Gramsci giovane. La critica e le interpretazioni

Abstract

Gramsci’s intellectual and political formation in the 1910s – a period long deemed of limited relevance in his biography − has recently received renewed critical and scholarly attention. The essay maps out the critical fortunes and misfortunes of young Gramsci. It opens with the earliest interpretations, whose main aim was to establish the level of Leninism characterizing the initial expressions of Gramsci’s thought, to then move on to the subsequent divergence between those critics who deemed Gramsci’s early work irrelevant to the overall understanding of his thought, and those who, conversely, considered it as the precocious expression of a distinctive political and intellectual identity. The current resurgence of Gramscian studies has latterly permitted to reconstruct the path leading Gramsci into the theoretical range of communism, thereby establishing continuities and discontinuities with his original concept of socialism.