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This is an introduction to the major themes and terminology developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. The text is divided into two parts. The first provides the historical, social and intellectual background which influenced Gramsci's childhood, education and later development as a political activist. Particular emphasis is given to the pattern of events which unfolded during Italy's post-First World War revolutionary period. The second part concentrates on the principal ideas developed in Gramsci's writings. Each chapter looks at a particular theme, providing clear definitions and explanations together with a brief discussion of their wider theoretical implications and applications. The main themes discussed are: Marxism and ideology; hegemony and the concept of ideology; Gramsci's theory of politics and political education and the role of the intellectuals. The concluding chapter looks at how a Gramscian perspective might usefully be used to analyze contemporary society. ... Read more

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Gramsci in Prison: The Birth of the PCI
Many have studied and written about Antonio Gramci's remarkable cultural and political achievements in creating his Prison Notebooks while living under severe conditions and in poor health in Fascist prisons and prison hospitals.Paolo Spriano provides a window into Gramsci's concrete relationships with the Communist parties of Italy and the USSR, with activists within prison confines, and with the means by which his friend and comrade Palmiro Togliatti managed to hold Gramsci above the cannibalistic intra- and inter-party struggles of the 1930s, in order to enable Gramsci's thought to emerge as the basis of "the Italian Road to Socialism" in the 1950s and after.Spriano, long the dean of the history of the Italian Communists, adds a practical and crucial insight into the process of the preservation of the Gramscian legacy.
James A. Young ... Read more

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This work is a project of historical-materialist critique of themes, theories, and arguments in contemporary cultural politics. It examines the contradictory actualities and potential of a class-conflicted world system from the radical perspectives of Antonio Gramsci, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Raymond Williams. It endeavors to forge a transformative praxis useful for understanding the current crisis of global capitalism. ... Read more

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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