Prison Notebooks (Vol. 3)

In this volume, Gramsci studies Machiavelli's ideas and proves that the thinker not only speculated about reality, but created a solid philosophical line on governments and the governed.

Readers familiar with Antonio Gramsci, and newcomers—already legion—have here the third volume of the Brazilian edition of the famous Prison Notebooks. This is the volume that highlights the themes perhaps most dear to the great Italian socialist thinker: those relating to the state, questions of hegemony, and politics, including the famous study of Machiavelli. Even so, this is a risky opinion, as the great Sardinian never considered any topic concerning human dilemmas to be minor. Gramsci's relevance is almost cowardice in the face of other paradigms and theories that, successively, succumb to the new configurations of history's great crossroads. Gramsci's thought confronts them with gallantry, in its complexity, precisely because it never reduced reality to models that, however elaborate, inevitably suffer from the evil of reductionism. - Francisco de Oliveira

"In the Notebooks , the workers' political party is seen as the center of a broad web of social and political institutions, through which the advancement of a class and its allies—that is, of social, mass forces—is accomplished. The attention focused on the apparatuses of hegemony, ideologies, and the phenomenology of political parties aims to investigate how a new relationship between the 'simple' and politics can mature. All of Gramsci's research revolves around this question: should the distinction between rulers and ruled be perpetuated or not? Gramsci's positions already contain something that not only selects certain aspects of Leninism, privileging them over others, but also 'forces' their meaning and develops them. He advances an innovation in relation to Lenin, but without abandoning the positive heritage contained in Leninism." -Pietro Ingrao