Sue Golding

Please note: If you are interested in this book, please go to the section on my Academia.edu site called 'Gramsci' - the entire volume is uploaded (in sections).


Taken from the Forward:

When one first approaches Gramsci's Quaderni del carcere a curious double spectacle confronts the uninitiated. Embedded in the many thousands of pages, each written in the highly censored atmosphere of a prison cell, is the passionate urgency of a political strategist striking out against the fascistic turn of events in Italy (and elsewhere) and beckoning to those 'not in the know' to organise and resist. Here one meets the militant tactician, the marxist-leninist par excellence. But, at the same time, one also encounters the finely tuned scholarship of a radical intellectual who questioned and alternatively incorporated a whole series of theoretical concepts that often seem markedly distanced from the marxist-leninism grounding his philosophic astuteness and political common sense. In relying on such concepts as 'ethicality7 or 'immanence/ or even 'the distincts' one seems to find traces of a slightly refurbished idealist, one who might appear to be casting his intellectual net closer to the analytic proposals of Hegel and Benedetto Croce rather than to those of Marx or Lenin.

These apparent contradictions have led novices and scholars alike to attempt to discover the 'real' Gramsci, 'discoveries' that, as we shall see, have little to do with the immense contribution and impact the prison notebooks have made on political theory in general and on democratic theory in particular.