Antonio Gramsci: Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks.

by Antonio Gramsci, Derek Boothman (Editor)

This volume brings together Gramsci's writings on religion, education, science, philosophy and economic theory. The theme that links these writings is the investigation of ideology at its different levels, and the structures which embody and reproduce it. Concepts such as subalternity and corporate consciousness, hegemony and the building of a counter-hegemony necessary for the formation of a new historical bloc, thus recur throughout the book. They complement some of the more overtly political writing published in the 1971 selection from the Notebooks.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

704 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

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

[Aiden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting parts here and there, particularly the religion section, but I can see why this is the more secondary material compared to the standard selections of machiavelli, the intellectuals, and fordism etc.