Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci

de Francesca Antonini

"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"--