"'This book is a brilliant and stimulating synthesis of Gramsci's life and thought. Students and scholars alike will find it extremely rewarding. Antonio A. Santucci brings to the study of Gramsci a fine historical sensitivity and a rigorous theoretical depth.'---Benedetto Fontana, Baruch College, author of Hegemony and Power: On the Relation Between Gramsci and Machiavelli" "Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci was perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci's masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary." "Gramscian terms such as 'civil society' and 'hegemony' are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that have nothing to do with Gramsci's purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci's writings, is absorb Gramsci's methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of 'grand explanatory schemes,' the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. The rigor of Santucci's examination of Gramsci's life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself."--BOOK JACKET.