Antonio Gramsci: From the Margins to the Center, the Journey of a Hunchback

anything materially .... 1 These words may be applied with justice to their author's own work as a political theorist and leader. The vast Gramscian corpus, extending from his massive journalistic writings in Turin to the last page of his meditations in prison, may be regarded as a series of designs for a new politics. These sketches or designs indeed reveal Antonio Gramsci to have been a great artist Today's Italian Communist Party, so different from its counterparts in other lands, is testimony to the fact that something impressive was built materially according to Gramsci's designs, although the debate will rage inevitably about the extent to which the postwar architects of the PCI have remained faithful to the style of the master. After five years' immersion in Gramsci and his world, I have concluded that Gramsci is incomparably more interesting than most of the literature about him. I frankly do not much care whether or not he got Hegel right on civil society, understood Marx's dialectic correctly, or added nothing original to thinker x's, y's or z's concept of hegemony. Most of all, I do not care whether he was a good Marxist.