Introduction à Antonio Gramsci

by George Hoare, Nathan Sperber

Journaliste et militant, Antonio Gramsci arrive à la tête du Parti communiste d’Italie dans les années 1920. Arrêté en 1926 et condamné à vingt ans de détention par le régime fasciste, il meurt en 1937 en laissant à la postérité ses Cahiers de prison, plus de 2 000 pages de réflexions aussi audacieuses que profondes sur l’histoire, la culture, la politique et la révolution.
Cet ouvrage retrace la trajectoire biographique de Gramsci, avant d’aborder sa conception de la vie culturelle et des intellectuels, puis sa pensée du politique, avec les notions clés de société civile, de guerre de mouvement/position, de révolution passive, de transformisme et de césarisme. Des éléments de philosophie gramscienne sont présentés, dont l’affirmation selon laquelle « tout homme est un philosophe » et la reconstruction du marxisme en philosophie de la praxis. Ainsi sont posés les jalons essentiels qui conduisent l’idée-force d’hégémonie, qui contient et approfondit les autres apports majeurs de Gramsci.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Politics, Philosophy

128 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 2015

Reviews

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

This helped me make more sense of the Prison Notebooks, by putting the various threads of Gramsci's thought into a framework with hegemony as the unifying concept. The book consists of a brief biography, some coverage of Gramsci's early writings, sections on politics, culture, the 'historic bloc', a small amount of discussion of organic vs. conjunctural crises, and a lengthy discussion of the concept of hegemony, by which the above threads are tied together.

The book concludes with a pair of case studies: applications of Gramscian ideas to contemporary questions. I thought this was an especially good idea, since Gramsci's work was versatile and grounded enough to be applicable over a wide spectrum of political and cultural settings.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to Gramsci, as well as examples of the application of his thought by various thinkers. Not too sure about the philosophical analysis in chapter 4. Positing Gramsci as maintaing some sort of middle-ground between idealism and materialism seems absurd—Hoare himself notes that the materialism Gramsci is critiquing is a "vulgar materialism," not the broader philosophical position of materialism.