Antonio Gramsci. Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Derek Boothman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
At first sight, it would seem that this is not a time at all receptive to works on the Left and most certainly to works on Marxism as a serious political and moral conception of the world. Indeed, it might even be said that Marx's paean in the Manifesto to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie is finally and truly justified: the world has only now become entirely bourgeois. And as capital has become global and universal, the various groups, nations, and religions that together make up humanity are becoming ever more parochial, fragmented, and particularistic. At any rate, a post-modern cornucopia of centrifugal tendencies and divisions.
It is therefore refreshing--certainly, to paraphrase Gramsci, a testimony to the optimism of the will in the face of the unrelenting pessimism and bleakness reality presents to the intellect--to see the publication of the work of a thinker whose main life's work was to uncover within a fragmented reality the material and cultural forces that would lead to the formation of a new, more universal socio-political order.
The work under review, a volume of selected translations from Antonio Gramsci's Quaderni del carcere, is a welcome and useful addition to the growing body of Gramsci's writings in English. As such, it is a critical selection of Gramsci's writings which completes and adds to the Hoare and Nowell-Smith edition of Selections from the Prison Notebooks, as well as complementing the notes on culture and literature presented in the Forgacs and Nowell-Smith Selections from Cultural Writings.
In addition, this collection makes a significant and necessary contribution to English scholarship on Gramsci because it presents topics, ideas, and themes that other previous anthologies either did not include, or else gave them too little space. In this regard, Boothman has performed a valuable service to all who are concerned with questions regarding the relationships between politics, ideology, language, economy, and hegemony. The collection, therefore, will be useful to a wide audience (both scholars and informed readers), ranging from historians to philosophers to political scientists to literary theorists and critics. [END PAGE 10]
The translation is organized into various main topics not emphasized by earlier collections. However, the over-riding theme which provides both continuity and direction is hegemony--its emergence, construction, development, and transformation--and its relation to ideology in its many different levels.
Thus, for example, the topic of the opening chapter is religion, which, to Gramsci, is the most prevalent and popular form of ideology. This section is especially good on the relation between religion and politics, devoting much space, naturally, to the Catholic Church, but also including interesting and perceptive notes on non-Christian, non-Western religoins. This first chapter on religion is important, both for the subtlety of Gramsci's critical analysis of religion as a vehicle for the hegemonic construction of a socio-political order, as well as for his sensitive understanding of the religious and spiritual needs expressed by ordinary people around the world. In a post-Cold War world where established, secular ideologies seem to be crumbling and disintegrating, and where religious ideologies and sentiments are ascendant both in "modern" Western societies and in more "traditional," non-Western areas of the world, Gramsci's notes on religion, as presented and translated by Boothman, provide an indispensable grammar for the analysis of religious movements.
Another important factor in the construction of hegemony is education, and this volume provides many notes in which Gramsci expressed his views on this topic, especially on questions dealing with the internal dynamics of the educational process, from elementary school to university. Here again, Gramsci's thoughts are not merely theoretically interesting, but are also alive with contemporary problems and issues concerning schools and education. These notes make clear Gramsci's belief in the intimate connection between education and hegemony, education and politics.
The notes on economics happily fill a long-standing vacuum in the English presentation of Gramsci's writings, and they go a long way in showing Gramsci's ideas on the relation between economics, science, and philosophy. What these notes do is relate economics to the general theme of hegemony. The conventional view of Gramsci presents him as a thinker who emphasizes culture and politics--as a theorist of the superstructure. Yet Boothman's translation shows the importance to Gramsci of economic and structural questions. Indeed, Gramsci's formulation and elaboration of ideas such as civil society and hegemony, as well as his notion of science and ideology, are intimately related to his understanding of economic and structural elements. As Gramsci notes in Notebook 13 on Machiavelli, "if hegemony is ethico-political, it cannot but also be economic." In addition, some notes are especially noteworthy when placed in the context of today's divisions between North and South, and Atlantic and Pacific economic zones. [END PAGE 11]
Most interesting and compelling are the collection's notes on science, philosophy, and Croce. These are crucial to the understanding of Gramsci's theoretical project and methodological perspective without which it would be difficult to follow his critique of contemporary thought as well as his analysis of hegemony and the role ideology plays in history and in politics. The significance of these notes to students and scholars delving into the genesis and formation of Gramsci's major ideas cannot be overemphasized. They established the philosophical and theoretical structure for Gramsci's conception of hegemony and its relation to various levels and aspects of history and culture. His notes on Croce (and, to a lesser extent, Gentile) are crucial: they demonstrate Gramsci's critical and philosophical relationship to Italy's most important cultural force (Crocean and Gentlian thought), and his adaptation (or "retranslation") of this force in ways (political, philosophical, theoretical) that would rejuvenate Marxism as an ideology and as a political movement.
Finally, the translation is introduced by Boothman with an enlightening and lively essay which locates Gramsci's ideas within their historical and intellectual context. Moreover, Boothman provides copious and informative notes helpful to both scholars and general readers.
To sum up: this work is an important contribution to the ongoing project of making Gramsci available to an English speaking public, and I am sure it will be welcomed by English-speaking scholars and readers of various intellectual and cultural interests.