Reading Gramsci

Historical Materialism #88

by Francisco Fernández Buey

Reading Gramsci is a collection of essays by Francisco Fernández Buey with a unifying the enduring relevance of Gramsci's political, philosophical and personal reflections for those who wish to understand and transform 'the vast and terrible world' of capital. Reading Gramsci is of considerable biographical and philosophical interest for scholars and partisans of communism alike.

Fernández Buey distils Gramsci's intimate thinking on the relation between love and revolutionary engagement from Gramsci's personal correspondence; he reveals how Gramsci draws on both Marxism and Machiavellianism in order to formulate his conception of politics as a collective ethics; he retraces the trajectory of Gramsci's thinking in the Prison Notebooks , and elucidates Gramsci's reflections on the relation between language and politics.

English translation of Leyendo a Gramsci , published by El Viejo Topo in 2001.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

200 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2001

Reviews

[Pablo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mezcla entre biografia, pensamiento y análisis filológico de la obra y vida de Gramsci. Creo que el objetivo del libro es conocer el estado en el cual escribió Gramsci su obra, pero creo que queda al debe, y no desarrolla nunca de una manera íntegra ningun punto. Cuando se termina de leer, no se sabe mayormente del pensamiento de este gran autor, solo aparecen como pequeños destellos parte de su genialidad, en alguna cita directa. No lo recomiendo en absoluto.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very strange, largely philological analysis of Gramsci's letters and the Notebooks. The first chapter is somewhat moving, but dedicated to a psychological-emotional biography of Gramsci's letters to his family that doesn't reach the realm of theory I would expect from Historical Materialism. The second chapter has some good insights on Gramsci's theory of morality, but doesn't connect it to wider Marxist theory or how it could be integrated into socialist praxis, but instead just demonstrates the influence of Aristotle and Machiavelli in Gramsci's dialogue with Kant. The third and fourth essays are again philological analyses of Gramsci based upon his plans and structures of the Notebooks and how they should be published, and Gramsci's engagement with language which is of little interest to anything but an extremely (too) close reader of Gramsci for his words rather than his theory.

[Otillaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/...