Prison Notebooks

This is the first time ever that Gramsci's extraordinary Prison Notebooks are available in English as he wrote them in italian, in their fragemntary brilliance and their disconcertingly restless, unorthodox probity. Joseph Buttigieg's work is a monument of scholarship and of supple, deeply sensitive translation. When his work is completed in subsequent volumes a remarkable monument of human courage and intellectual resourcefulness will stand forth as never before. -- Edward W. Said Until Joseph A. Buttigieg's meticulous translation and critical attention to Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, this invaluable text, a testimony to the most emancipatory thinking of our time, was available to English readers only in an artificially contrived form. Now Buttigieg's monumental and magesterial work is available in paperback. Scholars, teachers, students, activists, general readers--rejoice! -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University A poignant record of [Gramsci's] thoughts from a Fascist prison cell, adding a human touch to a key political figure. -- Terry Eagleton Prison Notebooks is one of the fundamental texts of modern thought. Politics, cultural studies, philosophy, history, the dialectic--everything is here. Buttigieg's translation is a superb achievement." -- Fredric Jameson

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is widely celebrated as the most original political thinker in Western Marxism and an all-around outstanding intellectual figure. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom. Nevertheless, in his prison notebooks, he recorded thousands of brilliant reflections on an extraordinary range of subjects, establishing an enduring intellectual legacy. Columbia University Press's multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. The notebooks' integral text gives readers direct access not only to Gramsci's influential ideas but also to the intellectual workshop where those ideas were forged. Extensive notes guide readers through Gramsci's extraordinary series of reflections on an encyclopedic range of topics. Volume 1 opens with an introduction to Gramsci's project, describing the circumstances surrounding the composition of his notebooks and examining his method of inquiry and critical analysis. It is accompanied by a detailed chronology of the author's life. An unparalleled translation of notebooks 1 and 2 follows, which laid the foundations for Gramsci's later writings. Most intriguing are his earliest formulations of the concepts of hegemony, civil society, and passive revolution.