Further selections from the prison notebooks PDF
Preview Further selections from the prison notebooks
Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci Edited and translated by Derek Boothman University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis Introduction, annotation and selection © Derek Boothman 1995 Translation © Lawrence & Wishart 1995 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. First published in 1995 by Lawrence & Wishart Limited Published simultaneously in the United States in 1995 by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed at Redwood Books, Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gramsci, Antonio, 1891-1937. [Selections. English. 19915] Further selections from the prison notebooks / Antonio Gramsci : edited and translated by Derek Boothman. p. cm. Originally published: London : Lawrence & Wishart, 1995. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2658-8 1. Gramsci, Antonio, 1891-1937. 2. Marxist criticism. I. Boothman, Derek. II. Title. HX288.G69213 1995 94-22165 335'.43'092—dc20 ■ CIP The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer. CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Note on the Translation ix General Introduction xiii I Religion: A Movement and an Ideology 1 II The Origin of Modern Educational Principles 138 III The Nature and History of Economic Science 161 IV Economic Trends and Developments 191 V Science, Logic and Translatability 278 VI Reference Points for an Essay on B. Croce 326 VII The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce 362 Concordance Table 476 Notes and References 507 Index 587 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In a book that ranges as wide in its subject matter as this one any editor and translator would indeed be hard-pressed to follow Gramsci on every single point without expert help and advice. The current translator is no exception and owes a great debt of gratitude to various people who have provided guidance in one way or another. Roger Simon made the initial suggestion of the topics to be dealt with and advised throughout, Jeff Skelley was a great help in the initial stage, while all other members of the staff of Lawrence & Wishart down to the present manager, Sally Davison, have been extremely useful when called on. Any serious work on Gramsci is greatly indebted to previous studies and editions of his writings, in particular to Valentino Gerratana’s masterly Critical Edition for the Einaudi publishing house of the Quaderni del Carcere. As well as to these people, grateful acknowledgement is here also paid to the encouragement, expert professional opinions and criticism of a number of other friends who were directly or indirectly important, amongst whom the following should be mentioned: Giorgio Baratta; Alberto Burgio; Joseph Buttigieg; Andrea Catone; Tullio De Mauro; Carlo Del Monte; Pat Devine; David Forgacs; Fabio Frosini; Luca Gammaitoni; Nadia Grimaldi; Quintin Hoare; Juha Koivisto; Mikko Lahtinen; Geoffrey Nowell Smith; Cesare Salvi, formerly of the PCI secretariat and currently Senator of the Partito Democratico della Sinistra; Regan Scott; Brian Simon; Aurelio Simone; Anita Weston; the staff of the Gramsci Institute in Rome, its director, Giuseppe Vacca, and especially its (unfortunately) former secretary, Antonio A. Santucci, who both advised and vii viii Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks granted exceptionally generous access to the photocopies of the manuscripts of the Notebooks held by the Institute. The Science Faculty at the University of Perugia was kind enough to allow a period of leave for necessary work on the book. Special thanks go to Sandra Giovagnoli and Stefano Boothman for their long-suffering patience, occasional irony and unflagging moral support; to Stephen Hayward, who saw the book through editorially with a mixture of tact, humour, patience, expertise and plain good sense; finally to Sara Sica, who read through the whole of the translation, compared it with the original, and made numerous comments and suggestions which improved the text and helped avoid a number of what, for the translator, would have been embarrassing slips. It is inevitable that errors and weaknesses, for which the translator alone is responsible, will remain in a text of this complexity. He and the publisher would be glad to hear from readers who find such defects. A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION The translation aims at giving a contemporary wording (avoiding, for instance, too heavy a reliance on masculine forms, like ‘mankind’ for ‘humanity’) at the same time as paying attention to the need not to introduce distortions through wordings which would indicate concepts post-dating Gramsci’s time. All abbreviations used to refer to previously published translations of Gramsci’s writings (e.g. SPN for Selections from the Prison Notebooks) are explained at the start of the general introduction. As is conventional, square brackets (i.e. ‘[...]’) indicate editorial interpolations while angle brackets (i.e. ‘<...>’) are used for material that Gramsci added at a later date than the main part of any note (above a line or, very frequently, in the margin). Titles of magazine articles are translated into English but it should be understood that the articles themselves are normally in the language of the magazine. The titles of papal encyclicals, on the other hand, are given in their original language (usually Latin), usually followed by an English translation where a generally accepted one exists; the translated title often bears little resemblance to the original but either uses a phrase from near the start of the document or gives a broad indication of the subject matter. (Modern encyclicals began in the mid-eighteenth century and initially had no official translation; the earliest ones quoted here, from the 1830s, are of this nature. Later on pastoral letters, ecclesiastical reviews and books carried translations and, in more recent times, officially approved translations have appeared under the seal of the Vatican Polyglot Press.) Gramsci’s use of language was highly innovatory; in this he was influenced not only by his studies of linguistics and ix x Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks his journalism but also by the need to get round the prison censorship. In addition, as with any language there exist some concepts that are difficult to translate with precision. A few comments on choices made in the translation may not, then, be out of place. For ‘Marxism’ Gramsci normally uses the term ‘philo sophy of praxis’, which has now become a hallmark of his writing; ‘historical materialism’ usually appears in the abbreviated form ‘mat. stor.’ while the name ‘Marx’ (used in this translation) in the notebooks is written ‘M.’ or, if he is mentioned together with Engels, the two are referred to, in the wording retained here, as the ‘founders of the philosophy of praxis’. The word ceto has, in the past, often been translated ‘stratum’, as indeed it had to be when Gramscian ideas were just being introduced into English in SPN and elsewhere. It is, however, more flexible than this would-be counterpart suggests and may refer to a class fraction or a social grouping or groupings (sometimes cutting across class dividing lines) which have a broadly similar function, e.g. a political or intellectual ceto. Given this difficulty, wherever the word occurs, ceto has been included in brackets after the translation chosen in that specific context. Gramsci makes frequent use of the adjective determinato, as applied to a set of circumstances, to convey the fact that they happen not just by chance but are brought about by a human agency. The rather awkward-sounding ‘determinate’ has normally been avoided in favour of the more common ‘given’, ‘particular’ or ‘specific’; this should be borne in mind when phrases with these words occur. In one special case - although the usage may at first sight seem rather strange - the term ‘determinate’ will however be used. The contexts in which Gramsci uses the wording mercato determinato indicate that this wording can mean the markets for various commodities (i.e. ‘specific markets’) or, in a stronger form, the market and its conditions for equilibrium (whether in a state of monopoly, perfect or imperfect competition) which are indeed ‘determinate’ in the sense that they can be described by a set of mathematical equations.1 (Phrases such as ‘a determinate solution’ or ‘determinate equilibrium’ are General Introduction xi found in English in the economic literature of his time and, earlier, ‘determinate’ in this sense - ‘a determinate quantity’ - enters the vocabulary of Ricardo himself,2 to whom Gramsci ascribes the concept - although not necessarily the use of the actual term - ‘determinate market’.) At the same time, as he says in ‘Ugo Spirito and Co.’ (pp.180-1), to say that economics is ‘determinate’ is a far cry from saying that it is a ‘deterministic’ science. Again on the subject of economics, while ‘command economy’ as a term is relatively modern, it has been adopted to translate the expressions economia secondo un piano or economia regolata (‘economy according to a plan’ or ‘regulated economy’). On the odd occasion Gramsci rescues from literary obsolescence the noun egemone (from the Greek qyepiov, i.e. ‘leader’) to indicate the person in whom hegemony is embodied; the translation follows him in using the term ‘hegemon’. In speaking of the new personality he expects to be created in (and indeed also to create) a new, more advanced socio-economic set-up he has quite frequent recourse (a dozen times in Section F of Chapter IV) to the notion of ‘social conformism’ in a polemically positive sense; the same notion occurs, especially in the last chapter, to indicate a uniformity of behaviour at the individual and social levels with the intellectual adherence to the philosophy of praxis. The concept thus emerges as a feature of what should be considered his technical political vocabulary; the decision was therefore taken to resurrect the adjective ‘conformant’ (Italian conforme) to describe a feature that actively ‘conforms to’ a structure. While not being the knottiest problem as regards translation, the notion of blocco storico requires particular attention. This expression is everywhere rendered ‘historical bloc’, as in the text of SPN, since the emphasis is always on its formation through the historical process. The index in SPN unfortunately however gives ‘historic bloc’, as if the emphasis were on the momentous nature of such a bloc; this has given rise to some confusion, compounded by the mistaken impression current among some people that by this term Gramsci meant a bloc of social alliances. Really only on one occasion might this be a legitimate reading. The xii Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks paragraph in question deals with ‘certain politico-economic social blocs’ (Q9§40, first draft) or ‘certain forces’ (Q13§23 in the final draft: SPN, p.168) which ‘have to be absorbed into a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc’ of a hypothetical free communist society of the future; here the notion of social ‘homogeneity’ might imply an alliance, and thus in this single passage ‘historical’ might coincide with ‘historic’. Elsewhere (and the current volume contains all Gramsci’s uses in final drafts of ‘historical bloc’ not already included in SPN) the expression deals prevalently with a bloc between structure and superstructure or with a social totality. Such a bloc is not merely static as in a ‘snapshot-like’ depiction, but is rendered dynamic through the introduction of the aspect of hegemony and thus the inclusion of the direction in which a society is moving.3 Seen in this light the historical bloc represents Gramsci’s attempt to transcend the limitations inherent in Marx’s description of a complex reality by a means of a two-dimensional base-superstructure metaphor. Hugues Portelli comes to a very similar conclusion: ‘A social system becomes integrated only with the emergence and consolidation of a hegemonic system under the direction of a fundamental class, which entrusts its management to the intellectuals: only at this moment does a historical bloc solidify. It follows that the examination of this concept cannot be considered separately from that of hegemony, that of the intellectual bloc. Only this way of conceiving the historical bloc allows us to grasp, in the concrete terms of social reality, the organic linkage between structure and superstructure.’4
The list of books you might like
