The best starting point for an engagement with Gramsci is undoubtedly his Prison Notebooks. Readers should start with Selections from Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971) (SPN). Despite problems that later scholars have found with selection, presentation and translation, SPN is likely to remain the starting point for readers of Gramsci, at least until the arrival of the complete critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in English. It can usefully be supplemented by Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Derek Boothman (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995).
The critical English edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is currently being prepared by Joseph Buttigieg and Columbia University Press; with the most recent volume published in 2007 it now includes notebooks 1–8, and an excellent introductory essay by Buttigieg at the start of the first volume.1 A very good single-volume reader is The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935, edited by David Forgacs, which includes both prison and pre-prison writings.
Gramsci’s pre-prison writings are available either in Pre-Prison Writings, edited by Richard Bellamy and translated by Virginia Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) or in the two-volume Selections from Political Writings (1910–1920), edited by Quintin Hoare and translated by John Mathews (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) and Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926), translated and edited by Quintin Hoare (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978).
Selections from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and translated by William Boelhower (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985) is an extremely engaging collection that includes both prison and pre-prison writings, and may be particularly useful to readers interested in cultural questions.
Gramsci’s prison letters, some of which are quite moving and which are an excellent companion to his other writings, are available in selection in either Letters from Prison by Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Lynne Lawner (London: Quartet, 1979) or Gramsci’s Prison Letters, edited and translated by Hamish Hamilton (London: Zwan, 1988). The complete edition is the two-volume Letters from Prison, edited by Frank Rosengarten and translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). For Gramsci’s pre-prison letters, see A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters of Antonio Gramsci, 1908–1926, edited and translated by Derek Boothman (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2014).
The best account of Gramsci’s life is Giuseppe Fiori’s Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (London: New Left Books, 1970). Fiori manages to paint a vivid picture of Gramsci as a person and a revolutionary. We would also recommend the documentary ‘Everything That Concerns People’, available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51DhvS9abyI.
There are several good introductions to Gramsci’s thought, and we would particularly recommend Roger Simon’s Gramsci’s Political Thought (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991) for those interested in Gramsci’s thought on politics, while Steve Jones’s Antonio Gramsci: Routledge Critical Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2006) has more of a slant towards cultural theory.
There are several useful collections of essays on Gramsci’s thought. Readers should probably start with Anne Showstack Sassoon (ed.), Approaches to Gramsci (London: Writers and Readers, 1982) as Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge, 1979), though excellent, is not an easy read. Marcus E. Green (ed.), Rethinking Gramsci (London: Routledge, 2011) and Joseph Francese (ed.), Perspectives on Gramsci: Politics, Culture, and Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2009) represent more closely the current state of Gramsci scholarship. James Martin’s (ed.) Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2002) is an indispensable four-volume collection that contains many of the articles we use here, although it is probably not a first step for the new reader of Gramsci.
In Chapter 8 we began to map Gramsci’s legacy on contemporary critical thought, and any of the works referred to there would be suitable further reading. Within post-Marxism, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe; London: Verso, 1985) is a necessary starting point, but is a difficult read. The Postcolonial Gramsci, edited by Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (London: Routledge, 2012) is an interesting collection, but the uses of Gramsci there are sometimes problematic and it should be read in conjunction with Timothy Brennan’s critical review ‘Joining the Party’, Postcolonial Studies, 16:1 (2013), pp. 68–78. A good starting point within cultural studies is Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott’s Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986).
Two of the most important overall interpretations of Gramsci in English are Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 1:100 (1976), pp. 5–78 and Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony, and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/index.htm
Some of Gramsci’s writings in English.
http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org
Website of the International Gramsci Society, with a useful website and mailing list.
http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/resources/concordance_table/index.html
Concordance tables linking the Prison Notebooks to anthologies published in English. Very useful for readers of SPN.
http://bobjessop.org/2014/04/21/lectures-on-gramsci/
An interesting set of lectures on Gramsci.
http://www.victoryiscertain.com/gramsci/
A useful, if slightly dated, set of links.
A suggestion on reading Gramsci
We wanted to conclude our guide to further reading by suggesting a very rough plan for a potential Gramsci reading group (although the outline here could of course also be followed by an individual reader). We would recommend centring a reading group around SPN as the single volume for the readers of the group. The concordance tables mentioned above might be useful here. Although we outline a ten-session reading group plan, readers should of course feel free to change it in any way they choose.
First, we would recommend reading the introductory essay in SPN (pp. xvii–xcvi) and possibly Stuart Hall’s short and powerful ‘Gramsci and Us’ (Marxism Today, June 1987, pp. 16–21; available online at: http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/archive_index.htm). The second session could then be on the intellectual and education (SPN, pp. 3–43), before two sessions each on the modern Prince (SPN, pp. 123–205) and the State and civil society (SPN, pp. 206–76). The seventh session could then be centred on Gramsci’s approach to philosophy (SPN, pp. 321–77) or on his interpretation of Marxism (SPN, pp. 378–419 and pp. 462–5), depending on interests, before an eighth session on Americanism and Fordism (SPN, pp. 277–318), and a ninth session on Gramsci’s 1926 Alcuni temi essay (SPWI, pp. 441–62). The tenth session could then widen the discussion by examining some chapters of a study that uses, criticizes or develops some aspect of Gramsci’s thought; particularly relevant here might be James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Farnham: Ashgate, 1977), David D. Laitin’s Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Change among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) or Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Alternatively, the group could choose to engage with Perry Anderson’s difficult but important ‘Antinomies’ essay or another more difficult secondary source. The final session of the reading group could then be followed by a screening of a documentary about Gramsci’s life, ‘Everything that Concerns People’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51DhvS9abyI).
1 The first editions of Gramsci’s Quaderni del Carcere were published by Einaudi (Turin) in six volumes between 1948 and 1951. These have now been superseded by the critical edition published under the auspices of the Istituto Antonio Gramsci in Rome: Quaderni del Carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). The critical edition consists of three volumes of the notebooks, and one of critical apparatuses.