Prison Notebooks

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is one of the fundamental texts of modern thought. Politics, cultural studies, philosophy, history, the dialectic--everything is here. Joseph A. Buttigieg's translation is a superb achievement. -- Fredric Jameson, Duke University This is the first time ever that Gramsci's extraordinary Prison Notebooks are available in English as he wrote them in Italian, in their fragmentary brilliance and their disconcertingly restless, unorthodox probity. Joseph A. 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 Antonio Gramsci is, in the words of Mussolini who sentenced him to a lifetime in jail, 'the brain that must be stopped functioning.' Mussolini failed. Gramsci remains one of the most important figures in modern Italian intellectual history and the most influential internationally. The Prison Notebooks contain the most original and open marxist thinking of the twentieth century, now superbly edited and translated. -- Eric Hobsbawm, professor emeritus of Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 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

Antonio Gramsci is regarded as the most original political thinker in the tradition of Western Marxism and an outstanding intellectual figure. This volume features his work where he develops his concepts of hegemony, civil society, and the state; and reflects extensively on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Machiavelli's political philosophy.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 3 contains notebooks 6, 7, and 8, in which Gramsci develops his concepts of hegemony, civil society, and the state; reflects extensively on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Machiavelli's political philosophy; and offers a trenchant critique of the cultural and political practices of fascism. A detailed analysis of positivism and idealism brings Gramsci's philosophy of praxis and conception of historical materialism into sharp relief. Also included are the author's extensive observations on articles and books read during his imprisonment.