READING GRAMSCI IN ENGLISH: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE RECEPTION OF ANTONIO GRAMASCI IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD,; 1957-1 982

Geof f Eley university of Michigan

March 1984

CRSO Working Paper 314 Copies available through: Center for Research on Social Organization University of Michigan 330 Packard Street Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 "Reading Cramsci in English: Some Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the Ek@ish-Speaking World, 199-1982".

Geoff Eley Department of History University of M5chigan The Cramsci reception in the English-speakiw world is one of the more rehble intellects phenomena of the 1970s. At the time of writing (summer 1982) we seem to have reached some sort of staging- post in the seemingly never-ending stream of publication and discussion.

A veritable explosion of books irnd essays has just taken place, but for almost a year there has been no new major intervention, and so 1 far as I am-anare none has been announced. In that case, now may be a good time to take stock. Of course, there amalready innumerable general introductions to Gramaci's thou&. There is also no shortage of attempts to 'place' him in the -st, European and Italian intell- ectual and polltical - traditions. By this saeyet another .general. essay attempting to sumaxize Gramsci" distinctive contributions to the latter would perhaps be hard to justify. Such essays will now show dinriaishing returns, and have started to serve more a process of pers- onal political or intellectuaJ clarification than the historical ill- ination of C-ci 's om career.* Eveone, it seems, has their own Cramsd, and the present author is certainly no exception to this

generdlization, as tha following pages will no doubt reveal. However, my intention in this essay is rather different. It is to comment on the -tar of the Cramsd reception rather than (in the first instance at least) on the thought and career of Cramsci himself. In so doing I hope to distinguish some salient themes and to make a'modest if largely impressionistic contribution to the contempora~ysociology of knowledge. 3

The origins of the Cramci reception are hard to chart vexy exacny. The eazliest discussions were fragmented and (whatever their individual qualities) not part of a coherent cr unified disc~une.~At Ws stage knowledge of Gramsci uas subsumed in the larger rediscovery of hmism then getting under way: the singularity of his contribution was less important than his place in a general revolutionary pantheon of 'non-Stalinist' thinkers. Gramsci was only one of several contin- ental theoreticians -- Georg Lukacs, bxl Korsch, and the Frankfurt School were the major examples - who were being translated and disc- ussed seriously for the first time (in the middle to late-1960s). me heterodox nature of their Mancism mattered more than the specific (axid divergent) content of their ideas .5 This ecumenical approach to

Cramsci prevailed during the flrst phase of his reception proper in the early-1970s. hen a more infowed and connected discussion became possible. As well as the Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971) which provided the fimt adequate textual basis for an EbgUsh-language discussion, we should mention the translations of Florf 's Mography and Poezolini's gend pdmer (both 1970). the two editions of .the famous prison letters by Hamish Henderson (1974) and Lynne Lanner (195). 6 and a general essay by Victor Kiernan in the 1972 Socialist .Ret#ster. The essence of the early discussion was excaMtion - reappopriating a buried -st tradition, nicely summarized in the title of an Am-

&can anthology on Western Mandsm as 'the unknown dimension'. 7

At the same time it is clear that some individuals were approaching

Cramsci with more specific questions in mind. One of these wrrs John Merrington, whose exposition of Gramsci 's disttnctive conceptual voc- abulary is the most impressive of the early treatments. Another was Harold 'Aolpe in a more general essay on the problem of 'revolutionarg consciousness'. In both cases Gramsci begins to emerge as the archfoe of 'economism', that crrrdial sin of contemporary Mantism, replacing the reductionist vocabulary of base and superstructure with a more soph- isticated stress on the organization of consciousness by different cat- egories of intellectuals and political agencies, amongst whom the pol- itical party clearly held pride of place. 'Ihis freed the possibilities of political action from the causal primacy of the economy and its move- ments and constituted ideology as an autonomous sphere of struggle (~ramsci's 'ethico-political realm', a term he adapted from Benedetto

~roce), where the legitimacy and cohesion of a given social order could be secured and reproduced, or modifled and even overthrown. As is now well-known, 'hegemony' was the concept Gramsci devised to express this process of political negotiation between dominant aad subordinate classes, and he essentially reformulated the problem of the revolutionary party C in terms of its aility to intervene creatively to influence the outcome.

These matters were very much to the fore in Merrington's and Wolpe's 8 accounts.

Cf course, this aspect of Gramsci's writings was well-known to the e&er commentators. But Merrington's essay in particular raised the discussion to a new level of explicitly theorized consistency, in which the full repertoire of Gramsci 's specific concepts -- the distinction between state ancl civil society, the different categories of intellect- uals, the notions of 'collective will' and 'historic bloc', the 'corp- orate' and 'directive' functions of social classes, the juxtaposition of 'war of manoeuvre'/'nar of position' -- are brought into play. While he only dealt explicitly uith Gramsci as such somewhat later, the same preoccupations are close to the fore in Perry Anderson's early work, particularly in the classic essays of the mid-1960s ('Origins of the Present Crisis', 'Components of the National Culture' , and 'Problems of Socialist strate=.') , where the problem of hegemony is posed in the context of British intellectual and political culture, admittedly

in an attenuated and over-formalized In a different vein we

should also mention the work of Robbie Gray, who pioneered the introd- uction of Gzamscian concepts into Bdtish historical. writing, to address 10 the bases of reformism i.n the nineteenth century working class.

me interest in Cramsci fully blossomed into prlnt in the middle

1970s. It was greatly eased by the better availability of his writings in English, .for which Lawrence Wishart's publishing program may take the credit: after the Prison Notebooks, two volumes of Polltical

Writins;s appeared (unobtrusively but authoritatively edited by Quintin H-) , tagether with related materials by Palnlm ~ogliatti.l1 Ms was accompanied by a more scholarly kind of exegesis. Merrington had

already worked at the Grarnsci Institute in Rome, and Davidson studied extansively in Italy, and henceforth it became increasin&y difficult to join the discussion without serious historical work and some familiar- ity with Italian sources. Moreover, until now the. published discussion

had been conducted almost exc"lusively by the Left -- without, it should v the universities or a major political party.12 The interest of the Left did not diminish (quite the contrary). But from the dd-1970s the Gramsd reception also attained academic respectability. Between 1975 and 1977 a flurrg of imporhat works appeared, some -st,

some not: Gwyn A. Williams' Proletarian Order and the accompanying trans- lation of Paolo Spriano's study of the 1920 factory occupations; I4axtin Clark's publication of his much earlier dissertation, on which Williams was.heavfly reliant; a typica3 tour de force by Perrg Anderson in the hundredth issue of New Left Review; >lastair Davidson's intellectual biography; and James Joll's valuable 'Ibdern Master'. 13

11.

By the end of this activity some distinct emphases were starting to emerge. I want to mention five of these, though other classifications might also be possible. First, Gramsci has been assimilated to a gend category of 'Western Mandsm' . The precise notations of this concept vary. In some hands it becomes little more than a residual categoxy for any inter-uar Marxist who set him/herself outside the fold of orthodox Communism during the period of bolshevization between the

Twenty-One Conditions of 1920-1 and the ultra-left turn of 1928: not only Lukacs, Korsch and the School, but also the va.rious council theorists arrd left-wing communists (the Ilutch Marxists Hermann

Corter and Anton Pannekoek, the German KAPD, Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga in Italy), various ~tsof philosophical radicalism in mce (which developed after the 1920s). Rosa Luxemburg (as a precursor), and even (incongruously) Paul Levi .14 In Russell Jacoby 's mind lest-

Msm' seems identical with rur anti-Leninist democratic impulse in

the revolutionary activity of 1917-23 and with 'processes of class

consciousness and proletarian subjectivity' which subsequent dissenting philosophers attempted to 'retrieve' .I5 Without dismissing the signif-

icance of these heterodox currents themselves, I would argue that this

conception of Western Mandsm is heavily idealist and over-philosophical in its terms of reference. It mistakes the neosyndicalist momentum behind much of the council co~stactivity in 1917-23, exaggexates the cohesion of the movement and the coherence of its anti-Bolshevik critique, and underestimates the force of the circumstances making for a Bolshevik or (as it became known) Leninist model of politics in the various countries. A more careful approach would recognize the popular volatility of the revolutionary years while focusing on the reflective endeavours of the leading Mandst thinkers in the stabiliz- ation that followed after 1923. Here Western Mandsm becomes more a syndrome of the objective conjuncture, which constrained the i-native capability of the -st theoretical tradition. It signifies a. retreat from practical politics into abstract philosophical discussion sharply removed From the materialist concerns of the classical -st tradition before 1914. The best case for this second perspective has been made by Perry Anderson in Considerations on Western Marxism, where he suggests that the principal thinkers involved (~ukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, the F'rankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, He& Lefebvre, Jean-Paul Sh, Lucien Coldmann, Louis Althusser, Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio ~olletti) shared a common social background, an experience of politicdl defeat or demodzation (at the hands of both fascism and ~Wnism), and a common indebtedness to 'successive types of European ideaUsm'. 16

Whichever framework we prefer, the argument is least convincing in the case of Gramsci, whose formal relationship to politics (in both

theory and practice) was quite different from the rest, as to his credit

Anderson accepts .I7 Such distinctions (e .g. Gramsci retained his Communist

Party affiliations, he was mainly interested in matters of political theory rather than formal philosophy or aesthetics, he arrived at his positions through comparative historical enquiry, he tried to produce historical explanations for the contemporary predicament of the eft)

are shown far less respect by other proponents of a 'Western Mandst' framework. This is preeminently true of Gramsci's principal commentators

on the American Left, Paul Piccone and the grouping around the journal Telos (in which Russell Jacoby has also been an important participant). . - Here Cramsci is coopted to a radically Hegelian Marxism which derives

from an uncritical affirmation of the achievements of the Frankflrrt School ('the only remaining Mandst tradition of any political and social

import', as Piccone puts it).18 But ultimately this is tii We a spec-

ific problem of Gramsci studies -- his precise relationship to Croce's

philosophical idealism at different stages of his c'areer -- and to elevate

it in a manner which subsumes all other facets of his mature political thought. Piccone's writing on Cramsci is obscurantist, obsessively

anti-Leninist, and at times breathbkingly insensitive to the real hist-

orid circumstances after say 2921. By conmt with Anderson's account, there is no effort to evaluate Gramsci's thought by its complex historical determinations -- within Italian intellectual culture, within the bndst theoretical tradition, within the international Communist

movement, and within the period of victorious fascism. Something of

the same syndrome also disfigures Carl Boggs' introduction to Gramsci's

Mandsm, where the concept of hegemony is bluntly assimilated to the characteristic Marcusean rhetoric of the North American New Left. 19

Secondly, by the end of the 1970s Cramsci was firmly installed at

the centre of 'cultural studies'. Raymond Williams, an excellent guide to these developments, was responding creatively to Gramsci by 1973 at the latest.20 But the main scene of activity in this respect has probably been the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at airmingham University, which through a saries of collective working projects - on youth sub-cultures, on ideology as such, and on wo&ng class

culture -- generated some of the most Figomus and challenging comment- azies on Gmmci's Uent ideas." Of course,. cult- studies provided natural ground for the exploration of Gramsci's ideas, with his stress on the importance of intellectuals in the organization, affirmation and withholding of popular consent to the dominant social and political order. The hegemonic capability of a social class in Gramsci's sense rests very much on its ability to build a commanding position of moral

leadership for itself in the sphere of cult- -- through the institutions

of education, relieon and the law,. more informally through the azbitr- ation of taste, manners and acceptable behaviour, and finally through the arts, the press and the fond intellectual culture of the univers- ities -- so that other social groups come to acknowledge its claim to rule.

In fact, in view of Cramsci 's increasing popularity and the vogue for radical educational theory in the early-1970s. it is surprising

that he was not taken up much earlier by writers interested in mechanisms of subonlination and domination in the educational system. But on the whole this'was not the case.=, The explanation is an interesting one,

to do mainly with the reception of Althusser, whose ideas for a key period (say from 1972 to 1977) displaced other sources of theoretical inspiration from the active centre of ~Yancisttheoretical discussion in Britain. 'fiefher we look to fields in education, literary studies, film theory, or the larger sociology of culture, we find British Maxxlsts in the mid-1970s registering advances through the (frequently tortured) appropriation of 'Althusserlan' concepts. This was true above all of the Birmingham Center, whose main exponents arrived at Gramsci via an elaborate, rigorous, and (I would argue) extremely fruitful Althusserian detour. How exactly the transition took place is too complicated for this discussion. But in the event recourse to a freshly accessible Gramsci helped free British discussions from a potentially constricting Althusserian cul de sac. 23

Thirdly, in the course of the 1970s a certain Gramscian vocabulary permeated the discourse of British and to a lesser extent North American soda historfans. Ed- Thompson (as always) has been a key influence in this respect -- by directiag attention to the study of popular culture, by enquiring into non-coercive forms of political domination, and by adopting the formal concept of 'hegemony' for his analysis of eighteenth century society. 24 But aside from Thompson himself, the most striking thing about this appropriation is really its unreflected and casual nature. The term 'hegemony' has in many wesbeen blithely severed fmm the complex tissue of concepts which for Gramsci himself constituted its full theoretical status. As Nield and Seed observe, even the best historical appropriations have 'tended to abstract the concept of hegemony from its locus within a much broader azmlysis of power which, in the

Prison Notebooks, is concentrated on the state and the organized instit- utional structures of civil society*.25 The major exception here is Robbie Gray, who apart from his work on the labour aristocracy has att- empted an ambitious deployment of Gramsci's central concepts for an unders&ng of Yictdan ~ritain.'~But otherwise hegemony tends to be divested of its specific' theoretical content and assimilated to superficially similar theoretical paradigms, so that (for example) it functions as a practical equivalent of social control perspectives or the older Mandst conception of an imposed false consciousness. In the more extreme versions it. can be 'reified into a kind of functionalist maintenance of social equilibrik' or can simply signify a general system

of ideologicd domination.Z7 It is these assumed correlations between concepts nhich actually possess very different potentials in the context

of their orfginating theoretical problematics that has permitted the

incorporation of hegemony into the 'common sense' vocabulary of histor-

ical analysis. A certain kind of knowing reference to the term has become very fashionable. I uill return to this problem below.

Fourthly, the assimilation of Gramsci's ideas by cultural studies, social history, and British Mandsm is paralleled by certain new depart-

ures in British sociology during the same period. This obviously makes more sense of the formal correspondence mentioned above between certain practical mesof 'hegemony' and similar applications of the concept of 'social control'. In fact, it seems clear that the same people uho were attacted by Gramsci's ideas were also reading certain cognate dis-

cussions in British sociology in the early-1970s. where there was some independent interest in the ideological basis of social cohesion in lib-

eral democracies (to adapt the title of a much cited essay of 1970 by

Michael I4ann) This was definitely true of Robbie Gray, for instame, and could probably be demonstrated biographically for other figures in the Gramsci reception In the longer view this sociological rad- icalism goes back to discussions of 'affluence' and 'relative deprivation' in the mid-1960s and receives its strongest further development in the work of Frank ~arlrin.~' As well as Parkin and b~,Steven Lukes and

Hona.rd Neuby deserve special mention in this respect.31 How exactly this work differs from work of a 'Cramscian' provenance is an interesting question, not made any easier to answer by the apparent indifference of its authors to C-ci 's ideas.32 However, at 1-t one individual - Bob Jessop -- whose work originated within the 'sociological' problematic, so to speak, has since mved very creatively in uhat is recog;ni=bly a 'Cramscian' direction. 33

fifthly, and perhaps most importantly, the Gramsci reception has received a decisive boost from the Ebrocommunist turn in the British

Communist Party (CPGB). Tendencies of this kind could already be extrap- olated on the party's reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia

in August 1968 and are not inconsistent with British Communism's deeper formation, at learst since the Popular Front period after 1935. But the

innerpaxty discussion got properly uDder way in the mid-1970s and the adoption of a new version of 'The British Road to Socialism' in 1977 registered the formal victoy of the new perspectives.YI Although for a time attention focused on Santiago Carillo's direction of the,Spanish

Communist Party (PCE), there can be little doubt that the main intell-

ectual influence on this development has been the Italian Communist Party (PCI) , whose experience received increasing prominence in the CPGB ' s deliberations from around 1976. 35 For 6ur purposes (aside from the basic translation and discussion of Gramsci himself) three manifestations of this process are worth mentioning. First, from around 1975-6 the annual Communist University of London (CUL) increasingly served as a general intellectual forum for the Left and played an imporknt part in crystallizing the concepts of the 'broad democratic strategy'. While discussions of Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas were initially an important stimulus here, by 1977 Cramsci was already coraing to define the primary theoretical orientation. 34

Secondly, during the same years Eric Hobsbawm emerged as a major ex- ponent of the 'Italian Road', elaborating a broadly conceived historical ierspective in a serles of essays, lectures, and inteew~.~~Thirdly, by 1979 and the aftermath'of the Conservative electoral victory similar discussions were also starting on the edges of the Labour Party. In some ways this is the most interesting feature of this overtly political dimension of the Gramsci reception, with origins that are complex and diverse. It is clear; for insbnce, that xmch of the Left intellectual discussion now oriented tonards the Labour Pey owes little direct in- spiration to Gramsci's ideas, if any. This would be true of the circle around Paul Hirst and Bafiy Unless, of the discussions recently taking place in New Left Review, and = fortiore of the more orthodox Labour and Left-Labour currents. On the other hand, the launching of the Socialist and the Socialist Society, cerbin intellectual cmss-currents through the grouping around Tony Benn, and talk of promoting 'a general ferment of socialist ideas', betray distinct 'Cramscian' traces. There is now an interesting stretch of intellectual common ground linking Ebmcommunists, independent Mandsts, and Labour Party currents (some Mandst, some not) uithin a shared problematic of rethought socialist strategy. The coherence of this broad left-intellectual milieu, I would argue, is decisively indebted to the discussion of Gramsci 's ideas, both directly and indirectly. 38

Where does this leave the current crop of books?39 If 1967-75 was a phase of initiation when notice of Gramsci was first properly taken, and 1975-7 a phase of consolidation when a range of essentially biogr- aphical studies started to appeax, then 1978-82 has been the phase of mature Gramsci scholarship, when an. adequate basis has been laid for the first time for a discussion of Gramsci in English. For some time it has been possible to discuss Mazx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukacs, and the Fankfurst School (though, interestingly enough, not Kautsky) without a knowledge of their original language. The same can now be said of Gramsd. The absence of a complete edition of the Prison Notebooks in English (which would be a luxury indeed) is now made good by a large body of debiled and extremely sophisticated exegesis. This comes ayfrom the accumulated momentum of profess- ional intellectual discussion, which (given the interlocking structures of university scholarship, Ph.D . production, and academic publishing, and the notable colonization of the educational system by i%ndsts since the early-1970s) might have been expected eventually to generate a sizeable literature of this kind. In this sense the current books are also partly a generational phenomenon, a coming to fruition of an interest odginating earlier in the reception, sometimes as a Ph.D. dissertation. Anne Showstack Sassoon was previously the translator of

Pozzolini, while her own book and those of Joseph Femia, Leonardo Salamini, and Walter Adamson began as dissertations undertaken in the late-1960s and early-1970s. The feasibility of translations (which are otherwise not a compelling necessitiy of intellectual life in the English- speaking countries) likewise presupposes this kind of academic infra- structure .

To some extent, then, we are seeing the arrival of 'CZramsciology' in English-speaking scholarship, and if the examples of Marx and &gels, the MurtSchool, and Lukacs are anything to go by, we should ex- pect a steady stream of additional publications in the years to come. In general Cramsci is definitely 'in ' . For example, the strew of this intellectual fashion has to explain the title and formal 'Cramscian'

focus of Cramsci and Itdly's Passive Revolution, because with the exc-

eption of John A. Davis's cogent Introduction d Paul Ginsborg's valuable discussion of bourgeois revolution, none of the individual essays engage

with Gramsci's historical theses or salient concepts in anything but the

most perflrnctory of ways. The point of the volume (at least according

to the editor, as the others barely mention Gramsci themselves, with Cinsborg's exception) is to confront Cmci's generalizations with the findings of some dense histoecal scholarship, concentrated on the unif- ying problematic of the agrarian question. Beneath this rubric the authors explore the definition of the Southern Problem, the nature of social relations in the countryside, the changing basis of the industsial- -an bloc, the regional diversity of the Italian class structure,

and the fragility of the liberal state's social cohesion. They do so

by means of wide-ranging general discussions (the editor and Adxian ~yttleton)and three regional studies (Frank Snowden on Tuscany, Anthow Cardoza on the Po Delta, and Alice Kelikian on Brescia). These are introduced by Davis ' s brief exposition of 'passive revolution' and Cinsborg's longer critique, which thoughtfully reposes the problem of bourgeois revolution. The volume concludes Kith an essay by Paul Corner on the Fksdst economy.

In their main aim, which is to test Gramsci's view of the Xsordm- -ento against their own inpressive expertise, the authors succeed very well. But as Nield and Seed say, 'Gramsci is not challenged directly through conceptual argument but is held at a distance and subjected to partial revision via narrowly selected empirical datae.@ To say that the fashion for Gramsci was just an excuse for bringing these essays together would be grossly unfair, for they meet the highest standards of empirical excellence, with a thematic coherence which is quite unusual for the geme. But they shed more light on over-particularized historical problems of a mainly 'local ' , technical and professional character, than they do-on the actual potential of Gramsci's concepts. A straightforward exposition of 'passive revolution' by the -editor is deemed to be enough,

so that the athers (with Cinsborg's key exception) can simply get on with

the detailed story. A chance to clarify, extend, or reconstitute

Gramsci's theoretical terms has been missed, aud with it the chance to form concepts adequate to the comparative aaalysis of other societies. The theoretical promise of the book's title and Ginsborg's initial wenda remains unfulfilled, because 'Actively to engage Kith Gramsci requires

more than a neb of empirical illustration; it demands a theoretical en- gagement with and against To this extent, and for all its qualities, the Davis volume remains more a symptom of the interest in Gramsci than a fully developed contribution.

What can we say in general about the other books? Those by Femia, Adamson, Salamini and Harold Entwhistle are prime examples of Gramsci- iology. They lack the openly political purpose of much discussion of Cramsci, but still possess a political integrity of their own. Indeed,

it is impossible to write about Gramsci without facing a range of polit-

ical implicationso Gramsci's place in the'continuing Bbndst tradition and the PCI's current policies chief among them. The latter are fight

to the fore of the other texts directly under review -- the books by Paolo Spriano, Christine BuciUucksmann, and Anne Showstack Sassoon, and the two readers, Gramsci && Mazxist Them and A~oroachesto Gramsci . The dominating perspective here is clearly Eurocommunist, an affirmation

in theory of post-Stalinist -- but also post-Leninist -- strategic poss- ibilities for the Left. One function of these boaks -- as Chantal Mouffe and Anne Showstack Sassoon, uho have navigated much of the Gramsci dis-

ussion for the British Left, would both see it -- is to bring the British . discussion up to the level of the Ftench and ~hllan.~~This is most

avowedly the case in Gramsci Ma;ndst Theory, which presents some of the major contributions to a debate opened by the second Cramsci Conf- erence at Wari in 1967, fetnile in its political urgency, on the nature of Gramci's political legacy, a kind of theoretical forecourt to the fomal elaboration of a distinct Eurocommunist .politics in 1975-6. Buci-Glucksarann's Gramsci and the' State (published in the original bench

in 1975) should also be seen as part of this debate, as should Spriano's careful reconstruction og Gramsci's relations with the party after his imprisonment (originally published in 1977) . finally, A~~maches3 $9 Cramsci also contains a number of pertinent essays from point of view, either as elements of contention (those by Ciuseppe Vacca, Buci- Glucksmaan, and Showstack as soon) or more detached commentaries (~c Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn), while Showstack Sassoon's own book is conceived as a theoretical foundation for an equivalent left-Eurocommunist politics in Britain, whose interpretation of Gramsci's politics synthesizes the best insights from the continental debate. Allowing for a necessary partiality in the reading of Cramsci, these texts maintain an exception- ally hi& level of exegetical rigour and intellectual sophistication, which caa rarely have been matched in the context of a party political discussion .

IV.

What can be said more specifically about the state of our current understanding? One's reactions to Gramsci's cmer may be organized in many different ways, but the following seem to me the features which are particularly worth remarMng.

First, attention has shifted from the young to the older Gramsci.

In a nay this is obvious, given the centrality of the Prison Notebooks to his intellectual achievement (indeed, the absence outside the Note- books of any sustained theoretical writing not directly harnessed to immediate political practice) . But it is worth remembering that Gramsci first came to notice in English as the theodst and instigator of the Turin factory councils in 1919-20. This uas true of some early fragments of translation before the major editions of the lVOs, of Cammtt's

pioneering book, of Martin Clark's dissertation, azd of Cwgn 'dilliams' * book and the accompanying translation of riano no.^^ This was a period (late-1960s to early-1970s) when discussion- of Cramsci was lazgely con- fined to a -st Left preoccupied Kith directdemocratic alternatives to parliamentary forins, and therefore more inclined to stress the rev- olutionzrry yeass 1917-21 than either the Second International or the Pop-

ular Front. The concern was explicitly polemical, namely to claim

Cramsci for 'an anti-Stalinist libertarian camp' and to show that he belonged 'in the revolutionary tradition of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and outside of the distortions which have so often posed as PIarxism in the last fifty The current literature does not ignore the

factory councils. But it addresses this early period either as a routine

part of Cramsci's biography before the real 'meat' of the theoretical exposition damson), or for the light it can shed on the larger prob- lems of hegemony howst stack as soon) or the state (~uci-~lucksmann)that azwcrystallized in the p&od of the Notebooks. There is nothing like

the intensive dissection of' the councils' experience in Gwyn Williams

and M;irtin Clark, which together remain the best sources for this phase

in Cramsci's career. In Salamini's book it disappears altugether.

The most integxated account is in Femia, who discusses the councils

in the context of Gramsci's thinking about the party ('Architect of the new hegemony ' , pp . 139-51) . But even Femia treats Gramsci 's * consiliar ' doctrine as a 'digression', before returning to the dominant theme of

the revolutionary party. , Thus, though he polemicizes @nst 'the folly of treating his (Gramsci's) writings as a unified nhole' (p. 139), Femia effectively does this himself by divesting the councils' experience of

an independent significance, 'on the grounds that Cramsci subsequently demoted them in his But while Gramsci never revisited the idea of the councils in any detail (as such they are virtually unmentioned in the ~otebooks), and while the foundation of the Communist Party and the victory of fascism involved a decisive break in Gramsci's career, the Ordine -Nuovo period retained a none the less constitutive significance for certain of his mature themes, like the educative power of the factory in particular. For this reason Showstack Sassoon's decision to include two essays on the councils in her reader (by Franc0 De Felice on 'Revol- ution and Production', and Flario Telo on 'The Factory councils') is all the more welcome. Here the key features of the factory councils are descriptively reafnrmed: their essential novelty in the context of the Second International; their affinities to the soviets in Russia and con- sequent intimations of 'dual power'; their subversion of undemocratic trade union bureaucracy (though not of legitimate trade union represent- ation on the basis of the wage relation); their radical potential, as agencies of direct as opposed to representative or parliament- democracy, & media of mobilization, and as instruments of working class self-educ- ation ('schools of propaganda', as Gramsci put it); and their fundamental political importance, as institutfons which raised the workers to a sense of their full capacity to dominate production and thence society itself.

Historically speaking, it is valuable to be reminded of this given the relative indifference to Gramsci's easly years now that the Prison lotebooks have come to dominate the stage. There were always definite weaknesses in the consiliar conception. Beyond a canpoint there is an essential vagueness to Gramsci's statements in 1919-20 re,ang the exact relations between councils, trade unions and party, and while he took pains to affirm the legitimacy of all three in the overall repertoire of working class action, the nuance in his own position proved an insufficient defence against the tendential syndicalism of the Turin movement as a whole. Many militants (probably a majority) saw the councils increasingly as a revolutionary substitute for political action by a party, and this could easily degenerate into a localist, apolitical celebration of working class spontaneity.46 Gramsd and his immediate collaborators were somewhat exceptional in holding the larger importance of state power firmly in view during the high tide of the Turin movement.

~dreover, this was compounded by other limitations. Given the factory as opposed to the territorial basis of the councils, it was unclea;l: how far the education of the workers into self-management could also equip them to run society. This qualified their potential as orgaas of future state power, and as Mario Telo observes in the Show- stack Sassoon collection, licensed 'a much reduced notion of the dict- atorship of the proletariat stemming from a conception of revolution limited to the working class* (p. 204). The same 'productivism' tended to suppress the problem of' class alliances (i.e. winning the democratic consent of aon-proletdan strata to the revolution), and obscured the

difficulties of articulating the councils with other kinds of popular activism (like agricultural unions and peasant land occupations) into

a larger political movement that was genuinely national in scope (in both the social and territorial senses). Telo succinctly srlmmirizes this weakness: *exaltation of a w6rking class productivism based in an already existing industria apparatus; separation of the working class from intermediate social strata; an accentuation of its distance from non-working class proletarian and semi-proletarian strata' (p . 205) .

It was a serious deficit in Gramsci 's thinking in the prison years

that he never revisited these early problems. At different points in the anti-fascist struggle the council concept resurfaced as the distinct- ive working class contribution to the democratic anti-fascist front, capable of ushering in the socialist phase of the struggle and sustain- ing an appropriate level of radicali~ation.~~But in generd they became displaced in Gramsci's thinking during the 1920s by a Bolshevik concept- ion of the revolutionary party. However, Gramsci's own later neglect is no reason to ignore the experience, uhether for the intrinsic interest of the consiliar idea, its centrality to the revolutionary conjuncture of 1917-23 (in both Italy and Europe), or its constitutive importance for many of Cramsci's later preoccupations. This is partly because the buoyant, not to say utopian expectations of 1919-20 (optimism of the intellect?) cast the subsequent period into necessary relief. But the Rtrin years also retain a founding importance in Gramsci's cazeer, not in the sense of some linear continuity which suppresses the elements of break and conjuncture in the following two decades, but as a moment of exceptional political and intellectual excitement, which convened an

enduring configuration of problems in Gramsd 's mind. u

This was true above all of his thinking about education and culture.

In this sense the conciliar experience already inscribed a powerful conception of the proletariat's hegemonic capability, though one whose conditions of realization in society at large remained to be elaborated.

Given the importance attributed to Crdine Nuovo by earlier work (espec- ially by Davidson, Clark, Williams), it is strange - though perhaps understandable in terms of how they construct their problematic around the 'privileged' texts of the Notebooks - that the cment works give it so little attention. As Davidson put it, Gramsci 's 'experience Kith the factory councils taught him once and for all that the fundamental mode of creating class consciousness was through the practical activity of organizing the workers in a "conciliar activity", through which their possibilities would become "visible", and theory "realized"' .M CLark summarizes the period's longer significance very well: 'The idea that Fiat is the capitalist firm par excellence, the beUef in the peculiar importarice of the Wnworking class (comparable in proletarian status to the miners in ~ritain), the leadership of intellectuals from the ''Kingdom of Ssrdinia", above all the willingness to debate cultural and historical topics, the hostility to corgealed orthodoxy and secbrianism -- all these features of the Italian Communist Party are characteristic- ally Wnovista' .49

The question of 'young' versus 'old' Gramsci also bears on the second them1 want to mention, namely the vexed question of Gxamsci's relation- ship to Benedetto Croce. In his early formation it seems clear that Gramsci owed very little to the German orthodoxies of the Second Intern- ational, specifically to the evolutioaary deterxinism normally associated with Kautskyan Social Democracy, certainly in its codified and popular-

ized versions .9 He was far more dram to the voluntarist and activist mode of discourse strongly in the ascendant amongst radical intellectuals by the time he nent up to Turin University in 1911. Amongst the specific influences on his early ideas the dominant Hegelianism of Croce's Neapol- itan school seems to have been paramount, politically charged with a defiant Sard radicalism derived from Gaetano Salvemini's writings on the L- South. Fiori and Davidson explored this intellectual milieu in some detail, and Walter Adamson non provides an admirable summary of the prev- ailing climate of ideas during Gramsci 's youth. He calls Gramsci a 'mil- itant Crocean' -- 'one who drew on the new wave for its democratic temper, but who still located himself in the long, neo-fiegelian stream of Italian

high culture'. He continues: 'This was possible largely because the left-

right cleavage of prewar Italian political and intellectual life was very much overshadowed and even confised by other, more dominating cleawes between North and South, positivist and anti-positivist, Marxist and

anti-positivist radical, and rationalist and irrationalist. On each of

these divides, Cramsci stood on the same side as Croce' (p. 33). This

puts it very well.

To this specifically Italian context should be added the influence of 'the romantic socialist but non--st or at least nonorthodox sector of the French intelligentsia: Roan aollactd, Charles Peguy, Henri Barbusse, and Georges Sorel', whom Gramsci seems to have been reading in 1916-17. They gave him 'an intense preoccupation with the category of "will" and

a mozalism aimed at renewing the "consciousness" of the masses through education and culture' (p. 33f .) . This makes sense of Gramsci 's ambiguous interventionism in autumn 1914 (expressed in his article 'Active and Oper- ative Neutrality ' , Oct . 31st 1914) , and Adamson 's treatment of these points is succinct and convincing (e.g. in his gloss on Gramsci's second major article, 'Socialism and Culture ' , Jan. 29th 1916, pp. 31ff. ) . The high point of this 'Crocean' or even 'pre-i-st' phase was repres- ented in three acts: the famous article. of Dec. 24th 1917, which greeted the victory of the Bolsheviks as a 'Revolution against "Ca?ital"'; the abortive publication of La Citta htura in February 1917 as the intended journal of the Socialist Youth Federation; and the founding of the Club --di vita morale in December 1917 as an incubator of socialist consciousness amongst young workers. 51

Of course, the Crocean origins of Gramsci's thought have never really been in dispute. The arguments arise over the nature of its lasting effects. Broadly speaking, there have been two extreme positions. One, for uhich

Togliatti was the firm but sophisticated spokesman, was the official view of the PCf in its sterner pre-1956 moods. Me may pass by the broader aspects of this view (e.g. the 'historicism' of the PCI's prevailing line in the 1950s), and for our current purposes stress the essential 'Leninism' of the interpretation. Gramsci is thought to have decisively repudiated the intellectual heritage of Italian idealism, so much so that the Prison Notebooks may be re&& as the *anti

The key break was his recognition ofthe need for a Communist Party and

for disciplined observance of the imperatives of the ?him3 International. We may note in passing that this implies a qualified judgement (though not a dismissal) of the period of the councils in Gramsci's development. 52

On the whole most subsequent Mandst commentary has accepted the premises

of this interpretation, which establishes an abstract 'Leixinism' as the

external measure of Gramsci 's maturity and consistency as a Ekrxist theor- etician. Arguments can then proceed over the timix (uhether the concil- iar experience of 1919-20, the split with the PSI in 1920-1, or the fight Kith Amadeo Bordiga and the accompanying Bolshevization of the PC1 in 1924-6 were the authentic 'Leninist' moments) and the completeness

(~ramsci*s 'historicism', his neglect of economics, his 'social dem- ocracy*, or his 'Stalinism') of Gramsci 's development into a genuine revolutionarg ~y~ist.j3 Despite the opening of discussion in the PC1 since the 1960s. in which the second Gramsci Conference was the key moment, this Leninist definition has remained largely intact. Gmci's political theory has been systematically coopted (both crudely and with immense sophistication) into recent dehates over the 'Italian road', to the point now of a decisive break with the Soviet model, but the revol- utionary lifeline to the early Comintern years has' not been snapped. In a similar vein, current discussions within the ihrocommunist persp- ective simply take Gramsci's materialism as understood and clearly see little value in discussing the question. Both Buci-C;1uCksmum and Show- stack Sassoon give the question of Gramsci's possible 'Croceanism' short shrift.

The second extreme position was that of the Croceans themselves, encapsulated in Croce's own post-war assertion that the prison letters showed Gramsci to be 'one of us' -- i.e. 'a philosopher in the speculative, anti-positivist tradition, who recognized the value of idealist categ- ories, displayed a lively appreciation of high culture, and took a broad view of historical development', as Femia puts it (p. 62). This achieved some slight currency in the l95Os, but only properly took root in 1963 with the publication of Giuseppe Tamburrano's' Antonio GraPisci. As Femia says: 'Cramsci's Croceanism, on this account, consists not in any fascination Kith abstract ideas or rarified philosophical questions, but in his emphasis on the subject zlather than the object as the primary maker of social change, in his refusal to recognize the efistence of any objectivity that cannot be overcome through conscious praxis. The materialist aspect of historical materialism virtually drops out. Cramsci emerges as a "realist1*neo-Crocean, a P!st working within a voluntarist, subject- ivist, idealist framework, totally opposed to any form of economic det- 9 erminism* (FI.65). This anticipated Norberto ~obbio'smore famous interv- ention at the Cagliari Conference four years later, when he claimed Gramsci as the 'theorist of the superstructure', who inverted the accepted relat- ionship between superstructure and base and broke decisively with Marx's theoretical problematic ( 'Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society', in Mouffe , pp. 21 47) . In one form or another the approach is shared by most of the non-Mantist commentators on G~amsci. H. Stuart Hughes (an especially simplistic version) , Ceurge Lichtheim, Neil McIme8, James Joll, and

Leszek Kolokowski allcome to mind.55 A paFticularly idiosyncratic rendering can be found in the writings of Piccone and the Telos group. 56

If Croce is to Gramsci as Hegel is to Marx, we should probably resign ourselves to a future of fruitful indetermi- in the critical discussion of the relationship. No one has tried to argue that Cramsci's intellectual . . achievement hinged on an epistemolbgical break, separating the mture problematic of the Notebooks from the youthful speculations in Wn, and

such a notion would be singularly inappropriate for making sense of his

career. It is surely Cramsci's consciousness of problems that makes him so attractive -- his awareness of difficulty and his willingness to argue his way through unknown territory, pushing the enquiry beyond the frontiers

of what passed for Mandst orthodoxy in the Iflamist txadition, not just

' in the Second International, but in the Third, and for that matter.in

PIan< himself. In this sense a kind. of permanent dialogue with Croce was

the motor for much of his innovation. Joseph Femia's discussion of this \S/> point first rate. As he says, 'Even the mature Gramsci employed the

Crocean id5om, and this usage is emblematic of how the Neapolitan's ideas are woven into the Quaderni' . Several key themes ( 'the notion of ideolog- ical and spiritual rule through consent, the insistence on the relative

autonomy of ideas, the hostility to philosophical materialism and so-called "economism"') were learned originally through a reading of Croce: 'Through

his confrontation with Italy's leading Hegelian, Cramsci came to appreciate that every historical action presupposes a cultural framework, a complex organization of ends and means enclosed within a system of values. This

insight, gained in his youth, always stood at the centre of his analysis, providing a foundation for his critique of mechanistic versions of Marxism' (p. 126) .

None the less, despite this (and, e.g., the sawof his attack on ~ukharin)Cramsci stayed securely within Marx's materialist framework, proc-

eeding from a definite notion of structure, as (in Togliatti 's words) 'the location of practical productive activity, on which rises the whole of the I social relations in which real men move and act'.57 In his elaboration of this point ('The economic base sets, in a strict manner, the range of poss-

ible outcomes, but free political and ideological activity is ultimately

decisive in determining which alternative prevails' ; or 'In the last analysis,

then, history works itself out throw the discontents of men afflicted with the contradictions that exist in the economic sphere. Any given hegemony must always be traced back to its material roots*, pp. la, 127). Fentia comes close to the conception of structural determination derived from Althusser earlier in the 1970s, suggesting that Gramsci manages 'to steer a middle course between the Scylla of absurdity ("~roductiondetermines everything") and the Charybdis of banality ("everything determines everything else")' (p. la). His summary of Gramsci's final position can hardly be bettered: 'Gramsci .... was far from denying the classical Mandst primacy of being over thought: he only wished to say that subject and object existed in an interactive relationship, manifested in praxis. Man is at once cause and effect, author and consequence of certain definite conditions. Once objectified, however, these conditions -- especially their economic manif- estation -- preclude the possibility of sovereign choice. Men make their own world and their own history, but not as they please. They are weighted

down by their own past constructions, which are in turn conditioned by the primal forces of nature. It was Gramsci 's hope to develop a concept of Mandsm equi-distant from idealism and positivism. History is generated neither by the speculative unfolding of some transcendent "spirit" nor by the evolution of material forces' (p. 27). 58

Beyond a certain point,. which was passed some time between the launch- ing of Ordine Nuovo in May 1919 and the formation of the PC1 in January 1921, Gramsci became more interested in Croceanism as a socio-cultural force than

in Croce as an individual thinker. In this sense his thinking about hegemony owed more to an analysis of the Crocean presence in Italian society than to

the intrinsic qualities of Croce's own ideas. For Cmci, Croce occupied a strategic place in Italian culture, 'a kind of lay pope', whose influence afforded a rare insight into the processes by which hegemony was secured. 59 In the celebrated essay on the Southern Question, dtten just before his arrest in 1926, Cramsci specified what he meant by this assessment: 'It is a remarkable fact that in the South, side by side with huge property, there have existed and continue to exist great accumulations of culture and intelligence in single individuals, or small groups of great intellectuals, while there does not exist any organization of middle culture. There exist in the South the Late- publishing house, and the review La Critica. There exist academies and cultural hodies of the greatest emtion. But there do not exist small or medium reviews, nor publishing houses around which medium groupings of Southern intellectuals might form. The Southerners who have sought to leave the agrarian bloc and pose the Southern Question in a radical form have found hospitality in, and grouped themselves around, reviews printed outside the South. Indeed, one miat say that all the cultural initiatives by medium intellectuals which have taken place in this century in Central and Northern Italy have been characterized by Southernism, because they have been influenced by Southern intellectuals'. Together with Giustino Fortunato Croce was one of 'the supreme political and intellectual rulers of all these initiatives', who ensured that 'the problems of the South would be posed in a way which did not go beyond certain limits; did not become revolutionary. Men of the highest culture and intelligence, who arose on the traditional terrain of the South but were linked to Zuropean and hence to world culture, they had all the neces- gifts to satisfy the intellect-

ual needs of the most sincere representatives of the cultured youth in the South; to comfort their restless impulses to revolt against existing condit- ions; to steer them along a middle way of classical serenity in thought and 60 action'. In short, 'Benedetto Croce has fulfilled an extremely important "national" function. He has detached the radical intellectuals of the South, from the peasant masses, forcing them to take part in national and European culture; and through this culture, he has secured their absorption by the national bourgeoisie and hence by the wanbloc'. Or, as Buci-Glucksmann puts it: 'In the absence of a great and politically united party of the bourg- eoisie, Croce played the role of ideological federator, a cement between the Mlrious liberal groups. He offered them a common nationaland European vision of the world, a cerhin type of intellectual and moral leadership over

society' (p. 393). It was this concentrated exercise of ideological creativ- ity in the interests of a dominant social bloc and its political represent-

ation (what Buci -4lucksmann calls an 'apparatus of philosophical hegemony ' ) that particularly fascinated Gramsci -- 'the access to and diligent use of scholarly journals and the scholarly press to saturate the intellectual life

of Italy with a single point of.view, a particular culture, in order to bring about what Croce liked to call the "cultural rebirth of Italy"' .61

Cramsci's esw on the Southern Question (which was appropriately included as a kind of preface to the original edition or' selections from the Prison Notebooks in The Modern prince) crystallized these thowts about the social and political functions of intellectuals and convened most of Gramsci's dev- eloping theoretical preoccupations in a strongly articulated analysis. We may accept Buci-Glucksmann's arguments against regarding 1926 as an overly decisive break in Gramsci's career (e.g. between the political activist up

to 1926, and the contemplative thinker after his arrest) and still regard

the unfinished thoughts on the Southern Question as a significant point of . 62 departure. It assembled an agenda of questions, which (by the accident of his arrest soon afterwards) Gramsci -as able to pursue more extensively in the Prison Sotebooks -- 'the role of the intellectuals, the historic bloc and the concept of hegemony, and the role of the proletariat and its political party' (as Showstack Sassoon summarizes them, p. 104). In other words, it brings us properly to the third major feature of the current books, nanely nhat they have to say about Granscit's concept of hegemony. I

VI. The concept of hegemony is the one most commonly associated with Gramsci's distinctive contribution to -st theory. Indeed, it would be no exagger- ation to say that it was through this concept that most people over the last twenty years first encountered him. An enormous quantity of paper and ink have been expended in the specification and elaboration of what Gramsci meant by the term, and there is no space here to do the compldty of these discussions anything like justice.63 In any case, my concern is less the clazification of Gramsci's concepts per se than the exploration of some current emphases in

the literature about him. But for general orientation we can do far worse than quote Guyn Yilliams ' '-ly definition (from 1960) , which' condensed the .numerous IWan exegeses and Gramsci's own widely scattered statements on the subject (only a tiny fragment of which, of course, .were then available in-

English), and whfch for many years (essentiay until the translation of the llotebooks and the 'second phase' of the Gramsci reception in the mid-1970s) remained the main starting-point for English-language discussion. In this summary notation, 'hegemony' signifies 'an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in nhich one concept of reality is diffused

throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, in- forming Kith its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and polit- ical principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intell-

ectual and moral connotations'. Uilliams continues: 'An element of direct-

ion and control, not necessarily conscious, is implied'. And he added: 'This hegemony corresponds to a state power conceived in stock $-st 64 terms as the dictatorship of a class'.

In the Prison Notebooks it was the process of constructiw hegemony, viewed through the lens of Italian history, that interested Gramsci more than anything else. How did such a single 'concept of reality' come to be

dominant? How was its dominance constituted, organized, reproduced?

Through what political modalities was the stability and moral cohesion of the

social order guaranteed? How was popular consent, as opposed to pragmatic acceptance or enforced compliance, achieved? How might such broader 'nat- ional-popular' solidarities, which expressed the common sense of belonging of a society, which transcended the divisions of region, religion, section-

alism and even class, and which conktrained the oppositional imagination of subozdinate and exploited groups, be undermined? How might the working class in particular claim for itself an independent political effectivity,

sufficiently resilient to Kithstand the enormous countervailing authority of the established order and sufficiently attractive to uin the allegiance of

the other popular classes? How, above all, might a credible counter-hegemonic potential against and uithin the existing society be organized? bT

It was to these questions that the remarkable achievement of the Notebooks

was harnessed. Gramsci adumbrated the broad outlines c& his project,. which

began as a 'study of the intellectuals' but uhich in practice (as Buci-Glucks- mann persuasively argues) developed increasingly into a discourse on the state, in a much quoted letter of September 1931: 'I greatly extend the notion of intellectuals beyond the current meaning of the word, which refers chiefly to great intellectuals. This study also. leads me to certain determinations of the State. Usually this is understood as political society (i.e. the dict- atorship of coercive app-tus to bring the mass of the people into conformity with the type of production and economy dominant at any given moment) and not as an equilibrium between political society and civil society (i.e. the heg-. emony of a social group over the entire national society exercised through the so-called pdvate organizations such as the church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.) . Civil society is precisely the special field of action of the intellectuals' .66 Though he takes cazeful note of direct interventions to suppress~opposition, to contain dissent, and to manipulate educational, religious and other ideological apparatuses for the production of popular com- pliance, therefore, (2lamsci explicitly links hegemony with a domain of public life ( 'civil society' ) which is relatively independent of such controls, and hence makes its achievement a far more contingent process. To establish its supre- a dominant class must not only imwse its rule through the state, it must also demonstrate its claims to 'intefiectual and moral leadership', and this requires a continuous labour of creative ideological activity. The

capacity 'to articulate different visions of the world in such a way that their potential antagonism is neutralized', rather than simply suppressing those visions beneath 'a uniform conception of the world', is the essence of heg- emony in Gramsci ' s sense. 67 .

The intricacies of Gramsci's meaning have been traversed many times. !Jith the current literature we have probably now reached the limits of the exegetical mode. In their different ways Showstack Sassoon, Plouffe, Buci- Clucksmann, Femia, Salamini, Anderson, =c Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, and 68 Raymond Yilliams have all provided first-rate explications. hongst the books immediately under review, Femia probably provides the most rounded and satisfying account of 'hegemony's' theoretical content, Adamson the most perfunctory. Amongst the more closely 'textual' accounts, Showstack Sassoon's displays great synthetic lucidity, placing Gramsci 's term securely in its larger conceptual field -- the idea of the state as 'hegemony fortified by coercion'; the notion of the 'historical bloc', the vlew of intellectuals as 'the organisers of hegemony', and the pervasive concern with 'the party'. 69

i,Iore specifically, Anderson and Buci-Glucksmann locate Gramsci's highly ind- ividual use of the term more precisely within the deeper ideological context of Russian social democracy (going back to ~lekhanov)and in the contemporary usage of the omi intern.'' Harold Sntwhistle explores its relationship to Gramsci's views on education, although his valuable account of Gramsci's rather 'conservative' pedagogy (stressing the need for 'precision, discipline, order, sbfidards and "sobriety" in schooling', p. 107) is gratuitously

hitched to an ultimately misplaced polemic against 'cument neo-lbzxist ed- ucational theory'. otherwise known as the 'new sociology of education'. 71

Finally, Ginsborg (in the Davis collection) and Adamson offer useful expos-

itions of Gramsci's views on the Eiisorgimento (see pp. 45-61 and 184-96 of - those works respectively).

As most authors point out, Gramsci's concept of hegemony is by no means

a finished quantity or free of ambiguities. To take a major example, the Prison Notebooks are far more concerned uith the mechanisms and modalities

of hegemony under capitalism than uith the problem of how a successful counter- hegemonic challenge might be mounted or the question of how working class hegemony under socialism might be democratically guaranteed. As Bob Lumley says, 'the concept of hegenony in the 9otebooks is used.primazily to explain the ways in which the ruling bloc entains its power'.72 Cf course, Gramsci also had much to say about the 'Ibdern Prince' -- his conception of the new revolutionary party which was capable of organizing 'the national-popular collective will' into the potential for a new state and a 'new historical bloc bound together by a broadlg extended hegemony', as Showstack Sassoon puts it (p. 153) - and during the prison years (as Paolo Spriano..shows) was ' understandably concerned with devising an anti-fascist strategy that might sim- ultaneously introduce the transition to socialism.73 These concerns were also linked to Gramsci's famous distinction between the 'war of movement' and the

'war of position', where the latter was meant to characterize the needs of the West European Left in the straig;htened circumstances of the later-1920s.and

1930s. But specifying the practical implications of these ideas has been the task of Gramsci 's subsequent commentators, of whom by far the most important

has been the towering figure of his eazly Turin associate, long-time comrade and political legatee, Palmiro Togliatti. Similarly, on the evidence of the Xotebooks Gramsci's thinking about the nature of revolutionary transitions remained fairly indeterminate once it came to the final moment of the seizure of power, a strategic question which the concept of the 'war of position'

tended to mask. Here again, the task of clarification has been performed by the post-war commentators, principally those of a Eurocommunist persuasion,

though as Poulantzas pointed out there was no explicit warranty in

for the idea that the state apparatus can be seized and transformed through

a strategy of pliamentaxy and electoral politics. 74

But despite these ambiguities the resonance of Gramsci's concept for the 1960s was very great. For generations raised on the rigours of the Cold

'ular, unimpressed with either the social democratic or orthodox Communist traditions, and bedazzled by the triumphs of consumer capitalism, a body of theozy so stronglg oriented towards the cultural aspects of domination

was bound to seem attractive. On the one hand, the widespread belief that the Soviet and -t European revolutions had left fundamental social ineq- ualities intact found considerable support in Gramsci's stress on the need for cultural as well as political and economic tramformation -- what Hobs- bawm calls his distinction between 'how revolutionaries come to power' and 'how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing and

irreplaceable rulers, but as guides and leaders' (~wroachesto Gramsci, p. 30) . On the other m, the imagery of 'bourgeois hegemony ' spoke eloq- uently to the emerging cultural critique of late capitalist society, with its stress on the incorporation of the working class, its absolute distinct- ions between revolution and reform, and arresting slogans of repressive tol- erance. Gramsci's relevance to these concerns - what Femia calls 'the process of internalization of bourgeois relations and the consequent diminution of ' revolutio- possibilities' (p. 35) -- is obvious, and it is easy td see

how from a sixties' perspective he seemed all of a piece Kith the murt

School and Lukacs. In this respect his importance has not only lasted but

grown during the intervening years. As Femia says, 'Gramsci 's most impress-

ive contribution to 2Iancist analysis uas to help shift its focus away from economics and natural science to the terrain of culture -- to philosophy and the intellectuals, to popular psychology, and to the manifold agencies of socialization' (P. 254) .

Eut in making this point' we should beware of mis-stating or exaggerating the nature of Cramsci's recent influence. After all, an interest in the cultural mechanisms of bourgeois domination and the forms of working class subordination under capitalism (which began in the late-1950s/early-l960s -with the new departures,in 3ritish sociology, the political project of the early New Left Review, and the early achievements of current aritish social history) considerably predated the serious reception of Cramsci (which was not under way until the end of the 1960s). Perry Anderson may point proudly (and justly) to the role of :lew Left Review in 1964-5 in pioneering the ex- ploration of Gramscian themes.75 But these were only properly placed 6n the agenda, sd to speak, by the political con juncture which immediately followed, whose energizing effects were dxamatized in the radical moment of 1968. Not the least of these effects radically reconstituted our understknding of the category of the political, culminating in a 'de-institutionalized underst- anding of politics, in which the possible sources of working class oppositional impulse are displaced from the recognized media of political parties and trade unions into a Mleiety of non-institutional settings, embracing bebviour previously regarded as "non-political" -- e.g. crime, street violence, riots, industrial sabotage, mentd illness, et~.'.~~Vithout simplifying too much,

we might argue that this expanded but de-institutionalized notion of the pol- itical opened the nay for a formally 'Gramscian' analysis and the more consc- ious appropriation of Cramscian concepts.

Ye might trace this trajectory in British left-intellectual practice in a number of places -- the annual conferences of the Labour History Society and the publications of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies would be two of the most obvious. The general field of North American and British social history, I would argue, reflects the process with particular clarity. There was the familiar expansion of research and ~ublicationin the course of the

1960s. There was the remarkable explosion of the academic subject's formal boundaries in and around the experience of 1968, so that whole new areas of social life and social practice became opened up as legitinate areas of serious discussion (particularly affecting women, blacks, ethnic and social minorities, peasants, and = fortiore the working class). There were the few seminal in- fluences uho possessed some early familiarity with the ideas of Gramsci (above all award Thompson and u3hgene ~enovese).77 'here was the lsrger eclectic universe of theoretical influences (other 'Vestern' I;iandsts and the various

tendencies of radical sociology) in which Gramsci then had his somewhat indist- inct place. It was in this unruly intellectual environment that the serious utilization of Gramscian terminology, and eventually the confident deployment

of his concepts, began. We might even say that it created the need for the

latter, to order and rationalize the highly particularized findings on this

or that individual aspect of popular culture and working class experience.

Fencia may say rightly that 'Iargely because of Gramsci, -st views of culture now understand symbolic or ideological representations of a given

historical situation as an integral and defining part of the situation' (p. 254).

But we should not ignore the impetus (partly linked to the Phrxist engagement with Gramsci in the 1960s'w' partly independent) provided by key social histor- ians, who pioneered the same type of i-?sights in the course of their om research. 78

In concluding this discussion, three points are worth making. First, 'hegemony' should not be confused uith 'ideology' or 'ideological domination' --tout court in a perspective stressing the 'manipulations' or 'social control' deliberately exercised by a ruling class. As 2aymond William says, in the course of a brilliant exposition: hegemony comprises 'not only the conscious

system of ideas and beliefs (i. e . 'ideology ' , 2), but the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings and values'; or 'a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very diff- icult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives'.

Xegemony should be seen 'as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living -- not only of political or economic activity, not only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relat-

ionships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense. Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of "ideology", nor are its forms - of control only those ordinarily seen as "manipulation" or "ind~ctrination". It is the whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: . our senses and assignments of energy, or shaping perceptions of ourselves and

our world' .79 lhis sense of completeness and externally structured experience, of 'the wholeness of the process' by nhich a given social order acquires its

legitimacy, is the most obvious feature of C-ci 's idea." From the social historian's standpoint it allows one to seek evidence of hegemony in the most

unlikely of places, from the nineteenth century attack on drink, popular festivals, cruel sports and customary-nays of life, to the social relations of production and appropriation in the Newfoundland fisheries. 81

Secondly, however, suggestions that Gramsci ' s is a ' totalitarian' con- cept, which were common in the older literature (e .'g . H. Stuart ~ughes), should be resisted. If we take the essential emphasis on consent (the idea that dominant classes must demonstrate their claias to 'intellectual and moral leadership' in society at large as well as asserting their control over the state's coercive apparatus) and add it to the equally essential concept of structured class i neauali ty (hegemon&c processes operate through social relations of dominance and subordination), then we arrive easily at a third element of definition, that of uncertainty, impermanence, and contradiction. In other words, hegemony is also susceptible to change and negotiation. As

I put it Kith Keith Nield on an earlier occasion, hegemony 'is not a fixed and immutable condition, more or less permanent until totally displaced by determined revolutionary action, but is an institutionally negotiable process in which the social and political forces of contest, breakdown and transform- ation are constantly in play'.82 In this sense hegemony is always in the process of construction. It is always open to inodification, and under spec- ific circumstances may be more radically transformed or even (though not very often) break down altogether. Thus civil society provides opportunities for contestiq as well as securin& the leetimacy of the system. Ellore than any- thing else, then, hegemony has 'to be won, secured, constantly defended'. It involves 'a struggle to win over the dominated classes in which any "resol- ution" involves both limits (compron&ses) and systematic contradictions ' .83 It requires that the dominance of a social group be continually renegotiated in accordance with the fluctuating economic, cultural and political strengths of the subordinate classes.

This last point -- the dynamic, contradictory and negotiabLe aspects of hegemonic construction, which open the space for counter-hegemonic potentials -- is vitally important and enables us to resolve a strange misunderstanding in certain non-;.iist discussions of Gramsci (this is the third and last of my concluding points). For example, we find R.J. Morris, in a long review of Robbie Gray's book an the labour aristocracy, asserting that the concept of hegemony 'implies the near impossibility of the working class or organized sections of that class being able to generate radical cultural and ideoloecal ideas indeperident of the dominant ideology' without external assistance from professional intellectuals. In effect, Moms reassimilates Gramsci here to an orthodox or classical i.Tantist tradition on the role of the revolutionary party (left to themselves the workers Kill pursue only their immediate material interests; socialist ideas and a revolutionary consciousness can only be intr- oduced from the outside), which is usually attributed to Lenin, but which was actually more widely diffused in the thought of :Tautsky and the mainstream of the Second International. Mods also equates hegemony Kith ideological domination pure and simple, or the subordination of wrking class culture to the 'imposed values' of a dominant class. To the extent that Gray is able to overcome the limitations of this conceptual framework to explain 'the spontan- eous generation of values and organization' within the working class itself (or in Gray's case the labour azistocracy) , Moms argues, he must reach outside the Cramscian framework altogether to independent theofies of 'cultural bargaining' between a subordinate class and the dominant culture developed within non-lust sociology. But once this theoretical borrowing takes place, bms argues, the maintenance of a given social order (and hence the contin- ued subordination of the working class, the containment of its aspirations within a reformist as opposed to a revolutionary framework of political demands) is seen to rest on a continuous process of renegotiation, and the concept of 84 hegemony consequently loses such of its 'totalitarian force'.

This is extraordinary. A Cramscian analysis (~obbie ray 's) is taxed with the very inadequacy -- an over-totalized conception of the power of the dominant ideology in society, and an idea of workirg class subo~~?- ation which is made to justify the intervention of a vanguard party -- which Gramsci's ideas have actually been used to overcome. Tine suggestion that the idea of hegemony does not already provide for a vital element of 'neg- otiation' and may even be radically opposed to it is very strange, and such a misunderstanding will be harder to repeat now that the exhaustive exegeses referred to in this essay are available. 85 ?low, it is certainly truethat Bobbie Gray also uses the kind of political sociology that Morris approvingly cites, notably the work of Parkin. But this is cognate to the Gramscian derivation of his argument, as opposed to supplemental ar contrad- ictory. This only goes to show how easily the potential value of Gramsci's concept may be misconstrued without a necessary familiarity with both the texts of the Notebooks themselves and the larger Marxist discussions that have recently come to surround them. 'Hegemony' must not be equated with straight- foruard ideological domination in Xomis 's ' totalitarian' sense, as l;iouffe, Showstack Sassoon, Femia, and most other direct commentators go to great lengths to point out. In general this is a salutary reminder of just how superficial a formal acquaintance with a Gramscian vocabulary can actually be.

n1. iJhere does this leave us? aspects of Gramsci 's importance have not been dealt with in the above observations. But it would be impossible to deal with them in an essay of this kind without slipping into the most descriptive and routinized of surveys. Each of Gramsci's key terms (state/civil society, organic/tradi tional intellectuals, war of position/war 02 manouevre , coll- ective will, historic bloc, corporatism, subal terni ty , passive revolution, and so on) deserves a commentary every bit as full as ay preceLir4 treataent of hegemony, and the latter itself suffers from being separates from thls larger array of concepts. Entire dimensior?~of Graiici's thought have been barely mentioned in this review -- his reflections of 'Americanism' and 'To+-- " '. 3 r ism', for example, or his thoughts on popular culture, folklore and language. ' Cramsci's place in currefit ?andst debates about the state, or about the nature of ideology, both deserve detailed exploration. Some of Gransci's weahesses (like his very schematic discussion of 'caesarism' or 'bonapartism' ) or blind spots (his relative neglect of sex-gender questions) deserve to be ex- plored. His notes of Iblian history might have been evaluated in the light of recent historiography. But rather than trying to 'cover' all of these topics,

I will use what is left of this essay to identify very briefly some fruitful areas for future research -- to assemble an agenda, so to speak, for the next stage of the reception.

(a) First, it has become an urgent priority to 'historicize' or context- ualize Gransci's development. In part this means returning to the more biogr- aphical enphases of an earlier phase in the reception. The books by Cammett,

Fiori, Davidson, Williams, and Cl& all opted for an essentially narrative presentation. Since then, as Tom ;:aim observes in a characteristically brilliant and dissentient essay in AQD~O~C~~SGramsci, the discussion has

grown far less 'historical' in the conventional sense, treating Gransci's career mainly for 'nhat can be distilled out of it as abstract political theory

or revolutionary strategy' for the present (p. 178). 'ulithout regressing fron the new theoretical sophistication (that would be terrible), this might now be reapplied to Cramsci's own biography. There are really two needs here. Cne is for a better grasp of the 'natiord-pazicular' or 'Itali=ate' element

In G-nsci 's thought, which was dominated (Xairn argues) by the failure to constitute a unified Italian state and rational political culture between the sixteenth and txentieth centuries. In this view, Gramsci iras formed fron 'the clash betveen Sardinia and Fiedmont, between the most unredeemed, alien South and the feral new capitalism of the ilorth' (i~airn, p. 178). between the embittering childhood experiences of poplar preju~ceand the exhilarat- ing Turin experience of popular vitality, between the exultation of revolut- ionary success and the slough of revolutionary defeat. He was the authentic philosopher of these specifically I talian contradictions , which ' constituted the very intellectual personality, the innermost drama of the founding father of the new revolutionaxy movement'. Gramsci's key ideas 'were valiant efforts to wrestle Italian dilemmas into some kind of theoretical sense' (rn, p. 175), 97 This stress on Italy's 'historical patholdgy' is very much to be welcomed.

The second need is for a fuller understanding of the 1920s. The early years up to 1917 are now adequately covered (especially by 250x5, Savidson, and damson), as are those of the factory councils up to 1920 (~ammett, David- son again, !Jilliams, and lark) . Likewise, Spriano 's meticulous chronicle provides as good a clarification of Gramsci's relations with the Communist

Party in the 1930s as we are likely to get. It is for the period between the

PCd'I 's foundation in January l9u and Gramsci 's arrest in 1926 that the ga? exists.. Amongst the more biographical works only Davidson's goes into appropr- iate detail, and his account of inner-party alignments is frequently ,.;arbled and hard to follow. '' Similarly, Juci-Glucksmann has lots to say about Lle ;%rxist debates or' the 1920s (e.g. concerning Cransci and 3-n, pp. 199-

290). but in a heav51y theoreticist vein which bears indistinctly on the detailed events in the Comintern. The real need is-for nonographs on the split xith the PSI, L!e sociology of the i.?fant Communist Pa-*j's reeonal and ifid- ustrial base, Zransci's relationship with Sordiga after 1921 (where >in :illliams stops) , and the PCd ' I ' s role in the Conintern, coqarable in qdity and depth to Latin Qark's study of the factory councils (or fa2lirg that a - .I transbtion of Spriano's multi-volume official history of the FCI). " Such studies would have to be infomed by a detailed knowledge of the interratiod dinension, particularly as this was articulated through the Conintern, about which we still remain extraordinarily ignorant. qb

(b) IWrhg from the talia an dimension to the Zuropean, we also need a compaxative history of the council novenent and the associated neo-syrdicalist manifestations during the revolutionary conjuncture of 1917-23. There is now

a large monographic literature on ' this' phenomenon in German and Italian, but a far spottier one in English. :Tot only would this broaden the discussion of Gramsci's Turin period and help ground the 'political' reading of the latter (i .e . the 'anti -Stalinist ' affimation of direct-democratic alternatives to Bolshevism) in a clearer grasp of its varying social reality and political lim-

i tations. It would also bring the history of the Communist Parties in the 1920s more clearly into focus. Arguably, the real significance of the councils was not their ability to offer a viable revolutionary alternative, but the -!ci~?dof Communist ?arty their failure irocld eventually create. Lilte the Faris Commune the councils provided a vital glLinpse of how a socialist society night be organized. But in other ways the most striking thing about the turbulent

years of 1919-21 was the fragmentation of the 'revolutionarj aovenent' into

violently adventdst localist tendencies , *which were sometimes consciously 'syndicalist', but were more often motivated by blanket antipathies to renote acd ineffect94 pa-ty machines. The problem of the left :ias horr to unify this militancy for political erds and -- after the defeats of 19SG-1 -- how to org- anize the frustrated revolutio~xcyexpectations for a period of nore prosaic Cefensive stwgle. This was essentially the 'problemtic' of 3olshev5zation (which as a process predated the slogans of the Fifth Conintern. Congress in 192b) and it was at the centre of Gramsci's and most other leading Com.ui?ists' preocc- upations in the little-studied peeod 'oetxeen 1923 ana 192e. In otner cronis, the complement to a social history of the council movement nould be an intensive investigation of the United Front. 9 1

(c) The most obvious area for fbture work is the nature of the Gramscian legacy in the PCI. Until recently this was the subject of prejudice (usdy aimed at ~ogliatti)a,nd not nuch research. But fortunately, the interest in dFurocommunism has produced a steady flow of Zngliish publication on the Pa, and 42. a. much better-informed appraisal of Gramsci's influence is becoming possible. 3iscussion might take three directions in particular. Cne night be the diffus- ion of Cramsci's ideas in Italian culture, amongst the intelligentsia ad the

PCI's own mass support, focusing on 'Cramscianism' as a socio-cultural force (much as Gramsci focused on '~roceanism'). This could lead natuz-dlly to mil- ysis of the PCI's remarkable influence in Italian intellectual life, which sets 93 it apart from most other Vest ,Zuropean Communist Parties. Secondly, we need to know nore about the years of iiesistance -xi reconstruction in the nid-l94Cs, when the PCI properly emerged as a nass party, when the Zoudations of the post-tar course were laid, and when the Party's democratic (or 'national-pop- 94 ular ' ) credentials were first established. Thirdly, Tomatti 's role r,eeds to be wxrgently delineated. As the most iqressive politiciazl produced by the intezmtional Comunist novement between the 'left tur-?' or^ 1928 aad the great wate-=shed of the nia-1960s (at least in ~uro~e)-- "',ne lzst gzeat fi,-e of the ?hi& Izterrational', as Eobsbam rightly calls him -- it is extraordraj that the Zr~lishlarguage has still produced virtually nothing approachi?? a

(d) ?!o less interesting than Gramsci 's impact today is the question of

Croce's influence 2.n the first three decaries of the century. Gramsci's observ- ations on the character of 'Croceanism' as a dominant intellect.& trend and larger cultural phenomenon linked to the rather fra&le structures of political cohesion in Giolittian Italy (~uci-~lucksmann' s 'apparatus of philosophical hegemony') are among the most fruitful of his specifically Italian reflections.

As X. Stuart Xughes remarked, 'Xot since Coethe had any single individual don- inated so completely the culture of a &jor ,&ropean country', while for Gramsci (as Zdmund Jacobitti aptly puts it) 'Croceanism was the Hegelianism of the twentieth century'. Clb Indeed, as suggested above, Croce ' s influence (both

through his own positive ideas of moral and intellectual reform, a& through Gramsci's evaluation of their social influence) may be credited with a crucial stimulus on Gramsci's thinking about hegemony. Consequently, it is no surprise to find one of Gramsci's recent commentators turning to the stiidy of Croce's

thought. q7 At any rate, testing the accuracy of Gramsci 's claims regarding Croceanism through some carefully focused historical sociology of knowledge irould be an excellent project to pursue. Zhis would also be a my of concret-

izing his arguments about intellectuals.

(e) Though much quoted, Gramsci's famous distinction between &st and Vest

('In iiussia the S'ate was everything, civil society was primordial and gelat-

inous; in the West there was a proper relation betueen State and civil society; ar-d when the State trembled a study structure of civ;,l society was at occe revealed ' ) " has had little discersole effect on studies of the 3ussian &pire or the Soviet Union. So far It has been Wen almost exclusively as a cue for work on the Yest. ci9 i4oreover1 the typical 'Gramscian' postulate of contemporary Left politics -- that the peculiar conations of the Yest (stable capitalism/liberal democratic state/advanced civil society) have created 'the need for a comprzhensive, systematic, long-range political strategy, bas&

on a rigorous study of all superstructural phenomena', as Temia (p. 254) puts it -- also has an unfortunate side, namely the implication that questions of democracy and 'pluralism' have been inappropriate for the more 'backward' cond-

itions of the 'East'. The potential for a certain kind of realist apologetics (~talinismwas determined by iiussian backwardness, authori'tarian bureaucratic regimes by the backwardness of %st European political cultures) should be

obvious here. In addition, the same syndrome easily perpetuates the West A%- opean Left's traditional twentieth century indifference to questions of democr- acy in the East and confirms its inexcusable ignorance of mtern Zurope's rich democratic socialist traditions. But, as recent events in Poland should remind

us, the East affords a rich field for the exploration of Gramscian concepts, !30 and not just as a negative counter-example to the iiest.

This clearly does not exhaust the range of questions which future research

~ghtpursue, aad it would be easy to go on addire; tc the list, from L!e ex-

trenely abstract (e .g. the exact relationship between '?= of position' ar-d

'war of manoeuvre' Ln Gramsci's strategic conception of 'the transition to social-

ism) to the very concrete (e.g. his attitude totxuds the idea of popular front). Ajstracting from my own discussion, the general gnority is to put Gramsci's concepts more concretely to work. Tne faliar exercise in exegesis, in either book or essay form, to CeTine ;$hat Gm.sci redly neat by :?is vazziocs con- cepts or to .establish his specific contribution to politic& tbieoqr, will be harder and harder to defend after the current outpouri~gof litemture.

On the other hand, the opposite danger, that of rducir~G~c~sc~ too radic- ally to the specifically Italian parmeters of his thought,, is equally to be avoided.. ;:a,irn, for one, comes perilously close to this, so that Grao-sci the general tfieofist (of revolution in the :iest, or of d3roccmunism) tkeatens to disappear altogether, save as a role model oS intelligent 'national-partic- ular' analysis. !' If anything has emerged from the intensive discussions of the last decade and a half, surely, it is that Gramscf's =-complexities should not be reduced. Both Gramscis -- the philosopher of specifically Italian contradictions a the architect of Mandst political theory, who precisely abstracted his distinctive general concepts from aa incisive scrutiny of the

Italian past and present -- are important. For entirely good reasons, as political theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists and historians discovered the enormous potential of Cramsci's ideas, the last few years have placed the accent on commentary, on clarifying Czamsci's formal meaxings, and on exploring their extnordiaarily fhitful indeterminacy. But it is no surprise that the most suggestive questions arising have increasingly concerned the intellectual, national-cultural, social and political contexts in which Gramsci mteand which subsequently lent weight to his ideas. The philosophers have had their say. The historians should now take the stage. 1. 30 sooner had this inanuscript been completed than ?.oger Simon's Graiisci*~

Folitical Thought: & Introduction (London: kicence & :!ishart, 1983).

iras announced. So far as I am aware there are no other major additions

to the literature, but Sy 'he tine 'this essay is published I my be provd '/ wrong. us;^: u.~bbk ~c'et,a~-%~/e,'+mrciAs ?&l~oy: ;w ./~*ffiki (1913). 32 7 '7%'~ Wh'&n. -1'A'> 13 - 64, y(t~*tA'&- efs*?, LJ~J

2. The political assimilation of Gransci seems to have reached a temporary

terminus in Britain, while in the USA it still coctinues. See Tau1 Costello, 'Antonio Gramsci and the aecasting of Xarxist Strategy', in Theoretical Review, 31 an. 1983), 1-20, which also appeared after the time of uriting.

3. This essay originated as a review of the most recent books on Gransci and

grew to its present form uith the encouragement and indulgence of the Ed- itor and Review Editors of the Euro~eanStudies Review, for which I an extremely grateful. general understanding of Cramsci owes much to a continuing intellectual collabozation with Xei th Eeld, while the present

text benefited from a careful reading by Ron Suny.

4. The first editions of Gramsci were published in 199: the well-known selection by Louis ;4adxs, The i+odern Prince & Gther (~ocdon,

. 9,arid the less well-known edition by Carl i%mxmi, me Cpen i.wsn -of Antonio Gramsci (:!eu York, 1957) . Instrumental in bringing Gramsci to the attention of an ZqQish-speaking audience were: Gwyn A. 'liilliams *

seminal article, 'The Concept of ''?3?3emoniaWin the Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some Xotes in Interpretation*, in Jour~d.of the Xistory of Ideas, 21 (~ct.-Dec . 1960). 586-99; and J0.h Cmett, Aqtonio Gramsci and the C5gi11s -of Italian Zorl~idsn tarfo ford, 1967). Also izpor'ant

were ,&gene C-enovese's redew.of Camnett, 'Cn Antonio Grainsci', ir? St~dieson the Left, 7 (1967), 83-f-07; aid Xl:sAcair Davi6son's early

biographical presentation, Anton20 Gmci: The :.Ian, 3is Ideas (Sydcey ,

1968). The Bew Reasoner published a selection of Gramsci's letters (9, 1959, 141-8, and 10, 1959, 122-7). and --New Left Review published a fragnent on education ('In Search of the Sducational Penciple', in+zoduce by

Quintin %oare, 32, . July-Aug . 1965, 53-62) , and nine articles fzon L'Wne Nuovo ('Soviets in Italy', introduced by Perry Anderson, 51, Sept .-Oct . 1968, 28-9) . There are two annotated bibliographies on Gramscf in wsh: Phil Cozens, Twenty Years of Antonio Gramsci ondo don, 1977). and :I=LNey J. 'Aye, 'Antonio Gransci: An Annotated Bibliography of

Studies in Znglish', in Politics & Society, 10 (1981), 335-53. In the

wider 'nistory of ideas Gramsci was all but ignored, a factor presumably

of the Cold War and its legacy. Cne partial exception was H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (i~ewYork, 1958), 96-104., but in retrospect

his comments seem extraofilinarily innocent of the subtleties and conplex-

ities that have subsequently brought Gramsci into vogue. 2ven Seorge Li chtheim's comments in iiazxisrn: & Historical & Critical Study onco con, 1961). 368-70, were disfigured by the facile assinilation of Gansci's

thinking to the concept of totalitarianism. Zut in the long run Lichthein was too good a historian to allow Craasci 's distinctive importazce to pass:

see his more nuanced remarks in Europe in tie Twentieth Century ondo don, 1974) , 257, 265ff. See also Heil i.:cImes, 'Antonio Cransci ' , in Survey, 53 (~ct.1964), 3-15.

.C TAe exciteaent of discovering the continental Xandst traditions for my generation in the late-1960s carmot Se overstateci, ard this was a grocess

which recc,&ze6 few of the distinctions which becane so inporta?t due,% the next decade (e .g. bet:ieen Begelizn and non-Eegelian i.~zxisn). 'JMs can be seen not cnly in the publishing ad t-slation progmmes of -Left 3ev;iew and ;?ew Left 3ooks from the 1960s, but also in the lists of other Left publishing houses (like i.!erlin or ?luto) . For a useful 5ut exc- essively kshdiscussion of this process, see Conald Sassoon, 'The

Silences ;!en Left Reqriew', in Politics & Zower: Zhree ondo don, 1981), 219-9; ard for Ferry b-derson's defence of the Sev;-e:i's record, Ar-qments -I-fithin Znglish I~"dsn ondo don, 1ge0) , 131-56.

6. Cuiseppe i?iori, Antonio Gra.asci. Life of a 3evolutio~lary(LOMO~, 1970) ;

A. Fozzolini , Anfo~ioGramsci o on don, 1970) ; 'Gransci 's Letters from Prison', transl. by Hash Henderson, in & Edinbur~hRevieu, 2 vols (1974), 347, la; Lynne Lawner, ed., Letters from Prison (Hew York,

1975) ; Victor Xiernan, 'Gramsci and l.qlandsm', in Socialist Begister (~ondon, 1972). 1-33. Particular mention should be made of Quintin Hoare's excellent introducticn to the Notebooks: Actonio Cramsci, Selectiozs --from the Frison !;otebooks, ed. and transl. by Quintin iioaze and Geoffrey ;Towell Smith ond don, 1971). xvii-xcvi (henceforth SPX) .

7. 3ick Xor~ardand ?a1 %. Iaare, eds , Cnkno~in3inension. -coean

ifarxism since Le~in(i:ew York, 1972). The essay on Graasci, 'Antonio

Gransci : The Subjective Revolution ' , 147-68, -as by Romano Giachetti .

8. John Xemington, 'Theory and Practice in Gransci's Yancism*, in Socidst 2e,dster 195E (London, 1968), 145-76; ,Harold iiolpe, 'Sone Froblems Con- cernir~i3evolutio~=j Zocsciouscess ' , in Socialist Zegister 1970 (Ladon, 1970) , 251 -80.

-. 9. Ferry Anaerson, 'Origir,s of the Present Crisis', ic --;.ew Left Aeyri,ew (ILR) , 23 (Jan. -3'e'o. 1964) , 26-53; Anderson, 'Components of the ITational Cult- ure', , 50 (July-~ug. 1968). 3-57; Andersoc, 'Froblens of SoclaEst Strategy', in Anderson and 2obin 3lackburn. eds., Towms Socialisn (Ithaca, 1966) , 22l-90. Anderson's .own contribution' to the C-ransci rec-

eption appeared in 1976 as 'The. Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci ' , in a, 100 (Kov. 1976-Jan. 1977), 5-77. ;:ore recently Anaerson has said of the -i'U policy in the later-1960s that 'the decisive influence was Gramsci , xhose concepts were deployed by the Seview in its explorations of 3llglisa history and politics a decade before they becane a vogue elsewhere' (a- unents , 149f .) . !.ihile true, this perhaps asserts too easy a continuity with the mid-60s essays, whose explicit 'Granscianism' is far less devel-

oped by present standards. Several essays by Tom Ikirn belo.% Kith those of Anderson: 'The "ynglish :!orking Class ' , in m, 24 (ik. -Apr . 19&) , 43-57; 'The British Political'i$litel, in s,23 (Jan.-Feb. 1964), 19-25; 'The Anatomy of the Labour ?arty1, in , 27 (sept .-~ct . 1964.). 38-65

and 28 (~ov.-~ec. 19&), 33-62. F'i-j, it is worth pointing out that

both John isierrington and Quintin Hoare and Geo-ey Yowell Smith have been

members of the 3oard since the mid-1960s.

10. 3obert Q. Gray, ~Labourhrist~crac~~~licto~anSiinburzh ford,

1976) ; Gray, 'Bourgeois Hegemony in Victoriul 3ritain1, in JOT.3100n- - field, ed., Class, Xesemon~and Party ond don, l9n), 73-93. See also Gray's essay on xi st or^', .in Trevor Fate-, . Coutlter Come. 4 :ikl<200L 01 Course Cniicisn (3mo~dsworth, 192), 220-93.

11. rjransci , Selections from Poli tic23 iix5 tin~s(1910-1920), eti. by &intin

Ucare (iondon, 1977) ; Cransci , Ze1ectior.s fron ioliticd ::iti?.zs (1921-

1925) , ed. by Sczre (London, 1978) ; Palniro Togliatti , & Sra~sci& -Cther ?!ritings, ed. 3y 3orald Sassoon (~o~don,1979) . :;e should dso nention the successive volumes of pa?ers from the Comu~istUrLvezsity of

London, rrhich contain exte-mive cEscussions of Gmnsci, as do the volumes

produced by the m's Sociology Group. Tor the forner, see 3loomfield,

ed., Class, ;-Ieaemony and. Farty; Sally Hibbin, ed., Politics, Ideolow ---and t'ne State (London, 1978); George Bridges and Rosalind arunt, eds., Silver Linings. Some Strategies for the Zizhties (London, 1981). Tor the

latter, see Alan Xunt, ed., Class and Class Structure o on don, 1377) ; Iiunt , ed., I'dsm Democracy ond don, 1980) . Lawrence L: ::ishart is also the publisher of two of the books reviewed later in this essay: Faolo

Spriano , Antonio Crarsci and the P&y: Frison Years (~on~on,1979) ; -stine 3uci41ucksmam, Gramsci and the State (blzdon, 1$0). A volme

c3 selections from the Prison Xotebooks on philosophy and culture has also

been announced. ;:uc~ of the individual credit for this anbitious progran;ne

12. As well as the ('hugh Lawrecce 2 Yishart, i:kcxism Tob~,the Zom-

uest Vniversity, and so on) ar-2 g,the following all nade iaportant

con'sibutions : the Socialist Ze@ster and i-lerlin 2ress; Pluto 2ress; the Institute of :;iodters Control and Spokesman Books; the -ETew Zdinburgh Beeex. 13. C;Q~A. ::Elliaris, P~leta~anC,zder. Aq'iorio ,Sraasci, ?2ctcrr Souficlls

--u.6 the CSdns & Coamnisa ifi Italy, 1911-1921 (iordoo, 1977,) ; Paolo Spri~~o, Ccc~pztion~f the Factories: I'aly 1920, transl. and introd-

uced by Gwyn A. !lillians ondo don, 1975) ; i;artin Clark, Xr,torAo Gransci --and the iievolution that Failed (i~erjHaven and Lonaon, 1977) ; .kcerson, 'Actinomi es of Antonio Gmsci ' ; AlisMr Javtdson, Antorfio Graiisci :

?ot&s g Intellectual 3iogra~hy(iondon, 1977) ; Caaes $011, Grunscl

60,197). The sane sort of quickering is apparent in the article litemture, as a glance at :%ye's motated bibliography (see note 4) will

confirm. Some of the more important items included the following: Thorns

3. 3ate.s. 'Graasci and the Theory of :iegenonyl, in Jour-?al of fke B:stor~

of Ideas 36 (1975), 35146 (abstracted from his 1972 PhD at t!e Cniv. - -9 of :!isconsin); Joseph Fenria, '!

I-, 303 Lumley Gregor lklennan, 'Politics and Ideology: Gransci', in :iol:i re, Paue in Cultural St~uiies. 10. & Ideoloq (~irmingM, 1977),

45-76; 2ric Hobsbawm, 'The Great Gransci ' , in Xew ~orfC3evLev of ~OO~S,

I..=5sm Today, 31 (~uly19~j) , 205-13; Jerome Ihbel, '3evolutiol~ Coctradictiocs: Actonio Graasci and the Problem of Intellectuals', in

?oEtics-.-- 2- Society, 6 (1976), 123-72; Cmntal. Eiouffe and Ar~eShowstack - 3assoon, 'Sransci in 2aace and Italy: X Ztvtew or" tie Literature1, in

Zconom~and Sociekj, 6 (1977)' 31-62; Icoger Sinon, 'C-mci's Concept of Eegenony ' , in Ikrxism Toda~, 21 (~'mh1977)~ 7846.

14. This is 3ussell Jacoby's list in 3izlectic of Defezt. Co.n.to- of Yesterr? I -5sn (Canbritge, 1981) . 15. Ibid., 62. I:ot s~~z5sfrigljt, Zzcoby has 2ifficqdtiesvith asslrLlati7~ 20,an urxepe~kntvz?gzz~-dist, to t:*s der'ini tion. Tie coaplexiti es

in G-wsci's own positron in this res~ectare dealt ;eth by essectially onitt-

irg hin f-on any extensive or direct dLsccssion.

1. Anderson, Cons2de~ztionsor, ;;ester3 i.k,x&sn (~ocdon, 1975) , 55.

17. Ibid., 77-80.

13. Taul Ticcone, 'Gramsci 's Segelian Iidsm' , in Folitical 'iheoxy, 2 (1974) , 36. Tnough it purports to be about Gramsci, this axticle is actually a ranb-

ling &,?d superficial discussion of the ,post-1317 voluntarist reaction ag-ainst

the Second International. Piccone's other articles are no nore illutirating: 'Gramsci 's ihxxisrn: Beyocd Lenin and Togliatti ' , in Theory ana Society, 3 (1976) , 485-512; 'From Spaventa to Gramsci ' , in Telos, 31 (i?~),35-66. Gn another occasion Piccone produced the nemoxable desception of Lenin ' s ----:,?hat fs to be 3one as 'tkt incredible piece of s.hitl, trh2ch at lezst has the vtrtue of candour. See Stanley Aronowitz, itussell: Jacoby, Faul Ficcone

and Trent Schroyer, 'Symposium on Class' , in Telos, 2e (1976). 157.

19. 1 20s Gransci 's :I&sn ondo don, 1976). See also the Telos reader: Pedro Wnlcaiiti ard Paul Picco~e, eds ., :3istory, Philoso~hy& Cdtcre --iri the 'ioung Gr-cf (st. Louis, 1975) . Eere the tmslations effer in interesting and symptoinatic nys fron those in the ;Jloare edition of Political ?ifitins from the sane pe,r;,od: essentially, few opportunities are nissed,

to re~derG-wci 's writirg in as 'Iiegelia?' a =iarAer as possible, the ncre obscurely the better (or so it seems). 20. c i , '3ase aid 3uperstnctl;re ill I.Az-5st Cultrtrzl '3eorj' , - - 2 , e2 (i:ov.-3ec. 1973), 1-i6 , originally gtven zs z lecture in .. i..catred. Cy iLIcisn +.& Liferat-vze (~~ord,19771, the Grasscia? persp-

ective has been syste~aticall~thought through.

21. See esp. EIal1, Lunley ard I.icLennan, 'Folitics and Ideology: Clraclsci ' ,

an6 the following collectiors of essays: Stuart ?dl ana Tony Jeffarson, eds ., Resistance through 3 tuals ondo don , 1976) ; John Clarke, Chas Critcher, FfiMJohnson, .eds. , :JorIrinq Class Culture. St~diesin Iiistoxy and Theory ondo don, 1979). See also Stuart iiall, Chas Critcher,

Tony Jefferson, John Ckke, aean Boberts, Eoliciq 't& Crisis. Xuq- the' State and Law and Crrier (London, 1978) , esp. 201ff., Bob ing, --# ---- Lumley, 'Cramsci's Mtings on the SLte and Hegemony, 1916-35 -- A Critical Analysis', Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Stencilled

Cccasional Paper i:o. 51. The essays of Stuart :!.all and ?ichaxd Johnson

have been especially valuable in the clarification of Granscian concepts.

For representative examples : XM Johnson, 'Xistories of culture/

Theories of Ideology: ?Totes on an Impasse', in l-iichele aarrett, Ehilip Corri,a, Annette !:uhn, Janet Wolf f , eOs ., Ideolo.~g& Cultural Frcd- -uction ondo don, 1979) , 49-77 ; Stuart Hall, 'Popular-Democratic vs Auth- ori-an Populism: Two ':lays of "Taki~~Democracy Seriously" ' , in Hat,

Fopular" ' , in ,%phael Sanuel, ed., Feoole's Xistor~& Soclast Theorj

ond don, 1981). 22740; ,YU, 'The Sattle for Socizlist Ideas In the -. 1980s', in Socialist Begister on don, 19&2), 1-19.

22. See for instance the followi,ng representative zrd influential texts: iio t es/9

'iouglas :ioll,r, ed., 22ucaticn or Doniratior.? 2 Z5tical Look at Xuc-

atlopal Froblens Toc2zy ondo don, 1974) ; Xell XeCciie, e., E?-ker, ... Wlor ... -?he :+:yth of Cultural 3eprivation (%arnon?sworth, 19?3) ; ~,~c!iael 9.2. Yow, ed ., I'norrledae g& Coztrol (iio~clon, 1971) ; Sa3owles ad Herbert Gintis, Schoolinq & Capicl;alist A~ex5ca(~:eu York, 1976) ; iZcbael P.3. Your!! and Ceoff :?lhitty, eds., Society, --State ar-d Schcoli-q (3zg~er, 1977). The absence of reference to Cra~sciis particaarly striMr4 in the

case of Fhzold Sosen's pamphlet Langmage and Class so on don, 1972) (repr- inted in Holly, ed., Jducation or Donination?, 58-37), which was emblem-

atic for the libe-rtarian educationaEsm of the mid-1970s in 3ritain. A

transitional text, so to speak, is the Cpen iJniversity reader edited by

Roger Dale, Geoff Zsland and ;:adeleine PkcEonald, SchooEnq and Ca~italism

(~ondon, 1976), which contained an extract fron the on 'The Intellect-

uals' (2l8-23) and Raymond Yilliams' 'Base and Sperstructure in fhrxist

Cultural Theory' (202-10). 3y 1980 it was virtually inconceivable that

reference to Cramsci should not be centrally inscribed in such discussions.

As well as Harold zntwhistle, Artonio Gramsci. Conservative Schoolizq for hciical Politics ondo don, 1975)). see Iiichael :.I. Apple, Ideoloa -and Curricull (iondon, 1979), ar.d ihhn Sanxp, Zducation, State and Cz5sis.

;kcxist Ferscectivz ondo don, 1982).

23. 30r a sense of this transition (from a situation where Cmscian referecce Is Tormally absent to one in which it increzsirgly pervdes discussion).

conpare the volume of papers fron the 1977 Conference 03 the 3ritish Sociol-

oecal Association -&th the one from the folloriing year: Gay Littlejohn, 2a.q~Smart, J0.h ilakeford, ?Cra Yuval-gavis, &s ., Power and Lhe State (~ondor., 1972) ; 3~etet al., eds., Ideolopr g& Cultural Prcductiofi. Coqaze also the cEscussions in the 'Cultural r'erspectives' issue of

Screen c'd-mation, (~pri.~1980), .with thcse in Screen earlier ir? the

1970s. 70r some inclividuals in the forefront of the Althusser reception

an explicit interest in lkznsci has get to develop, . however. ?his seeas

to 5e true of .&yeth 3tedman Jones, of Fail :

(by and large) of the circle around 3csnon:y & Societx. ?or reasons of

extza conplaity (not for personal or polit~califidifference) :,hzzSstZem-

inist -nitings are excepted from these observations.

2. Thonpson first addressed Gramsci in his polemic xith Ferry Anderson and Toc

::aim in the mid-1960s -- see 'The Peculiarities of the wish', in 3 Poverty of Theor1 an6 Gther Zssays ondo don, 1978). 72ff. -- but it is fair to say that his close faniliarity with ~mci'sideas really dates from a

decade later. See the foUoKing works in particular: 'Tatrician Societjj, Plebeian Culturet, in Jourrd of Social Xistory,. 7 (1974), 382-405;

Yhigs -and Hunters (~amondsworth, 1975) ; '3ighteent.3 Century Society: Class Struggle idt!!out Class?', in Social History, 3 (I-ay 1~3). 133-66.

25. :Ieith Iield arid John Seed, ':kiting for Gransci ' , in Social ,L;istorj, 6 (:a 8 2lO. For a sPle.ndid example 05 how a Gramscian analysis might

be better conducted, . see Seed's own article, 'Uni*arianisn, Zolitical

Sconoiny and the Antinomies of Libe-rail Culture in iknchester, lS;O-:C', in Social iIf.story, 7 an. 19&2), 1-25.

26. Gray, '3ourgeois Iiegerno-ny in Victorian E,iAtain'. See also Alastair ZeiS,

'Folitics and Economics In t!e Fomation of the 3ritish :lorI~i~!gClass:

A Zesponse to H.F. i,Ioorhouse0, in Social Xiston, 3 (~ct.1~;79), 353-7. 27 :::el= Zeed, ';iai t+1~7 o Tor C-~ci' , 210 ; GeoZf at;. ;:el t'n :;illd,

I... - f ,,ny Joes Social :-:Fstorj Ignore iolitics? ' , in 2ocial :l'istor~, 2 {.zy ISSO),

252. As StedL-an Jones observes, tie tern 'bourgeois hegeno~y'also ca-~Les ar. extra cache/ of nod disapproval (although at the sane the he pro'cably

disrLsses the broader potectial of a Sramscian perspective too easilj):

Gareth Stednan Jones, 'Class Zxpression versus Social Control? A Critique . of 3ecent Trends in the Social ?istory of "Leisure"', in Xistorj :~o?Jcsho~.

Journal, 4 (1977). 168. For reified usages of the concept in some prom-

inent recent works of American history: T. Jackson Le-, lio Flace of

Grace: Antimodernism ard the ';ransf ornation of Anerican Culture, 1c&0-1920

(>?enYozk, 19e0) ; 30dd T. T&&, Iron Cwes: &?ace azd Culture ?Tineteenth Century America (Xew York, 1979) .

28. ZBchael ih~,'The Social Cohesion of Liberal aemocracies', in American Sociological Review, 35 (1970) , 423-39.

29. See for instance, 3obert Q. Gray, 'The Labour Aristocracy ir! the ~Iictoz5a.n

Class Structure', in larkin, ed., Social Ardysis 02 Class Structure ondo don, 1974) , 19-38.

30. Frank Parkin, Class, Inequality Political Crdar pa on don, 1971) , a~d ?=kin, iarxisn and Class 'iheoq: 3ouzgeois Cri'iioue (lorxicn, 1979) .

31. ~&tfrom works already cited, see the following: Farkin, 'Systen Contr- adiction ard Political lkamfomation' , In 3uopean Jo=~;il of Sociolom,

13 (19'72). ; iah, Consciousness @ Action =on% the liestern

;:orIda? Class fa on don, 1973) ; Steven Ldces, Eower: A ~~calView do,/ = 197k: ; So:iazd :fewby, -3,s 3ef erential Xod:er (;

32. Cdy iukes discusses Gransci 's ideas directly. P,e ceglect Is es?ecially

rarked ir? F=kf n, whose receptivetless to G-raiici has not i~zeasecibet;;een

his first acd secozd book;. See dso his coctribution to Ardre/Lie>ich, ed ., mr Future & Sccizlisx -In 2urope? (i :oatreal, 1979) , 'Soclalisn, Zqudlity and LiSerty' , 2%7-56, his extremely intolerant ar.a =ogant contI;,butions to the discussion which followed, 221-96. Another coxq~scn

oI' corf erence papers from the British Sociological Association Conferences

(this tine from 1973 ard 1975) will also be illuninatirg;: Earkin, ed.,

Social Aralysis of Class Struc~ue, =d ,%chazd Scase, ed., Irdustx5al

Society: -# Class Cleavage Control ondo don, 1977). i3y the latter soiae

cursory references to Gramsci are starting to appear, though not in Eowd :Tewbyls very interesting contribution on 'Faternalism and Capitdisn' , 59-73,

:{here they might have been eqected. Gramsci is also largely abse-rt froa the writings of Anthony Giddens. See in y.rticular: Central Pro'clecs &I Social Theory. Action, Strccture Contradiction Social Ard-jsis

(~onaon, 1979) ; 9 Zontemonrj Cz5 time of Yistofical ;kte-rialisr?.. '10i. 1

-9 -9Sorier Propert1 and the State (~on5on. 1981) .

33. Fcr Jessop's ezrlier xork, see: 30b Jessop, Tzaditio~dLsx, Cocserv- --ztisn and Sxitish Politiczl Culture (~oniion, 1974) . :ie the2 moved t!!ugh a series of Pighly stindating essays to the publication of Sa~italist -SAate (Cxford, 1982). which contains an excellefit discusion of Grmsci, 142ff. See also the extreneljr interesting works of Abercronbie ari Urnd?:

:iic:?olas Abercrombie , ass, Structure $& :hok-ledge ordo don, 1920) , esp . -Civil Society ---acd the SAtate (~o~dcn,1921) ; Xbercrozt;ie, Stephen Xiil, Jqan Turner, '& 3oni,?ant Ideolo~fThesis (~~~con,1983; .

24. 5sse developments aze conveniently s-zed in 'iolfgang Leonhard, 3x0-

comunisn. Challenge for &st an6 Yest (;yew York, 1979), 127-66, 271-7.

35. Zpecific dating will obviously be arbitrary, and ny choice of 1976 is Sase on a reading of the ZEG3's journal c'kxisn Today and the procedngs of the

annual Comdst University of London.

35. See the volumes of essays listed in Xote 11 above.

37. Some of these were directly on Gramsci .and the ECI , some on the internatioral Zomnunist movement, and some on the specific features of the Sritish situat-

ion: 'The Great Gramsci ' ; 'Cramsci and Political. Theory' ; 'Gxansci =d

I!h~xist Political. Theory', ir. &me Showstack Sassoon, ed., &proaches to C-ransci o on don, 1982). 20-36; 'The Dark Years of Italian Comnunisn' ,

in iievolutiona-ies (Xew York, 1975), 3142; Italian 3oad to Socialisn.

&I Inte-rvieti & Zric Eobsbam with Ceorgio I:auoli tan0 of the Itaiian COEL~L~~S~

Far*;! (iofidon, 1977) ; 'Intellectuals ai~d the Labour ;Iovemer.tl, in ;A.z.zs;l

Todz.y, 23 (duly 1979) , 22-20: '7crty Years of Fopulz 7ront Zoverrnent ' ,

in ;krxism Today, 20 (jog 1976) , 221d; '%e Ponraxl ;.arch of Labo~

Xalted?' and associate6 materials, in iF&in Jacques ard -.cis Xulhern,

eCs., Sorrjard i.iarch of Labour Halted? ondo don, 1$8i), 1-19, &-71, 9. If space perxitted further aencnstra5ion or' this poizt, it would pr~ceed. by re5erer.ce to several key incZv',dcals -- ??j.rior,d ';;ilE&cd, stw% Sdi, Stuart Xollulc! anorig them. A;o.= the sore inpor-a~tcontributfons to

recent discussiocs 02 the ia'souz Earty the following should 5e nentioned:

essays by 3azrz-y 3indess aid Eaul Sirst in Politics 2 Fotier, & vois. .(19~~-1);

;~obsbarm's 'Fo~r~Ivarch of Wcour Halted?', and subsequent debates in ILr:dsm Today, s,2nd Socialist (197e-52); T~r,yPenn, 2zzliz!egt, Eeo~lea?d Fower. Agenda for a -Free Socieey. Ir,ter&etrs --?.th (Lordon,

1982) ; ~hyriond:;illiams, 'An .Utern&tive Politics', ifi Socialist Resster

1981 ondo don, l?81), 1-10; IIaI.1, '3attle for Socialist Ideas'; ?aphael

Samuel and Gzeth Stdrran Jones, 'The Labour Fzty and Social 3emocracy',

in Sanuel and Stednan Jones, eds., Culture, Ideolo~~gr& FoEtics. L'ssays --for 2tic iiobsbarm ondo don, 19e3), 320-9. See also Stuart ;olland, 'The ;Ten Conmunist Zconomics', in Faolo ,310 della Torre, award ibrtimer, Jonathan Story, eds ., ,&rocommunisrn: iiyth or Beality? (~arnondsrlorth, 1979). 20945; Stuart EaU ar,d ::=tin Jacques, eds., The Politics of Tfatcher',sn o or don, 1983) . The f eninist contribution to current ~Sscuss- lons of socialist strategy bas been deliberately left out of these coments,

not because it isn't important, but because its coo~rratesare very diff-

erent and its oz5gins independent. The theoretical trajectory of ibxst and Socialist feminists in the 1970s cannot be assinilated to the Zramsciaq

logic here described, althcugh there are definite 2oints of conpefice. See here Zheila 30iibot*W, L;yr-?e Segal, Xilarr Yzinmtght, eyo~cithe

-%gents (Lonbon. 1979j ; ;ichele mett, :.omen's CBression Toby.

Froblens in iast--r'enirist Analye (Lordoc, 193C) ; Colin ;..ercer, '3ev- elutions, 3eforns or Befomulations? :-st 3iscourse on ilenocracy',

iz Zunt, ed., :-ia~Xisr!& democracy, 101-37. But for the persisting

diI'ficulties, see the adve-J Yomen's a?d ilen's %torials in Politics --: or: -Eree (on 'Sexul Zolitics, ?~rir.iss=d ~ocialisc,'), 1-19, and the assoclatd polemic Set:.reen Eaul 2irst ('The Zenesis of the Social')

a& Fran Zernett, 3eatri:: Caapbell, 3csaiind C0-v-..--= ( ' F=~;ip&t~-- 3e 3egenemtes cf the social? ' ) , 67-95. See also the sc'csequent sxehazgs

betiieen Eke ?nor and Can Snith, in Folitics 2 ,501.ier: 70~(~onioc, 1~52),

305-22. %owever, the acrinony of tids pzxticldar fallicg-out should not

be allowed to obscure the iqortant convergence betyeen stro.ig terxiezcies

within az5tish I'e-rrlinism znd .'anti-ecor,onistic ihzxists'.

A. 39. P.e full list is as follorrs: Arae ShoustacIc Sassoon, Gra~sci'sFOLL .. bits,

Locdon, Croon Xeln, 19C0, 261 pp., 12.9: covers, 5.95 paper covers;

ChanAc;al ;.!ouTfe, ed., Gransci & ;!mAst Theo-ry, Londor., Zoutledge 3 :{em ?ad., 1979, 288 pp., 9.50 hard covers, 5.95 Fager covers; C.-stine

3uco-C-lucksmann, Gramsci and the State, London, Larccence 2 :.;ishart, 1'$0,

xiv + 470 pp., 14.00; Joha A. aavis, . , Gransci azd Itzly's Fassive 3evolution, London, Zroom :ieln, 199, 278 pp . , 12.50 ; Earold Lrhrhistle, Antonio Gm~sci. Conserrative Schoolin6 & foritcliczl Folitics, Scc6on, -- loutledge ,": Leu%. Paul, 1979, viii + 207 pp., 7.95 kt~covers, 3.95

gaper covers; Paolo Spriano, Antorio Graxsci uld. =he r"&j;: 2 Fr',son

'leas,London, Larrrence 2 :/ishart, 1979, 192 pg., 2.95 paper covers; Alter L. Adamson, 5egemon:r 2evoluti on. Anto-nio Grascl 's Political -ar-d Zulturzl Theorr, 3erkeley 3 Los &ngelss, Yri'rersity 02 WforrLa Press, 1980, x + 3Gb 3p., ; Joseph Y . FerLa, .2L.-a~.sci' s Fclitical n-o&-ht. Kegenony , Consciousness, and the 3evolutiorury Erocess , C:Zord, c:cZo&

Vniversity Press, 19e1, xiv + 303, 17.5C; Leorho Salacd,rL, 3.e Soc-

iolo~of Foliticzl Fx-5s. & Iztroduction k G-z?lsci's Tneo~j, LG~~oP.,

1981, x + 252 pp., -;27.50; Anne Showstack Sassoon, ed., A~proact'.esto

Grarsci, Loidon, Xz5ters anci Rders, 1 29pp., 3.95 paser covers. 6. 19 eld ar.5 8e&, ';iai. tirg for G,-sc~ ' , 225.

42. See their joiqt article, 'Graxsci in Zrance =d IWy'.

$3. Gr, the other k=d, this was not tne of the receptlor,'~'?re-history'. See here YilEans, 'The Concept of "ZgemorLa"' .

. quoted fmm Andrew Sayers' Introduction to Pozzoiini, Antc~2oGrasci, .ex. IrsiCe Italy the same coccern led deng the 1970s to an ultra-left stress

cn the *rtues of 3ordiga over those of Gmnsci, :iho his thereby consigned to the same anti-Stalinist denonology . Xone of this specifically IWan literature has found its way into English. There is some bibliographical reference in Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat, 181 (note 9) . Cthenrise, see note 53 belon.

45. It also -?akes his criticisms of Showstack Sassoon a little ,mtuitous. See Jour.na,l of i,Iodern Xistory, 9 (1982)~

4%. For the best discussion, see Clask, Antonio Gmsci as,d tf..e aevolution -that Failed, 36-73.

47. ISid. , 2l7ff. Xowever, by the 193Cs, as Spriar.0 's book mkes cleaz,

Cmici sras fa,r nore preoccupied 16th the idea of a Zonstituent Asseci'ly for the 'period of tramition' after the fall or" fascisn. ??lis ifould facil-

i'ate the broadest basis of 6snocratic wity, destroy the inaterial basis of

fascisn, and mobilize the workers ad pe-ts for the riext phase of the st~~gle.See Spria~o, 65-78, 1CL;f., li?f., ,-,,,7 Ty--s .

kz. Davicson , Bnto~20Craiisci , 155.

kg. Clark, Aitonio C-msci --u;d the 2evolution thzt hiled, 28.

50. %ere is little in ZngEs;? on Iklian socialisn before 191h. me older :iod's by :I. Eilton Young, 3 Italian Left ondo don, 1%9), ar.d I~c:zard Xostetter, -Tfie Itzlian Socialist ;iovement: Criens, 126O-i%2 (~rinceton, 195l?), ase still e:ctrenely useful. Eut see now AFtxmco Anclreuccl, '%e Cif*%sion of Ikxism in Italy duri3g the Late 2:ineteenth Century', in Saauel and St&-

.?ul Jones, eds., Culture, Ideolom & Tolitics, 214-27.

51. Tne best and most detailed discussion of this eaxly period is In Lavidson, Antonio Gransci , 48-207. Bemia (81-9) is also excellent.

52. ,?or the Frison Iiotebooks as an 'anti-Croce' , see 2a14dro Togliatti, 'Tne

Present Fielevace 03 Gmci's Theory ard Fractice' , and Tor Togliatti 's jutigenent on the councils, 'Leninism in the Theo-y an& Fractice ol Cmsci', -Cn Sransci, 153, 173f. 'ihe 3ixt text dates from 1957, .the second eon

I i 53. The main attacks on 12msci from the Lel':' caae in the late-1960s/early-~970s, ei'her from the ultra-left (te-riding to ac ideazed reaClrg of the cow.cils xovement or a refurbished 'krdigism' ) , or fron the followezs cf Althusser.

Piechers, ~kokebook 21as (cahr~tousl;.) until rece~tlythe ~aic

ifitroduction to Gransci in Smai, is a? e;..treze case of the Zirst ",-enti, sEle uthasaer's 5ecera.l slc~picesson the su3iect oZ Grzzsci ~27sqlain

.. . -, idezs. See C1.Astlaa ?Lechers, tintorLo Zrarioci : .=f., 1653, 198-260). See also: is,2r~le~z.c -Czter, 302-6, 33eJ.K); :..1 *The ;.aid,; erid Uri~alii~gof Antonio ~Zmsci', in -Yew 3iinbur;rh Revievr, *Gra,nsci-111' , (1974), 7-14; Saedson, 'Tne TIarying Seasons of Zrznscian Studies', in Holitical Studies, 26 (1972), -1; %?co Andreucci a?d iklcoln Sylvers, '!3e IA&a.? Cc1m1~dsts

7irite their Xistory' , in Sciexe & Societx, Xi, (1976), 28-26.

$0 Tar~b~ior-ras a Socialist activist, :iho precisely didn't question Gransci 's own Fa-*st activ5sn. fiere I an follotring Fenia's excellent

.. 55. Iiughes, Consciousness g& Societ;~, 96-I&; LZchthein, =A, 3Q-70;

-7In.cInnes, 'Antonio GraLcci ' ; Joll, Grarnsci , 75-1 07 ; Leszeir ::olokou&, -!.kin Currents of :,azxism, ?l.le 3reaJkdown (~xford, 11), 22C-52. See also 3obert :!ohl, Generation of 1914 ambr bridge, :%ss., 1979: , 192-2C2.

25. See notes 18 arid 19 zbove. See also JacoSy, 2izlectic of Zefsat, ard Ddn Couldner, 'i'e 2ro i:bxi.sns (:yew York, 1330) , :?hose scatter& res'er-

ecces to Craslsci are '- to W.e verj sex5ously. ,.-.= ? . ?e.*z1s ;;hole ~scussior.i~z tY5.s lang chapter ( '3xe z;?< Siqerst~xctcre: 3e?ole of Sonsciocsczss', 61-1293. is excellest ar-6 Is the best gz=t of

the 5004. ';he closeness to certain f,or;.ulations of 2ayr.0~2i;illia,as is also xorth noting. See his '3eyond Xctiily Zxisting Sccizlisa' , in Ercblszs

-i2 Xaterialisn 'Jature ondo don, 1980) , 255-7.

C3, m 2 , ~nlsprosession, from Croce's direct inspiraticnal i.xiirler.ce to the soc- ioiogJ of his impact on Italiai? culture, prolri-2es a csefcl pointer to one

of the directions which a 'Grunscian' approach to concrete histox5cal ad-

ysis night take. In this sense it is no accident that at least one of the

carrent Cramsciologists has noved on to a studj of Sroce. See :;alter L.

Adanson, 'Zenedetto Croce and the Death of Ideology', in 3~~~a.lof iiodern

Xistory, 55 (1?83), 208-36. See also the work of Zch~id2. ,Tacobitti :

'iiegenony before Gramsci: The pae of Benedetto Croce', in --journal --of --;-ioderr. . --Iiistory, 52 (1980). 66-24; --3evolutionary Iiunanism ~a gstoricism ir, --;:odern I-Wy (;:ew Faven and London, 1981).

60. Cransci , Lolitical >!ritinrj;s (13~-1926), b59f. (also 'for the fol1o.wir.g

quotej.

61 . u'acobitti , 'Xegemony before Gramsci ' , 69.

62. SuciK-ludcsza~argues that the concept of hegenory is gresent nucn earlier than 1326, but 'in a practical state', and on the iihole her detailed anal-

yses are persllasive. ShowsAa& Sassoon follows broadly the saae =went.

53. I fid 'he follow%-s accoxnts to be the acst .ueful: Zi~in;iilEam, 'Tie ~2cr.cept of "3,-er:oria"' ; 1,LqxiLey, ;,Ic&?~&r, 'EoE tics a.";ci Ideclog;l" ;

Skows'ack Sassoon, 'Yegezony, 02 losition aid ioliticzi Interventioc',

in Showstack Szssooc, e , Xzproaches to Gramsci , -11; 3x5-2luc!;s~a:~,

I r.legmony azd Consent ' , ibid ., 116-26; C>i,?tal I.;o~ir"fe , 'Segezczy a25 the

Inte,pal S'iate in C~ar~sci: To>ra,rd.s z Zeii Concept 09 Foiitlcs' , ir. 3~5dgss

and 3mt, eds ., Sil-~erLi~Lngs, 167-87 ; hyiaor-d :iiU;~~s,i2-*sz & 2: ,c,eratqxe, 108-14; Jessog , Cap5 talist SCate, lk2- 52; ULT~, .4mtcz:r -~f Ca~itali~tSocieties,. 21-5 ai~in geceral.

Src . >i~.im.s, 'Concept of "Zgemonia" ' , 587.

45. 'The work which poses these questions best is roba ably Lunley, i.icLe.mla!!, '2oli tics and Ideology' .

66. I ha,ve quoted this letter from iiobsbaran, 'G-msci and Folitical Theorj' ,

209, irhich Cffers from the translation in iatrner, ed., Letters fron Ffisor,,

2&. Cn occasion Cransci referred to 'two major superstructual "levels "'. ( 'ciel society' and 'political society' or the 'State ' ) , ~.hic:?

correspond to the functions of 'hegemony' ad 'direct domination' (s?rr-IS 12). / In fact, there has been much discussion of the ambiguities and ccctradictions

in how e-yactly Gramsci deploys the distinction between state ciel society

at 63ferent places in the ITotebooks. 2.e key texts In t.%s respect are Suci-Gluc!isrann (19-195) and Anderson, 'Antinomies of Litonio C-,-a~?ci ' . In the en2 Antierson probably mIces too nuch out of Gmsci's iccor-sistencies,

and I find Showstack Sassoon's resolution of this disc-ussf on (112f.) Zairlj

persuasive. E2. See tine uor!:s listeC in notes 63, €6, ar-d 21 a3ove.

69. As sox revie>rezs 'mve noted, ShcirsLkck Sassoon's synthetic iuciEtg is achieved partly at the cost of over-ratiorzdizing ~ar.3~of Graiiiici's asbig- -- uities a

books nuch tieer than they actually are. See Zield ad Seed, ';laiA.blrz fcr

Cramsci', 212. Xield and Seed provide a much fuller assessment of the books by Sho:.rstack Sassoon, iiouffe and 3uci-Glucksnar~nthan I :.'re attenpted here,

and as I largely agree with their judgements it seemed otiose to retzace the sa?e gr0ur.d again.

70. Until this basic work was done, the assumption was easily rade that G-sci invented the term hegemony in ':h~Astdiscourse, whereas in fact it had lor4

been ,in technical use. See Buci-ClucksY7ann, 174-95, ar.d hderson, 'Antin-

71. Tntwhistle points to certain interesthg correspondences betxeen (a) Cratsci's stress on discipline, structure and basics ad the current concerAns of cors-

ervative &ucationa,lists as contained in the 3lack Fapers, wd (b) the li5-

ertazia? eaphases of progressi-re educationalists in the 1970s (e.g. on ths

social corst-=\lction of Icno:iledge, 'learning Sy doi-w', and so on) ard the

subjective f dealism of Giommi Gentile, IIussolini 's i.8nister'of Fublic

Ir,stnction in the 1920s. 2ut this polenic is never systratically-:wfoldec?,

and 'the essential upfairness of the anti-libertarian taunt threatens to underudne the value of ~.tdhlstle' s own gosi tive e.qosi tion. Lltlrateiy , :?e - eo?l"uses the zonj.mct-d specificl ty of Grasci ' s Imeeate c3se~r~tior.s

02 '&xcatior! r-fith the larger a-,-u;lents about Imoxlecge, ~e,cqd.tEe,

a26 ideoiogy that his tko~htsas whole ca?, h;lp susAdn. i,,~el2.-. Seed

=e agfn veqr 5005 cr. this point. See ':l'ai'Yir.g Tcr C--=.sci', . 221-3.

72. Ley, 'Sraisci 's iiritings or. the State ad?egenor-.jl, 27.

73. %ere has Seez much political controversy over G,raiici'a attitudes to~~-&s ozficial Colmunist policy in both the 'ultra-left ' phase after 1928 acd the sew period of the Eo~ularZ'ront introduced in 192b-5. Sprias-0's book xas

x5tten in large part to resolve &hese speculations.

7b. T.s p0ir.t is r&e by i.-Ii 5. :'m, 'Antonio Gransci and iioaerfi i~~sn',

in Studies in Comparative Comwisn, XI11 (1980), 2s. The Foulantzas

reference comes from an interdew conducted by iiemi Eebez, "Be State a~d

the Tmsition to Sccialisa' , ir, Socialist Tievieri, 'I11 (1978), 17.

75 'Xztinomies 02 Antcnio Gramsci '., 6f. : .. .. - iras the first sccialist Sournzl in 3ritain -- possibly the first =ywhere outside Italy -- to umke deliberate azd systematic use of Graznsci's 'theoretical caon to udyze its

own ~atio~a.1societ.~, and to debate a political strategy capable of t,zzs- TD-T~?~it'

76. y .& id, ';ihy Does Social Eistorj Ignore Politics? ' , 267.

77. -?or Thonpson, see zote 29 above. .A?& Zron I~sreeel;; of dZaLc.ett, Gecovese's

3011, ;or"a~, 2011 (?ex York, 1972) wzs enom.cusly i~~lcentizlir. kd?! 73. ?'e ~Cect-e for Sonten2oran; Cd.tu& Stc91ss has prctiuczd a ~~uiiiberof put-

Eca'iions exglcfir! -these processes ic post-war 3~5tishI:x-kst lh5stcrisG~-

a in which ?LC:& Johnson and 3ill Schwa,rz :=ve been garticula?~ . . Irii"luentizl. See Slzz!ce, Cz5tcher, Joh~son, eds ., ,;or:kinq Zkss 3iLt-xe,

ar,d aore recefitly ?LC:~,'ohnson, :-regor IIcLerran, 3iil 3ch.:zrz, 2z&< Suttor,, ds., ~~k'!'!?!Slsto,r',es. StuC3.e~ ELsto~-iizitirr;& Folitics

79. iii111ains, :.&cxisn g& Literature, 10Bf. See also ;oh~son, 'Xistories of

~ulture/Theories 02 Ideology' , 73, xhere he distinggs;ies betxeen 'COITJI~OR sense' ('the lived culture of a particular class or socfal group'), 'philos-

ophy' (or 'ideology'), and 'hegemony' ('the state of play, as it were,

between the whole complex of "educative" institutions =Ad ideologies on the

one hand, and lived culture on the other').

81. See the w~ificent article by Gerald ::I. Sider, 'The Ees that 3iad: Zulturs and A@cult~-e, Prcperty arAd Propriety in the li'ewfoupdlu.d Village Zsherj' , ir, Sccial 'Xlstor~, 5 (~a?.1980), 1-39, vi.Lch iAth See&'s artlcle zeferzsci

to in note 25 above is one of tine very best applications of GraascF1s coccepts

in a concrete histofical field.

?2. Zey ztd i!ield, ':;'hy Zoes Social :%storj'Igr,ore ~oiitlcs~',269. 3Ls

essay conAains auch that we ;.rould now say differently (or not say at all),

but t:his particular fornulation see~strorth defencr~. 3!. a '3h-9"fi-ttp4 of - -- . , :~;Lth :-'.ege=on;t1 in i;-cietir. --th; s0cle-l~-.for ~t.25-0' kj0.z ;~s';~r;,.-. 35 197.7), ;4-,-.;.-- see- Lso ;..c1---,s1s.. . - L 2 -- w:phlet, ---Class and Class Co~scLocsr,essir, the 126iistrL.2. ilevo:iitizr! 17?C- 1350 (bon

Qc4d Jut see Feter Surke, ',%om Fioneers to Settlers: 3ecent Studies of the

.-..:ls

SocLet~ad Slstor~, 25 (1983), 1861'., here an approach to the study of

populaz/high culture 'based on "negotiation"' is directly opposed to 'a model of cultural interaction centred on 'hegenony"'.

86. For the former, see b;ichael aurawoy, Yanufacturing Consent. Changes in

t!!e Labour Process under i+iono~olyCzpiitalism (chicago, 1979: ; for the - -.- -.- - latter Albert0 Faria Cirese, 'Cransci's Cbservatiocs on 7olklore1, in

Showstack Bassoon, ed., Approaches Gxaiscl, 212-47. 3ee also Tin

Tattersor?, ';.Totes on the Bistorical Applicatiofi of :'&st Sulec~ralTheorj ' , in Sclence and Socieby, 39 (197:), 257-91.

37. Xowever, Aim also goes too far. 22te apart froix the faifitly Csrepu+able . . side ssripes against 'those plagued ldith cosinopoli tas. delusions ' (178). nzs definition of Gransci ' s centrail concern is m.ecessarily exclusive. 2. g.

'?he problenatic corditioning all' Gransci's themes md res-ches was ess-

entially oneof ltalian catastrophe; not Stali~isc, workers' control, the

natcre of the Pzrty, Leninism's Seventh Seal os the other 2reocc~pationsof the 3~-o-ccn~~ip~sts' (170) . 2is redly >ic- ' t

- m 33. 3a7&dacn, Ar.toni,o Grezsci, 15e-231, ax Ycecr,. -.zsci Erzctf cz -cf Itdian Co~:mdsm, 7101. I (~oncion, 1982). 1022.2. 7Y.s cr',tlcisn should zot 2etract from the ove~l~e~ts of 2av5dson's nex vcl:xe, ;inic:? is co7.r the

best t3ing we have on the FCI Sefore the 3esistance.

89. See Taolo Spriano, Storia c&J Partito corr~;~unis~aitdliu?o, 5 vjols. (~urin, 1967-75). universally adnired in the quality of scholarship, as sucn

quite ucusual amongst Comu~ListParty histories, offLcial or othemrise.

90. Aside from the copious menoirist literature, the best introduction to the

history of the Comintern in the 192Cs is through the relevant pzrts of Carr

and Gruber's two volunes, followed by Clauiin's nore discursive treatment.

Zorkenau's pre-ria volqne also retains Its value. See 2.3. C=, Xistcry -of Soviet aussia, 10 vols. (landon, 195C-7e) ; Xelnut Gm>er, eci., International Comurisn ir, the Sra of Lenin (:yew Yor!~, 1967), ui .Smber,

ed., . Soviet Russf a lasters Commintern (2ew York, 19715) ; Ternando

91. For stimulating introductions 'to the cap-tive anal:rsis of the pex5od

1917-23, see James 2. Zronh urd 'Jamen Six5anni, eds . , 0,ConnurL tx, --an? Fower. &perier?ce of Lzbour in Zurope a-d &erica, 1900-1925 (F~ladel~~a,1983), ar,d -.en Sibatti, liorksrs Control SocialZat 0 zot

cote.

92. 3eliteralxre on 3~ocom~ismhas beccme sinply eno=.ons. 3s'best introd-

uction is through the follotri-ng vo1w.e~: Eeter &.ge a26 ;~~tiz5cfo:?a~&celli, eas ., ';he Co~zu~,lst;=ties I'aly, Tzazce azd Stain . Zcst>iar -flkz?.~e -and tContinuia. X Casebook (~ocdon, 91; Leorhard., ~crccccm~isa;Carl aoggs ard David Flotke, eds. , Politics d-ccornf:~nism (coston, 19e0) ;

3avid Childs, ed., Chandnq Face of Jestern Co~llr~unisn ondo don, 19&0); Xeith iXddlemas, Pokier----- and the Party. 2&,~~nrFaces of Com~~i.saIn ',.iestern

Y3zope ondo don, 198~); George Schwab, - ed ., Zurocomttnisn. 9 Ideologtcal -and Political-Theoretical Foundatio~s'(ilestport, COM ., 1981) ; ?&chard -In Search of J%.rocommunisrn (LonCon, 1981). Tor a t~icallyscccinct state- sent of Bey issues, see Perry Anderson, 'The Stzategic C2tion: Sone Quest-

iom' , In Lieblch, ed., 7uture of Socidisa & Zurcpe?, 21-9. 70r liter-

ature specifically on the Fa, the nost useful are the foilor~5,ng: ~Giuseppe

'lacca, 'The 'Wocom~~nist"Ferspective: Tne Contfibution of the I talian

Conauriist Party', in ::indersley, ed., - Se-h o_=I Zuro~oinc.~iisn,1C546;

Eobsbarm and i;apolitano, Italian 30ad to Socialisn; I~k.xza XntorLetta

:'acc5"occhi, Letters fron Izside the ltalian Co~mu.nistFartv to Louis Althusser

ondo don, IT>),esp. 114-39; ciaz5n Set;reer? solshevisa- ad2e7.6~- --ionism. -%e Italian Comunist Party, 19&47 (~toc:&~ols,1575) ; Zorslci Sassoor., sest rate,^^ of the Itdial Lo~aunistiar3.r. --?on the 3etisAcar.ce -. --to the 2istoz5c Co-~prodse ordo don, 1921) ; God6 ZlacIxer, GPL?I --in dzv- ersity . I'dizii Comurism -d the 30rz~nist:.;orlC ('~acl~rid~e,:zss. , 19ee) ; 2lackxer ard Sidney TLTO:.~, eds., 2o;rz.urisn Lq Italy g& ?rz-?ce (~ricceton, - 5); Lra~t rot, ->Le Itdian Co~~~l~~~stEat:*. --&.-b *Z_*~_S~S --of khz FO;IA= --,;'rant Str~te.71(~ocdoc, I ; Sirioc Ser5zQi azd. 2z;.re?.ce Gzg, zes., - -rq~ I --.~O~dy~y~~tr*b 'iesieeay, , -2r.d. Tozsrrc;; (liestaort, 2cr.n. , !C. 9.2 Sest singlo noncgz~his that Zy Xx~iot, i

edited by Serfaty an2 ,Zrag coctens an excellent Sitllogzphical essay.

$2. 1'or.e ,d the works listed. above contzins a satisfactcr~,treatnect of t5f.s

&bhe~e.

9. Sere see Emin's excellent study, 2et;seen 2olskev?sn ard 2eltsiorisn, a.56

;acclocc;?i ' s eloquent and suggestive Escussioc, Letters fron izslde the

I tali an Commun5st Tzrtg, 114-39.

- . 95. :Xobsbawn, '?orward', in Sassoon, Strates! of the Italian Connunist Farty,

l:. Tozether Kith his Introduction to Togliatti, Q Gramsci, 7-20, Sassoon's

zonob=a?h Is the closest xe have to an Znglish 1-we biogzaphy. Lawrence

m a '3061 Cra;;lsci to Togliatti: 3.e r'artito ITuovo and the ;-lass Zasis ol

-A~calia,? Zomunisn', in SedaQ a??C-zy, eds., 1talia.l Coi~mnist:arty, .

21-35, is also a good bx5ef introduction.

96. Sughes , Consciousness & Societ~, 201 ; Jacobi tti , 'Beg-ony before S~~aci' , 59.

97. A&ison, '3enedetto Croce a-ci the Death of Ideolcar ' . Urfortunztely 'the com.ents on Gransci (234f.) fill corsiderably belox the level of &he aral:rsis

f n Ac%mson's book. 99. %c!.;ever, see .the ~reli.ai?~z--sIretches ir. two articies 3y ::en 3;2T~s: ' 12,rp+.- st ".ecrj 2-cc the Sc~letSupers txct-ze ' , ic -socigist z7z-cDe, : (1?76), 15-i?, .ar.6 *crisis ~r?soviet 16eclo~-'-',ir; ~oci&s+ zCope, 4 (:977), 13-ie.

100. I am grateful to my colleague Roman Szporluk for making me more anare of

this point. In this respect it is not without interest that a two-volume edition of Cramsci uas published in Poland in 1961 as part of an ambitious multi-volume 'Library of Socialist Thought'. As projected this consisted partly of Saint-Simonists (saint-~mandBazard, Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin,

Dom ~eschamps)ami other eaxly Socialist pioneers - (~osephDietzgen) , some leading figures of the Second International (~ntonioLabriola, Paul Lafme,

Fram Mehring, Rosa ~uxemburg), and pioneers of Polish Mamdsm tanis is law Krusinski, Kazimierz Eelles-w, and a volume on the first generation of Polish Handsts between 1878 and 1886). Aside from Anatoli LuMcharsky, Gramsd is notable in this list for being a figure primarily of the 1920s and the years of the Comintern. I have not been able to trace the Further

historg of this publishing project, but an analysis of its conception and inpact would make an interesting contribution to the history of PoUsh

Marxism between 1956 and 1968. See Antonio Crapsd, pisma vvbrane, 2 vols.

(w-w, 1961). I am gzateful to Roman Szporluk for bringing this to my attention.

101. Of course, for all his criticisms of Eurocommunist efforts to appropriate Cramsd for their om contemporary purposes, Nairn's Gramsd is just as partially and instrumentally defined, in his case by the commitment to a left Scottish nationalism. For the extremely interesting.self-presentation of the latter, see the various issues of the Bulletin of Scottish Politics, from Autumn 1980, espec . Nairn' s own article, 'Internationalism: A Critique ' ,