Like many others, I first came across the name and ideas of Antonio Gramsci when I was a student in the 1960s, and read with interest and excitement the path-breaking study by John Cammett on Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, which introduced me to some of the fundamental ideas of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and to Gramsci’s political activity and the historical context of his life and work. But it was only many years later, in the post-communist epoch of the 2000s, that I was able to engage more closely with Gramsci’s thought in the course of preparing and teaching a final-year undergraduate module at the University of Leeds on ‘Antonio Gramsci and the Theory of Modern Politics’. I enjoyed teaching that course and remain grateful to those students who took it, for lively discussion and stimulating exchanges which helped me (and, I hope, them) to understand Gramsci, as well as helping to convince me of the continuing relevance of his theories to our contemporary world.
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are undoubtedly a classic text of twentieth-century political and social thought, and they deserve inclusion in a series devoted to introducing and explaining the great books of all time, but writing a guide to such a multifaceted and at times complex text is no easy matter. I am very grateful to those scholars and experts who have helped me in this task. My first thanks are due to the staff of the Istituto Gramsci in Rome, who received me with courtesy and openness on my visits there, and whose help was invaluable. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the librarian of the Istituto Gramsci, Dario Massimi, for his friendly assistance and courteous welcome, and for making me aware of relevant literature in Italian that otherwise I would not have known about. Conversations with the director of the Istituto Gramsci, Professor Giuseppe Vacca, and with its vice-director, Professor Francesco Giasi, were inspiring and illuminating, and I am most grateful to both of them for sparing the time to share their expert knowledge with me, and to Professor Vacca for making available to me copies of extracts from some of his writings on Gramsci. Professor Vacca was also kind enough to read and comment on an earlier version of several chapters, and this was extremely helpful and encouraging. I am also happy to acknowledge the enjoyable lunchtime discussions with fellow researcher David Broder while I was working in Rome, which flowed all the more easily because of the wine consumed over lunch but helped me broaden my awareness of the history and problems of Italian communism and the Left in general.
I am also grateful to my old friend Professor Ernst Wangermann of the University of Salzburg, who encouraged me to take up the challenge to write this book, and who was kind enough to read some chapters in draft and who made very helpful stylistic and substantive suggestions which certainly helped improve the text. I have also enjoyed and benefited from discussion with friends with whom I talked about Gramsci and his ideas, and who encouraged me with their support for the project, in particular my former colleague Justin Grossman and my friends Professor Judith Pallot of Oxford University and Professor Janet Wolff of the University of Manchester. They all really helped, and so too did a number of other friends.
Finally I must acknowledge the help and support received from the successive editors and colleagues at Routledge with whom I have dealt. I received the initial invitation to write this guidebook to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks from the commissioning editor Andy Humphries, and I appreciated his encouragement and positive responses to my queries, and I am equally grateful to his successors Siobhán Poole and Rebecca Shillabeer and to editorial assistant Iram Satti, who have all been helpful and efficient at all times. I would also like to express my gratitude to James Thomas for his excellent work in copy-editing the typescript. His eagle-eyed scrutiny saved me from many careless blunders.
When I started preparing to teach my undergraduate module on Gramsci at the University of Leeds, a colleague in the Italian Department whom I had approached for advice told me he thought that Gramsci had ‘gone off the boil’ in recent years, meaning that interest in his ideas, which had been so lively in the 1960s, both in Italy and internationally, had waned. I would prefer to agree with Professor Vacca, who in his recent and highly valuable study of Gramsci’s life and thought in the period of the Prison Notebooks talks about a ‘new season’ of Gramsci studies. The waning of Cold War passions and distortions, as well as the discovery of new documentation, sources and archives (used in the work of Italian scholars in preparing a new ‘national edition’ of Gramsci’s works), have made it possible to approach the Prison Notebooks in a fuller and more objective way. I have benefited very much from this recent excellent work by Italian scholars, and their work is referred to at many points in this study. I hope that the present work introduces readers to Gramsci’s highly original and exciting reflections on politics, history, philosophy and culture, which can help us make sense of our present epoch, different though it is in crucial aspects from the era in which Gramsci wrote his notes in the cell of a fascist prison.