The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci

(Paperback)

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An explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in Gramscis thought, as revelatory today as on first publication in New Left Review in 1976. This landmark essay has been the subject of keen debate across four decades for its disentangling of the hesitations and contradictions in Gramscis 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 Gramscis work, Anderson 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, Lukcs and Trotsky, with contemporary echoes in Brecht and Benjamin. A preface considers the objections this account of Gramsci provoked, as well as a memorable intervention by the late Eric Hobsbawm.

Reviews

A remarkable example of the deep, historically situated reading of complex texts -- Wolfgang Streeck * London Review of Books *
Anderson is the most distinguished living Marxist historian -- Gavin Jacobson * New Statesman *

Author Bio

Perry Anderson is the author of, among other books, The H-Word - a companion volume to Antinomies - American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, The Indian Ideology, The New Old World, Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions and The Origins of Postmodernity. He is an editor at New Left Review.