gramsci's work but rather with what the the author characterizes as the "gramscianism" that in his view pervades the mainstream of cultural studies and other leftist curents in Britain. The basic thrust of the book and its motivation are described in the blurb on its flyleaf:
This book arises from reading and teaching gramscian work in cultural studies, education, media studies, leisure and politics over the last twenty years. It argues that gramscian work is undoubtedly powerful and persuasive. Indeed by the 1990s one can almost say that it has become the governing orthodoxy. This book tries to read the work critically and in detail, tracing arguments across time and across different specialisms, assessing them, and trying to examine how they deal with critics and with new challenging topics. The author maintains that cultural studies contains many absences, silences and closures, and that it deploys a number of narrative techniques to remain credible.
Wide ranging and critical, the book provides an ideal critical assessment of one of the most fashionable and powerful intellectual traditions in contemporary social science. The book will appeal especially to students in cultural studies, media studies, leisure studies, education and the sociology of culture. They will find a way of critically reading gramscian work which should enable them to decide where its strengths and weaknesses lie for [END PAGE 38] themselves, and make them less dependent on the gramscians' own accounts and agendas.
In an "Author's Note" that prefaces the book, Harris provides some background information for those readers who might be unfamiliar with the British academic and leftist scene. He explains:
Gramscian cultural studies in Britain has been organised around a number of groups, netweorks or 'colleges', both concrete and invisible. This has given it a consistency and a continuity which has been taken almost for granted by those of us who have followed the work over the years . . . There are also less formal groups clustered around particular journals or particular conferences.
He specifically describes the activities and orientations of the folowing groups, institutions, journals, etc.: the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; the Communist Party; the New Left; Marxism Today; New Left Review; and the Open University.
In his "Introduction" Harris writes:
I have chosen to focus on the 'British gramscians', those writers who stitch together their stories using Gramsci's work at strategic moments. Roughly, anyone who lets Gramsci always, necessarily, have the last word, in any debate whatsoever, is a gramscian, although I have also further reserved the use of the term to mean those who use selected concepts based on a reading of Gramsci, to develop a certain 'mobility', to be able to manipulate these concepts, define them flexibly, and make them refer to a wide range of phenomena, or use them to endlessly generate a sense of newness, relevance and beginning. Gramscians vary in terms of how they manage a return to the familiar terrain.
Harris opens his concluding chapter with the following observations:
In the course of this book, I have tried to discuss both the strengths and the weaknesses of gramscianism. In case the critical focus of the piece has been misunderstood, let me repeat that gramscian work has opened a number of areas to critical inspection in a novel and interesting way. It has been responsible for the emergence of a critical sociology of culture and for the politicisation of culture, and these developments have generated very successful academic programmes of research and course construction.
However, to summarise my reservations about the project, there are also a number of tendencies towards closure in gramscianism too. I still think of these tendencies in terms of work like Adorno and his attack on 'identity thinking' . . . or Habermas, and his work on the limitations of 'strategic communication". . . Very briefly, gramscianism for me is far too ready to [END PAGE 39] close off its investigations of social reality, to make its concepts prematurely identical with elements of that reality in various ways. Gramscianism's writings are liable to premature closure by being too 'strategic' for me, as well--by letting a politics privelege analysis, both an explicit national politics, and a less explicit local academic politics. Such closures have benefits, but there are also considerable losses, as I hope I have demonstrated.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. The Context: Breaking Into Marxism 2. Floating Signifiers
3. Struggle and Education
4. Youth and Symbolic Politics
5. The Crisis and Its Consequences
6. The Mass Media: Politics and Popularity
7. Positioning, Pleasure, and the Media Audience
8. Leisure, Pleasure, Sport and Tourism
9. Gramscian Politics
10. Conclusion
Renate Holub: Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London & New York: Routledge, 1992)
The blurb on the back of the paperback edition points out that this book offers a "detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of present-day critical and socio-cultural debate" and then goes on to explain:
Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was far ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production which engages these issues at a high level of practical and theoretical concern. She takes stock of Gramsci's achievement with particular reference to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas) and to Brecht's theoretical writings. She also discusses Gramsci's writing in relation to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition--especially Merleau-Ponty--an angle which has so far received little attention from Anglo-American commentators.
She also has some strikingly original points to make about Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of widespread retreat from Marxist positions among those on the postmodern left. 'Differential pragmatics'--in Holub's suggestive phrase--is a theory of cultural production and critique derivable [END PAGE 40] from Gramsci's writings with the benefit of other, more recent ideas, like Habermas's theory of communicative action and the insights of feminist criticism.
It should also be pointed out that in the opening pages of her book Holub provides a detailed comparison between Gramsci and Lukács, while in other sections she discusses Gramsci's ideas in relation to the work of several poststructuralist theorists and critics.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Introduction
1. Gramsci and critical theories: towards a 'differential pragmatics'
Marxism and modernism
Modernism, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School
Beyond the modern: linguistics and phenomenology Towards a 'differential pragmatics'
Part II: From Realism to Modernism
2. To realism farewell: Gramsci, Lukács and Marxist aesthetics
Critical practices
Predicaments of history
Gramsci's Manzoni: an intellectual with class
Lukács' reading of Manzoni
3. The industrialization of culture: Gramsci with Benjamin, Brecht and the Frankfurt School
Modernist thresholds
Gramsci, Turin and culture industry
4. Gramsci's theory of consciousness: between alienation, reification and Bloch's 'principle of hope'
Objectivity, subjectivity and Gramsci's Pirandello
Subjects of popular culture
5. Phenomenology, linguistics, hegemony
Between perception and reception: Gramsci's Dante and his readers
Towards a critical theory of active communication: Gramsci and volosinov
The phenomenology of the prison world: Gramsci and Merleau-Ponty
Part III: Beyond the Modern, Beyond the Postmodern
6. Gramsci's intellectual and the age of information technology
The adventures of a concept in Gramsci's texts
'Mode of production' and 'mode of information'
Between Habermas and Lyotard: Gramsci's intellectual and 'differential pragmatics'
7. In lieu of a conclusion: Gramsci, feminism, Foucault [END PAGE 41]
Tibor Szabó, ed., Ellenszélben. Gramsci és Lukács--ma (Szeged: 1993)
This book is divided into five sections. The first four sections comprise a total of 21 essays in Hungarian. The fifth section consists of four essays, three of them in Italian and one in English. There are also two versions of the table of contents--one provides the titles in the language in which the essay appears in the volume, while the other offers an Italian translation of those titles that are in Hungarian. A note in both Hungarian and Italian explains how this volume had its origins in an international conference held in Szeged on 14-15 February 1991 to mark the centenary of Gramsci's birth. The conference is describes as follows:
Nel centenario della nascita del filosofo Italiano è stato organizzato nella città universitaria di Szged (Ungheria), un convegno internazionale di due giorni (14-15 febbraio 1991). Allora non sapevamo ancora che esso sarebbe risultato, fino ad oggi, l'unico convegno organizzato in un paese dell'ex "socialismo reale"--reso possibile da un lavoro tenace di un gruppo di studiosi (assistenti e docenti universitari) che da più di dodici anni studia il pensiero filosofico di sinsitra del nostro secolo, sopratutto l'opera di György Lukács. Questo gruppo, il "Circolo Lukács" di Szeged, con l'esperienza di altri convegni internazionali, ha pensato di celebrare tale centenario anche, evidentemente, visti i tempi, in "controcorrente."
Il nostro convegno aveva un duplice scopo: di radunare sia gli studiosi dell'Ovest e sia dell'Est europeo--prevalentemente questi ultimi--per discutere la possibilità stessa di un pensiero di sinistra oggi, in questa nuova situazione; e, secondariamente, di confrontare le idee filosofiche, politologiche ed estetiche di questi due filosofi di spicco del Noveceno, cioè Gramsci e Lukacs. Durante i lavori del convegno da ambedue i temi siamo riusciti ad ottenere dei risultati interessanti.
Per quanto riguarda la possibilità di un pensiero di sinsitra, già il primo giorno di questa iniziativa, dopo le relazioni introduttive, si è tenuta una tavola rotonda dal titolo: "È attuale oggi il pensiero filosofico di sinistra?", alla quale hanno partecipato quasi tutti gli invitati. I due poli del dibattito sono stati formulati dagli studiosi Ferenc Tókei e Péter Sárközy. Tókei (ex-allievo di Lukács, buon conoscitore dell'opera di Gramsci, presidente della Fondazione Lukács di Budapest) ribadiva la tesi sul carettere "controcorrente" del pensiero di sinistra e sottolineava l'importanza della continuazione delle ricerche, nonostante le difficoltà. Secondo Tókei, infatti, proprio il pensiero di Gramsci e di Lukács potrebbe costituire la base solida [END PAGE 42] per ripensare una nuova società socialista, che per adesso è un compito di lunga lena e difficile da realizzare.
Al contrario, Sárközy (dell'Universita "La Sapienza" di Roma, noto studioso di Gramsci) metteva in rilievo l'attualità del pensiero di Gramsci in Ungheria nei nostri giorni. Non ha condiviso le opinioni secondo le quali si collocava in una situazione di "controcorrente" in Ungheria. Anzi, sosteneva che adesso Gramsci è più attuale che mai. Ma per fare ciò, bisogna liberarsi prima di tutto da una interpretazione "ufficiale" (dogmatica) del filosofo italiano che molte volte è stato strumentalizzato dall'intellighencija dello Stato-partito. In Gramsci si possono scoprire due idee significative, attualissime. La prima è l'importanza data da Gramsci al momento culturale della politica: dalla fondazione dell'Ordine Nuovo fino ai Quaderni del carcere; e la seconda è l'insistenza sul momento nazional-popolare sia in politica sia in letteratura. Sárközy ritiene che con quest'ultimo concetto Gramsci abbia anticipato molte concezioni degli attuali dirigenti dei paesi dell'Est europeo. Per l'Ungheria il Forum democratico, infatti dà un maggior rilievo alla formazione di un senso comune "nazional-popolare." . . .
The volume contains essays based on the papers presented at the Szeged conference as well as additional essays contributed by R. Finelli, A. Santucci, A. Infranca, L. La Porta, W. Adamson, A. Showstack Sassoon, N. Tertulian, Gh. Lencan Stoica, B. Wagner, and V. Chacon. In reproducing the table of contents below we have used the Italian version as it appears in the volume itself--but one must bear in mind that all the essays that appear in the first four sections of the volume are in Hungarian Table of Contents:
I. Saggi Su Gramsci
Peter Sárközy (Roma-Budapest): "L'importanza di Gramsci--oggi"
Sergio Caprioglio (Torino): "Il 'capo rivoluzionario' nel pensiero di Gramsci"
Roberto Finelli (Roma): "Tra Croce e Gentile"
Antonio Santucci (Roma): "Le lettere di Gramsci prima del carcere"
Péter Márkus (Budapest); "Le 'élites', il partito e gli intelletuali in Gramsci"
Walter L. Adamson (Atlanta): "Gramsci e la politica della società civile"
II. Gramsci e Lukács
Guido Oldrini (Bologna-Milano): "Gli avversari del marxismo della II. Internazionale"
Luciano Amodio (Milano): "Sul marxismo postclassico oggi"
Alpár Losoncz (Novi Sad): "Gramsci e Lukács come pensatori dell'autoreriflessione alla modernità" [END PAGE 43]
Antonino Infranca (Roma-Tivoli): "Progresso allternativa alla modernità: Gramsci e Lukács"
Nicolas Tertulian (Paris): "Gramsci, l'Anti-Croce e la filosofia di Lukács"
József Bayer (Budapest): "Sul concetto di ideologia in Gramsci e Lukács"
III. Dalla Presenza Fino all'Influenza
Ernó Gáll (Cluj-Napoca): "Gramsci e gli intellettuali ungheresi della Transilvania"
Gheorghe Lencan Stoica (Bucarest): "La presenza di Gramsci nella cultura e filosofia rumena"
Ábel Dési (Subotica): "Gramsci e la filosofia iugoslava"
József Pankovits (Budapest): "Gramsci sul partito--alla luce della svolta ungherese"
Elemér Kéri (Budapest): "Interpretazioni recenti di Gramsci"
Vamireh Chacon (Brasilia): "La preistoria della fortuna di Lukács in Brasile"
IV. Sulla Cultura e Sulla Letteratura
Pavol Koprda (Bratislava):"Il romanzo storico e la sovranità del popolo nella cultura nazionale"
Lelio La Porta (Roma): "Gramsci, Lukács e la letteratura italiana" Birgit Wagner (Vienna): "Gramsci come critico letterario del periodo fascista"
V. Appendice (testi in italiano ed in inglese)
Géza Sallay (Budapest): "Scoprire Gramsci in Ungheria"
Tibor Szabó (Szeged): "Svolta politica nell'Est e il pensiero di Gramsci"
Péter Sárközy (Roma-Budapest): "Croce e Gramsci in Ungheria"
Anne Showstack Sassoon (London): "Back to the Past, On to the Future: Rethinking with Gramsci"
A Special Issue on Antonio Gramsci. Italian Quarterly, vol. XXXI, nos. 119-120 (Winter-Spring 1990)
This is the second special double issue of Italian Quarterly dedicated to Gramsci--the earlier one was vol. XXV, nos. 97-98 (Summer Fall, 1984). This issue contains six essays as well as some reviews of books that deal directly with Gramsci. The essays are:
Howard K. Moss: "Gramsci and the Idea of Human Nature"
William Hartley: "Notebook Ten and the Critique of Benedetto Croce"
Darrow Schechter: "Gramsci, Gentile and the Theory of the Ethical State in Italy"
Michael G. Smith: "Gramsci in the Mirror of Italian Fascism: Mussolini, Gentile, Spirito"
Naomi Greene: "Pasolini: 'Organic Intellectual'?"
Alexander De Grand: "The Italian Communist Party, the Italian Socialist Party and the Communist International: Alternative Visions of Proletarian [END PAGE 44] "
The reviews of books dealing directly with Gramsci are (with the reviewer's name first):
William Hartley: Robert S. Dombroski, Antonio Gramsci (Boston: Twayne, 1989) and Maurice Finocchiaro, Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Frank Rosengarten: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings. 2 vols. ed. Quintin Hoare (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990)
William Hartley: Esteve Morera, Gramsci's Historicism: A Realist Interpretation (London & New York: Routledge, 1990); Dante Germino, Antonio Gramsci: Architect of a New Politics (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1990); and Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. vol. I, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992)
"Impaginazione e analisi dei Quaderni" in Belfagor, XLVIII, iii (31 maggio 1993), pp. 345-352 "Sulla 'classicità' di Gramsci" in Bollettino Filosofico (Dipartimento di Filosofia dell'Università della Calabria), 10 (1993), pp. 181-194
Two essays on Gramsci in Rethinking MARXISM
In the last issue of the IGS Newsletter we published an article ("Gramsci in Rethinking Marxism") in which Jonathan Diskin surveyed and discussed the essays on Gramsci that have been published in that journal. Since that article was written, two more essays on Gramsci have appeared in Rethinking Marxism:
Daniel O'Connell: "Bloom and Babbit: A Gramscian View" in vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 96-103
Steven R. Mansfield: "Gramsci and the Dialectic: Resisting 'Encrocement'" in vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 81-103