Volume 21, Number 5 · April 4, 1974
The Great Gramsci
By E.J. Hobsbawm
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
edited and translated by Quintin Hoare, by Geoffrey Nowell Smith
International Publishers, 483 pp., $4.25 (paper)
Letters from Prison
by Antonio Gramsci, selected, translated, and introduced by Lynne Lawner
Harper & Row, 275 pp., $10.00
Antonio Gramsci, probably the most original communist thinker produced in the twentieth-century West, has until recently been virtually inaccessible to non-Italians, and not very accessible even to Italians.[1] Anyone who reads only English has hitherto had to rely chiefly on some frankly inadequate textual selections, on the usual scatterings of articles in left-wing journals, and, more than anything else, on John M. Cammett's most useful book of 1967.[2] The situation is now radically changed with the publication of Giuseppe Fiori's pioneer biography[3] and, above all, with the exemplary edition of a selection from the Prison Notebooks by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. We can now see Gramsci as a man rather than as a shadow. But, as he himself would have observed, men can only be understood in and through their politics.
Review, 6397 words
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