Prison Notebooks

"The fourth book is Antonio Gramsci’s Notebooks . In the Italian edition of the Notebooks, they are collected in four volumes. And it’s the third volume that I particularly like. Essentially, it’s the central notebooks from Notebook 12 onwards. It’s the notebook that is normally published under the title “On the Role of Intellectuals in Society” that I find particularly interesting. It contains miscellaneous thoughts on culture and literature. Gramsci, like a lot of these Italian thinkers, was not a professional philosopher. Gramsci came from Sardinia. He was born in the 19th century and he died in the late 1930s, during fascism. His family was part-Albanian. They were Albanian refugees—Gramsci is an Albanian name. There were a lot of Albanian refugee communities in Italy. His father’s family had taken refuge in Italy, I think, in the early 19th century. So he grew up in Sardinia, then moved to Turin, which was one of the hotbeds of Italian intellectual life in that period. And he became a Marxist early on, and was quite active in local and national politics. After the First World War, he played a key role in Italian left wing politics and led the faction that split from the Socialist Party to found the Communist Party. Gramsci also travelled to Moscow where he met his wife, who was a Russian revolutionary as you would expect. He also met Lenin there. But he then came back to Italy and, before too long, ended up in prison. “There is so much debate about liberty, the rule of law, political institutions and self-government today, but it tends to be quite parochial” Mussolini came to power in 1922. Some democratic life could continue for the first few years, but by the mid to late 1920s—1926 or 1927—Italy was essentially a dictatorship, and Gramsci was near the top of the list of public enemies of the new regime. So, he was in prison, he suffered poor health and died in Rome, shortly after being released on health grounds in 1937. As I said, Gramsci wasn’t a professional philosopher and had been engaged in a lot of real politics. But he was an extremely curious and learned man. He was interested in literature; in theatre; in economics, and in the social sciences. The Notebooks are full of references to different strands of intellectual thought. A lot of the Notebooks are just ideas that are not developed, because he didn’t really have the time or the resources in prison to develop them at greater length. But they’re extremely original and powerful. In the notebook on intellectuals and their role in society, he’s obviously looking at their role with reference to Italian history. He says that Italian intellectuals were quite different from others in Europe, because there had been until comparatively recently no unified Italy. And so Italian intellectuals were always traditionally ‘cosmopolitan’, as he puts it. He doesn’t see that as a good thing. He thought one of the problems with political and social progress in Italy was that Italian intellectuals never felt any particular connection with, or commitment to, their people or their communities. Perhaps. One of the interesting things about reading Gramsci is that he’s a Marxist, but of a sort of right-wing kind if there is such a thing. He’d be more Blue Labour than New Labour. Gramsci doesn’t criticize their cosmopolitanism because he favours a nationalist alternative. What he criticizes about the cosmopolitanism of Italian intellectuals is their lack of commitment to anyone. They essentially just exist for themselves. Some of them may have said that they are helping humanity, but humanity is just an abstraction. Ultimately, you have to have a connection to a real group of people whose situation you’re trying to improve and for whom you’re trying to fight. For a Marxist like him, that group has to be the working class. But he thought the Italian working class never had any intellectuals who stood up for it. But power tends to create its own intellectuals. Every hegemonic project, every political project, every ruling class will have what Gramsci describes as ‘the organic intellectuals’. These are the people who just provide intellectual cover for power and who also enable power, because power needs intellectuals to function and be effective. Since Italy wasn’t a state and Italian intellectuals always felt so removed from any community, class or people, intellectuals in Italy ended up becoming the organic intellectuals of different groups of power, such as the Catholic Church. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So, when Gramsci is thinking about cosmopolitanism, he’s not thinking about the debates that happened later and are still going on today about the merits of nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. He’s thinking about Italian history in the 19th century and early 20th century. For him, the Catholic Church was the ultimate cosmopolitan institution and, like Machiavelli by the way, he doesn’t like it very much. He had a phenomenal memory and a real disposition to erudition. The amount of literary references that he masters in these notebooks is just phenomenal. He thinks literature is very important, with a unique role in shaping the consciousness of society. He says that, again, Italians have been failed by Italian novelists, who often looked down on ordinary people. He gives the example of Manzoni’s The Betrothed , and says that, essentially, everyone who is working class in that book has no agency. They’re just pawns moved by Providence. But the moment an aristocrat appears, all of a sudden you get this interesting and beautifully depicted inner life. He points out that that is in stark contrast to Dostoyevsky or Dickens . He found this failure of Italian intellectuals to relate to the people in their country very frustrating. Yes."