Crisis as method and the history of the State in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks: the strategic production of theory in the first phase of the prison writings

Abstract

The main purpose of this essay is to point out the centrality of the notion of crisis in Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism as a historical and political key to the interpretation of social reality. In this sense, we will highlight the strategic point of view of the crisis in relation to the Gramscian analysis of the history – both phenomenological and conceptual – of the bourgeois State, understood as the crystallisation of a set of relations of power. We will focus, in particular, on the development of this theme during the first phase of the writing of the Prison Notebooks, which extends from the First Notebook to the beginning of the special notebooks. Our hypothesis is that “crisis” is neither an external nor merely a contextual determination in Gramsci’s theoretical production but rather a strategic standpoint that develops within the concepts as a determination of their own epistemological structure. We argue that it is around this question that some of the characteristic features of Gramsci’s Marxism are outlined as, consequently, are his own concepts in the Notebooks.