Series: Studies in Critical Social Sciences

Over the course of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci became an author so often cited and so extensively studied at the international level that it now sometimes seems his cultural origins have been overlooked. Thanks to translations of his writings into English (and many other languages), Gramscis thought has acquired a truly global audience and inspired scholars in different disciplinary areas by reaching beyond the original utterance in Italian. Almost daily, new research is being carried out: articles and books are published completely neglecting the scientific literature produced in the language that he himself spoke. This can be considered legitimate when Gramscis thought is -more than anything else - an occasion and a stimulus with the aim of saying something other than what he himself affirmed, but the difficulty of accessing the primary sources of his political thought can sometimes produce an unintentional misunderstanding and conceptual inaccuracy. Reflecting on the relationship between scholarly studies in Italian and in other languages may perhaps lead us to speculate that while the first might be able to guarantee a greater philological precision and hermeneutic penetration, the second may demonstrate themselves to be more prone to developing the reformulation of Gramscian categories in the areas of sociology and anthropology besides those of historiography and politics.

In A Companion to Antonio Gramsci some of the most important Italian scholars of Gramsci's thought realize a sort of intellectual account of the Gramscian historiography.