The eighteenth-century British moralist and belletrist nonpareil, Joseph Addison, declared somewhere in his Spectator essays that Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind. When Antonio Gramsci died on April 27, 1937 he had not written any books. In spite of some glowing obituaries and elegaic testimonials that appeared in a few Italian clandestine journals and other leftist publications, there was no reason to believe fifty years ago that Gramsci had left behind him a lasting legacy. His death, it seemed, had brought to an end a painful life of selfless commitment to the socialist vision; of great expenditures of energy on behalf of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) he helped found; of unwavering dedication to the cause of the oppressed; of brave, unyielding and very costly defiance of the Fascist dictatorship; and of-failure. Like Giacomo Matteotti, Giovanni Amendola, and Piero Gobetti more than a decade before him and Carlo
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Joseph A. Buttigieg (1986) studied this question.