In Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci, Francesca Antonini offers a fresh insight into Antonio Gramsci's thought. Building on the achievements of recent Gramscian scholarship, she investigates his usage of the concepts of Bonapartism and Caesarism, both in his pre-prison writings and in the Prison Notebooks. The Caesarist-Bonapartist paradigm relates crucially to Gramsci's reflections on hegemony and on its transformations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While this model is essential to Gramsci's understanding of the interwar period and of the Fascist regime in Italy, it also sheds a meaningful light on other past and present scenarios, from the French Second Empire to the USSR of his time. Finally, Antonini's analysis illuminates Gramsci's approach towards the Marxian legacy.
Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci is winner of the prestigious Giuseppe Sormani International Prize for works on Antonio Gramsci.
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"It is sadly exceedingly rare to find a book that integrates theory and the ‘real’ world beneath the abstractions meant to explain it. Francesca Antonini’s profound and carefully concise interrogation of the long-neglected concept of Caesarism is a most welcome exception to this rule. – David Brent Moore, Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power
"Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci: Hegemony and the Crisis of Modernity [...] is very timely in that it represents a retrospective analysis, that is, an analysis of the fascist or interwar period, which holds great potential for contributing a theoretical, historical and conceptional framework to the current debates on democracy." – Sevgi Doğan, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
"Antonini's book [...] arrives as a timely reminder that authoritarianism develops not only through strictly political structures but also through civil associations, which constitute an integral element of the hegemonic apparatus." – Ian Anstee, New Political Science
Other books by Francesca Antonini
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Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks
Edited by Francesca Antonini, Aaron Bernstein, et al.