The Routledge Guidebook to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

The Nature and Genesis of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

Key Themes and Originality of the Prison Notebooks

In order to understand Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, it is necessary to have some knowledge of the core themes which are developed in Gramsci’s reflections on politics, on history, on culture and on philosophy. The Prison Notebooks seem at first glance to be an uncoordinated assemblage of very diverse reflections on all of those subjects, but in the light of recent scholarship it is possible to grasp the basic unity of thought which runs through the twenty-nine notebooks, and which also emerges in the English-language Selections from the Prison Notebooks (SPN), which is the text to which the present volume is designed to serve as a guide.

The Prison Notebooks have to be understood (at least in the perspective taken in the present book) as a fundamentally political text, if politics is understood in the broadest terms as the understanding of a historical epoch and an analysis of the forces acting to preserve and to change the nature of a political and social order. The complete version of the Prison Notebooks opens with an initial heading: ‘First Notebook (8 February 1929)’, followed by the words ‘Notes and jottings’, and then by a list of sixteen ‘main topics’, ranging from the first one, ‘Theory of history and of historiography’ and including, to give some selective illustrations, number 3, ‘Formation of Italian intellectual groups: development, attitudes’, number 11, ‘Americanism and Fordism’, and number 15, ‘Neo-grammarians and neo-linguists (“this round table is square”)’, with the phrase in brackets referring to an essay by a figure who looms large in the Notebooks, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. The last in the list, number 16, is ‘Father Bresciani’s progeny’, referring to a reactionary Jesuit writer who was prolific in his attacks on liberalism (QE1, 99; Q1, 5; the italicized words are those underlined by Gramsci himself). This list of topics, with the dating of 8 February 1929, heads the first of over 2,300 pages of notes, arranged in paragraphs of varying length, which range over a vast field of topics in politics, culture, history and philosophy. But their guiding thread can be seen as a political reflection on the defeat of the wave of revolution in Europe sparked off by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, and the attempt to explain that defeat by understanding the nature of the world order of twentieth-century Europe. In particular, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks should be seen as the attempt to develop a new theory of politics appropriate to the features of that historical epoch, and also as a wide-ranging reflection on the nature of politics and political action, as well as the search for a new philosophy of politics, based on Marxism but in some respects going well beyond classical Marxism, and certainly challenging the ways in which Marxism was interpreted by classical social democracy and (after 1917) by the communist movement of which Gramsci himself was a leader, as one of the founding members of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista d’Italia, PCd’I) in 1921. In that search for a new political strategy Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks reveals himself as an extremely creative and innovative political thinker, sketching out not just a different perspective on politics and political action in modern society but offering an analysis of the ways in which hitherto subordinate groups can overcome their subaltern position and achieve hegemony, to use the term for which Gramsci has become famous and which is indeed the core concept of his reflections on political life and action.

The Prison Notebooks thus should be approached as an attempt, however fragmentary and cryptic in places, to understand the historical epoch opened up by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution and the enduring crisis of the society of that epoch, understood on a global level. This attempt at analysis of the nature of that historical epoch and its critical points is at the same time the exploration of a new form of political knowledge and strategy appropriate to that epoch, rejecting forms of political action and analysis which have no bearing on modern society in its most developed form. In turn such a new political understanding depends, in Gramsci’s perspective, on the working-class movement developing its own autonomous and independent philosophy of politics, and indeed a philosophy in the broader sense encompassing ideas of will and creative action, seen as a necessary condition for any subordinate group to become in its turn hegemonic and leading. These are some of the key ideas which Gramsci develops in his Prison Notebooks, and which are to be explained in the present text. Given the nature of the endeavour which Gramsci set himself, the task of developing the understanding of the new historical epoch, and of the politics and philosophy appropriate to it, it is not surprising that such an endeavour requires a new language of politics, a different political lexicon of terms and concepts through which the new political knowledge and the corresponding political strategy could be expressed and analysed. For this reason the reader coming to the Prison Notebooks discovers a new vocabulary for analysing politics and society. Some of these new concepts (including the idea of hegemony) have become very well-known, sometimes with the result that they are detached from any explicitly Gramscian use and employed in a loose and watered-down way. Any reader of the Prison Notebooks will be struck by the deployment of certain key terms, which play a pivotal role in the theorization of politics which those Notebooks develop. Some, indeed most, of these concepts are ones whose names were not invented by Gramsci but used in earlier political theory, whether Marxist or not. This is true of the ‘master concept’ of hegemony, and of civil society, and of course the concept of the state, or the Hegelian idea of ethical state. In these cases, as we will show in the course of our exposition, Gramsci is taking familiar terms of political and social theory and giving them a new use and definition, filling them with a different content, employing an old language of politics in radically innovative ways, a case of ‘new wine in old bottles’. The same is true of other key terms employed in the Gramscian analysis of politics, such as passive revolution, Americanism and Fordism, and what seems to be his own invention, war of position as opposed to war of movement or war of manoeuvre, to describe different forms of political strategy, the former the one appropriate to the political world after 1870. Other Gramscian conceptual innovations are related to his radical reworking of Marxism, and notably his use of the term ‘the philosophy of praxis’ to refer to Marxism, a term of crucial importance for his whole approach to politics and philosophy. This term was not employed merely (or even primarily) as a means of avoiding drawing the attention of the censor whose suspicions might have been aroused by use of the word ‘Marxism’. It is a term which came to replace ‘historical materialism’ in the course of the writing of the Notebooks (see Cospito 2011a), and suggests the way in which Gramsci’s version of Marxism went way beyond the economistic determinism which he saw as characteristic of both the Marxism of the Second International (1889–1914) and equally of Marxism–Leninism in its orthodox communist or Third International form, as exemplified in a text frequently referred to by Gramsci, Bukharin’s book Historical Materialism.

This is to say, then, that reading the Prison Notebooks and understanding them entails encountering a vocabulary of often familiar terms which are used in new ways to provide a distinctly original conceptual apparatus of politics. Even if some of the terms (like state and civil society) are themselves established terms in the political vocabulary, they are used by Gramsci with radically original meanings, which open up what one leading expert on Gramsci (and present director of the Istituto Gramsci in Rome), Giuseppe Vacca, calls a ‘new conception of politics’ (Vacca 1991, 7). Vacca also observes that ‘the Notebooks aim to develop fully a gnoseology of politics’, a knowledge of politics and the exploration of political action seen as a creative field of human action not determined rigidly or immediately by economic factors (Vacca 1991, 25). In that way Gramsci took Marxist theory in new and creative directions, through his vehement and extended critique of ‘economism’, the idea that the economic base determines directly the political and ideological superstructure. Indeed, as will be more fully shown below, while frequently taking as his starting point Marx’s famous and classic summary of his doctrine in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Gramsci came to reject what one commentator (Cospito 2011a) calls the ‘architectural metaphor’ of base and superstructure, replacing that couplet with the entirely new idea of a ‘historic bloc’. The Prison Notebooks focus on the role of intellectuals and the political party (seen as ‘the modern Prince’) as the chief agents of a transformation of consciousness and ideology. Such a transformation is seen as indispensable for any social grouping seeking to overcome its situation of subordination and intellectual dependency, in other words aiming to achieve hegemony. The Prison Notebooks therefore open up an original and novel intellectual world, with radically new ideas developed as tools for understanding the politics and society of the twentieth century. These are concepts also needed to comprehend the epoch in which we live today. This new intellectual world, and the concepts that go with it, certainly take their inspiration and starting point from Marxism, and are illustrated with references to certain core Marxist texts (the nature of Gramsci’s Marxism is explored further below). Yet the Gramscian understanding of politics both extends and in a way transcends, or at the very least develops, the categories of Marxism, not least by recasting the terms of the classical base/superstructure distinction, and laying the emphasis on what Marx’s 1859 Preface called the ‘ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’, the ‘conflict’ here being between productive forces of society and the property relations or existing relations of production (Marx 1973a, 426). Gramsci’s distinct stance on these matters is well expressed in some of the many passages of the Prison Notebooks devoted to the critique of the ideas of the philosopher Benedetto Croce, with whom much of the Prison Notebooks is a form of critical dialogue (see Chapter 6). Gramsci writes that ‘for the philosophy of praxis the superstructures are an objective and operative reality (or they become such when they are not pure individual machinations)’ (FSPN 395; Q10 II, §41, 1319). So while Gramsci is certainly a Marxist in the sense of basing his thought on Marxism, which he sees as a totalistic and autonomous philosophy which both includes and goes beyond all previous movements of thought, Gramsci in some respects transcends Marxism or rethinks it in radically new directions, changing its emphasis from what he sees as the distortions of an economistic view to a much more open and creative one, emphasizing will and creative human action, expressed in another frequently used term, that of ‘collective will’, and exploring the processes through which such a collective will can be formed.

The Prison Notebooks thus constitute a classic text of twentieth-century political thought. As the editor of the first full-length text of the Prison Notebooks (Valentino Gerratana) put it, ‘if a “classic” is an interpreter of their own time who remains topical for any age … and if a “classic” is an author whom it is worthwhile to re-read and re-interpret in the light of new demands and of new problems, one can say that Gramsci today deserves the title of a classic author’ (quoted in Liguori 2012, 310). One translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the author Dorothy L. Sayers, wrote that ‘the whole of the Middle Ages moves before us in Dante’s thumb-nail sketches’ (Dante 1949, 65). In the same way one could say that if not the whole, then at least many of the central episodes and themes of twentieth-century politics move before us in the Prison Notebooks, if sometimes in an allusive and coded way: the wave of strikes and factory seizures in Italy in the immediate post-war years (the so-called red two years 1919–20 or biennio rosso); their failure and the subsequent rise of fascism; reflections on Stalinism and fascism as political and social regimes; criticism of the erroneous (in Gramsci’s view) policy followed after 1929 by the international communist movement (the so-called Third Period or class against class policy which proclaimed the imminent collapse of capitalism as a result of economic crisis); the significance of the crash of 1929; the nature of new methods of capitalist mass production; the attempt to create a new state and society in the Soviet Union – these (among other episodes and processes) are all discussed in the Prison Notebooks. They are analysed in the context of a wide-ranging historical perspective, with references to the whole course of Italian and European history, from Roman Empire through the communes of the Middle Ages and comparisons of Renaissance and Reformation, with extended discussions of the Italian Risorgimento or movement of national independence, itself related to the development of ideas stemming from the French Revolution. The aim of such analysis is an intensely political one: to understand the nature of contemporary society and to use such understanding to develop a political strategy which could be suitable for that society, rejecting modes of political action which had led to defeat in the recent past and which failed to grasp the distinctive and complex characteristics of the modern age. In order to express such a new political strategy, a different vocabulary was necessary, and it is this which Gramsci develops through the pages of the Prison Notebooks, jettisoning what he sees as hindrances and obstacles to a clear view of contemporary reality. The Notebooks reveal a clear rejection of simplified and crude versions of Marxism (economism) and of political strategies (like that of Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’ and the idea of a direct uprising against the state – ‘war of manoeuvre’) which are seen as outdated and irrelevant to the historical epoch of the contemporary world, whose salient features are analysed in Gramsci’s notes.

One of the most important of the new concepts developed in the Notebooks is that of ‘passive revolution’, seen in a broad historical context as characteristic of much of the two periods opened up firstly by the French Revolution of 1789 and later by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Gramsci uses the term passive revolution in the first instance in the course of his analysis of the Italian Risorgimento, the movement to achieve the political independence and unity of the Italian nation. As with all the terms of his political analysis, this concept is not developed in an abstract way, but is formulated by Gramsci out of particular historical analyses, with reference to events and processes which he probes in detail, with close attention to leaders, parties, events, out of which a particular concept emerges, whether passive revolution or hegemony or other terms in his lexicon which are used to shed light on those events and processes, and more broadly to analyse the nature of a whole historical epoch. Passive revolution (the concept is analysed at greater length in Chapter 4 below) is a case in point. While Gramsci did not invent the term, he uses it primarily to analyse the Italian Risorgimento as a movement in which national unity and independence were achieved in ways which consolidated the domination of liberal and moderate groups, with results that shaped the nature of the Italian state and society after unification. But in the course of the Prison Notebooks the term is used with a wider significance, to characterize whole historical epochs, notably the period after 1815, in which liberalism and liberal parties established their intellectual and political dominance, and equally for the epoch following the revolutionary upsurge sparked off by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the subsequent wave of working-class militancy and class struggle in Italy and elsewhere. Passive revolution is a term used by Gramsci to refer to attempts to contain popular pressure and adapt to modernity without fundamentally challenging the dominance of ruling groups. Gramsci calls this ‘revolution without revolution’, and sees both fascism and Americanism and Fordism as examples of passive revolution, in their different ways. Historically speaking, Gramsci saw passive revolution as characterizing both ‘the period which followed the fall of Napoleon and that which followed the war of 1914–18’ (SPN 106; Q15, §59, 1824). Gramsci characterizes the post-First World War period as constituting a decisive break which opened up a new historic period: ‘And yet, everybody recognises that a whole series of questions which piled up individually before 1914 have precisely formed a “mound”, modifying the general structure of the previous process’. Gramsci cites a whole range of problems as characterizing this period, listing them as ‘parliamentarism, industrial organisation, democracy, liberalism, etc.’, but he lays his emphasis on ‘the fact that a new social force has been constituted, and has a weight which can no longer be ignored, etc.’ (SPN 106; Q15, §59, 1824). The core theme of the Prison Notebooks is how this ‘new social force’ could put an end to the passive revolution and achieve the opposite, namely a complete or active revolution, even if neither of those adjectives is used by Gramsci to refer to a revolution that is not a passive one. This new social force is that of the masses, the working class and peasantry, in general the mass of the subordinated or subaltern groups whose cultural and political emancipation involves a radical transformation, a revolution.

The Prison Notebooks should thus be seen as an ambitious attempt, written in the highly limiting conditions of a prison cell, to make sense of the modern world; that is, of the conditions of political action subsequent to the coming to power of fascism, first in Italy in 1922 and later in Germany in 1933, by which time Gramsci had been in prison already for seven years. Through the new conceptual apparatus deployed in the Notebooks (even if using familiar terms, but with different and innovative meanings) the aim is to explain the features of twentieth-century modernity, and to sketch out forms of political strategy through which hitherto subordinate groups could achieve hegemony, a form of intellectual and political leadership which educates and transforms the members of those groups, the ‘new social force’ referred to in the quotation just given. Gramsci thus is seeking a way forward that goes beyond the passive revolutions of fascism and liberalism, and indeed of what he calls ‘Americanism and Fordism’, the attempt to employ modern means of mass production without changing the structure of class relations. In philosophical as well as political terms (and for Gramsci the two cannot be separated – for him Marxism, or ‘the philosophy of praxis’, is ‘a philosophy which is also politics, and a politics which is also philosophy’; SPN 395; Q16, §9, 1860), this means a perspective which rejects forms of determinism which see political action as determined directly and simplistically by the economic structure of society. His fundamental argument in the Prison Notebooks is to investigate the process through which a collective will could emerge, a collective will formed by hitherto subordinate groups aiming to transform the conditions of their subaltern situation. In Gramsci’s own words, we have to investigate ‘the problem of the formation of a collective will. In order to analyse critically what the proposition means, it is necessary to study precisely how permanent collective wills are formed, and how such wills set themselves concrete short-term and long-term ends – i.e. a line of collective action’ (SPN 194; Q8, §195, 1057).

Nature and Writing of the Prison Notebooks

We now have to explain exactly the nature of the text of the Prison Notebooks, how they were written and how the text has come down to us in its present form. The matter is complicated, and raises a number of questions which do not have to be confronted in other ‘great books’ whose genesis and publication were far more straightforward. In the first place, it is necessary to explain the nature of the Prison Notebooks as a whole, before showing how the English Selections from the Prison Notebooks (the Hoare/Nowell-Smith edition) relate to the complete text of the Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci was arrested on 8 November 1926, at 10.30 in the evening. This was an arrest illegal even under the existing fascist laws, since at the time of his arrest Gramsci was a member of parliament and thus enjoyed the privilege of parliamentary immunity from arrest (Canfora 2012, 17). The privilege of parliamentary immunity was withdrawn from the communist members of parliament and from those socialists who had formed the Aventine opposition in protest against the murder of the socialist deputy Matteotti (123 deputies in all), but the law ratifying this withdrawal of parliamentary privilege only passed through the Chamber of Deputies on 9 November, the day after the arrest had been made. Initially held in prison in Rome, Gramsci was then sent as a prisoner, along with fellow communist deputies, to the island of Ustica, off the coast of Sicily, where he remained from the end of November 1926 until 20 January 1927, when he was transported to Milan, where he was questioned by the investigating judge drawing up the prosecution case, Macis. After more than a year in detention in Milan Gramsci was sent for what amounted to a show trial before the Special Tribunal in Rome, and this was the infamous occasion where the prosecutor said ‘we have to stop this brain working for twenty years’. Gramsci was sentenced to prison for twenty years, four months and five days, and on 8 July 1928 was transferred for the long journey to the prison of Turi, in the south of Italy, arriving there on 19 July 1928. The most recent research divides Gramsci’s time in prison into three phases (Daniele 2011). The first runs from his arrest in November 1926 to February 1928, when he was held in the Milan prison of San Vittore. The second phase covers his detention in the penal establishment of Turi di Bari, from July 1928 until a severe health crisis in March 1933, when Gramsci had to be looked after continually day and night, by three comrades who took it in turns to be with him in twelve-hour shifts. In the early months of 1933 Gramsci envisaged the possibility of some agreement between fascist Italy and Soviet Russia which would lead to his liberation. There were hopes that the fascist government would celebrate its tenth anniversary in power by some humanitarian gesture, as long as this was not seen as arising from pressure by the PCd’I or as a result of the international campaign carried on to demand the release of Gramsci from prison. Yet this plan of what his sister-in-law Tania (Tatiana) called the ‘big attempt’ (tentativo grande) came to nothing. The final phase of Gramsci’s imprisonment started in March 1933, when Gramsci was examined by Dr Arcangeli, who confirmed the chronically bad state of Gramsci’s health. On 19 November 1933 Gramsci left the prison of Turi, and after a temporary stay in a prison in Civitavecchia he was transferred to the Cusumano clinic in Formia, but still under penal conditions of detention and surveillance. In August 1935 he was allowed to move to a clinic (the Quisisana) in Rome, suffering from extreme ill-health caused by the years of prison. After June 1935 the writing of the Notebooks stopped – Gramsci was unable to continue working on them, and thus the period he spent in Rome at the Quisisana clinic was one in which no more of the Notebooks were written. In what turned out to be the last months of his life Gramsci urged his wife to make the journey from Russia to Italy. He also considered the possibility of moving back to Sardinia, though in the end Gramsci agreed to make a request to be allowed to go into exile in the Soviet Union to be with his family and because of his own serious health condition. Such a request was drafted by his friend Piero Sraffa, but this was not finally submitted because of Gramsci’s death, which none of his friends and family had expected, the result of a stroke on 27 April 1937.

What exactly are the Prison Notebooks, and how did they come to be written in such dire conditions of surveillance and imprisonment? As a result of the careful philological work carried out by Gianni Francioni, it has been possible to establish in some detail the chronology of the Notebooks and to understand the way in which Gramsci worked on them. The following account is based on Francioni’s studies, in particular his article ‘Come lavorava Gramsci’ (How Gramsci worked), which stands as a preface to the edizione anastatica of the Notebooks – an edition which is the photocopy of the notebooks in their original form. We first have to understand the hindrances to Gramsci being able to write and study at all while in prison. It was on 19 March 1927 that he wrote to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht to tell her of the scheme of study which he had proposed for himself. In this famous letter Gramsci wrote that ‘my life still goes by always with the same monotony. Studying too is much more difficult than it might seem’ (LP1, 83). At the time of this letter Gramsci was in prison in Milan, awaiting trial, and able to receive books, but it was not until nearly two years later, when he had been at Turi for more than seven months that he was given permission to write. In this letter of 19 March 1927 Gramsci wrote: ‘I am obsessed (this is a phenomenon typical of people in jail, I think) by this idea: that I should do something für ewig … I would like to concentrate intensely and systematically on some subject that would absorb and provide a centre to my inner life.’ He went on to list four subjects for his proposed investigations: ‘a study of the formation of the public spirit in Italy during the past century; in other words, a study of Italian intellectuals, their origins, their groupings in accordance with cultural currents, and their various ways of thinking, etc. etc.’ The second topic was ‘a study of comparative linguistics’, and the third was ‘a study of Pirandello’s theatre and of the transformation of Italian theatrical taste that Pirandello represented and helped to form’, while his final subject was ‘an essay on the serial novel and popular taste in literature’. Gramsci wrote that there was ‘a certain homogeneity among these four subjects: the creative spirit of the people in its diverse stages and degrees of development’ (LP1, 83–84). As we shall see, Gramsci subsequently modified (on more than one occasion) his plan of study and of writing, and of the four topics listed in this letter it is only the first of them (the study of intellectuals, Italian and others) that is prominent in the Notebooks.

However, it was to be nearly two more years before Gramsci received permission to write in his prison confinement. Permission had been refused in March 1927, and this permission was only granted in January 1929, when he was in Turi, and then under stringent and repressive conditions. He was allowed only four books in his cell at any one time, and it seems the same limit was imposed on the notebooks in which he was allowed to write. These notebooks, which were given to him after having been stamped and signed by the prison governor, were school notebooks, obtained for him by his sister-in-law Tania. Here it is necessary to explain the form of the Prison Notebooks in their original edition, since none of this is obvious from the form in which they appear in the SPN. The Quaderni del carcere, or Prison Notebooks, consist of thirty-three such school notebooks, in which Gramsci wrote his notes and thoughts on a huge variety of topics. Of these thirty-three notebooks, four are ones in which Gramsci made translations from English, German and Russian. As he wrote to Tania once he had received permission to write in his cell, ‘Do you know? I’m already writing in my cell. For the time being I’m only doing translations to limber up: and in the meantime I’m putting my thoughts in order’ (LP1, 245). Gramsci wrote these notebooks over a period of six of his eleven years of incarceration, with the first notebook having as its first line the date of 8 February 1929, and the writing of the notebooks ceasing in the middle of 1935 as a result of the collapse of Gramsci’s health. These notebooks consist of over 2,300 pages of notes as printed in the Gerratana edition, sometimes short paragraphs (on occasion of one or two sentences with a quote from a book or article which is summarized or commented upon in the note), and often of much longer sections devoted to particular themes. Each section (with a very few exceptions) is headed by a paragraph sign §, a number, and by a rubric or short phrase describing or summarizing the paragraph or section in question. Some of these rubrics recur frequently throughout the text of the Prison Notebooks, for example ‘Formation of the Italian Intellectual Class’, and (taking this as a random example), a typical entry in the Prison Notebooks, would start in the following way, as is the case with this one, paragraph 137 of Notebook 3:

§ (137). The formation of the Italian intellectual class. The effect of the socialist workers’ movement on the creation of important sectors of the ruling class. The phenomenon in Italy is objectively different from that in other countries in this respect …

(QE2, 114)

The paragraph number and the rubric (above in italics) are placed by Gramsci at the beginning of each of the 2,300 and more printed pages of notes that together constitute the Prison Notebooks. From what has been said it should be clear that the reader who is coming to the Prison Notebooks with their first port of call being the SPN will be presented with a text which in physical appearance and indeed in its coherence is quite different from the original version of the notebooks, which have a much more fragmentary look, divided as they are by these sections, each with its number and heading, and varying very much in length and in content. Some sections, as noted already, are just summaries of books or articles, with a sentence or two adding Gramsci’s own observations. Other sections are much longer and coherent, dealing at length with such themes as the role of intellectuals, the critique of the ideas of Benedetto Croce, the history of the Italian Risorgimento, or problems of philosophy. The English SPN is therefore a much more tidied-up text, which brings together sections from different notebooks under headings such as ‘State and Civil Society’ or ‘The Modern Prince’ which are indeed themes that Gramsci discusses, but in the full version of the Notebooks they are discussed and presented in a much more fragmentary way.

For these reasons, the Prison Notebooks are a classic text like no other, especially when one takes into account the conditions under which they were written, and the political as well as the personal context of the notes which Gramsci penned in the twenty-nine notebooks (plus the four translation ones) which constitute the work. The letters which Gramsci wrote from prison, mainly to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, as well as to his wife Julia Schucht, are an indispensable aid to understanding Gramsci’s personal and intellectual preoccupations during the eleven years of his imprisonment. Giuseppe Vacca is right to point out, in his study of Gramsci’s life and thoughts, that ‘the correspondence forms an important key to help in the reading of the notebooks: in some cases they summarize the contents of the notebooks, in others they follow the development or anticipate the lines of research in the notebooks’ (Vacca 2012, xv). As Gramsci wrote to Julia in a letter of 25 January 1936, written after he had been released from the prison in Turi, and was in a clinic in Rome, though still under police supervision and control, ‘ … since 1926, immediately after my arrest, when my existence was abruptly and with not a little brutality impelled in a direction determined by external forces … the limits of my freedom have been restricted to my inner life and my will has merely become the will to resist’ (LP2, 353). In the same letter, describing his train journey to the clinic in Rome, and urging Julia to make the journey from the Soviet Union to Italy (which in the end she did not make), Gramsci wrote that ‘after such a long time, after so many events, whose real meaning has perhaps in great part eluded me, after so many years of a wretched, compressed life, swathed in darkness and petty misfortunes … I have changed a great deal’. As he explained, ‘I have been cut off from the world for ten years (what a terrifying experience I had in the train, after six years of seeing only the same roofs, the same walls, the same grim faces, when I saw that during this time the vast world had continued to exist with its meadows, its woods, the common people, swarms of children, certain trees, certain vegetable gardens, but especially how struck I was at seeing myself in a mirror after so much time; I immediately returned to the carabinieri’s side)’ (LP2, 354).

Despite what he wrote in this letter about events whose real meaning had perhaps in great part escaped him, the Prison Notebooks are not an abstract text containing meditations on politics and philosophy with no reference to current developments or to the epochal transformations occurring at the time. In one sense they can be read as an analysis of the defeat of revolutionary aspirations in Italy and in Europe more generally in the period after the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. Gramsci sought to explain the victory of fascism in Italy and the failure of the working-class movement to oppose its seizure of power and political victory. The Prison Notebooks are in part an attempt to work through the implications of this defeat and to sketch out an alternative political strategy for the working-class movement in the broadest sense, in the light of the structure of modern liberal-democratic societies with their complex range of practices and institutions (civil society) so different from the society in which the Bolshevik Revolution had taken place in Russia. Yet the Prison Notebooks contain also, in a cryptic and Aesopian sense, a critique of Stalinism and authoritarian communism of the Bolshevik type, and Gramsci’s political development, even under prison conditions, was to lead him to distance himself from the model of revolution imposed by the RCP (Russian Communist Party) on communist parties throughout Europe and the world. In a letter of 27 February 1933, again to his sister-in-law Tatiana, Gramsci reflected on the tribunal which had sentenced him and on the conditions of his imprisonment, and very strangely included his wife Julia (‘Julca’ in this letter) among those who in a sense had contributed to his incarceration:

I was sentenced on June 4, 1928, by the Special Tribunal, that is, by a specific collegium of men, which could nominally be indicated by name, address, and profession in civilian life. But this is a mistake. Those who sentenced me belong to a much vaster organism, of which the Special Tribunal was only the external and material expression, which compiled the legal documents for the sentence. I must say that among these ‘sentencers’ was also Julca. I believe, indeed I’m firmly convinced she was there unconsciously, and then there is a series of less unconscious people.

(LP2, 276)

This has led some authors to write of ‘Gramsci’s two prisons’, the obvious fascist one to which he was condemned by the Special Tribunal acting as agents for the fascist state, with the personal intervention of Mussolini, the Duce or Capo of that state, and the other more metaphorical prison of the international communist movement. This theme is pursued in the book by the scholar Franco Lo Piparo (2012).

Gramsci’s main correspondent in prison was Tatiana Schucht, his sister-in-law, but she in turn was in close communication with the eminent economist and close friend of Gramsci, Piero Sraffa, based in Cambridge (England), who received from Tania copies of Gramsci’s letters, which he then forwarded to Togliatti, who became leader of the PCd’I in exile and head of its foreign centre in Paris (Daniele 2011). Gramsci was aware of this, and realized that his dissent in prison from the political line which the communist movement (including the Italian party) took after 1929 was known through Sraffa to Togliatti and to the Comintern leaders in Moscow. This implies that his language in his letters (known to the Italian party centre in exile) and in his Notebooks (which of course were not known to them at the time they were being written) had to be doubly cryptic or Aesopian. Not only were his letters subject to fascist prison censorship, but were also being copied (by Tania) and forwarded to Sraffa and via him to the Italian party centre in exile. As for the Notebooks, the conditions under which they were written and the constant fear of their being impounded and censored imposed also limits on what could be written directly and openly, causing them to be written in a sort of coded language. While it may be true as some scholars argue that Gramsci’s term for Marxism, the philosophy of praxis, did express his activist and non-deterministic concept of Marxism (this is discussed in Chapter 6 below), it was also a term used to avoid any explicit mention of Marxism, and has to be explained at least partially by a wish to avoid penalties imposed by the censor.

How then did Gramsci write the Prison Notebooks, and how were they structured and written under the rigorous and repressive conditions of fascist imprisonment? Following Francioni’s work, it seems that Gramsci was only allowed three or at the most four notebooks in which to write in his cell at any one time (Francioni 1984). Francioni argues that in order to maximize the space available in which to write the notes, he would make a division of each notebook into two halves, starting a particular set of notes halfway through each notebook, and writing notes in more than one notebook at any one time. In this way each notebook could contain two sets of reflections and themes, which could be pursued simultaneously across more than one notebook, so that a topic written on in one notebook is then continued in another notebook. For example, ‘Appunti di filosofia’ (‘Notes on Philosophy’), starts in Notebook 4, and occupies the second half of the original notebook. Then ‘Notes on Philosophy II’ continues this strand of thought in Notebook 7, again starting halfway through the actual notebook, with further ‘Notes on Philosophy’, the third block, coming in Notebook 8, also starting at the halfway point of that notebook, so that there is a continuing series of reflections on this theme which appear in the full printed version of the notebooks in three different sections but represent a continuous thread of thought even though physically separated in the notebooks, because of the prison restrictions which forced Gramsci to write that way and maximize the writing space and pages available to him. None of this is evident to the reader of the English language edition of the SPN, but needs to be kept in mind in order to appreciate the nature and compositional methods of the original text.

We also need to be aware of two other features of the text of the Prison Notebooks, both of which are also ‘hidden’ from the reader of the English-language selections. Gramsci wrote several notes and blocks of notes. These notes he then copied out again, in many cases adding and extending the original material, and these revised and developed versions constituted the ‘special notebooks’, a term coined by him to distinguish these notebooks from the ‘miscellaneous’ ones. The earlier versions were then crossed out, while leaving the text perfectly legible through the lines deleting the text. This is the second feature of the Notebooks which is not evident from the English-language selections, the distinction between the special notebooks, each of which is dedicated to a particular theme, and which comprise revisions of notes written in their original form at an earlier stage, from the miscellaneous notebooks, which contain notes and remarks of a very diverse nature, juxtaposed with no regard to thematic continuity. In the Italian edition of the complete text, and also in the as yet incomplete English translation of the full text, a distinction is made between A, B and C texts. The A texts are those notes which Gramsci recopied and (in many cases) revised and developed for the later special notebooks, crossing out the earlier versions (the A texts), while the fuller revised notes are called the C texts. The notes which fall in the category of B notes are those which Gramsci did not cross out and revise for the special notebooks. In both the Italian (1975) and the English (as yet incomplete) versions of the full text of the Notebooks, the A notes are printed in a smaller typeface, to make it clear that they reappear in a fuller version at some other point in the Notebooks, with reference given to the place of their later reappearance. Hence in the full version of the Prison Notebooks there is a considerable amount of repetition, given that Gramsci repeats and extends many of his earlier notes, reassembling them into the special notebooks which are dedicated to particular themes and in that way distinguished from the miscellaneous notebooks. Gramsci started the special notebooks in 1932, three years after having written the heading for the first (‘miscellaneous’) notebook in February 1929. Of the thirty-three notebooks, excluding from that total the four given over to translation exercises, seventeen are special ones, sometimes given a title by Gramsci to indicate the themes treated in those notebooks, and these special notebooks start with number 10, devoted to ‘The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce’, number 11 with the title (this one not given by Gramsci himself) ‘Introduction to the Study of Philosophy’, followed by number 12, ‘Notes and Scattered Thoughts for a Group of Essays on the History of Intellectuals’. This notebook was followed by number 13, a substantial discussion of the politics of Machiavelli, which is also the subject of the much shorter Notebook 18. Two of the specials are devoted to the topic of culture (Notebooks 16 and 26), to which could be added the short Notebook 21 on ‘Problems of Italian National Culture: 1 – Popular Literature’. The substantial Notebook 19 deals with problems of the Italian Risorgimento (though this one was not given that title by Gramsci), and Notebook 22 is devoted to the theme of Americanism and Fordism. The final special notebooks were written in the years 1934 to 1935, when Gramsci’s health was giving out, and these are much shorter notebooks, concluding with the brief Notebook 29, ‘Notes for an Introduction to the Study of Grammar’, in which Gramsci went back to the philological studies of his student years.

From what has been said so far about the Notebooks, a number of things should be evident, the first of which is the enormous range of topics discussed in them, in both the miscellaneous and the special notebooks. These topics range from a discussion of Canto 10 of Dante’s Divine Comedy (this is in the fourth notebook) through a thorough critique of the philosophy of Croce, the history and historiography of the Italian Risorgimento, as well as analyses of the structure of modern society under the heading of ‘Americanism and Fordism’, and the politics and significance of Machiavelli. Another important topic is the nature of culture and the significance of popular culture, while another crucial theme is the role of intellectuals and their significance not only in Italian history but more generally their role in both preserving and opposing the existing order (the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectuals, discussed in Chapter 3 below). And this variety of topics listed so far does not include the diverse topics discussed in the miscellaneous notebooks, under such recurring rubrics as ‘Past and Present’ and ‘Types of Journal’. While the Prison Notebooks therefore are certainly a classic of political theory, it is clear that they form a classic very different in nature, in form and structure, from other classics in the canon of political theory, from Plato’s Republic to Hobbes’s Leviathan or Rousseau’s Social Contract, to name but a few. The reader confronting the Prison Notebooks for the first time is faced with a maze of seemingly disparate topics, and it is not surprising that words like ‘labyrinth’ and ‘archipelago’ have been used to describe the text and the problems facing the reader. As Francioni points out, the Prison Notebooks ‘are not a systematic work: while the substance of their theoretical and conceptual foundation is profoundly unitary, the notebooks nevertheless have in great part the form of an ensemble of fragments’ (Francioni 1984, 22). This fragmentary character is less evident from the English-language Selections (SPN) which piece together extracts from the various notebooks under headings given by their editors such as ‘Notes on Italian History’ and ‘The Modern Prince’. This certainly has the advantage of imposing a certain unity on the text, and making it in some ways easier for the reader to read the Prison Notebooks as though they were a systematic treatment of issues of politics, history and philosophy. Indeed, the first Italian edition of the Prison Notebooks treated the text in this way, putting together parts of the Notebooks in a series of volumes each of which dealt with one particular theme. These volumes took notes from the full text and assembled them thematically, with reference to the topic signalled by the title of each volume, so that, for example, all of Gramsci’s notes relating to the Italian Risorgimento appeared in the volume with that title. It was only in 1975 that the full edition of the Prison Notebooks was published, edited by Valentino Gerratana, and this reproduced the Notebooks not thematically but chronologically, following the text of each notebook in its entirety, and seeking to arrange the series of notebooks in the chronological order in which they were written. This edition has been up to now the definitive edition, though a new edizione nazionale is in the course of production, which makes a clearer distinction between the miscellaneous and the special notebooks, and includes the full text of the four containing Gramsci’s translations from English, German and Russian. This new national edition of the Notebooks is in three parts, the first part consisting of the translation notebooks, the second part of the ‘miscellaneous’ ones, and the third devoted to the special notebooks, and with no difference in font between A texts and C texts (Cospito 2011b). The English language translation of the full text of the Prison Notebooks has so far only covered the first eight of the twenty-nine notebooks, and follows the Gerratana edition, with extremely full notes and scholarly apparatus provided by the editor Joseph Buttigieg (QE1, 2 and 3: 1992, 1996, 2007).

The approach to the Prison Notebooks thus presents problems distinct from those involved in other classic texts of political theory and from other great books. Instead of a text destined and prepared for publication, with a coherent argument deployed from beginning to end, as one could say was the case, for example, with Hobbes’s Leviathan, we have a text which as Francioni says was written in a ‘spiral’ method (Francioni 1984, 22), with concepts introduced, revised, then repeated in a different way. For instance, one of the concepts for which Gramsci is best known is the idea of hegemony, yet there is in the Prison Notebooks no systematic exposition of this concept, which is introduced on several occasions by reference to particular historical and political examples, rather than in a general and abstract way. Francioni talks of Gramsci’s method as that of an ‘analogical model’, in which Gramsci proceeds by ‘isolating specific historical phenomena which offer similarities with contemporary reality that has to be interpreted’ (Francioni 1984, 70). Francioni points out that, for example, the category of hegemony is developed in the Notebooks in this way – the concept is tested, so to speak, through Gramsci’s analysis of the class relationships and struggles in the period of the Italian Risorgimento (Francioni 1984, 71). Nevertheless, despite the fragmentary and ‘spiral’ nature of the Notebooks, much more evident, as we have said, in the full edition of the Notebooks than in the ‘reconstructed’ English-language selections volume, there is a structure and certain basic themes, which were identified both by Gramsci himself and by later commentators like Francioni on the basis of their careful philological and textual investigations. We have seen that in his letter to Tania of 19 March 1927 Gramsci announced his intention to write something für ewig, something permanent or lasting, and the four central themes which he announced in that letter. Two years later, in a letter to Tania of 25 March 1929 Gramsci explained that he now wanted to focus on three principal topics. He wrote that he wanted no more books sent to him unless he specifically asked for them ‘because only if I myself ask for them will the books fit into the intellectual plan I want to construct. I’ve decided to concern myself chiefly and take notes on these three subjects: (1) Italian history in the nineteenth century, with special attention to the formation and development of intellectual groups; (2) the theory of history and historiography; (3) Americanism and Fordism’ (LP1, 257). This letter shows clearly Gramsci’s focus on problems of history and historiography, as well as his principal concern with the role of intellectuals and intellectual groups, in Italian history as well as more generally, and the theme of Americanism and Fordism, as indicating his desire to make sense of modernity and the nature of economy and society in the contemporary world.

Yet after the letter of 1929 just quoted, Gramsci came again to revise and extend his scheme of work. Francioni notes that in Notebook 3 there is ‘an extension of the field of research which breaks down and puts in crisis the programme of February’ (Francioni 1984, 71). New rubrics appear in that third notebook, dealing with, among other topics, the history of the subaltern classes, the role of intellectuals in Germany, France and Italy, and popular literature in various countries. In Notebook 8 (discussed further below), there is a further list of topics given by Gramsci himself, under the heading ‘Groupings of Subjects’, and this list itself is preceded by two paragraphs which start by stating the ‘provisional character – like memoranda – of these kind of notes and jottings’, with Gramsci writing (to himself? to any future readers?) that such notes could result in ‘independent essays, but not in a comprehensive organic work’ (QE3, 231; Q8, 935). Gramsci insists in this paragraph that these notes often involve assertions which have not been verified, so that they are merely ‘rough first drafts’. Further research, Gramsci wrote, might lead to these assertions being abandoned, and even being replaced by exactly contrary assertions (QE3, 231; Q8, 935). This suggests the hypothetical or provisional quality of the material contained in the Notebooks, which again affects the way in which we read this text, since the analysis developed by Gramsci is often, so to speak, him ‘thinking aloud’, or writing notes which reflect his grappling with a series of problems, rather than giving the considered definitive result of a conclusively meditated process of thought. This is one aspect rightly highlighted by a recent study of the Notebooks, by Fabio Frosini, who writes of ‘the open and provisional dimension, at the limit hypothetical, of the thought that, almost surprised in the very act of its generation, we find in the Notebooks’ (Frosini 2010, 16).

The Notebooks, then, are a text written under conditions of imprisonment in which Gramsci’s access to books was restricted, in the sense that he could only have a limited number in his cell at any one time. Francioni offers a helpful periodization of the writing of these twenty-nine notebooks, plus the four used by Gramsci for translation exercises (Francioni 1984, 127–29). Francioni divides the process of writing the notebooks into four periods, the first of which started in February 1929 (as we have seen, over a year after Gramsci was given his prison sentence), and lasted until November 1930. This period involved work on four translation notebooks, and on eleven theoretical ones, of which two (Notebooks 1 and 3) were completed by November 1930, while others were either not filled or only just started. This first period ended in November/December 1930, with what Francioni calls a ‘phase of transition’ (Francioni 1984, 128), that is to say transition towards the reformulation and extension of Gramsci’s initial project as sketched out in his letters to Tania of 19 March 1927 and 25 March 1929, quoted above.

This reformulation opens a second period of work on the Notebooks, covering the years from the end of 1930 to the spring (March/April) of 1932. This reformulation found expression in the early pages of Notebook 8, mentioned above, which opens with the heading ‘Loose Notes and Jottings for a History of Italian Intellectuals’, followed by a paragraph headed ‘Principal Essays’. This list of essays starts with ‘Development of Italian intellectuals up to 1870: different periods’, and includes such topics as ‘The medieval commune: the economic-corporative phase of the state’, ‘Cosmopolitan function of Italian intellectuals up to the 18th century’, and ends with the topic ‘Machiavelli as a technician of politics and as a complete politician or a politician in deed’. After that Gramsci added the words ‘Appendices: Americanism and Fordism’ (QE3, 231–32; Q8, 935–36). In turn this agenda for intellectual work is followed in Notebook 8 by the heading ‘Groupings of Subjects’, which gives a further list of ten areas of research. This list starts with ‘1. Intellectuals: Scholarly issues’, followed by ‘2. Machiavelli’, and includes as number 4 a theme which was treated extensively in a later notebook, namely ‘Introduction to the study of philosophy and critical notes on a Popular Manual of Sociology’. As we shall see, this ‘Popular Manual’ was Gramsci’s coded name for a text by the Russian Bolshevik leader Nicolai Bukharin on ‘Historical Materialism’, by reference to which Gramsci criticized Bukharin’s mechanical and (as Gramsci saw it) deterministic form of Marxism. Francioni dates the writing of the first list (the ‘Loose Notes and Jottings for a History of Italian Intellectuals’) to a date between November and December 1930, while he suggests that the second list (‘Groupings of Subjects’) was written between March and April 1932, and has the character of a reflection or ordering of work already done, rather than a plan for work still to be embarked on. What is clear is indeed the reformulation of the initial plan of study, and a broadening out of Gramsci’s work. Notebooks 5 and 6 fall in this period. If Notebook 5 is what Francioni calls ‘the laboratory on the intellectuals’, Notebook 6 is called by him ‘the notebook on the State’, in which Gramsci began his attempt to develop a new conception of the state. In a letter to Tania of 3 August 1931 Gramsci wrote that ‘right now I no longer have a true programme of studies and work and of course this was bound to happen’. He explained that he had set himself ‘the aim of reflecting on a particular series of problems, but it was inevitable that at a certain stage these reflections would of necessity move into a phase of documentation and then to a phase of work and elaboration that requires large libraries’ (LP2, 51–52). Nevertheless, he continued, he was not ‘completely wasting [his] time’:

One of the subjects that has interested me most during recent years has been that of delineating several characteristic moments in the history of Italian intellectuals. This interest was born on the one hand from the desire to delve more deeply into the concept of the State and, on the other to understand more fully certain aspects of the historical development of the Italian people.

(LP2, 52)

This joint theme of the role of intellectuals and the need to redefine the nature of the state was taken up in another letter to Tania a few weeks later, when Gramsci wrote on 7 September 1931 that

I greatly amplify the idea of what an intellectual is and do not confine myself to the current notion that refers only to the preeminent intellectuals. My study also leads to certain definitions of the concept of the State that is usually understood as a political Society (or dictatorship, or coercive apparatus meant to mould the popular mass in accordance with the type of production and economy at a given moment) and not as a balance between the political Society and the civil Society (or the hegemony of a social group over the entire national society, exercised through the so-called private organisations, such as the Church, the unions, the schools, etc.), and it is within the civil society that the intellectuals operate (Ben. Croce, for example, is a sort of lay pope and he is a very effective instrument of hegemony even if from time to time he comes into conflict with this or that government, etc.).

(LP2, 67)

So it is evident that in this second period Gramsci had expanded his original plan even further, and that what was involved in the Notebooks was a rethinking of politics and the nature of the state, connected as always with his preoccupation with the role of intellectuals and the particular nature of Italian history. What Francioni calls the third period of the writing of the Prison Notebooks extended from the spring of 1932 to the end of 1933, by which time Gramsci had left the prison at Turi and (from August 1933) found himself, still under surveillance and prison-like conditions, in the slightly less repressive environment of the Clinica Cusumano in Formia. This period is the one which Francioni calls the most intense and the most demanding of the work Gramsci carried out in his notebooks. It was in that period that he abandoned his translation exercises and started on the first of the special notebooks, which (as explained above) were each designed to focus on a particular topic, and which in many cases saw Gramsci rewrite earlier notes (the so-called A texts) which he then crossed out when he had completed the later version. This period saw him working on ten notebooks, of which four were special notebooks, including Notebooks 10 and 11, the most philosophical ones, concerned respectively with the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, named by Gramsci in the letter of 7 September 1931 as a ‘sort of lay pope’, and with the theory of historical materialism as expounded by Bukharin in his book Historical Materialism, or as Gramsci refers to it ‘the popular manual of sociology’. Francioni suggests that taken together with Notebook 11, and understood in the context of an overall vision of the philosophical work of 1932, Notebook 10 on Croce can be understood as ‘the moment of greatest theoretical depth on the part of Gramsci, halfway through the journey of the Prison Notebooks’ (Francioni 1984, 109). In the same year (1932) there were also some highly significant letters to Tania in which Gramsci explained his preoccupation with Croce’s work, and his criticism of this most important thinker who for Gramsci represented the type of traditional intellectual who exercised a profound influence in Italy and well beyond.

The fourth and final period of the writing of the Prison Notebooks runs from the beginning of 1934, by which time Gramsci was already in Formia, to the summer of 1935, when his health was giving out after nine years in the fascist prisons. These two years saw Gramsci working on thirteen special notebooks and two ‘miscellaneous’ ones, but only Notebook 16 was completed. In March 1933 Gramsci underwent a severe crisis of health, described by him briefly in a letter to Tania of 14 March 1933: ‘Precisely last Tuesday, early in the morning, as I was getting out of bed, I fell to the floor without being able to stand up by my own efforts. I’ve been in bed all these days, and very very weak. I spent the first day in a somewhat hallucinatory state, if I can put it that way, and I was unable to connect ideas with ideas and ideas with the appropriate words’ (LP2, 281). A few days later (21 March 1933) he wrote to Tania again, describing some of the manifestations of what he had gone through: ‘my body is traversed by twinges and by sudden ticks in the most various parts but especially in the legs and arms, and by distensions and contractions; I have the feeling of being “electrified”, so to speak, and any abrupt or unexpected movement provokes a rapid sequence of twinges and upsurges of blood (my heart jumps into my throat, as the saying goes)’ (LP2, 282). Francioni says that this last period of Gramsci’s work on the Notebooks is marked by a greater fragmentation of the work, and by the fact that several of the special notebooks are unfinished, and often stop after a few pages. The reworking of the A texts in this period is limited to rather minor changes, compared with the more substantive changes which those texts underwent in the notebooks of the third period. Having said that, this last period saw Gramsci working on two substantive notebooks on the Italian Risorgimento (Notebook 19) and on Americanism and Fordism (Notebook 22) where he rewrote the A texts, the original version of his notes on these topics, even if without any substantive changes. The last of the notebooks, number 29, seems to have been written in April 1935, and Gramsci gave it the title ‘Notes for an Introduction to the Study of Grammar’. This was a short notebook, and was the last text on which Gramsci was able to work.

In August 1935 Gramsci left the Cusumano clinic for the Clinica Quisisana in Rome, where he was to remain for the final months of his life, in which he sought permission to leave Italy to rejoin his family in the Soviet Union, or, if such permission was not granted, to be allowed to go to Sardinia. Yet neither the ‘big project’ of emigration to the USSR nor the plan to move to Sardinia came to anything. Gramsci had at one stage hoped that in the light of better relations between Italy and the Soviet Union his release could be agreed by diplomatic means between the two states, perhaps in terms of an exchange between him and some Italian prisoners held in Russia. Yet here again Gramsci was victim of the two prisons of fascism on the one hand, and Stalinism on the other, perhaps even three prisons if one adds the foreign centre of the PCd’I as a separate entity. Mussolini was reluctant to agree to Gramsci’s release because it could be construed as a victory for the international campaign that had been launched to secure Gramsci’s release. This campaign had been given renewed life by the publication of the report on Gramsci’s health, which announced that it was unlikely his health could resist any more years of prison life. Gramsci remained insistent that he would not ask for pardon from Mussolini, and so the only way in which his release was acceptable was through a diplomatic arrangement between the two states. Yet for the Soviet regime and the Comintern, by now firmly subordinated to the foreign-policy requirements of the Soviet state, there was no real interest in pursuing negotiations for Gramsci’s release, even in the context of the exchange with the Italian detainees held in the Soviet Union. This was the period of the start of the ‘Popular Front’ against fascism (announced at the Seventh Comintern Congress of 1935), so as relations between Italy and the USSR were cooling down, this meant that there was less chance of any negotiations between Italy and the Soviet Union. Finally, it seems that Togliatti, now leader of the PCd’I in exile, knew of Gramsci’s reservations towards what had been up to 1935 the policy of the international communist movement, namely the sectarian policy of ‘class against class’, which treated social democracy as the left wing of fascism and therefore to be treated as an enemy rather than as a potential ally in the fight against fascism.

Indeed, while in prison in Turi Gramsci had come to open opposition with his party comrades who followed the PCd’I (and Comintern) line. It seems that news of this dissension on the part of Gramsci towards the party line had emerged and reached the foreign centre of the party in Paris. Of course at this stage no one knew what was in the Prison Notebooks. However, it was now clear that Gramsci was anything but an ‘orthodox’ communist, since he had developed his idea (and shared it with his fellow communist prisoners) that the aim of communist and socialist politics must be for a Constituent Assembly, in other ways the restoration or achievement of democracy, rather than the Comintern line (certainly up to 1935) that revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat were the goals to be fought for (on this see Vacca 2012, ch. 8). While in prison in Turi, Gramsci had discussed with his fellow prisoners the strategy to be adopted in the struggle against fascism, and had articulated his dissent from the prevailing Comintern line, which the PCd’I had accepted. Up to 1935, this was the so-called ‘class against class’ line which combined a belief in the imminent collapse of the capitalist system with a sectarian hostility to social democracy, seen as an agent of capitalism with which there could be no thought of alliance or joint action against fascism. This changed after 1935 with the coming of the Popular Front strategy, which completely transformed the political line of the international communist movement, laying the stress on a broad popular alliance with social democrats (and others) to fight fascism. It seems that Gramsci’s political analysis in prison was critical of both ‘class against class’ and, to a lesser extent, of the Popular Front. Gramsci’s slogan of the need for a Constituent Assembly has to be interpreted, so argues Vacca, in terms of the general political analysis developed in the Prison Notebooks (Vacca 2012). This dissent from the party line led to hostility to Gramsci on the part of other communist prisoners in Turi, and news of Gramsci’s ‘heterodoxy’, or ‘revisionism’, as Vacca calls it, was communicated to the PCd’I in exile. Terracini, one of those sentenced along with Gramsci by the Special Tribunal in 1928, wrote to the party centre in exile on 2 March 1931 that ‘the rumour that Antonio radically disagrees with the line of the party is current and growing stronger in our groups in prison, with repercussions you can imagine’ (quoted in Spriano 1979, 71).

In opposition to the Comintern (and PCd’I) line of the Third Period (before the switch to the Popular Front strategy) that fascism was weakening and that the expected crisis of the capitalist system put the idea of a proletarian revolution on the agenda as the goal to be fought for, Gramsci’s analysis pointed to the relative success of fascism in Italy in implanting itself and the possibility that through its corporatism it could achieve both industrial and agrarian reform. Gramsci in his notebooks envisaged the possibility that ‘if the state were proposing to impose an economic direction by which the production of savings ceased to be a “function” of a parasitic class and became a function of the productive organism itself, such a hypothetical development would be progressive, and could have its part in a vast plan of integral rationalisation’ (SPN 315; Q22, §14, 2176; see Vacca 2012, 144). Hence expectations of the imminent collapse of fascism and the possibility of proletarian revolution against the capitalist system were based on a false analysis. The call for a Constituent Assembly fitted in with the broader political analysis developed in the Prison Notebooks, based on key ideas of a war of position, a broad struggle to achieve hegemony, to develop an anti-fascist movement of industrial and agricultural workers, as opposed to the war of manoeuvre, the idea of a sudden anti-capitalist (and anti-fascist) offensive with the objective of the immediate transition to proletarian revolution. These key concepts of Gramscian political analysis will be explained fully in the following chapters. It is clear that in his discussions with his fellow prisoners Gramsci explained his idea that the Communist Party should put forward the slogan of a Constituent Assembly, and that this meant a broad alliance fighting in the immediate period not for proletarian revolution but for the restoration of democracy. This was seen as a demand not for the period after the defeat of fascism but as an integral element in the struggle against fascism. It might be thought that this demand for a Constituent Assembly was quite in line with the new (after 1935) line of the Popular Front, and in a letter to Togliatti (leader of the PCd’I) written on 27 April 1937, two days after Gramsci’s death, a fellow communist Mario Montagnana reported that ‘the friend [i.e. Gramsci] said that “in Italy the Popular Front is the Constituent Assembly”’ (quoted in Vacca 2012, 156). However it seems that Gramsci thought that the Popular Front strategy in its orthodox implementation was too much a defensive strategy or perspective. The Popular Front was for him not just a slogan for the transitional period between the fall of fascism and an expected or hoped-for proletarian revolution, but represented an aspiration to a new form of popular political action, rooted in the mass of the Italian people, bringing together industrial and agricultural workers. In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci had developed an entirely new concept of democracy and political action, quite different from orthodox communism and critical of the form which that had taken in the Soviet Union.

These matters are still the subject of lively debate among specialists and historians, and there are differences between them on the topic of the extent of Gramsci’s disagreements with the official party line and whether it led to his ostracism by his fellow communist prisoners and to Gramsci’s withdrawal from the political discussions he had had with them while in prison in Turi. Paolo Spriano puts it well when he admits that ‘the discussion in any case is still open’, while insisting on the ‘wholly convincing’ nature of ‘his [Gramsci’s] criticism of the hasty preparation of an insurrectional coup which would have no likelihood of coming to pass.’ However, because of the deep divisions caused by his criticisms of the party line, Gramsci ‘found himself virtually isolated, left on one side, by the majority of the members of the communist group in Turi’ (Spriano 1979, 70). It is clear then that the Prison Notebooks, despite their necessarily fragmented form, have a series of coherent themes and that their subject matter is not an abstract political treatise but one concerned with intensely practical and topical questions. Gramsci was reflecting on the implications for political struggle of the defeat of the revolutionary wave of post-First World War Europe, and developing an entirely original set of political concepts to analyse the possibility of democratic and radical politics in modern complex societies. Understanding the labyrinth of the Prison Notebooks thus has to involve some understanding of the political context in which they were written and the themes, however cryptic, which Gramsci addressed in the course of his political analysis. Of course, the wide scope of the Notebooks goes beyond a narrow concept of politics to tackle problems of culture, philosophy and history, as well as the topic of revolutionary political action in the context of states and complex societies totally different from that in which the Bolsheviks had come to power in 1917. But to see the Prison Notebooks as an abstract theoretical text divorced from the problems of the day would be a distorted and limited perspective through which to analyse the concepts developed in them.

As we have seen, in August 1935 Gramsci was in the Quisisana clinic in Rome, in deteriorating health as a result of nearly ten years of incarceration, and still under strict police supervision, even in the clinic. In the words of Spriano, ‘At the Quisisana clinic, too, the surveillance was continuous and watchful to a degree which might seem almost unbelievable, were it not that irreproachable witnesses have recalled it’ (Spriano 1979, 106). Work on the Notebooks stopped in 1935, and it seems that initially Gramsci’s plan was to move to Sardinia on completion of his prison sentence, which was to come on 20 April 1937. Seen as an enemy, obviously, by the fascist regime which had put him in prison, and seen as expendable or at least not a priority by the Soviet regime, then at the high (or low) point of Stalinism, and viewed as dangerously heterodox and as a critic of the party line by his party comrades and the leaders of the party in exile, Gramsci could not count on diplomatic forces or party support for his struggle to be at the least left free to go to Sardinia, or in the optimal context to be allowed to go to the Soviet Union to join his wife and children. On 25 March 1937 his friend (and crucial intermediary between Gramsci’s sister-in-law Tania and the party centre in exile in Paris) Piero Sraffa visited Gramsci in the clinic in Rome, and this was to be their last meeting. After this meeting Sraffa then drew up the draft of a request to Mussolini to give authorization that Gramsci be allowed to move to Russia to rejoin his wife and children, since, in the words of the draft, the state of the applicant (Gramsci) ‘is such as to prevent him doing any useful work, even of an exclusively intellectual nature, and to make any form of social life intolerable, except with relatives brought in to help him’ (Spriano 1979, 179). This draft was dated 18 April 1937. On 25 April 1937 Gramsci received notice that the surveillance to which he was subject would be suspended, but on that very day he suffered a stroke from which he died two days later, at 4.10 in the morning of 27 April 1937.

How then did his Notebooks get saved and preserved, to constitute the text of one of the classics of twentieth-century political thought? They were removed from the clinic by Tania, to whom Sraffa wrote urging her to put them in a ‘safe place’, which Vacca says was the Soviet embassy in Rome, where they were placed by Tania no later than 5 May 1937. This account is challenged by another scholar, Franco Lo Piparo, who claims that the safe place was not in fact the Soviet embassy but the safe of the Banca Commerciale in Milan, and Lo Piparo suggests that the manuscripts of the Notebooks found their way to the Comintern archives in Moscow in April 1941, after having been first in the hands of Gramsci’s wife Giulia (Julia) in Moscow, where they arrived in December 1938. Before that, according to Lo Piparo, the Notebooks had been ‘for nearly a year and a half in places not clearly identifiable between Italy and Russia’ (Lo Piparo 2013, 44). He suggests that before his death Gramsci had been concerned that the notebooks should not fall into the hands of Togliatti, of whom Gramsci had become mistrustful, blaming him for a letter (signed by Grieco) received in 1928, which exposed Gramsci to the risk of a longer prison sentence because of its indiscreet revelations. Nevertheless, again following Lo Piparo, it seems rather that Togliatti and Sraffa together kept tabs on the manuscripts of the Notebooks in the sense that they were keen that the communist authorities in Moscow did not scrutinize the Notebooks, because of their heterodox nature and the fact that, as Lo Piparo puts it, they contained passages ‘all too clearly not in harmony with Soviet communism of those years or with the political line of the PCd’I’ (Lo Piparo 2013, 108). Lo Piparo even thinks there is a missing notebook to be added to the ones currently known, though it seems this hypothesis is not supported by other scholars.

From Russia, where from the house of Julia Schucht the manuscripts were transferred in 1941 to the Comintern archives, the Notebooks made the return journey to Italy in 1945, again through the agency of Togliatti. But it took several years before the Notebooks were published in Italy, and, as already noted, their first appearance was not in their totality, arranged in the chronological order in which they had been written, but in a series which arranged the notebooks in six separate thematic volumes. These volumes appeared in the years 1948 to 1951, starting with the first on Historical Materialism and the Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, followed in 1949 by three volumes on The Risorgimento, The Intellectuals and the Organization of Culture and Notes on Machiavelli, on Politics and on the Modern State, concluding with Literature and National Life (1950) and finally with Past and Present in 1951. It was not until 1975 that the full edition of the Notebooks appeared, edited by Valentino Gerratana, who attempted to reconstruct the chronology of the Notebooks and to reproduce them as they were written, with full editorial apparatus tracing the references to the books and articles which Gramsci used, or referred to, in the course of writing. The Gerratana edition also makes a clear distinction between the A texts, those which Gramsci revised and rewrote into C texts, and then crossing out (but leaving perfectly legible) the original A text, and those texts labelled B texts which were left in their original form and not revised or extended. This has remained the standard text up to now, and has been used for the as yet incomplete Buttigieg English translation of the full text of the Prison Notebooks, which at the time of writing has covered the first eight of the twenty-nine notebooks (leaving aside the four translation notebooks, and neglecting the hypothesis put forward by Lo Piparo that there could be an as yet undiscovered notebook). This Gerratana edition is now being complemented, or perhaps replaced, by a new edizione nazionale of the Notebooks, currently in the course of production, and this new edition includes the four notebooks which Gramsci filled with translations.

Thus we can conclude with a few observations to summarize the nature of this classic text which the present study will be attempting to elucidate in the chapters that follow. In one sense it is a miracle that the Prison Notebooks have come down to us at all, given the dire conditions in which they were written, the oppressive surveillance which pressed on Gramsci while he was compiling them, and the heroic and sustained physical and mental efforts required to sustain coherent and original thought under such conditions, not to mention the more distant and perhaps metaphorical prison or disciplinary structure of orthodox communism in its more rigid Stalinized form which dominated the communist movement for nearly all the period of the composition of the Notebooks. The Notebooks were taken by Gramsci from Turi to Formia only because some of his fellow prisoners distracted the prison warders so that he could slip the notebooks into his suitcase. It could easily have been the case that they were confiscated and destroyed during the period of his imprisonment. Similar observations could be made about the journey of the Notebooks from Italy (taken from the Quisisana clinic by Tania immediately after Gramsci’s death) to the Soviet Union, but it seems that their ‘heterodox’ character was not known by the Comintern guardians, perhaps because of Togliatti’s intervention or protection, despite Gramsci’s suspicions of Togliatti and his (Gramsci’s) divergence from the official communist line to which Togliatti had to adhere. These Notebooks could so easily have been buried, or destroyed, in the Comintern archive. Even after their post-war return to Italy, it took several years for the Notebooks to see the light of day in a form accessible to a wider public, and even longer for the complete Gerratana edition to appear in 1975, nearly fifty years after the date of 8 February 1929 posted by Gramsci at the beginning of the first notebook. Not only are the Prison Notebooks a posthumous text, not seen or perhaps intended for publication by the author, at least in the form in which they have come down to us, but they constitute a text which took a long time to see the light of day.

Gramsci himself, in the pages of the Prison Notebooks, offered some reflections on how to study a text which the author himself had not revised for publication. This paragraph of the Notebooks is headed ‘Questions of Method’ (SPN 382–86; Q16, §2, 1840–44), and evidently it deals with how to study the work of Marx, and also with the question of the relationship between Marx and Engels. Gramsci wrote that if one wishes to study ‘the birth of a conception of the world which has never been systematically expounded by its founder’, then some preliminary detailed philological work has to be done. It would be necessary first of all to ‘carry out as a preliminary a meticulous philological work, carried out with the most scrupulous accuracy, scientific honesty and intellectual loyalty and without any preconceptions, apriorism or parti pris’ He also insisted on the need to distinguish between those works which the author had completed and published, and those ‘which remain unpublished, because incomplete, and those which were published by a friend or disciple, not without revisions, rewritings, cuts, etc., or in other words not without the active intervention of a publisher or editor’. Gramsci warned that ‘the content of posthumous works has to be taken with great discretion and caution’ and must not be seen as definitive, ‘but only as material still being elaborated and still provisional’. Gramsci insisted that in studying a thinker, especially one whose conception of the world lacked a systematic exposition, the ‘search for the leitmotif, for the rhythm of the thought as it develops, should be more important than that for single casual affirmations and isolated aphorisms’ (SPN 384; Q16, §2, 1841–42). While Gramsci was referring explicitly to the works of Marx he was probably thinking also of his own writings, and this suggestion is reinforced by the fact that on several occasions in the course of his Notebooks he explicitly emphasized their provisional character, the idea that they were notes developed in the absence of a proper library and that they might need to be modified and even abandoned in the light of further research which was not possible in his present conditions. Hence we are dealing, in the pages that follow, with a text that is in many respects unique, not just because of the circumstances in which it was written and composed, but because of the labyrinthine and spiral nature of Gramsci’s meditations on politics, history, culture, literature, religion, education and a whole host of other disparate topics. The guiding leitmotif, to follow Gramsci’s own injunction, has to be discovered and analysed. Certainly one such leitmotif is the reflection on the defeat of the working-class movement after the First World War and the rise and hegemony of fascism, and the nature of the historic (and organic) crisis of twentieth-century Europe to which fascism provided one answer, if only temporary and contradictory. How could a new form of politics be developed, one adequate to the conditions of modernity evident in the twentieth-century? And in what ways was a new culture necessary for such a form of politics, and how too could that be fostered and developed? These are some of the themes which Gramsci analysed in his Notebooks, and which need to be clarified in the exposition of the following chapters. In addition, one question has to be posed in the course of the exposition and analysis: given that the world has changed fundamentally since the period in which the Prison Notebooks were written, what do the concepts developed in that text have to say to those of us living in the twenty-first century?

Taking, then, the SPN as the entry point for the study of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, while recognizing the particular and in some ways limited nature of those selections, the following exposition seeks firstly to explain and clarify the key concepts of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, secondly to place them in some kind of historical context and to develop a critical analysis of the material, to show the originality and new perspectives on politics, culture, philosophy, opened up by Gramsci’s thought, and finally, in the light of new scholarship, Italian and international, to assess in what ways this classic text speaks to the conditions of twenty-first-century politics, a world far removed from that of the 1920s and 1930s in whose harsh circumstances the Prison Notebooks were composed.

Suggestions for Further Reading

There is a very useful guide to the terminology and concepts of the Prison Notebooks in the Dizionario gramsciano: 1926–37, edited by Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (Rome: Carocci, 2009). The most detailed researches on the way in which Gramsci wrote the Notebooks and the dating of the Notebooks are those by the Italian scholar Gianni Francioni in his book L’Officina gramsciana: Ipotesi sulla struttura dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’ (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1984), followed up by his article of 1992, ‘Il bauletto inglese: Appunti per una storia dei “Quaderni” di Gramsci’, Studi Storici 33, no. 4 (1992): 713–41, and his introduction to the edizione anastatica (photocopy of the original manuscripts of the Notebooks), Come lavorava Gramsci (Rome: Biblioteca Treccani, 2009). None of this material seems to be available as yet in English or summarized in the English-language literature. The ongoing work on the edizione nazionale of the Prison Notebooks is summarized in the article of Giuseppe Cospito, ‘Verso l’edizione critica e integrale dei “Quaderni del carcere”’, Studi Storici 52, no. 4 (2011): 881–904, and this whole issue of Studi Storici is given over to articles dealing with the new ‘national edition’ and its significance for Gramsci studies. The articles by Maria Luisa Righi on ‘Gramsci a Mosca tra amori e politica (1922–23)’ and Chiara Daniele on Gramsci’s Prison Letters, as well as the other articles in this issue, are important. The most important recent study of Gramsci’s life and thought in the period during which he wrote the Prison Notebooks is that by Giuseppe Vacca, Vita e pensieri di Antonio Gramsci 1926–1937 (Turin: Einaudi, 2012).

In English, the book by Paolo Spriano, Gramsci: The Prison Years (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), remains important for its account of Gramsci’s incarceration. Gramsci’s Prison Letters, in the full two-volume edition edited by Frank Rosengarten (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) is the best accompaniment to reading the Prison Notebooks themselves, which are available in the Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, which provides the framework for the analysis in the present book. Those who wish to go beyond the Selections can turn to Derek Boothman’s edition of Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995), and to the complete English translation of Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, by Joseph Buttigieg, though at present the three volumes of this translation, with very full notes and introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 1996, 2007) only cover the first eight of the twenty-nine notebooks. There is also a very good, if brief, discussion of the Prison Letters and the Notebooks in the book by Antonio Santucci, Antonio Gramsci, which is available in English translation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).