CONTENTS

       Preface

      1.Alteration

      2.Variants

      3.Asymmetry

      4.Contexts

      5.Implications

       Annexe: Athos Lisa’s Report

      Notes

       Index

       PREFACE

      No Italian thinker enjoys a greater fame today than Antonio Gramsci. If academic citations and internet references are any guide, he is more influential than Machiavelli. The bibliography of articles and books about him now runs to some 20,000 items. Amid this avalanche, is any compass possible? The Prison Notebooks first became available, thematically pre-packaged and politically expurgated, in Italy in the later 1940s. The first extensive translation from them into any language came in the early 1970s, with Selections in English produced by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, giving them a global readership in what is still probably the most widely consulted single version of his writings. Some four decades later, the history of their worldwide reception is itself a scholarly topic, covering a vast span of usages.¹ The scale of this appropriation, in an epoch so unlike that in which Gramsci lived and thought, has owed much to two features of his legacy that set it apart from that of any other revolutionary of his time.

      The first was its multidimensionality. The range of topics covered in the Prison Notebooks—the history of leading European states; the structure of their ruling classes; the character of their dominion over the ruled; the function and variation of intellectuals; the experience of workers and the outlook of peasants; the relations between state and civil society; the latest forms of production and consumption; questions of philosophy and education; the interconnexions between traditional or avant-garde and popular or folkloric culture; the construction of nations and the survival of religions; and, not least, the ways and means of passing beyond capitalism and sustaining socialism—had, and has, no equal in the theoretical literature of the left. The range was not only topical but spatial, since Italy combined an advanced capitalist industry in the North with an archaic pre-capitalist society in the South, and the Notebooks came from a direct experience of both, capable in another time of speaking to First and Third World readers alike. There was a lot to choose from.

      The second magnetic attraction of this writing lay in its fragmentation. In prison, Gramsci’s notes were laconic, exploratory jottings for works he was never able to compose in freedom. That made them, as David Forgacs would point out, suggestive rather than conclusive, inviting imaginative reconstruction after his death, into one kind of totalisation or another.² Less binding than a finished theory, they were the more appealing to interpreters of every sort—a score inviting improvisation. In that attraction lay, inevitably, also a temptation. What were the limits beyond which the score itself was broken? That was one basic question the essay below set out to address. At this date, some explanation of its origins, aims and reception is needed. As a study of central political concepts in Gramsci, it followed the reception of his work in the New Left Review of the early sixties, historically the first sustained attempt to make use of it outside his homeland. Concerned with analysis of the past and present of British society, this body of writing set out to put Gramsci’s ideas to work more than to expound them. But soon afterwards, the journal began to publish translations and presentations of the canon of a Western Marxism that had developed in Europe outside the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, still vital—Lukács, Sartre, Adorno, Althusser were all active—at the time, with the aim of explicating and assessing its major thinkers.³ Gramsci occupied a central place in this line. A product of that collective project was an essay that I published in 1974 attempting to resume the tradition, Considerations on Western Marxism.

      A year later the first critical edition of the notebooks Gramsci composed in prison appeared in Italy, the fruit of years of meticulous work by Valentino Gerratana, a Communist scholar of outstanding sobriety and dignity. With this in hand, in late 1976 I wrote the text that ensues. The intention of ‘Antinomies’ was twofold, philological and historical: to look closely at the usage of central concepts in the Prison Notebooks, in a way that had not been done before, and to reconstruct the political contexts in which they originated and to which their meanings referred. The effect of doing so was, equally, twofold: to show the oscillations and contradictions in even, or perhaps particularly, the most striking and original themes of the Notebooks, with the intelligible reasons for these; and to demonstrate that, politically speaking, Gramsci was a revolutionary of Leninist stamp, whose strategic thought could only be understood within the parameters of the Third International and its debates.

      Conceived as a sequel to Considerations, ‘Antinomies’ was composed in late 1976, and came out in New Left Review at the beginning of 1977. The following year it was published as a book in Italy under the title Ambiguità di Gramsci. There the Italian Communist Party had for some time declared that the way forward for the party and the country lay in a Historic Compromise with Christian Democracy, and in the summer of 1976 had achieved its highest ever level of electoral support, with over a third of the vote. In the wake of this success it was now backing a government of ‘National Solidarity’ led by Giulio Andreotti. This was a turn that in different ways had its counterpart in most of the Communist parties of Western Europe. Theorised as Eurocommunism by the Spanish party leader Santiago Carrillo, then helping to restore the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid, it was reproduced in its fashion by the Communist party in France, where the new doctrine had early adepts. Common to all variants was rejection of the principles on which the Third International had been founded, and commitment henceforward to gradual parliamentary reforms as the West European path to socialism; the Italian version adding a declaration of loyalty to NATO. In these conditions, the image of Gramsci—for the PCI, a national icon who could not be casually abandoned—had to be adjusted to the needs of the time, as a far-sighted precursor of the party’s conversion to peaceful, incremental progress towards more advanced forms of democracy.

      The