Antonio Gramsci - Collected Works, incl. Prison Notebooks (23 boo...

* Antonio Gramsci - Collected Works, incl. Prison Notebooks (23 books)

ANTONIO GRAMSCI (1891–1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and politician who developed a nuanced account of ideology and political leadership that extended classical Marxism beyond a narrowly economic focus. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Mussolini's regime in 1926. At his trial the fascist prosecutor argued, "We must stop his brain from working for 20 years."

Before his imprisonment, Gramsci was a prolific journalist and activist, championing workers’ councils and factory occupations, seeing them as the embryo of a new socialist state. His early essays—later collected in volumes such as the PRE-PRISON WRITINGS (1994) and the two-volume SELECTIONS FROM POLITICAL WRITINGS (1997–98)—articulated his belief in the revolutionary potential of organized workers and emphasized the importance of political education in forging a cohesive revolutionary movement.

Gramsci’s most influential work emerged under the harsh conditions of Fascist imprisonment and secured his lasting intellectual legacy. Between 1929 and 1935, he composed the PRISON NOTEBOOKS , a vast and fragmentary set of reflections on history, politics, philosophy, and culture. In these notebooks, he introduced key concepts such as “cultural hegemony,” arguing that ruling classes maintain power not only through coercion but by securing consent through institutions like schools, churches, and the media. He also developed the idea of the “organic intellectual” and reinterpreted the state as a complex network of political and civil society institutions. The first three volumes of the critical English edition of the Notebooks (1992–2007), edited by Joseph Buttigieg, are especially worthy of note. A very good single-volume reader is THE GRAMSCI READER: SELECTED WRITINGS (2000), which includes both prison and pre-prison writings.

In addition to the Notebooks, Gramsci’s prison correspondence—published as the LETTERS FROM PRISON —reveals a more personal dimension of his thought, blending political reflection with intimate concerns about family, health, and morale. For Gramsci’s pre-prison letters, see A GREAT AND TERRIBLE WORLD (2014). Together, his pre-prison journalism and theoretical writings, along with the profound meditations of the Prison Notebooks, established Gramsci as one of the most original Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, whose analyses of culture, power, and ideology continue to influence political theory and critical sociology worldwide.


The following books are in PDF unless otherwise noted:

* Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935 [ed. Forgacs] (Schocken, 1988)
* Further Selections from Prison Notebooks [ed. Boothman] (Minnesota, 1995)
* A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters 1908–1926 [ed. Boothman] (L&W, 2014)
* Letters from Prison [ed. Lawner] (Noonday, 1989)
* Letters from Prison, Vol. 1 [ed. Rosengarten] (Columbia, 1994)
* The Modern Prince & Other Writings [tr. Marks] (International, 1957)
* Pre-Prison Writings [ed. Bellamy] (Cambridge, 1994)
* Prison Notebooks, Vol. I [ed. Buttigieg] (Columbia, 1992)
* Prison Notebooks, Vol. II [ed. Buttigieg] (Columbia, 1996)
* Prison Notebooks, Vol. III [ed. Buttigieg] (Columbia, 2007)
* Selections from Cultural Writings [ed. Forgacs] (Harvard, 1985) – PDF^
* Selections from Political Writings, 1910-1920 [ed. Hoare] (L&W, 1977)
* Selections from Political Writings, 1921-1926 [ed. Hoare] (L&W, 1978)
* Selections from Prison Notebooks [ed. Hoare & Nowell-Smith] (Int'l, 1971)
* The Southern Question [tr. Verdicchio] (Bordighera, 2015)
* Subaltern Social Groups: Critical Edition of Prison Notebook 25 (Columbia, 2021) – PDF & ePUB

== BIOGRAPHICAL ==

* Antonio Gramsci: A Biography [Andrew Pearmain] (Tauris, 2020) – PDF
* Antonio Gramsci: An Intellectual Biography [Giovanni Fresu] (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) – ePUB / PDF
* Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography [Alistair Davidson] (Brill, 2016) – PDF
* An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci [George Hoare & Nathan Sperber] (Bloomsbury, 2015) – ePUB
* An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci, 2e [George Hoare & Nathan Sperber] (Bloomsbury, 2025) – PDF
* The Revolutionary Marxism of Antonio Gramsci [Frank Rosengarten] (Brill, 2014) – PDF
* To Live Is to Resist [Jean-Yves Frétigné (Chicago, 2021) – ePUB / PDF

PDF^ courtesy of Mohamed5438


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