Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought

This is an interpretative and evaluative study of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the founding father of the Italian Communist Party who died in 1937 after ten years of imprisonment in Fascist jails. It proceeds by a rigorous textual analysis of his Prison Notebooks, the scattered notes he wrote during his incarceration. Professor Finocchiaro explores the nature of Gramsci’s dialectical thinking, in order to show in what ways Gramsci was and was not a Marxist, as well as to illustrate correspondences with the work of Hegel, Croce, and Bukharin. The book provides a critical reappraisal of Gramsci as a thinker and of the dialectical approach as a mode of inquiry.

Preface and acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Gramsci’s Crocean critique of Croces’s philosophy; 2. Croce and the theory and practice of criticism; 3. Gramsci’s methodological criticism of Bukharin’s sociology; 4. Bukharin and the theory and practice of science; 5. Gramsci’s dialectical interpretation of Machiavelli’s politics; 6. Gramsci’s political translation of Hegelian-Marxian dialectic; 7. Hegel and the theory and practice of dialectic; 8. Gramsci and the evaluation of Marxism; Conclusion; Appendix; Notes; Bibliography; Index.