Antonio Gramsci

The 'Southern Question' has been a major topic in Italian political, economic and cultural life for a century and more. During the Cold War, it was the justification for heavy government intervention. In contemporary Italy, a major part of the appeal of the Lombard League has been its promise to dissociate the South from the North, even to the point of secession. The South also remains a resonant theme in Italian literature.This interdisciplinary book endeavours to answer the following:· When did people begin to think of the South as a problem?· Who - intellectuals, statisticians, criminologists, political exiles, novelists (among them some important southerners) - contributed to the discourse about the South and why?· Did their view of the South correspond to any sort of reality?· What was glossed over or ignored in the generalized vision of the South as problematic?· What consequences has the 'Question' had in controlling the imaginations and actions of intellectuals and those with political and other forms of power?· What alternative formulations might people create and live by if they were able to escape from the control of the 'Question' and to imagine the political, economic and cultural differences within Italy in some other way?This timely book reveals how Southern Italians have been affected by distorted versions of a complex reality similar to the discourse of 'Orientalism'. In situating the devaluation of Southern Italian culture in relation to the recent emergence of 'anti-mafia' ideology in the South and the threat posed to national unity by the Lombard League, it also illuminates the world's stiff inter-regional competition for investment capital.

Providing a lively and informed introduction to the last hundred years of political thinking--from T.H. Green's lectures to Ronald Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously--the third volume in the successful Political Classics series has been designed to enable all students of political ideas to gain a fuller appreciation of the great works which form the foundation of the subject. Besides giving a full analysis of the contents of each text, this book also highlights what makes the texts of central importance to an understanding of political philosophy. The twelve chapters concentrate on the ideas contained in the texts, rather than on the lives of their writers, and each chapter is supplemented with useful suggestions for further reading.

This collection of original essays offers a defense of socialism in the face of its recent collapse. The volume provides both an overview and a critical inquiry into the essential aspects of the crisis and fall of socialism. It also, however, assesses the prospects for the renewal of the socialist project by addressing long-neglected issues in socialist thinking and writing. Recent developments in Russia, Cuba, and China, combined with theoretical expositions of the crisis and fall of socialism, are used to assess some of the strengths and weaknesses of socialist regimes. Critical essays on specific issues---such as the environment, feminism, law, and Marxist theory---point the way, the authors hope, toward a renewal and re-energizing of socialism.

A thorough exploration of the ideas of leading socialist and anarchist theorists about nationalism and the challenges it presented to the labor movement from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

The resurgence of nationalism accompanying the decline of communism has been taken to indicate the failure of socialist theory to grasp the nature of this phenomenon. Against both those who argue that the radical tradition has ignored and underestimated nationalism and those who accuse it of economic reductionism, this careful analysis of the idea of the nation as it was developed in the work of the major thinkers of the international labor movement reveals evidence of how seriously they grappled with nationalism.

Each of the main sections of the book focuses on the most influential theorists of the international labor movement as it became organized and grew: Bakunin, Marx, and Engels and the concern of the First International (1864-1876) with class solidarity across political borders; Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bauer and the preoccupation of the Second International (1889-1914) with socialism in ethnically plural societies; Stalin and Gramsci in relation to the substitution by the Third International (1919-1943) of nation-building and national liberation for the old class project.

In the conclusion, the author examines the relationships among ethnic and civic nationality, national self-determination, republican institutions, and the process of globalization from the perspective of the post-Soviet era and in the light of social theory and Kant's ideas about cosmopolitan right.

This book provides a critical sociology of religion in Latin America. It discusses the notion of religion as part of social, cultural, and political processes in capitalist societies, drawing on the classics of sociological thought (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Gramsci). Thus, churches are analyzed as organized institutions of religious mediation intimately linked to the production of social, cultural, and political hegemony in Latin America. The Catholic Church, the dominant church in the region, is analyzed in terms of its transformations from conquest and colonization through the changing winds of Vatican II to the revolutionary experiences of the popular church in the seventies and eighties.

Can politics now be both radical and realistic? Gramsci and Contemporary Politics is a collection of Anne Showstack Sassoon's writing which spans the major transitions from Thatcher and Reagan to Clinton and Blair; the collapse of communism to the regeneration of social democracy. Applying original interpretations of Antonio Gramsci's ideas on the intellectuals, political language, civil society and political leadership, she argues that drawing from the past, and broadening contemporary sources of political and academic knowledge can contribute to a grounded, radical hegemonic politics which can bring about change.