This Anthology presents the reader with a rich and complex portrait of the work of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), from his earliest publications in the press around 1910, when he was 19 years old, through the notes and reflections of the celebrated Prison Notebooks, to the final letters to his family shortly before his death. The record of a mode of argumentation demanding of itself, characteristic of the articles and essays, coexists with the more personal tone of the letters, where even the expression of affection is marked by an extreme lucidity.
Organized into sections headed by tables containing information about Gramsci’s life as well as the political and social history of the years in which he carried out his work, the book is founded on two principles: first, not to completely separate the “personal” texts from the public ones, but rather to consider chronology a stronger source of homogeneity than genre; second, to emphasize the mode in which the unity of the “work” is most fully realized. That genre is political literature; within it naturally converge the philosopher and the journalist, the historian and the politician, the literary critic and the cultural critic.
In organizing this Anthology in 1970, the Spanish philosopher Manuel Sacristán did not rush to offer his readers a selection of texts tailored to the circumstances of the moment. He worked for many years, striving to reveal the fusion of Gramsci’s philosophical-political thought with his political and cultural practice, as well as the richness and tension with which the Italian Marxist conceived a new type of intellectual. And although since then Gramsci’s legacy has become the subject of one of the most fruitful debates in contemporary thought, the Anthology prepared by Sacristán with such care and rigor, far from aging, has remained solid and relevant. That is why, half a century later, it continues to be the principal gateway to Gramsci’s thought in the Spanish language.