Selections From The Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci Preview
Selections From The Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci Preview
Selections From The Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci Preview
PRISON NOTEBOOKS
Antonio Gramsci
ELECBOOK CLASSICS
Selections from
the Prison
Notebooks
Antonio Gramsci
ISBN 1 84327 119 2
PRISON
NOTEBOOKS
OF
ANTONIO GRAMSCI
ElecBook
London 1999
Contents
Click on number to go to page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................. 12
PREFACE .................................................................................. 13
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.......................................................... 22
Early Life................................................................................ 24
Intellectual Formation .............................................................. 27
Socialist Politics in Turin .......................................................... 33
Ordine Nuovo, the “Red Years” and the Founding of
the P.C.I. ............................................................................... 46
The P.C.I. under Bordiga 1921-1923 ........................................ 62
The Interregnum in the Italian Party 1923-24 ............................. 74
The P.C.I. under Gramsci 1924-26 ........................................... 90
Prison .................................................................................. 117
2. ON EDUCATION................................................................... 162
Introduction....................................................................... 162
The Organisation of Education and of Culture ......................... 165
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editors would like to express their thanks to the Istituto Gramsci in
Rome, holders of the copyright on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, for
permission to publish the present selection and for allowing them to
consult and to copy from the photostat of Gramsci’s manuscript in the
possession of the Institute. Particular thanks for their assistance are due
to Dr Elsa Fubini and Prof. Valentino Gerratana of the staff of the
Institute, and to the director, Franco Ferri. The initiative for the
publication of this volume came from Roger Simon and Steve Bodington,
who have supervised its progress throughout, making many invaluable
suggestions, and without whose stimulus the work would have taken
even longer to complete.
We would like to acknowledge our indebtedness to certain books
without which the General Introduction could not have been written. The
most important of these sources is the series of books on Turin working-
class history and the early history of the Italian Communist Party by
Paolo Spriano. Also indispensable were Giuseppe Fiori’s biography, the
Tasca archive material published in the Annali Feltrinelli in 1960 and
1966, and the Marx Memorial Library’s collection of Comintern congress
reports, etc.
Geoffrey Nowell Smith would like to thank all those who helped or
took part in the preparation of his sections of this edition, in particular
Rosalind Delmar, a constant collaborator on the volume from its
inception; John Merrington, Ian Steedman, Norman Geras and Michael
Evans; and Shirley Hill, who produced a flawless typescript of his part of
the translation.
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PREFACE
Existing Editions
he present edition comprises a selection of texts from the
Quaderni
MS. II materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, 1948.
Int. Gli intellettuali e l’organizzazione della cultura, 1949.
Ris. II Risorgimento, 1949.
NM. Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo Stato moderno, 1949.
LVN. Letteratura e vita nazionale, 1950.
PP. Passato e presente, 1951.
Letters
LC. Lettere dal carcere, edited by S. Caprioglio and E. Fubini, Nuovo
Universale Einaudi, Turin 1965.
texts, about whose coherence and general order there can be no doubt,
are often partially revised in such a way that it is necessary, in editing
the text, to intersperse the revised or rewritten sections with passages of
which only an earlier draft exists. Both in the classification of the notes
according to subject and in the ordering of particular items, we have,
broadly speaking, followed the lines laid down in the Einaudi edition,
which also provides the basis of the text used for the translation. At the
same time we have not hesitated, in the interests of clarity of
presentation, to depart from the Einaudi order wherever this seemed to
us justified on philological grounds, by reference to the original
Quaderni. We have also, where relevant (e.g. in the political sections),
appended in square brackets the date of the Quaderno from which a text
is taken. The texts that we have used are as follows.
The essays on the Intellectuals and on Education belong together in
Gramsci’s original manuscript (Quaderno XXIX, ff. 1-12). We have
translated the texts as they appear in the Einaudi volume Gli intellettuali
on pp. 3-19, 97-103 and 106-14.
The sections on Italian History and on Politics have necessitated the
most reordering, both in relation to the Einaudi edition and to the
original Quaderni. The “Notes on Italian History” in this edition come
mainly from the Einaudi volume II Risorgimento. One passage, “Material
for a Critical Essay on Croce’s Two Histories”, is previously unpublished,
and we have also integrated into the text one passage from each of the
Einaudi volumes II materialismo storico, Note sul Miachiavelli and
Passato e presente.
The “Notes on Politics” were all included, with the exception of one
previously unpublished text—”Self-criticism and the Hypocrisy of Self-
criticism”—in the Einaudi volumes Note sul Machiavelli and Passato e
presente. Within the political sections however our ordering, in terms of
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a rough division into two parts, on the Party and on the State, is original.
The Einaudi order here is not satisfactory, but it is equally impossible to
follow the Quaderni. The principal source for the notes is a late
Quaderno (XXX, datable to 1933-34) in which a number of earlier texts
are rewritten in a more polished form but in an order which has no
particular internal coherence. Drafts of some of the same texts, together
with notes on related topics, are to be found in a number of other
Quaderni, written between 1929 and 1933. Short of a literal
reproduction of all these texts, or a massive critical apparatus, out of
place in an edition of this size and scope, there is clearly no alternative
to a reordering of some kind, aimed at presenting to the reader a
selection of texts which is as reasonably comprehensive and coherent as
possible, while making it clear, through the dates appended at the end
of each passage, roughly where each stands in terms of Gramsci’s
original project.
The essay “Americanism and Fordism” derives from a single
Quaderno, number V, and is translated here as it appears, slightly
reordered, in the Note sul Machiavelli.
The philosophical texts have been translated, with one or two minor
changes, as they appear in the Einaudi volume II materialismo storico.
The essays “Some Preliminary Points of Referencc” and “Critical Notes
on an Attempt at Popular Sociology” are fairly complete in the original
Quaderni. Those entitled “Problems of Philosophy and History” and
“Some Problems in the Study of the Philosophy of Praxis” are the result
of some reordering’ by the Einaudi editors.
In translating our aim has been to combine the demands of a
readable English style with a respect not only for the precise content but
also for the flavour of an original which, in its fragmentary and elliptical
character and its frequent recourse to tricks to deceive the prison censor,
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Terminology
Questions of censorship apart, Gramsci’s terminology presents a number
of difficulties to the translator. Wherever possible we have tried to render
each term of Gramsci’s with a single equivalent, as close as possible to
the original. In one particular set of cases this has proved impossible,
and that is with the group of words centred around the verb dirigere
(dirigente, direttivo, direzione, etc.). Here we have in part followed the
normal English usage dictated by the context (e.g. direzione =
leadership; classe dirigente = ruling class) but in certain cases we have
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