A landmark study of Gramsci, emphasising the shaping of his work by its historical and political context.
Gramsci’s Laboratory provides a new reading of the relationship between philosophy and politics through an analysis of Gramsci’s famous Prison Notebooks. A milestone in the ever-evolving international reception of Gramsci, the volume argues that in order to understand the Gramscian unity of theory and practice, we must first appreciate the unity in his writings of philosophy, history, and politics.
Bianchi argues that this unity was developed in the writing of the Prison Notebooks, written during Gramsci’s incarceration and thereby ‘determined in the last instance’ by politics. Reading Gramsci’s work through this lens, Bianchi argues that history and philosophy are constitutive elements of the political field.