American readers could study Antonio Gramsci’s ideas in English by 1946. That summer, Samuel Putnam translated some of his prison letters for the American Marxist journal Science & Society. The letters dealt with the Italian thinker Benedetto Croce. They asked how beliefs helped a class hold power, alongside the state’s power to make people obey.[1]
Gramsci had asked how workers could become fit to rule. Shared hardship did not by itself give them a common aim. They needed to build groups, win allies, and challenge beliefs that helped keep the old order in place. The struggle over work and wealth was also a struggle to lead and shape daily life.[2]
It took years for those arguments to enter American debate. Gramsci died in 1937, leaving unfinished prison notebooks. Others saved, arranged, published, and translated them. The historian Eugene Genovese was one of several important figures who brought Gramsci’s ideas into American debate. In 1967, he drew on Gramsci to argue for a change in American socialist work. He urged a new approach to workers, universities, and the New Left.[3]
Marxism and the problem of waiting
Gramsci’s challenge grew from Marx’s account of how people work and live. Marx set out part of that account in his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He tied law and state power to how a society made its wealth. Over time, the means of making goods could clash with the rules of ownership. That clash could open an era of revolution. People would grasp it and fight it out through politics, religion, and other forms of thought.[4]
Marx gave a central place to how people made and shared wealth. His account also raised a question for socialists. Did they have to wait for the economy to follow a set course before they could bring about a revolution?
The founders of Marxism had resisted a simple answer. In an 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch, Friedrich Engels rejected the claim that economics was the only force in history. Struggles over power, laws, and beliefs passed down from the past also shaped events. He wrote that Marx and he had at times put such stress on economics that their followers gave it too much weight.[5]
In Socialism and Culture, published in January 1916, Gramsci asked why socialism had not arrived when workers had been exploited for so long. Hardship alone could not explain a revolution. People had to grasp their place in society and form a shared aim. He pointed to the books and debates of the Enlightenment that had helped prepare the French Revolution. Work on culture helped a class learn to act together.[6]
The Russian Revolution put that question to the test. The Bolsheviks had taken power before Russia had followed the course of capitalist growth seen in Western Europe. In December 1917, Gramsci called their victory The Revolution against Capital. His title referred to Marx’s book and to its use as a rule for what Russia must do next.[7]
Gramsci meant to provoke. The Bolsheviks had broken the scheme in which Russia first had to pass through a full stage of capitalist rule. War and suffering, joined to socialist teaching and work among the people, had helped form a shared will to act. People seeking power could help shape events. They did not have to wait for the economy to do their work for them.
Gramsci still claimed Marx as his teacher. In Our Marx, published in May 1918, he rejected the idea that history followed an automatic law. But wishes alone could not change it either. People had to study the real economy and build the strength to act. An aim became practical when a movement found the means to pursue it.[8]
Learning to rule before taking power
In Turin, Gramsci proposed a way for workers to learn to rule. He wrote Workers’ Democracy with Palmiro Togliatti in June 1919. They urged workers to build on the groups that spoke for them in their factories. Those groups could become councils through which workers learned to run the plant and wield power.[9]
The councils would reach beyond wages. Factory delegates would link up with workers in other trades and with local groups. Through votes, meetings, and shared duties, workers would learn to run their own affairs. Gramsci and Togliatti called their goal the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They meant a workers’ state built through the shared, organized action of workers and peasants.[9]
Workers would learn through discussion and through the duties they took on. The party would help organize and direct their activity. Education helped prepare workers to wield the power they sought.[9]
The Turin strike of April 1920 exposed the limits of local strength. In a report to the Communist International that July, Gramsci described the defeat. He blamed the national Socialist Party and trade-union leaders for leaving Turin isolated. He also noted acts of support elsewhere, including those of railway and port workers. Gramsci was taking part in the dispute he described. In his view, the defeat showed the need for a national organization and wider support. Strong councils in one city had been unable to win the struggle.[9]
Building a party raised another problem: how to keep its members active and in touch with workers. On February 9, 1924, Gramsci wrote to Togliatti, Umberto Terracini, and other comrades. He attacked the way the Italian Communist Party had worked. Too many members left all thought and action to the leaders. Loyalty to the party line had taken the place of debate and work among the people.[10]
He also challenged the strategy of the Communist leader Amadeo Bordiga. Gramsci argued that capitalism in Western Europe had produced a layer of better-placed workers, union leaders, and socialist groups that favored reform. They helped make workers slower and more cautious in taking action. A party seeking revolution would need a more complex strategy, over a longer period, than the Bolsheviks had needed in 1917.[10]
Gramsci also faced the gap between factory workers in northern Italy and peasants in the South. He took up the problem in his unfinished 1926 essay on the Southern Question. Workers needed allies to draw most working people into a struggle against capitalism. They had to make the peasants’ needs part of their own aims.[11]
Workers also had to question their own views. Gramsci attacked northern claims that people in the South were poor because they were born inferior. He charged that socialist writers had helped spread those beliefs. A party could speak for workers while repeating ideas that cut them off from possible allies.
He used hegemony to name leadership built by winning consent. A class seeking power had to persuade other groups that its aims also served their needs. Those allies needed reasons to join a common struggle. Workers therefore had to take up peasant demands as part of their own program for change.[11]
Gramsci gave concrete examples. Workers’ control of industry could provide peasants with farm machinery, while a workers’ state could offer credit. These were promises within a plan to replace capitalist rule. Hegemony joined work on beliefs to practical aims and class alliances.[11]
Institutions and the long struggle for power
The Fascist authorities arrested Gramsci in 1926. While confined, he developed these questions in notebooks. He wrote on many subjects and returned to earlier notes to revise them. He died in a Rome clinic in 1937, with the notebooks still unfinished.[12]
Gramsci asked why an established order could survive even when its government faced a crisis. Part of his answer lay in civil society: the institutions, groups, and social ties through which people formed beliefs and loyalties. His examples included the Church, trade unions, and schools. Their influence reached into daily life, beyond the officials who held government posts.[13][14]
State power rested on consent and coercion together. Coercion meant the use or threat of force. The police, army, and law could enforce discipline when consent failed. But a ruling class also drew strength from people who accepted its leadership and saw its way of organizing society as right or normal. Cultural hegemony names this power gained through beliefs and consent.[13]
For a movement seeking power, those loyalties presented a lasting obstacle. A government might weaken while the institutions supporting the wider order remained strong. Gramsci compared Russia in 1917 with the West, where civil society offered stronger defenses. A movement had to understand those defenses and build support capable of challenging them.[14]
He called this struggle a war of position. The image came from war against a well-defended line. He contrasted it with a war of movement: a direct attack intended to break an opponent’s power quickly. A war of position required the patient work of building alliances, organizing people, and challenging the beliefs that sustained the ruling class.[14]
Institutions therefore mattered as places where leadership could be sustained or contested. The struggle for power reached into organized social life. A movement needed to win people’s support there and give its allies reasons to remain together. That work could take years.[11][14]
The goal remained state power. Building strength across society was part of preparing to win it. Gramsci credited Lenin with recognizing the need for this change of course, but each movement had to work out how to pursue it in its own country.[14]
Turning everyday beliefs into political strength
Building support across society required more than gaining a place inside its institutions. A movement also had to work on how people understood their lives, whom they trusted, and what changes they thought possible. Gramsci’s ideas about common sense, intellectuals, and the party addressed different parts of that task.[15][16][17]
He used common sense to mean the ideas people picked up through language, religion, custom, and ordinary life. Those ideas could clash. A person might repeat one view while acting on another, or combine beliefs passed down from quite different sources.[15]
A movement had to begin with that mixed outlook. Gramsci wanted people to question views they had taken on trust and work out how those views fitted together. He also saw sound insights in daily thought. Debate and shared action could help people build on them and form a clearer view of their world.[15]
He made this point in a dispute with the Soviet Marxist Nikolai Bukharin. Bukharin had written a guide to the Marxist account of history. Gramsci argued that a book for most readers should begin with the beliefs they held. A clash with the views of great thinkers alone could miss what shaped those readers’ lives. Teaching Marxism meant working on that outlook and trying to change it.[15]
People also needed others who could explain ideas and help them act together. Gramsci’s organic intellectuals helped explain who could do that work. They grew with a class and helped give it a shared sense of its role. He used “intellectuals” to mean more than professors and writers. His examples included technicians and people who helped organize work or social life.[16]
His example was the business owner. A firm needed people with the skills to make goods. It also needed people who could win trust and help shape the rules and ties that sustained the business. A class seeking to rule had to develop its own people who could explain its aims and lead.[16]
The party could give this work a shared aim over time. Gramsci drew on Machiavelli’s work on power to name his modern Prince. This Prince was a party through which people could form a shared will and act together. It would lead a change in thought and values, tied to a plan for economic reform. Changes in culture had to go with changes in how people worked and lived.[17]
From prison notes to English selections
American Communist journals had named Gramsci in the 1930s. The American edition of The Communist International printed a tribute in July 1937. It praised him as a Bolshevik leader and a victim of Fascism. The signers, leaders of the Communist International, stressed his loyalty to Lenin and Stalin. They honored a fallen comrade.[18]
People who worked after Gramsci’s death helped make his notes available to readers. The editor Joseph Buttigieg later described how Gramsci’s sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, helped save them. She had advice from the economist Piero Sraffa. She helped protect the papers and arrange for them to be sent to Moscow. They returned to Italy after the war.[19]
Editors shaped what readers could study. Gramsci had used several notebooks at once, returned to themes, and rewritten parts. He had left no single finished book. Editors had to decide which notes belonged together and how to arrange them.
Felice Platone grouped the prison writings by theme into six books, under Togliatti’s general guidance. Einaudi published them between 1948 and 1951. Gramsci’s prison letters had appeared in 1947. Readers now had books on thought, intellectuals, Italian history, politics, and literature. But the editors had placed the notes in a new order, apart from the notebooks in which Gramsci had written them.[20]
Americans could read some of these arguments before the Italian edition was complete. Putnam’s 1946 translation drew on letters printed in June 1944 in the Italian Communist journal La Rinascita. Gramsci asked how Croce’s essays spread ideas to people who did not even know his name. He also argued that modern Marxism gave cultural leadership a central role in class power. Readers could find his contrast between consent and force, and his attack on the view that the economy fixed people’s fate.[1]
The Italian books then drew reviews in Science & Society. In its winter 1948–1949 issue, Giulio Muratore praised the range of Gramsci’s thought and his freedom from dogma. But he thought Gramsci went too far in his attack on crude materialism. Muratore defended the view that the world exists apart from what people think about it. He feared that Gramsci put that view at risk. His 1951 review welcomed Gramsci’s account of intellectuals, parties, and class leadership. It ended with a call to translate the work for readers who did not know Italian. Praise and debate came before the better-known English books.[21]
The English selections meant further choices about what to print. Carl Marzani translated The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and added his own notes. Cameron Associates published it in New York in 1957. Louis Marks’s larger selection, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, appeared in London that year. American journals discussed both in 1958. By June 1959, an ad in Political Affairs offered Marks’s book to American buyers for four dollars.[22]
Marzani had served in the wartime Office of Strategic Services and then the State Department. He went to prison after a prosecution for hiding his Communist Party membership.[23]
After prison, Marzani edited a leadership magazine for the United Electrical Workers. He joined Angus Cameron’s publishing venture in 1954. Together they ran the Liberty Book Club. His translation entered a network that already served union and left readers.[23]
Marzani told readers how his book took shape. Cameron Associates had considered a translation in 1955, he recalled. He began work after injuries kept him in bed. When he learned that International Publishers planned a selection, he stopped. He then chose to publish the notes he had translated, mainly on philosophy. He thought they could help readers address American problems. The printing leaf dates the book to October 1957.[22]
He also told readers what he had changed. He cut references he thought would mean little to Americans, removed repeated points, and rephrased some terms. He used Marxism for Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis. In his introduction, he urged readers to test Marxist ideas instead of treating them as fixed dogma. He still saw Marxism as a distinct way of understanding the world that could guide action.[22]
His notes linked the texts to American life. He pointed readers to William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man and Harvey Swados’s essay The Myth of the Happy Worker. He thought these works could help readers understand American social groups. In his notes on intellectuals, he faulted American union leaders for failing to help other leaders and members build their knowledge. Years before Genovese’s 1967 essay, Marzani was using Gramsci to question how American Marxists studied and taught.[22]
American readers test Gramsci’s ideas
The translations arrived amid a crisis over the Soviet Union. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes. Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising. These events deepened disputes among American Communists. Marzani placed Gramsci within debates over the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Poland. His call to test Marxist ideas spoke to those disputes.[24]
Howard Selsam questioned that use of Gramsci in Mainstream in February 1958. He valued Gramsci’s effort to understand society and move people toward socialism. But he thought Marzani’s notes read current party disputes into Gramsci’s work. Readers needed to separate the two men’s views. Selsam also wanted sources that would let them check the Italian texts.[25]
Fred Hallett saw lessons for American Marxists in Gramsci’s work on alliances and intellectuals. He wrote in Political Affairs in April 1958. In his account, workers needed more than a strong sense of their own class. They had to win other groups to a shared plan. He linked Gramsci to Lenin and rejected the view that events followed a fixed course. Each nation had to find its own road to socialism. Hallett wanted a fuller account, with concrete detail and language more familiar to Americans.[26]
The question was how to use lessons from Italy to build socialism in their own country. Selsam questioned how Marzani drew those lessons. Hallett wanted an account that Americans could more easily use. Their reviews show an early debate over how to use Gramsci. They do not tell us how widely his ideas had spread.[25][26]
Scholars and editors widen the debate
Scholars offered another way to read Gramsci. H. Stuart Hughes devoted part of Consciousness and Society to him. The book appeared in New York in 1958. Hughes admired the range of Gramsci’s thought and his concern for human freedom. Yet he judged that hegemony kept the substance of Leninist rule beneath more liberal language. That raised a question: did Gramsci’s work on culture change communist power, or give it a more appealing form?[27]
The Welsh historian Gwyn A. Williams took up Hughes’s account in 1960 in the American Journal of the History of Ideas. He praised Hughes and agreed that Gramsci had returned Marxism to its idealist roots. Williams stressed the role of human thought and will in Gramsci’s account of history. He also valued the freedom of thought he found in Gramsci. His sharpest attacks were on Togliatti and Giuseppe Tamburrano, whose readings he found too rigid. He accepted that Gramsci saw hegemony as a development of Leninism. He disputed how those readers explained it, including Togliatti’s paper at a Rome conference in January 1958.[28]
In 1964, Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders included Gramsci in an American paperback survey. Socialist Thought: A Documentary History came out from Anchor Books in Garden City, New York. Its last chapter paired Gramsci with the British Labour writer C. A. R. Crosland as two views of contemporary socialism. It reprinted passages from Louis Marks’s translation of The Modern Prince, with permission from the New York and London publishers.[29]
The editors placed Gramsci’s ideas within a wider history of socialism. They chose passages on Marxism and culture, parties in crisis, and bureaucracy, the system of officials who run a party or state. Readers could study how rulers held on to power and how a party could lose touch with its members. The book gave readers another way to find the texts; it does not tell us how many adopted the ideas.[29]
British writers also argued over what hegemony could explain. In 1965, E. P. Thompson attacked Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn’s use of the idea to explain English history. He thought they had turned a subtle account of class power into a rigid label. Thompson drew on Williams’s explanation.[30]
From a translation to an American argument
John M. Cammett studied how Gramsci’s political work shaped his ideas. His book Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism came out from Stanford University Press in 1967. He later recalled that Marzani’s booklet had encouraged his research. Cammett showed how workers had to win allies before taking state power. Culture was part of a struggle for class rule. Lenin and a party seeking revolution remained central to his account.[31]
Cammett also drew lessons for socialists in a Science & Society paper in spring 1967. They had to study how rulers won consent. They also needed to build a socialist culture of their own. He wanted it to draw workers and other groups to their cause.[32]
The book prompted Eugene Genovese’s essay On Antonio Gramsci. It appeared in Studies on the Left in March–April 1967. Genovese praised Cammett but charged American Marxists with neglecting Gramsci. His claim that Gramsci was “untranslated, unread, and undiscussed” overstated the case. His own footnote named two English selections; earlier American reviews also show the limits of his charge.[3]
He drew on Williams’s view of hegemony, which Cammett had quoted. Why might workers accept the existing order even when it hurt them? That was a question for the American left.[28][31][33] He pointed to dockworkers who refused to load ships trading with Communist countries, even though doing so could cost them money. In his view, socialists had to understand such loyalties and win people over. They could not expect hardship alone to produce support for revolution.[33]
This was his own reading, offered in a dispute.[34] He urged socialists to work openly inside existing universities, unions, and other groups. Socialists should seek to turn them into tools for a transition to socialism. The goal was state power. He urged radicals to win people over, defend free thought on campus, and reject bullying.[35]
He credited the New Left with seeing culture and ways of living as grounds of struggle. But he also wanted a lasting socialist party. Shared action could test its ideas and give possible allies reasons to trust it.[36]
A different judgment appeared in Luigi Barzini’s September 28, 1967 review in The New York Review of Books. The Italian liberal praised Cammett’s scholarship but questioned whether Gramsci’s party could protect freedom. The two writers drew different lessons from Gramsci’s work.[37]
Genovese’s essay leaves a further question open. Which readers would act on his proposal, and what would they make of it? Answering that requires following their choices beyond 1967.
Sources and notes
1. Antonio Gramsci, “Benedetto Croce and His Concept of Liberty,” translated by Samuel Putnam, Science & Society 10, no. 3 (Summer 1946), pp. 283–292, especially p. 283 n. for the translation source and credit, p. 286 for the spread of Croce’s ideas, and pp. 287–288 for hegemony, consent, force, and the criticism of economic fatalism. Original record. The editorial note identifies La Rinascita 1, no. 1 (June 1944) as the Italian source. This is evidence of an American English-language publication, not a claim to the first American mention. The first letter is dated April 13, 1932 in this translation; Boothman identifies the correct date as April 18. No argument here depends on that disputed day. The journal’s explanation of “philosophy of praxis” as a censorship device is its editorial interpretation, not adopted here as a complete account of Gramsci’s terminology.
2. Antonio Gramsci, “The Southern Question” (1926), in Louis Marks’s translation, cited in note 11; and Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 129–133, 181–182. Hereafter SPN.
3. Eugene D. Genovese, “On Antonio Gramsci,” Studies on the Left 7, no. 2 (March–April 1967), pp. 83–107 in Geoff Eley, “Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the English-Speaking World, 1957–82,” European History Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1984), pp. 441–478, at p. 471 n. 4 (publisher record); the 1971 reprint’s credit line gives pp. 83–108. The original issue has not been collated. Consulted in For a New America: Essays in History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959–1967, edited by James Weinstein and David W. Eakins (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 284–316, especially 284–286. Subsequent Genovese locators refer to this inspected reprint. The opening charge and acknowledgment of two English selections are on p. 285. The 1971 reprint, In Red and Black, pp. 391–422, retains both passages but adds a later retrospective note; it is not treated as an unchanged 1967 text.
4. Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), English text from Progress Publishers, 1977, paragraphs beginning “In the social production” through “Mankind thus inevitably.” Text and edition information.
5. Friedrich Engels to Joseph Bloch, September 21, 1890, point II, translated by Sidney Hook and reprinted with emendations in New International 1, no. 3 (September–October 1934), pp. 81–85. Text and translation information.
6. Gramsci, “Socialism and Culture,” signed Alfa Gamma, Il Grido del Popolo, January 29, 1916, in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935, edited by David Forgacs (New York: NYU Press, 2000; collection first published 1988), pp. 56–59. Hereafter Reader. The Reader identifies John Mathews’s translation in Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920 (1977), pp. 10–13, with editorial changes described in the Reader’s note on the text, pp. 14–16. This later translation establishes Gramsci’s early argument; it does not establish early American access to that article.
7. Gramsci, “The Revolution Against Capital,” Avanti!, December 24, 1917, in Reader, pp. 32–36. The Reader’s note on the text, pp. 14–16, identifies John Mathews’s translation in Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920 (1977), with editorial changes described there. The wording checked is the Reader text; its publication dateline appears at the end, p. 36.
8. Gramsci, “Our Marx,” Il Grido del Popolo, May 4, 1918, translated by David Forgacs in Reader, pp. 36–39; see the note on the text, pp. 14–16, identifying new translations.
9. Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, “Workers’ Democracy,” L’Ordine Nuovo, June 21, 1919, Reader, pp. 79–82. The editorial attribution identifies the unsigned article as written in collaboration with Togliatti. For the defeat and isolation, Gramsci, “The Turin Factory Councils Movement,” report dispatched July 1920, in Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920, edited by Quintin Hoare, translated by John Mathews (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977; inspected 1988 reprint), pp. 310–320, especially 310–311, 319–320. This is Gramsci’s account of the dispute, including his accusations against party and union leaders.
10. Gramsci, letter to Togliatti, Terracini, and others, Vienna, February 9, 1924, in Reader, pp. 127–134, especially 128–131. The Reader uses Quintin Hoare’s translation in Selections from Political Writings, 1921–1926 (1978), with the editorial changes described in its note on the text, pp. 14–16. Cammett discusses this dispute in chapter 8, especially pp. 160–169, and cites the letter’s Italian source at pp. 262–263, notes 26–28 and 52. The party criticism and account of Bordiga’s position are Gramsci’s.
11. Gramsci, “The Southern Question,” drafted 1926, in The Modern Prince and Other Writings, translated by Louis Marks. Consulted through the CUNY transcription, the discussion of farm machinery and credit in the January 1920 passage reproduced near the opening, followed by paragraphs beginning “The Turin Communists posed” through the discussion of northern prejudice. The examined New York copy is a 1968 third printing, copyright 1957. The essay is also titled “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” in other translations.
12. Reader, chronological outline, pp. 20–21, for the arrest; Joseph A. Buttigieg, introduction and chronology to Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, edited by Buttigieg, translated by Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 1–5, 89–94; preface, pp. ix–x. The inspected archive copy is the 2011 paperback of this edition.
13. Gramsci, SPN, pp. 12, 258, 263. Page 258 discusses the ruling classes’ political and cultural hegemony, including the role of schools and private activities. The equation joining political and civil society occurs on p. 263.
14. Gramsci, SPN, pp. 237–239, including the East/West comparison and his discussion of Lenin’s united-front approach. The edition dates these notes 1930–1932. For the Church, trade unions, and schools as specific examples, see pp. 55–56, the editorial note to “The Problem of Political Leadership,” which reproduces Gramsci’s account from a prison letter, cited there as LC, pp. 482–483. This is a letter excerpt checked in the inspected SPN edition, not an independent collation of the complete letter.
15. Gramsci, SPN, pp. 323–328, especially the discussion of everyday philosophy, conflicting beliefs, and the relationship between thought and action; pp. 419–421 for the criticism of Bukharin’s Theory of Historical Materialism: A Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology.
16. Gramsci, SPN, pp. 5–10. The examples of the entrepreneur and specialized organizers occur on pp. 5–6.
17. Gramsci, SPN, pp. 129, 132–133. The party is identified as the modern Prince on p. 129; economic reform is linked explicitly to intellectual and moral reform on p. 133.
18. “Antonio Gramsci,” The Communist International, U.S. edition, 14, no. 7 (July 1937), pp. 435–436. Original American issue. The statement is dated Moscow, April 28, 1937, and collectively signed by Dimitroff, Ercoli, Manuilsky, and other Communist International leaders. Its claims about Gramsci’s loyalty are evidence of the official tribute’s framing. Its inaccurate account of his release is not used as biography.
19. Buttigieg, introduction to Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, pp. 3–4. This later editorial reconstruction, which cites correspondence and earlier editions, supplies the preservation account; the original correspondence has not been independently collated for this draft.
20. Buttigieg, preface to Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, pp. ix–xiii, including the six-volume edition list on p. xi. Derek Boothman, introduction to Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995; consulted in the ElecBook 1999 transcription), electronic p. 31, identifies Togliatti’s general guidance. These editorial accounts distinguish the provisional manuscripts from subsequent arrangements for publication.
21. Giulio Muratore, reviews of Gramsci’s Lettere dal carcere and Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Science & Society 13, no. 1 (Winter 1948–1949), pp. 79–81, especially pp. 80–81, original record; and of Gli intellettuali e l’organizzazione della cultura, Il Risorgimento, and Note sul Machiavelli, Science & Society 15, no. 3 (Summer 1951), pp. 275–278, especially pp. 277–278, original record. The reviewer signed from Mexico City. Derek Boothman, “Le traduzioni di Gramsci in inglese,” inTRAlinea 7 (2005), scholarly article, identifies Muratore as the name used by Henry F. Mins. The original issue settles 1951 against Cammett’s later recollection of 1952.
22. Antonio Gramsci, The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, translated and annotated by Carl Marzani (New York: Cameron Associates, 1957), original title and printing leaves; Marzani’s introduction, especially p. 6; translator’s note, p. 15; editorial notes, pp. 16 and 25–26. Complete scan inspected, with University of Central Florida PRISM wrapper identifying repository item 366. The printing leaf specifies October 1957. The translation-project sequence is Marzani’s participant account. His recommended American works are sources he used, not evidence that their authors followed Gramsci. Hallett, p. 56 n., identifies the London Marks selection (Lawrence & Wishart, 1957); Henry F. Mins’s 1958 review metadata also dates both selections 1957: publisher record. For American sale, see the advertisement in Political Affairs 38, no. 6 (June 1959), unnumbered back matter, offering the book through New Century Publishers, New York: original issue, PDF p. 67. Cammett’s bibliography, p. 275, dates the International Publishers edition 1959. These establish a contemporary sale notice and a bibliographical date, but the first New York printing itself remains uninspected.
23. New York University, Tamiment Library, Carl Aldo Marzani Papers, TAM.154, biographical note, paragraphs on OSS and State Department service, prosecution, the United Electrical Workers, Cameron Associates, and Liberty Book Club. Finding aid. Its separate chronology dates Open Marxism 1959, which conflicts with the original October 1957 printing leaf and reviews published in 1958. The original edition establishes the date used here.
24. Marzani, introduction to Open Marxism, p. 11; Selsam, pp. 60–62. For the American Communist crisis, Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), chapter 1, especially pp. 9–16. Marzani and Selsam establish how participants connected Gramsci to the disputes; Isserman supplies the later historical account.
25. Howard Selsam, “Thinker Unchained,” Mainstream 11, no. 2 (February 1958), pp. 60–62. Original issue, PDF pp. 62–64. The review’s judgments remain Selsam’s. Compare Marzani’s stated cuts in his translator’s note, p. 15, and his explicit reference to contemporary debates over the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Poland in the introduction, p. 11.
26. Fred Hallett, “Antonio Gramsci,” Political Affairs 37, no. 4 (April 1958), pp. 55–59, especially 56–59. Original issue, PDF pp. 57–61.
27. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958; inspected Vintage Books reprint, copyright 1958), chapter 3, “The Critique of Marxism,” section “Postscript: Gramsci and Marxist Humanism,” pp. 96–104, especially pp. 99–104. Hughes’s judgment of hegemony and totalitarianism is his interpretation; his biographical chronology is not used to establish Gramsci’s party leadership or release dates.
28. Gwyn A. Williams, “The Concept of ‘Egemonia’ in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some Notes on Interpretation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21, no. 4 (October–December 1960), pp. 586–599, especially pp. 586–588, 590–592, and 594–595. Original record. The signature identifies University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. His account of intellectual freedom is an interpretation contested in the reception, not a settled description of all Gramsci’s positions.
29. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, eds., Socialist Thought: A Documentary History (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1964), original title/copyright and permissions leaves; chapter X, “Contemporary Socialism: Two Views,” pp. 511–527, especially Gramsci’s introduction and selections, pp. 512–526. Library of Congress record. The permissions leaf credits Louis Marks and both International Publishers, New York, and Lawrence & Wishart, London. This is the 1964 edition, not Columbia’s later revised edition. Editorial framing belongs to Fried and Sanders; translated selections belong to Gramsci.
30. E. P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” The Socialist Register 1965, pp. 311–362, section discussing hegemony and notes 58–59. Text. Thompson explicitly identifies his debt to Williams. His criticism of Anderson and Nairn is his interpretation, not a claim that their account exhausts Gramsci’s concept.
31. John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967; inspected 1971 printing), preface, pp. vii–viii; introduction, pp. xiii–xiv; chapters 9–10, especially pp. 190–192 and 204–206. Cammett identifies himself as the translator of the Italian quotations in his book. The research and acknowledgment account comes from his preface; the interpretation is his scholarly account, distinguished here from Gramsci’s own writings. For Marzani’s encouragement, Cammett, “Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) and the American Left,” appendix to Marzani, Reluctant Radical, book 3, pp. 271–275, especially 271 and 275 n. 3. The American Historical Association’s 2008 memorial account corroborates the Columbia PhD date. The dissertation itself remains uninspected. Cammett’s retrospective claim that American references ceased for more than a decade after 1937 is contradicted by Putnam’s 1946 publication. It is not used to establish a period of silence.
32. John M. Cammett, “Communist Theories of Fascism, 1920–1935,” Science & Society 31, no. 2 (Spring 1967), pp. 149–163, especially the conference footnote on p. 149 and concluding argument on pp. 162–163. Original record. The footnote establishes the 1966 delivery; the claims summarized are from the published 1967 text. No separate recording or manuscript of the delivered paper has been inspected.
33. Genovese, pp. 300–303, 305–306. Page 300 and footnote 4 reproduce Williams’s definition through Cammett, p. 204. Compare Williams’s original, p. 587. This establishes the identified textual reuse, not a wider readership. Genovese’s dockworkers example appears on p. 306.
34. Genovese, pp. 304–307. His declaration that this section is interpretive and polemical appears on p. 304.
35. Genovese, pp. 307–312, especially the proposal for open socialist work within institutions on pp. 308–309 and the defense of academic freedom on pp. 310–312.
36. Genovese, pp. 313–316, especially his proposal for shared political action and a party on pp. 314–315.
37. Luigi Barzini, “A Founding Father,” The New York Review of Books, September 28, 1967. Publisher’s full text, reviewed-work list, paragraph beginning “The Cammett book is a scholar’s work,” and closing discussion beginning “The central core of Gramsci’s political philosophy.” For the Italian book’s original 1966 publication, see Laterza’s publisher account. Barzini writes as an Italian liberal and critic of communism. The citation establishes his American-journal review and argument, not the truth of his wider claims about Communist Party members or unpublished evidence.