This volume analyses the philosophical nature of Gramsci’s Marxism and its Hegelian source, the radical critique of the economistic tradition and the original analyses of the role of superstructures, ideology, consciousness and subjectivity in the revolutionary process. It relates the central themes of Gramsci’s writings, such as hegemony, ‘historical blocs’, the role of intellectuals and political praxis, to the more peripheral ones, such as science, language, literature and art. The introduction includes a brief intellectual biography of Gramsci.

This volume analyses the philosophical nature of Gramsci’s Marxism and its Hegelian source, the radical critique of the economistic tradition and the original analyses of the role of superstructures, ideology, consciousness and subjectivity in the revolutionary process. It relates the central themes of Gramsci’s writings, such as hegemony, ‘historical blocs’, the role of intellectuals and political praxis, to the more peripheral ones, such as science, language, literature and art. The introduction includes a brief intellectual biography of Gramsci.

This sociological critique of the ‘philosophy of praxis’ looks at the importance of the concept in the social theory of leading influential Western Marxists such as Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno in the inter-war period. It offers a detailed critique of Marx and Hegel, and explores the validity and implications for sociology of two of Marx’s ideas which the later theorists made the centre piece of their social theory: first, that true theory is authenticated by praxis, and second, its corollary that certain major social transformations should and would in practice render sociology redundant.

This book familiarizes the English-speaking reader with the debate on the originality of Gramsci’s thought and its importance for the development of Marxist theory. The contributors present the principal viewpoints regarding Gramsci’s theoretical contribution to Marxism, focussing in particular on his advances in the study of the superstructures, and discussing his relation to Marx and Lenin and his influence in Eurocommunism. Different interpretations are put forward concerning the elucidation of Gramsci’s key concepts, namely: hegemony, integral state, war of position and passive revolution.

In The Struggle for Development and Democracy Alessandro Olsaretti proposes a humanist social science as a first step to overcome the flaws of neoliberalism, and to recover a balanced approach that is needed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

A comprehensive survey of how scientific disciplines have always been informed by politics and ideology on the basis of the Gramscian views in historical materialism, hegemony and civil society.

In the years since the publication of the Prison Notebooks, the interest and importance of Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to Marxist thought and political analysis has become widely recognised. The concern to explore and identify the structures of the capitalist state is both the principal characteristic of Gramsci’s theoretical and political writings and also the inspiration for his writings on Italian history. This set re-issues four volumes by leading commentators on Gramsci's politics and philosophy which were originally published between 1979 and 1981.

A major essay on the thought of the great Italian Marxist Perry Anderson’s essay “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” first published in New Left Review in 1976, was an explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in the thought of the great Italian Marxist. Since then it has been the subject of book-length attacks across four decades for its disentangling of the hesitations and contradictions in Gramsci’s highly original usage of such key dichotomies as East and West, domination and direction, hegemony and dictatorship, state and civil society, and war of position and war of movement. In a critical tribute to the international richness of Gramsci’s work, the essay shows how deeply embedded these notions were in the revolutionary debates in Tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany. Here arguments crisscrossed between Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lukács and Trotsky, with later echoes in Brecht and Benjamin. A new preface considers the objections the essay provoked and the reasons for them. This edition also includes the first English translation of Athos Lisa’s report on Gramsci’s lectures in prison.