Abstract

The author of this study was born in Italy, received degrees in physics from MIT and in philosophy from Berkeley, and now teaches philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has written on the historiography of science, especially on Galileo. The present book looks ahead to a larger work, Gramsci and the History of Dialectic, about to appear with Cambridge. It focusses on the methodology rather than the substance of Gramsci’s thinking, and seeks to bring out a certain polemical, critical cast to it. In the first part—Gramsci the critic—we have four chapters devoted to Gramsci’s critical encounters with Croce, Bukharin, Machiavelli, and Mosca. The second contains the author’s own polemical treatment of four recent books of Gramsci criticism, those by Pellicani, Adamson, Femia, and Paggi. The first part is more useful and informed; the second by contrast seems like a series of extended reviews. But with the growth of Anglo-American interest in Gramsci, it is good to report that Joseph Femia’s Gramsci’s Political Thought is judged the best, most “judicious”, of the books criticized.