The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci - Perry Anderson

An explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in the thought of the great Italian Marxist, Anderson s essay has been the subject of book-length attacks across four decades for its disentangling of the hesitations and contradictions in Gramsci s highly original usage of such key dichotomies as East and West, domination and direction, hegemony and dictatorship, state and civil society, war of position and war of movement. In a critical tribute to the international richness of Gramsci s work, it shows how deeply embedded these notions were in the revolutionary debates in Tsarist Russia and Wilhemine Germany, in which arguments criss-crossed between Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lukacs and Trotsky, with contemporary echoes in Brecht and Benjamin. A new preface considers the objections this account of Gramsci provoked and the reasons for them.