Antonio Gramsci

Antonio A. Santucci, Lelio La Porta

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781583674864
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

“What the future fortunes of [Gramsci’s] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this.” —Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface

Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci’s masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary.

Gramscian terms such as “civil society” and “hegemony” are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci’s purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci’s writings, is absorb Gramsci’s methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of “grand explanatory schemes,” the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: “Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society.”

The rigor of Santucci’s examination of Gramsci’s life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.

APPENDIX I

Biographical Chronology of Antonio Gramsci

1891	Born in Ales, near Cagliari, January 22.
1911	Graduated from Lyceum in Cagliari; in November he enrolls at the Department of Literature, University of Turin.
1913	Joins the socialist section of Turin.
1915	On December 10, joins the Turin editorial staff of Avanti!
1917	Continues his journalistic activity and becomes director of Grido del Popolo [The People’s Cry]. Elected secretary of the temporary executive committee of the socialist section of Turin.
1918	Grido del Popolo ceases publication.
1919	With Tasca, Terracini, and Togliatti, he founds Ordine Nuovo [New Order]. The first issue appears on May 1st.
1920	In September, he takes part in the factory occupation movement. On December 24, the last issue of the weekly Ordine Nuovo is printed.
1921	On January 1st, the first issue of the daily Ordine Nuovo, organ of the Turin Communists, appears. On January 21, he is elected member of the executive committee of the Italian Communist Party, formed the same day in Livorno.
1922	In March, he is elected to represent the party in the executive committee of the Communist International. On March 26, he leaves for Moscow. In June, he participates in the Second Congress of the International. He is admitted to a clinic in Moscow, where, in September, he meets his future wife, Julia Schucht.
1923	During his stay in Moscow, the Italian police issue a warrant for his arrest. On December 3, he arrives in Vienna, elected by the International’s executive, and tasked with maintaining contacts between the Italian Communist Party and other European Communist parties.
1924	On February 22, the first issue of l’Unità [Unity] is printed in Milan. The third series of Ordine Nuovo, now a fortnightly publication, is printed in Rome beginning March 1. On April 6th, he is elected deputy in the Veneto constituency. He returns to Italy on May 12. In August, his son Delio is born in Moscow.
1925	In January, he meets Tatiana Schucht, Julia’s sister, in Rome. He takes part in the 5th Session of the International Executive in Moscow in March and April.
1926	In January, he participates in the 3rd National Congress of the PCI in Lyon. Julia gives birth in August to a second son, Giuliano, in Moscow. On November 8, despite parliamentary immunity, he is arrested and imprisoned in Regina Coeli. On November 18, he receives a five-year sentence of solitary confinement. On December 7, he arrives on the island of Ustica.
1927	On January 14, the military court of Milan issues a warrant for his arrest. He leaves Ustica on January 20, and on February 7 he is sent to San Vittore prison.
1928	On March 19, he is tried by the Special Court. On May 11, he leaves for Rome and the following day is imprisoned at Regina Coeli. On May 28, the trial against the leadership of the PCI starts. On June 4, he is sentenced to twenty years, four months, and five days in prison. On June 22, he is assigned to the special prison in Turi, near Bari, where he arrives on July 19.
1929	On February 8, he begins to write the first of his Prison Notebooks.
1931	Already severely ill, in August he is affected by a serious health crisis.
1932	Following amnesty measures, his sentence is reduced to twelve years and four months.
1933	On March 7, he is struck by a second serious health crisis. In July, he asks Tatiana to initiate a petition for his transfer to the infirmary of another prison. The petition is accepted in October and, on November 19, he leaves Turi and is temporarily assigned to Civitavecchia. On December 7, still under arrest, he is admitted to Doctor Cusumano’s clinic in Formia.
1934	He forwards a request for conditional freedom, which is granted on October 25.
1935	In April, he asks to be transferred to a private clinic in Fiesole (near Florence). In June, he suffers a third health crisis. On August 24, he leaves Cusumano’s clinic and is admitted to the Quisisana clinic in Rome.
1937	With the end of conditional freedom in April, his full freedom is restored. On April 25, he suffers a cerebral hemorrhage. He dies on April 27. The funeral takes place the day after. His ashes are buried at the Verano Cemetery in Rome and, following liberation, transferred to the Protestent Cemetery.

APPENDIX 2

Biographies of Main Political Figures

BARBOUSSE, HENRY (1873–1935). French novelist and journalist. During World War I he took an active part in antimilitarism and pacifism through his actions and writings. A Communist, he published Clarity in 1919, and Lenin and Stalin in the 1930s. He lived for many years in the Soviet Union and died in Moscow.

BARTOLI, MATTEO GIULIO (1873–1946). Linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Turin, where he was Gramsci’s teacher. Founder of “Spatial Linguistics,” a method that derived the chronology of linguistic events through observation of their geographical distribution. His works include: Introduzione alla neolinguistica [Introduction to Neo-linguistics] (1925) and Saggi di linguistica spaziale [Essay on Spatial Linguistics] (1945).

BORDIGA, AMADEO (1889–1970). Became a member of the Socialist Party when a student of engineering in Naples. After the end of World War I, he founded the weekly Il Soviet [The Soviet]. Printed from December 1918 to April 1922, in 1919 it became the organ of the Communist Abstentionist faction of PSI. After the Livorno scission, he was secretary of PCI until 1923. He was arrested in 1923 and spent from 1927 to 1930 in solitary confinement. In 1930 he was accused by the Comintern of Trotskyism and expelled from the party. After his expulsion, he left militant politics.

BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVIC (1888–1938). Bolshevik since 1906, forced into exile in Scandinavia and in the United States, he went back to Russia in 1917 and played an important role in the October Revolution. Author of theoretical works, in 1918 he became part of the Left Communists. However, during the 1920s he was the strongest supporter of NEP (New Economic Policy). He was Stalin’s ally in the fight against the left opposition, but in 1929 he was excluded from any position and accused of “right-wing drift.” Arrested in 1937, he was tried and executed in 1938.

COSMO, UMBERTO (1868–1944). Taught literature in various lyceums in Italy, in Turin, from 1898. An antifascist, he was forced to leave academia in 1926. As a literary critic, he contributed in particular to Dante studies with works like La vita di Dante [The Life of Dante] in 1930 and L’ultima ascesa [The Last Ascent] in 1936.

CROCE, BENEDETTO (1866–1952). A philosopher, he exercised great influence on twentieth-century Italian culture. A pupil of Antonio Labriola and a Marxist scholar, he nevertheless gained greater affinity for idealism, seeing all reality as history (absolute historicism) and a product of the human spirit. At the beginning of the century, he took on a central position as aesthetic innovator. In politics, he was a great supporter of liberalism. Elected senator in 1910, he became minister of public education in 1920–1921, and minister without portfolio in 1943–1944. A Hegelian, he integrated Hegel’s “dialectic of the opposites” with the so-called “dialectic of the separate,” according to which the spirit is divided into four categories, two of them related to theoretical activity (aesthetic and logic) and the other two being part of practice (economic and ethic). His works include: Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale [Aesthetics as General Science of Expression and Linguistics] (1908); Logica come scienza del concetto puro [Logic as Science of Pure Concept] (1908); Filosofia della pratica. Economia ed etica [Philosophy of Practice: Economics and Ethics] (1909); Teoria e storia della storiografia [Theory and History of Historiography] (1917); Materialismo storico e economia marxistica [Historical Materialism and Marxist Economics] (1918); La storia come pensiero e azione [History as Thought and Action] (1938).

DE AMICIS, EDMONDO (1846–1908). Journalist and scholar, wrote his most popular works, Gli amici [Friends] (1883) and more importantly Cuore [Heart] (1886), when he shifted his interest from the bourgeois world to that of the working classes. A typical exponent of a certain nineteenth-century pedagogic and paternalistic literature, he denounced the miserable conditions of the Italian emigrants with Sull’ oceano [On the Ocean] (1889) and tackled the issue related to popular schools with Il romanzo di un maestro [A Teacher’s Novel] (1890).

DE SANCTIS, FRANCESCO (1817–1883). Literary critic, and a liberal, he elaborated his method and critical theory under the influence of Hegel’s Aesthetic. He took part in the Neapolitan insurrection of 1848. He was arrested, and after three years in prison he was sent into exile. He first taught in Turin and later at the Polytechnic University of Zurich. After the unification of Italy, he was elected parliamentary deputy and minister of public instruction. Among his works, in which he theorized about the autonomy of art and the inseparable nexus between content and form, are Saggi critici [Critical Essays] (1866) and Storia della letteratura italiana [History of Italian Literature] (1870–1871). The story of his political experience is told in his autobiographical writing Un viaggio elettorale [An Electoral Voyage] (1875).

ENGELS, FRIEDRICH (1820–1895). Founder, together with Karl Marx, of scientific socialism. Hegelian at first, he very soon approached communism. In 1848, together with Marx, he published Manifesto of the Communist Party. In the same year, he took part in revolutionary insurrections and in the following years he became involved in the organization of the proletarian movement. In 1870, he settled in London and, after Marx’s death in 1883, became the natural leader of the international workers’ movement and took care of the coordination of the various centers of social-democratic political action, following the foundation of the Second International (1889). He dedicated himself to intensive study of the theoretical problems of communism. His works include: The Situation of the Working Class in England (1845), Anti-Dühring (1878), and the posthumous Dialectics of Nature (1883).

FEUERBACH, LUDWIG (18...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Editor’s Note
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• The Political Writings
• The Letters from Prison
• The Prison Notebooks
• End-of-Century Gramsci
• Appendix 1: Biographical Chronology
• Appendix 2: Biographies of Main Political Figures
• Notes
• Index