Gramsci

A century before the military takeover, deforestation of the island by Italian railways and companies left Sardinia “literally razed as if by a barbarian invasion,” declared the legendary Sardinian journalist and Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci in 1919.

But a more trenchant quote for our times might come from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written about a decade after Yeats’ poem: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Speakers summoned the grand ideas of figures like the Pope, Homer, Dostoyevsky, Leo Strauss, Tocqueville and Gramsci.

Bloch’s book is only one of the numerous little-known or underappreciated works that Toscano draws upon, although usual suspects like Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno certainly appear as well.

One of my favorite sentences of his: “The peculiar esotericism of Western Marxist theory was to assume manifold forms: in Lukacs, a cumbersome and abstruse diction, freighted with academicism; in Gramsci, a painful and cryptic fragmentation, imposed by prison; in Benjamin, a gnomic brevity and indirection...”