Antonio Gramsci is regarded as the most original political thinker in the tradition of Western Marxism and an outstanding intellectual figure. This volume features his work where he develops his concepts of hegemony, civil society, and the state; and reflects extensively on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Machiavelli's political philosophy.

Preface Prison Notebooks Notebook 6 (1930-1932) Notebook 7 (1930-1931) Notebook 8 (1930-1932) Notes Notebook 6: Description of the Manuscript and Notes to the Text Notebook 7: Description of the Manuscript and Notes to the Text Notebook 8: Description of the Manuscript and Notes to the Text Sequence of Notes by Title or Opening Phrase

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is one of the fundamental texts of modern thought. Politics, cultural studies, philosophy, history, the dialectic--everything is here. Joseph A. Buttigieg's translation is a superb achievement. -- Fredric Jameson, Duke University This is the first time ever that Gramsci's extraordinary Prison Notebooks are available in English as he wrote them in Italian, in their fragmentary brilliance and their disconcertingly restless, unorthodox probity. Joseph A. Buttigieg's work is a monument of scholarship and of supple, deeply sensitive translation. When his work is completed in subsequent volumes a remarkable monument of human courage and intellectual resourcefulness will stand forth as never before. -- Edward W. Said Antonio Gramsci is, in the words of Mussolini who sentenced him to a lifetime in jail, 'the brain that must be stopped functioning.' Mussolini failed. Gramsci remains one of the most important figures in modern Italian intellectual history and the most influential internationally. The Prison Notebooks contain the most original and open marxist thinking of the twentieth century, now superbly edited and translated. -- Eric Hobsbawm, professor emeritus of Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 Until Joseph A. Buttigieg's meticulous translation and critical attention to Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, this invaluable text, a testimony to the most emancipatory thinking of our time, was available to English readers only in an artificially contrived form. Now Buttigieg's monumental and magesterial work is available in paperback. Scholars, teachers, students, activists, general readers--rejoice! -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University