Peter D. Thomas’s book The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism draws us to reflect on a point that Gramsci’s interpreters have often neglected: the particular structure of the Prison Notebooks, i.e., the ways in which the text was constituted and, dependent on that, the fundamental methodological criteria for its interpretation. Thomas’s book is a consummate synthesis between the deep and detailed study of the Notebooks text and the need to reconstruct some order within; between close historicalphilosophical assessment and theoretical (...) proposal within contemporary Marxist (and para-Marxist) debate. Consequently, this book confronts us – as Gramsci’s present-day readers – with a task that no-one can face alone, but that is nonetheless extraordinarily urgent: the task of intervening in the debate within the post-modern and post-Marxist Left so that the link between Marxism and philosophy is resumed, starting out from Gramsci himself. In short: a revival of Marx through Gramsci, through – in turn – a return of the philosophy of praxis as Marxism for our own day. (shrink)

History appears already to the young Gramsci as a system of forces in unstable balance, which struggle to position themselves on the side of history, to identify with it. For this reason, in his reading of Marxism, the unity of history is a result, the product of a successful strategy of hegemony building. This article reviews the Gramscian theory of hegemony and tries to show its coherence with the philosophy of praxis, that is, with the notion of the fundamentally practical (...) nature of reality. In particular, it is argued that, on the one hand, a crisis of hegemony must be understood as disintegrating a hegemonic system, which allows subordinated hegemonic moments to emerge; on the other hand, the crisis itself is determined by the formulation of hegemonic discourses that try to escape their condition of subordination. (shrink)