P R I S O N N O T E B O O K S VOLUME III European Perspectives European Perspectives A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism Lawrence D. Kritzman, Editor European Perspectives presents English translations of books by leading European thinkers. With both classic and outstanding contemporary works, the series aims to shape the major intellectual controversies of our day and to facilitate the tasks of historical understanding. For a complete list of books in the series, see pages 677-78. A ntonio G ram sci P R I S O N N O T E B O O K S VOLUME III Edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK Columbia University Press New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 1975 Giulio Einaudi Editore, S.p.a., Torino, Seconda edizione. Translation copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gramsci, Antonio, 1891-1937. [Quaderni del carcere. English] Prison notebooks / Antonio Gramsci. p. cm.—(European perspectives) Translation of: Quaderni del carcere. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-06082-0 (v. 1) ISBN 978-0-231-10592-7 |v. 2) ISBN 978-0-231-13944-1 (v. 3) I. Title II. Series. DG575.G69A5 1991 3 3 5 • 4 3'0 9 ^—dc20 [B] 91-22910 CIP © Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Preface.................................................................................................vu Prison Notebooks Notebook 6 (1930-1932).......................................................................1 Notebook 7 (1930-1931)...................................................................151 Notebook 8 (1930-1932)...................................................................229 Notes Notebook 6: Description of the Manuscript..................................387 Notes to the Text.............................................................................389 Notebook 7: Description of the Manuscript..................................487 Notes to the Text.............................................................................493 Notebook 8: Description of the Manuscript..................................547 Notes to the Text.............................................................................55° Sequence of Notes by Title or Opening Phrase..............................645 Name Index........................................................................................661 PREFACE On November 17, 1930, Antonio Gramsci wrote to his sister-in- law Tatiana Schucht: "For the time being, you mustn't send me any books. Put the ones you have aside, and wait for me to tell you to ship them." Why would Gramsci, a voracious reader, want to suspend temporarily the flow of books to his prison cell at Turi di Bari? He was studying and writing as assiduously as ever, filling the pages of one notebook after another with critical commentar­ ies, bibliographical information, textual analyses, and theoretical reflections. He was certainly not slowing down,- indeed, at the time he wrote this letter, Gramsci was about to begin or had just begun making entries in three fresh notebooks—namely, Notebooks 6, 7, and 8, which are included in this volume—while continuing to fill whatever blank spaces were still available in the ones he had started using earlier. The reason for this atypical request, Gramsci explained, was that he needed time "to get rid of all the old periodicals that have ac­ cumulated over four years." Getting rid of the back issues of the journals and reviews he had received since the beginning of 1927 meant, of course, not just leafing through them but taking notes "on the subjects that interest me most, and naturally this takes up a good part of my day, because the scholarly notes are accompanied by references, comments, etc." The contents of the notebooks in this volume, as in the earlier volumes, are fully indicative of the thoroughness with which Gramsci scrutinized the periodical lit­ erature in his possession and the ways in which this material often vin Preface provided him with the starting point or the cue for a line of think­ ing, an argument, or an insight that had an important bearing on his continuously expanding and increasingly intricate intellectual project. Furthermore, by surveying the miscellaneous articles and book reviews in the rather broad range of journals and reviews he received and also by reading the newspapers and magazines avail­ able to the inmates of the Turi prison, Gramsci was able to keep himself rather well informed about the political and cultural scene in the outside world. Much of what Gramsci read and commented on belonged decidedly to his time and was of little lasting value. Yet, short of reading for themselves the same range of publications that Gramsci painstakingly examined, there are few better ways for today's readers to enrich their understanding of the cultural politics and political culture of fascist Italy than by accompanying Gramsci as he systematically casts his critical eye on the journalistic and scholarly writings of his contemporaries. Important though it was for Gramsci to catch up with his scru­ tiny of periodical literature, however, he had an additional reason for wanting a pause in the shipment of books. He did not convey it directly to Tatiana Schucht, but it is rather easy to detect if one juxtaposes some additional remarks he made in the letter of No­ vember 17, 1930, with what he wrote at about the same time on the first page of Notebook 8. By the end of 1930, Gramsci had writ­ ten such a large quantity of notes and his initial plan of study had branched out so extensively that he believed it was necessary to organize at least some of the widely scattered entries on what he considered the salient motifs or main threads of his work. "I've focused on three or four principal subjects," he informed Tatiana Schucht, while also revealing that foremost among them was the "cosmopolitan role played by Italian intellectuals until the end of the eighteenth century." What he went on to describe to her in the next couple of sentences, however, was not so much a plan for containing his notes within a general frame or shaping them into a study held together by a governing thesis but rather the necessity of subdividing this main topic into a series of separate studies. The topic had so many facets that all he could attempt under the cir­ cumstances was an "introduction to a number of monographs." Intending to implement his rather vague organizational plan, Gramsci turned to a fresh notebook (Notebook 8 in this volume), and on the first line of its first page he inscribed and underlined a title: "Loose notes and jottings for a history of Italian intellec- Preface ix tuais." Immediately underneath the title, Gramsci made it clear what he meant by "loose notes": the notes that would be gathered under this heading would still be provisional, and they would not constitute the draft or outline of "a comprehensive organic work," though they could possibly result in "independent essays." Further down the page, he started compiling a list of the topics of these independent essays, or monographs, as he called them in the letter to Tatiana Schucht. Included are all but a few of the major topics he had already addressed in many different notes scattered through­ out the notebooks he had already filled. In one respect, then, this list looks back at ground already covered, a succinct reminder of not only many prominent, recurring themes but also the fact that, despite their seemingly disparate foci, Gramsci regarded them as interrelated. The list, however, also adumbrates the future course of Gramsci's work. For although he continued till the very end to use some notebooks as repositories for his miscellaneous and nonconsecutive reflections, analyses, critiques, and theoretical explorations, he would also gradually devote more of his time to assembling special—that is, thematically organized—notebooks by selecting and often elaborating notes he had already composed. Thus, for example, Notebook 13, on Machiavelli^ politics, incor­ porates a large block of notes originally drafted in Notebook 8. Gramsci abandoned the idea of reserving the pages of Notebook 8 for his notes on Italian intellectuals. Whereas its first page was written around the same time as his letter of November 17, 1930, the rest of the notebook was not used until late the following year. (This edition gives 1930 as the beginning date of the notebook, based on the sketchy annotations Gramsci made on its opening page. In Valentino Gerratana's critical edition of the Quaderni, the notebook is dated as having been started in 1931, which is in fact the year when Gramsci began using its pages regularly for his vari­ ous notes.) In any case, within a couple of weeks of his letter to Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci was asking for new books and persisted in the practice of writing more or less unsystematically on a broad array of topics, as can be seen from the contents of this volume. There is, however, a specific project within his larger program of study and research that he did complete by the time he used up the last page of Notebook 8, in the spring of 1932. It is a project that he had launched in Notebook 4 by devoting half its pages to "Notes on Philosophy. Materialism and Idealism. First series." The second and third (and final) series of this sequence of notes occupy most Preface X of the pages of Notebook 7 that were not set aside for translations and fully half the pages of Notebook 8. Gramsci wrote this three- part series of notes consecutively, in the sense that as soon as he ran out of pages in one notebook he started another series in the pages of the next available notebook. He would later reassemble most of their components in separate notebooks: Notebook 11 (on philosophy and Marxist theory) is almost entirely made up of notes from this series, and so is a substantial part of Notebook 10 (on Croce). These two notebooks occupy an especially important place in Gramsci's opus; in them, the lineaments of his philosophy of praxis and conception of historical materialism are brought into re­ lief by a detailed critique of positivism and idealism, as exemplified by Nikolai Bukharin and Benedetto Croce, respectively. Despite Gramsci's own efforts to bring some order to the pro­ liferation of notes by organizing them thematically, readers of the Prison Notebooks would run the risk of overlooking the author's most provocative and valuable contributions to political thought and cultural analysis if they used his own lists of topics and the­ matic assemblages as a guide to what is especially significant and what is peripheral in the massive and unwieldy text. To give an obvious example, nowhere does Gramsci specify hegemony, civil society, or the concept of the state as a rubric around which to cluster a block of his notes. The titles of the individual notes in which Gramsci makes some of the most penetrating observations about these three inseparable core elements of his political theory often provide little indication of the import of their content. One of the clearest expressions of Gramsci's concept of the state—"state = political society + civil society, that is, hegemony protected by the armor of coercion"—occurs in a note (Notebook 6, §88) with a title, "Gendarme or night-watchman state," that is used only once in the entire text of the notebooks. There are numerous such in­ stances scattered throughout the three notebooks that constitute this volume. In these three notebooks, one finds Gramsci's concepts of hege­ mony, civil society, and the state developing and acquiring greater subtlety even as they become ever more tightly interwoven with the other major strands of his program of study. The impulse to di­ rect his attention to "the history of Italian intellectuals," Gramsci tells Tatiana Schucht in his letter of August 3, 1931, "arose from the desire, on the one hand, to probe the concept of the state and,