Gramsci's Interpretation of Fascism

Bibliographic Data

ID4456214
AuthorsWalter L Adamson (corresponding author)
Year1980
Volume41
Issue4
Pages615
Publication date1980-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2709277
OpenAlexW2324404473
LanguageEN
Citations received10

In the six years before his 1926 arrest by Mussolini's police, Gramsci wrote some 250 pages on the peculiar new political phenomenon of fascism. Prison officials later did their best to prevent the further development of this analysis, but there are nonetheless many passages in the Prison Notebooks which deal with it sub rosa and reveal subterranean connections between his understanding of fascism and the formulation of his larger theoretical standpoint. Although nearly every serious work on Gramsci makes at least passing allusions to this writing, no one has yet subjected it to a careful analysis. Here I propose to document the emergence and development of Gramsci's attitude towards, and understanding of, fascism within the more general context of his political ideas. I shall then show how much of the conceptual universe of the Prison Notebooks was invented to come to grips with the nature of fascist rule, and indeed, with the entire history of Italy's failed revolutions from 1848-1920 to which fascism was the tragic epilogue. It is in this ironic sense that fascism made Gramsci the great twentieth-century political theorist of Marxism

Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci

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