Two new books on Gramsci in the Historical Materialism series with Brill.

Francesca Antonini, Aaron Bernstein, Lorenzo Fusaro and Robert Jackson (eds.), Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks and Alvaro Bianchi, Gramsci’s Laboratory: Philosophy, History and Politics

Both only expensive hardback and e-book at the moment, but these books usually appear in paperback with Haymarket fairly soon after initial publication. [Update: Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks is available in paper here]

Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks offers a rich collection of historical, philosophical, and political studies addressing the thought of Antonio Gramsci, one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century. Based on thorough analyses of Gramsci’s texts, these interdisciplinary investigations engage with ongoing debates in different fields of study. They are exciting evidence of the enduring capacity of Gramsci’s thought to generate and nurture innovative inquiries across diverse themes. 

Gathering scholars from different continents, the volume represents a global network of Gramscian thinkers from early-career researchers to experienced scholars. Combining rigorous explication of the past with a strategic analysis of the present, these studies mobilise underexplored resources from the Gramscian toolbox to confront the actuality of our ‘great and terrible’ world. 

The purpose of Gramsci’s Laboratory is to interpret the relationship between philosophy and politics in Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere. A milestone in contemporary Brazilian Gramsci reception, the book argues that in Gramsci’s work the unity of theory and practice is unfolded theoretically through the unity of philosophy, history and politics. 

Bianchi argues that this unity was developed in the research project that Gramsci carried out in prison, and was thus a product of the ‘determination in the last instance’ of politics itself. His book demonstrates that a correct understanding of this unity requires us to recognise that history and philosophy are constitutive elements of the political field from which they claim to keep their distance.