Over the course of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci became an author so often cited and so extensively studied at the international level that it now sometimes seems his cultural origins have been overlooked. Thanks to translations of his writings into English (and many other languages), Gramsci’s thought has acquired a truly global audience and inspired scholars in different disciplinary areas by reaching beyond the original utterance in Italian. Almost daily, new research is being carried out: articles and books are published completely neglecting the scientific literature produced in the language that he himself spoke. This can be considered legitimate when Gramsci’s thought is – more than anything else – an occasion and a stimulus with the aim of saying something other than what he himself affirmed, but the difficulty of accessing the primary sources of his political thought can sometimes produce an unintentional misunderstanding and conceptual inaccuracy. Reflecting on the relationship between scholarly studies in Italian and in other languages may perhaps lead us to speculate that while the first might be able to guarantee a greater philological precision and hermeneutic penetration, the second may demonstrate themselves to be more prone to developing the reformulation of Gramscian categories in the areas of sociology and anthropology besides those of historiography and politics.
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Gramsci’s premature death, therefore, it was thought to organize a sort of intellectual account of the situation, including some of the most important Italian scholars of Gramsci’s thought, and to arrange their musings around the relation between culture and politics, history and historiography. The results of this work forms a type of “companion” that is useful for a deep understanding of this author within an international dialogue which must express itself, nowadays, in English.
The volume is organized into five parts. In the first two essays – entitled Gramsci: From Socialism to Communism and Antonio Gramsci: the Prison Years –, under the general heading of “History”, a concise and updated reconstruction of his biographical events is offered. The second part, dedicated to the “Theories of History”, provides three different perspectives – summarized by the titles The Crisis of European Civilization in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci, Notes on Gramsci’s Theory of History and The Layers of History and Politics in Gramsci – permitting an analysis of the ideas and theories of history which emerge from Gramsci’s writings. In the third part, addressing the concept of “Communism” – with the essays Gramsci and Marx: Notes and Reflections, Gramsci, the October Revolution and its “Translation” in the West and On the
The collection of these essays exposes a view of the complex relationship between Antonio Gramsci and the twentieth century, a century that for reasons analyzed here in various ways showed itself to be very generous in conceding so much importance to one man amongst many men. This fact cannot be taken for granted. Gramsci died in 1937, in a century that was densely full of events and personalities. It is not a given that the twentieth century would leave space for a man such as Gramsci: someone who was politically defeated, physically disabled, (according to some) betrayed and who was also certainly the expression of a particular tendency of a current of political thought – Communism – considered by most (even well before the end of the 1900s) to be tragically flawed, in concrete political experience and therefore also in its theoretical formulations. Gramsci expressed his thought, then, in a country – Italy –, that is not always at the center of international attention. Thinking about the relation between Gramsci and the twentieth century or Gramsci within the twentieth century, first of all means this: remembering how the remnants of his experience and his political thought have surpassed the date of his death, invading and permeating the Italian and international political culture for the full duration of the twentieth century. Making the point of Gramsci in the 1900s signifies underlining how this author, as markedly different than others, became a century’s indisputable protagonist – both for the infinite interpretations that he elicited as well as for the uses and abuses of his thought and life story, with the purpose of quickly becoming one of most translated and cited Italian authors of all time together with such illustrious personalities as Dante Alighieri and Niccolò Machiavelli.
Considering this relationship between Gramsci and the twentieth century, today, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, also signifies something more – clearly connecting with the international dimension acquired by this author. The temporal reference, the twentieth century, therefore, also emerges fully pregnant from the point of view of declaring its own primacy over the