Book Description

--Radical Philosophy

Book Description
This provocative book examines the political ideas of two major twentieth-century Italian thinkers-Gaetano Mosca, a thorough-going conservative, and Antonio Gramsci, a humanist Marxist-and arrives at surprising conclusions. Maurice Finocchiaro argues that these representatives of the Right and the Left are closer to each other than is commonly supposed and that, in fact, they share the same political tradition of democratic elitism. ... Read more

Book Description
The essays collected here relate the writings of Antonio Gramsci and others to the contemporary reconstruction of historical materialist theories of international relations. The contributors analyze the contradiction between globalizing and territorially based social and political forces in the context of past, present, and future world orders, and view the emerging world order as undergoing a structural transformation, a "triple crisis" involving economic, political and "socio-cultural" change. The prevailing trend of the 1980s and early 1990s toward the marketization and commodification of social relations leads the contributors to argue that socialism needs to be redefined away from the totalizing visions associated with Marxism-Leninism, toward the idea of the self defense of society and social choice to counter the disintegrating and atomizing effects of globalizing and unplanned market forces. ... Read more

Book Description
Antonio Gramsci examines the influential work of the great Italian thinker.Renate Holub seeks to reclaim Gramsci from classical Marxism, and instead places him in the broad European critical context--alongside the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and sociolinguistics.This book points to Gramsci's affinities with the cultural theories inscribed in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Bloch, Brecht, Benjamin).It also establishes affinities between Gramsci's linguistic and phenomenological forms of knowledge.

Placing Gramsci in this broader context evokes the immense conceptual and methodological complexity of his work, a complexity Holub discusses in terms of "differential pragmatics."It is this very complexity which is, the author claims,relevant today when constructing our own critical theories.Faced with the transnationalization of capital, the centralization of monetary and economic power, and the decentralization of production processes, a critical theory today must investigate, in the context of information technology, the possibilities of alternative positions to such an order.Gramsci's methodological itineraries are more useful, this book argues, than other critical theories in developing ways of seeing and doing that are commensurate with the complexities of this era. ... Read more

Book Description

This is a comprehensive anthology of the Italian communist leader's most important works. Antonio Gramsci (18911937) made an important contribution to Marxist theory from a humanist perspective. He developed concepts such as hegemony, base and superstructure, and the role of intellectuals. He was sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment under Mussolini.

Book Description
Including articles translated from the Italian for the first time, this unique set is the first systematic collection of critical commentary on this influential figure. Reprinting some thirty years of Gramsci criticism, the collection features individual volume introductions as well as a general overview introduction.
The thematically-organized volumes include: * Volume I: Life, Context and Intellectual Development * Volume II: Marxism, Philosophy and Politics * Volume III: Revolution, Praxis and the Party * Volume IV: Contemporary Applications ... Read more

Book Description

Though he died as Benito Mussolini's prisoner, leaving only newspaper articles and fragmentary notes, Antonio Gramsci is now seen as the most significant Marxist thinker since Lenin. This volume is the first English translation of his writings on culture, organically and coherently edited from his journalism and his Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci writes about the popular and the great artists from Jules Verne to Dante, but not as so many timeless monuments. He sees artworks in the context of their reception and their absorption in particular cultures and histories. He is sensitive to the politics of culture as well as to the demands of philological scholarship, as his superb work on Dante in this volume shows. We have in this book Gramsci's changing views on particular literary movements and authors, as well as his ideas on the nature of proletarian and popular cultural criticism. Throughout he is concerned with cultural analysis and strategy rather than literary criticism by itself. The headnotes and footnotes prepared by Forgacs and Nowell-Smith address themselves both to the circumstances surrounding the composition of each segment and to the central problems of contemporary Gramsci scholarship. Antonio Gramsci is the twentieth-century writer who has most brilliantly and suggestively explored the ties that bind culture and politics. The publication of this collection is an event of major significance for theorists of all sorts.

Book Description
Dante Germino's biography of the Italian communist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci offers a major reassessment of this important twentieth-century thinker. Geromino analyzes Gramsci's remarkable life as well as his extensive oeuvre, from the early Turin articles to the meditative Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci saw society as composed of a small but powerful political center and a large body of emarginati -- marginalized people at the periphery of society, who are denied access to traditional positions of power. That vision led Gramsci to concentrate on the significance of the "common man" as he developed his theory Of the political organization of society, The persistent theme in Gramsci's work is how the ordinary man thinks, feels, and endures, and how the course of political institutions is shaped by the efforts of the marginalized to erode the boundaries of the center. Gramsci's approach is perhaps best expressed as a reunion of philosophy and experience and revaluation of the quotidian.

Gramsci's new politics of inclusion anticipated by well over a half-century the recent epoch-making developments in the USSR and in Eastern Europe. His anti-authoritarian leadership style as secretary of the Italian Communist party in the 1920s prefigured Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost. Gramsci's insistence on the international Communist movement's openness to new social formations at the grass roots is supremely relevant to developments in Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland, where forces hitherto kept at the margins of political life by ossified Communist-party structures have burst on the scene with unprecedented vitality.

Germino's compelling study ofGramsci's personal life and intellectual development offers fresh insights into Gramsci's work that will be of interest to all students of cultural and political theory, of particular interest is bas extensive consideration of the preprison writings both in their own right and for the light ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Daedalus, published by American Academy of Arts and Sciences on June 22, 2002. The length of the article is 2196 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: On Gramsci.(Antonio Gramsci)
Author: Joseph A. Buttigieg
Publication: Daedalus (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 2002
Publisher: American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Volume: 131Issue: 3Page: 67(4)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more