A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters, 1908-1926

by Antonio Gramsci, Derek Boothman (Editor)

A collection of letters is also essentially a biography – here of a man recognized as one of the twentieth century’s leading thinkers. By translating and presenting for the first time many letters previously overlooked by other volumes, this collection greatly expands what the English-speaking world knows of him, both politically and personally. These extracts from his pre-prison correspondence—with his wife and her sister, international communist leaders, and fellow Italian revolutionaries—show his most important ideas at their beginnings, and give a well rounded picture of Gramsci’s political, intellectual, and emotional development. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party, and among the twentieth century's most influential theorists.

Genres: Nonfiction

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926, where he remained until his death in 1937.

During his imprisonment, Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis. His Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory. Gramsci drew insights from varying sources — not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, and Benedetto Croce. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including the history of Italy and Italian nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, the state, historical materialism, folklore, religion, and high and popular culture.
Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class — the bourgeoisie — use cultural institutions to maintain wealth and power in capitalist societies. In Gramsci's view, the bourgeoisie develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. He also attempted to break from the economic determinism of orthodox Marxist thought, and so is sometimes described as a neo-Marxist. He held a humanistic understanding of Marxism, seeing it as a philosophy of praxis and an absolute historicism that transcends traditional materialism and traditional idealism.

Reviews

[Rjurik Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of the excellent Haymarket publishing program (which features the equally excellent HM series), this is an uneven collection of Gramsci's pre-prison letters. They range from the rather minor letters from his youth, when he lived in crushing poverty and tended to beg his father for money, to his rather romantic and melodramatic later letters to his wife. In between are letters which give a glimpse of his life in Russia in the early 20s, and the later essential letters to his collaborators as he re-oriented the PCd'I away from Bordiga's fatalistic line. Entire sections of his life are missing, especially the period of the Factory Council movement in Turin. This book probably suffers in comparison with Gramsci's prison letters, which are much more unified in style and subject, but they give us an important glimpse into the mind of probably the most creative Western Marxist. The introduction is also extremely good, and important to orient the reader. It's a book that will appeal more to Gramsci scholars more than the general reader, but it takes an important place in the burgeoning rediscovery of him.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

编辑蛮良心的。最好的毕竟还是写给爱人那些吧……工作信件多少有一种令人伤怀的隔膜感（可能也跟英译有关），说起来，这部分里给人印象最深的反而是Bordiga对他的影响呢（。

[Bill Crane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe I'm being won over to the value of collections of letters- well, as long as they're letters of actually interesting people. I read the selection Luxemburg's letters a few months ago, and this most recently translated collection of Gramsci's letters stacks up quite well, having much of value to the revolutionary and the intellectual both. Through the letters he wrote, for example, about the conflict with Bordiga on the leadership of the PCd'I, we get brilliant insight into how the Italian party operated as one of the small on the European scale, but one which had to find its way through an unprecedented cycle of revolution and reaction. You get a good sense of the style and substance of leadership in the pre-Stalinist Comintern: while Gramsci was determined to defeat Bordiga's defeatist and sectarian political line, he had a just appreciation of the man's strengths and was convinced that the issues at stake needed to be debated by the Italian communist rank-and-file and the party as a whole won away from Bordiga. A fine collection which shows the living reality of revolutionary leadership.