Antonio Gramsci is one of the most well known Italian authors in the world today. In his introduction to a collection of essays on the subject, Eric Hobsbawm (who was the first to really note this fact)¹ recently re-emphasised the magnitude of Gramsci’s fortunes outside of Italy.² The American historian John M. Cammett has put together a bibliography of writings about Gramsci published between 1922 and 1993, which includes more than 10,000 titles.³

After a long phase of ‘bad fortunes’, interest in and debate regarding the author of the Notebooks seems to have been rekindled – including in Italy. This is despite the paradoxical fact that in the 1980s, exactly when Gramsci was becoming increasingly famous abroad, the Sardinian thinker was generally ignored in Italy itself. Lately even the political heirs of his torturers have attempted to put forward their own clumsy claims to his legacy, attempting to insert Gramsci into their own political family tree.⁴

To my mind, such efforts, although clearly instrumental, are only possible because while it is the case that Gramsci has become something of a nome celebre, a subject for polemical journalism, perhaps even a myth in some select areas of Italian politics and culture (though not very large ones, to tell the truth), his life, work and thought are not really understood or widely studied. The reason for this lies in the difficulty of approaching a body of work which comes across as disorganised and complex, labyrinthine and still significantly ‘open’. The critical literature is not of particular assistance in this regard. Instead, the myriad of accumulating and overlapping interpretations and re-interpretations that have been produced over the decades are equally difficult to decipher, containing their own theoretical presuppositions and political motivations, thus providing their own additional obstacles rather than helping one in approaching the author himself.

The present work, therefore, hopes first and foremost to be a map for making one’s way through the great book of Gramsci interpretation – the thousands of articles, essays and volumes that today comprise the bibliographia gramsciana – by providing a volume dedicated to the Italian debates, one that complements similar work which has already been undertaken in other geographical contexts. There is an obvious difference however, in that Gramsci’s presence is far more rooted within the history of his own country than elsewhere, meaning a history of interpretations of Gramsci in Italy must inevitably leave some issues uncovered, perhaps to the dissatisfaction of some of the protagonists. It is clear that the current work leaves some disciplines of study insufficiently analysed and under-represented, despite having been influenced by the author of the Notebooks. It is worth noting, in fact, that it is perhaps impossible to give an account of the repercussions of Gramsci’s legacy through all of the developments within the different specialist lines of inquiry. We have chosen therefore to privilege the theoretical-political reflections and focus on particular studies (from historiography to literary criticism, from the study of Southern Italy to cultural anthropology and pedagogy) when such studies have taken on a significance which is of interest not only to the relevant specialists in those fields.

In any case, due to the peculiar fact that Gramsci was not only an intellectual or a philosopher or a politician but all of these things together, the history of the debates around Gramsci are not only a history of the reception of his thought but also of the story of Italian culture, in particular of the culture of the Italian left, its different phases of evolution and its intellectuals.

Without exception, all of the exponents of the most importance fields in twentieth-century Italian culture have grappled with Gramsci, whether to praise or condemn him. The reconstruction attempted in these pages shows how, throughout the period of time examined herein, there are two different interpretations of Gramsci that have frequently been opposed to each other. If it were not quite so hackneyed a formula, the title might have been The Two Gramscis.

First, there is the communist reading – whether in line with Togliatti, against him or in reaction to him. In their cultural and political turns, in fact, Italian communists have always proposed different, renewed readings of Gramsci, which has proven to be a litmus test for the transformations that have characterised the history of the Italian Communist Party. From ‘the leader of the working class’ and the party of antifascist martyrs, from the father of ‘the politics of unity’ after the war, a ‘great Italian’ and ‘great intellectual’, through to the inspiration for the Italian road to socialism; from the exponent of traditional national culture to the ambassador of Italian communism throughout the world and emblem of Eurocommunism; to the critical communist, and in the end the point of departure for a new possibility of being a communist after the crisis of ‘real existing socialism’.

Alongside these we find another, equally varied but nevertheless distinct series of interpretations. This is the liberal-democratic, liberal-socialist, pragmatic interpretation, which relies on a different but consistently revived emphasis that, faced with a communist Gramsci, proposes a liberal and libertarian one, more intellectual than politician, frequently the yardstick by which to measure (negatively, and almost always uncharitably and prejudicially) his comrades in the party and in struggle. This line of interpretation again contains great diversity within itself, ranging from Gobetti and Prezzolini through to Croce (‘as a man of thought, he was one of us’) and right up to the supporters of the post-communist Gramsci of recent years.

How come there is this contested Gramsci, libertarian and Cominternist, councilist and Leninist, liberal and man of the party, intellectual and militant, communist critic and critic, ante litteram, of communism?

Of course, there have been plenty of episodes of patent instrumentalisation (not all of which have been abandoned). But even these were only possible by beginning from a shared factual starting point; they did not come from nowhere. At the basis stands the extraordinary richness and complexity of Gramsci’s thought, whose conceptual repertoire can be – and continues to be – drawn on from different sides with very different objectives. This is without doubt a positive fact, perhaps the best proof of a thinker’s greatness.

Gramsci is thus shown to be more advanced than nearly all of his interpreters, and also more problematic and more open. Due to the peculiarity of his biography (the gap represented by his arrest and his parallel affirmation of Stalinism; the fact that his work was to be known better after his death than in life, in times and places profoundly different from those in which it was conceived; the specific characteristics of being inextricably both intellectual and politician) has contributed to the possibility of these quite different readings.

Due to a complex weave of historical reasons, therefore, Gramsci perhaps represents a theatrical stage on which struggling elements have played out their battles for hegemony in Italy and the Italian left. His destiny has been that of being both an ideological weapon and a piece in the game, a ‘protagonist’ in the confrontation and a locus of different forces, projects, theoretical hypotheses and politics. It is for these reasons that, for the most part, the present work does not try to affirm or demonstrate the greater or lesser theoretical plausibility of the different interpretations of Gramsci under examination, but instead attempts to measure their meaning and historical significance objectively, in order to represent their greater or lesser validity from within.

This book is the product of continued study, not without interruption, over a considerable number of years, in the course of which some parts of it have been published in different articles which I would like to note: Gramsci negli scritti dei suoi contemporanei, in Critica marxista, 1986, n. 4; Dieci anni di studi gramsciani in Italia (1978–1987), in Critica marxista, 1987, n. 2–3; Tradizione e indentitá di partito in Togliatti interprete di Gramsci, in Critica marxista, 1988, n. 3–4; Apogeo e crisi della cultura gramsciana in Italia, in Democrazia e diritto, 1991, n. 1–2; Il centenario gramsciano nella stampa italiana, in IG Informazioni, 1991, n. 1; La prima recezione di Gramsci in Italia (1944–1953), in Studi storici, 1991, n. 3; Le letture di Gramsci nel dibattito della sinistra dopo il 1956, in Studi sorici, 1992, n. 2–3.

I would like to express my gratitude to the journals in the aforementioned citations, and to their editors (Aldo Tortorella, Aldo Zanardo, Pietro Barcellona, Giuseppe Vacca, Francesco Barbagallo) for having supported me through the generous scholarly examination of my work. All the articles in question have been more or less significantly revised and modified, not only in their form for the sake of publication in a larger volume, but also in how they were originally conceived. If on one hand they might seem outdated in terms of their opinions and evaluations, on the other hand I would like to refer the reader back to them if they should desire a more specialised analysis, the kind from which I have needed to partially distance myself in the attempt to offer simultaneously a synthesis and an overview.

In particular I must thank Valentino Gerrantana, who read and discussed my work attentively with the greatest competence and meticulousness. Many thanks also to Joseph Buttigieg, Domenico Losurdo, Giorgio Lunghini, Carlo Montaleone and Antonio A. Santucci for reading the manuscript and encouraging me to publish it.