Selections from the Prison Notebooks

What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural “levels”: the one that can be called “civil society”, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private”, and that of “political society” or “the State”. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of “direct domination” or command exercised through the State and “juridical” government.

{"offset":263324}

Read in the edition cited, page 12, in 'The Intellectuals'. The same text is in the corpus at work:w1e20a8fa7e08ea97, offset 263324. The scan reads 'fnnction' and 'fnnctions' for 'function' and 'functions' and prints the Italian gloss as 'organicitd'; those are misreads of the printed page and are set right here, and nothing else is altered. Buttigieg's later complete translation renders these notes differently, so this wording is Hoare and Nowell Smith's and should not be swapped for his.

This transition in political science is only indirectly (mediately) related to that which took place in the military field, although certainly a relation exists and an essential one. The war of position demands enormous sacrifices by infinite masses of people.

{"offset":917499}

Read in the edition cited, pages 238 and 239, in 'State and Civil Society', under the section heading printed there. The same text is in the corpus at work:w1e20a8fa7e08ea97, offset 917499. The scan breaks 'MANOEUVRE' as 'MAN<EUVRE' where the page prints the oe ligature, and flattens the page's em dashes to hyphens; both are set right against the printed page and nothing else is altered. The em dash before 'with controls' is the translators' punctuation and is kept, and it falls outside the quoted span. Buttigieg's later complete translation renders these notes differently, so this wording is Hoare and Nowell Smith's.

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.

{"offset":242865}

Read in the edition cited, pages 5 and 6, the opening of 'The Formation of the Intellectuals'. The same text is in the corpus at work:w1e20a8fa7e08ea97, offset 242865, in the chunk that also carries the translators' introduction to the section; the quotation and its context here are Gramsci's own text and start after that introduction ends. The printed page carries a footnote marker after 'strata', which the scan glues on as 'strata1'; the marker is dropped and the words are unchanged. This is the passage the edition's own footnote on page 60 points to for the concept of 'organic intellectuals', and Gramsci uses the phrase itself on page 10 of the same section: 'this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals'. Buttigieg's later complete translation reads 'on the primal basis of an essential function' and 'a rank or several ranks of intellectuals' for the same sentence, so this wording is Hoare and Nowell Smith's.