Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci: Hegemony and the Crisis of Modernity (Historical Materialism Book #215)

In Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci, Francesca Antonini offers a fresh insight into Antonio Gramsci's thought. Capitalising 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 the twentieth centuries. While this model is essential to Gramsci's understanding of the interwar period and of the Fascist regime in Italy, it sheds a meaningful light also on other past and present scenarios, from the French Second Empire to contemporary USSR. Finally, yet importantly, such an 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 (Fifth edition, 2020).

"Antonini's book is very significant in comprehending and situating the place of Marx's works in Gramsci's theory; but also in analysing the current occurrence of authoritarian and quasi-fascist regimes in the light of his concepts. The book gives detailed and elaborative research on Gramscian Caesarism..." - Sevgi Doğan, in: Marx and Philosophy Reviews of Books, 15 April 2021 [Full review]

Francesca Antonini, Ph.D. (2015), is Early Career Fellow in Intellectual History at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany). Previously, she has held research fellowships at the ENS Lyon (France) and at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi (Turin, Italy).