Review

This helped me make more sense of the Prison Notebooks, by putting the various threads of Gramsci’s thought into a framework with hegemony as the unifying concept. The book consists of a brief biography, some coverage of Gramsci’s early writings, sections on politics, culture, the ‘historic bloc’, a small amount of discussion of organic vs. conjunctural crises, and a lengthy discussion of the concept of hegemony, by which the above threads are tied together.

The book concludes with a pair of case studies: applications of Gramscian ideas to contemporary questions. I thought this was an especially good idea, since Gramsci’s work was versatile and grounded enough to be applicable over a wide spectrum of political and cultural settings.

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