The Modern Prince as Laboratory of Political Intellectuality

摘要

The aim of this article is to return to Antonio Gramsci’s highly original contributions in the Prison Notebooks concerning questions of organization and especially his conceptualization of the Modern Prince. In particular, I want to stress the importance of a certain conception of the intellectuality of politics that emerges in the Prison Notebooks, and which I consider to be one of Gramsci’s more original contributions. Since Gramsci’s texts were written against the background of the various debates around the “organization question” in the history of the working class movement, the article begins by revisiting some the answers offered to this question, in order to stress that the question of a certain intellectuality of politics from the beginning has been central to these debates. Then, I move forward to Gramsci’s own intervention, in an attempt to show how a conception of organization as a laboratory of political intellectuality and experimentation emerges and how it is linked to the entire conceptual framework of Gramsci’s work-in-progress. Finally, I attempt to show how all these are relevant to contemporary debates regarding radical left political parties and fronts.