The Routledge Guides to the Great Books: A Compilation

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Introduction

01:: Aristotle's Life and Work, from The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

02:: Einstein's Life, from The Routledge Guidebook to Einstein's Relativity

03:: Gramsci Before the Prison Notebooks, f rom The Routledge Guidebook to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

04:: The Phenomenology in Context, pages 1-30, from The Routledge Guidebook to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

05:: Mill and the Liberty, pages28-45, from The Routledge Guidebook to Mill's On Liberty

06:: Plato and the Republic, f rom The Routledge Guidebook to Plato's Republic

07:: Style and Method, from The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

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Introduction

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Aristotle's Life and Work, from The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

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01:: Aristotle's Life and Work, from The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

AN OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE AND TIMES

Aristotle came to Athens in 367 BCE at the age of 17, to go to university. ?University? in this case meant the Academy, the philosophical school founded by the great Plato, who himself had been a disciple of Socrates. Athens was the cultural centre of the Mediterranean, and its citizens might have had two reasons for not being immediately impressed by the young Aristotle. He came from the far north of Greece, from the city of Stagira in Macedonia; a country boy, then, doubtless lacking in cultural refinement. In this, the Athenian prejudice would have been misleading. Both Aristotle?s parents came from families with a long tradition of the practice of medicine, and his father was court physician to king Amyntas III of Macedon. Court circles in Macedon were not uncivilized, and the value they placed upon education is demonstrated by the very fact of their sending Aristotle to Athens. There was, however, a second reason Athenians would have had for not welcoming Aristotle with wholly open arms. He was connected with the royal family of Macedon, and Macedon had military ambitions. Amyntas? son Philip II embarked on a programme of militarist expansion which, much to the resentment of many prominent Athenians, led to his domination over much of Greece, and eventually to the subjugation of Athens itself.

Still, for 20 years Aristotle remained at the Academy, studying, debating, writing and teaching. Unfortunately, most of his writings from that time have been lost, and we are able to do little more than make educated guesses about precisely what he studied, and where his own interests lay. But as those years went by, the political situation brought about by the policies of Philip of Macedon rapidly worsened, and the climate in Athens became more and more nervous and hostile. Against this background, Aristotle, whose legal status in Athens was that of a resident alien, found himself regarded with suspicion. Finally, the crisis came. Philip battered the city of Olynthus, one of Athens? close allies, into submission; and, a few months later, in 347, Plato died.

Aristotle was thus doubly isolated. Speusippus, a nephew of Plato, took over as head of the Academy. Would Aristotle have hoped that he himself might have got the job? Did his not getting it depend upon the fact that Speusippus was a relative of Plato, or on the fact that to appoint Aristotle would have been impossible in the prevailing political climate? Or was it perhaps that Aristotle?s own philosophical views were by this time somewhat out of tune with the prevailing tone in the Academy? Whatever the academic reasons may have been, Aristotle thought it prudent, especially given the hostile political situation, to leave Athens and the Academy. He went to join a group of Platonists at Assos, a city on the north Aegean coast of what is now Turkey. The local monarch, Hermias, was himself interested in philosophy, and the philosophers encouraged him to fulfil the Platonic ideal of becoming a philosopher-king. Aristotle was later to write a hymn lamenting his untimely death (he was murdered) and praising his personal qualities ?for which he will be raised by the Muses to immortality?.

Before that, though, Aristotle had himself married Pythias, and they were again on the move. Philip II invited him to return to Macedonia to become tutor to his son Alexander. Alexander later was to become known as ?the Great? because of his amazing conquests which extended the Macedonian Empire across what is now Turkey, Egypt, much of Western Asia, and on into India. Perhaps Aristotle hoped to inculcate Plato?s ideals in the young heir to the throne, but in the

The following is excerpted from The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics by Gerard J. Hughes. © 2013 Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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l ight of the brutality of some of Alexander?s campaigning tactics, one may wonder just how complete Aristotle?s influence on his pupil was.

Alexander left for his campaigns in the east, and Aristotle once again returned to Athens, in 334, under the protection of Antipater, the regent whom Alexander had appointed, and who was one of Aristotle?s closest friends. At some point during his time in Macedonia, Aristotle?s daughter, called Pythia after her mother, was born, but, tragically, his wife died, perhaps in childbirth. It was probably to help with looking after his infant daughter that Aristotle either married, or lived with (the ancient sources differ on the point), Herpyllis. Whatever his legal relationship with her was, in his will Aristotle was to speak warmly of her devotion to him, and to make careful provision for her support. She also became the mother of his second child, this time a son, whom he called Nicomachus.

Upon his arrival back in Athens, Aristotle founded his own philosophical school in a public exercise park called the Lyceum. The students there became known as ?peripatetics? from their custom of walking up and down (in Greek, peripatein) as they discussed their philosophical researches. Here in his Lyceum Aristotle taught and pursued his own research happily for the next 11 years. It was the most productive period of his life, and the time of his most enduring achievements. Once again, though, political disaster struck. Alexander died suddenly at the young age of 32. The Athenians at once saw their chance to rid themselves of the Macedonian regent. In a wave of anti-Macedonian feeling, they charged Aristotle with ?impiety?, the same catch-all offence which had led to Socrates? execution two generations earlier. Once again Aristotle had to leave, remarking, it is said, that he did so ?lest the Athenians commit a second sin against philosophy?. He survived only a year in exile, and died at the age of 62, in 322.

HIS WORKS AND PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND

The two great influences on Aristotle?s philosophy were Plato and his own research into biology, especially the biology of animals.

Plato must have been a hard act to follow. He had developed and transformed the philosophical method of Socrates and applied it to an amazingly wide range of problems, including the immortality of the soul, the nature of virtue, the meaning of justice and the theory of truth. He had attempted to give a theoretical justification for what he regarded as the right way to live both as an individual and as a member of the city-state. In so doing, he had been forced to seek for the foundations of ethics and politics by developing highly original views in metaphysics and in the theory of knowledge. The very scope and style of philosophy itself were those which had become established in Plato?s Academy. The framework was to all appearances firmly established. Was there any room for genuine originality?

Recall that Aristotle studied and debated in Plato?s Academy for 20 years, from the age of 17 until he was 37. He must surely have been enormously influenced not merely by Plato?s method and by the conclusions which Plato and his students believed to be beyond dispute, but also by the places at which Plato?s arguments were recognized as deficient, often by Plato himself. It is still a matter of dispute whether the young Aristotle started off by being more in agreement with Plato and ended up being much more critical; or whether he was more critical in his earlier years and only later began to see that there was perhaps somewhat more to be said for his old

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teacher?s views than he used to think. It may also be true that the brill iant young pupil influenced his teacher, and that this influence shows up in some of Plato?s later works. Still, at least some things are reasonably clear. Aristotle retained Plato?s interests in ethics and politics, and like Plato agreed that ethics and politics had ultimately to rest on more general considerations of epistemology and metaphysics. There are also some similarities in method. Plato, following Socrates, often starts his dialogues by eliciting the views of one of his students, and then going on to see how far those views will stand up to criticism. Somewhat similarly, Aristotle habitually takes as his starting points endoxa, ?received opinions?. By this term Aristotle means to include views which are held by everyone, or at least by most people, as well as those held by the wise. We should start, then, with what common sense might suggest, or with what earlier philosophers have thought, and then subject those views to critical assessment. Aristotle is more sympathetic than Plato to the thought that most people cannot be wholly mistaken.

The view most popularly ascribed to Aristotle is that he rejected Plato?s ?Theory of Forms?. Certainly at one time Plato did believe that, if words like ?beauty? or ?courage? or ?equality? or ?good? were to have any meaning, they must point to the corresponding forms ? really existing, perfect, instances of these properties. Only if there are such forms as Beauty itself, or Goodness itself, will there be any satisfactory explanation of the way in which we understand the beauty and goodness of this-worldly things, imperfect as they are. Only if these perfect forms exist will there be any solid basis for morality, or indeed for knowledge itself. So, the popular view has it, Aristotle had no time for such metaphysical speculations, and made a radical break with Plato. This view is a gross oversimplification. First, Plato himself later in his life at least considerably modified the Theory of Forms, if by that is meant the kind of views advanced in the Phaedo. Besides, Aristotle is perfectly willing to talk about forms, and on some interpretations even ended up by holding a view of forms not wholly unlike Plato?s. Still, there is an important truth behind the oversimplification. The clue lies in Aristotle?s interest in biology, which perhaps had been first aroused by his parents with their medical background and practice. Much of the research done by Aristotle and his students consisted in the meticulous examination and classification of animals, fish and insects, and in the attempt to explain why they were as they were, and why they behaved as they behaved. Aristotle was convinced that the explanations were to be found not in some super-sensible world of Platonic Forms, but in the internal organization of the organisms themselves. Their patterns of growth, development and behaviour were directed by an inbuilt purposiveness, different for each species, the nature of which could be called the ?form? of that organism, and could be discovered by patient study and inquiry. More generally, perhaps the nature of every kind of thing could be discovered in a similar way. This quest for the natures of things ? for the phusis of each kind of thing ? is what Aristotle called Physics; and the further underlying truths about explanation in general, upon which such inquiries ultimately rested, were what he discussed in his Metaphysics.

Here, then, is the original contribution which Aristotle believed he could make towards handling the questions which Plato had raised. Instead of looking to an abstract discipline such as mathematics to provide the ultimate explanation of things, as did the Platonists in the Academy, Aristotle proposed to study in detail the world around him, and to deal with the philosophical implications of that study in an integrated way. What, he asks, must be the

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fundamental characteristics of a world if inquiry into the natures of things in that world is to be possible at all? Like Plato, then, Aristotle seeks to know the ultimate explanations of things; unlike Plato, he thinks that questions about ultimate explanations must arise out of, rather than dispense with, mundane questions about how we are to explain the shapes and movements and growth of animals, and the regular behaviour of the inanimate parts of nature. In particular, looking at how the different species of organism are by nature impelled to pursue what is good for them, we can begin to see how values are central to the behaviour of living things. Once we learn to look at ourselves as animals, and to understand how animals function, we can begin to glimpse how biology, with its inbuilt values, can in the case of thinking animals like ourselves make a fundamental contribution to ethics, without in any way seeking to reduce ethics to some version of biology.

Aristotle would have thought it astonishing if thinking animals like ourselves had no way of expressing to themselves what was good for them. So, at many points in the Ethics, he starts by considering what people usually or frequently think about various questions connected with morality, on the assumption that their views must either be right or at least contain some considerable kernel of truth which would explain why people hold them. But is this assumption a reasonable one to make? Might an entire society not be blind to the rights of women, or accept racist beliefs quite uncritically? Quite in general, does Aristotle?s method not amount to little more than repeating the prejudices and unquestioned assumptions of his own culture? Aristotle might reply to this that he has no intention of merely repeating the views of the ordinary person, nor of the wise, without criticizing and assessing them. If one asks how this criticism is to proceed, Aristotle would reply that a good first step would be to bring into the open any hidden inconsistencies in common beliefs, and try to sort those out. But, the critic might press the point, even if that results in a coherent account, mere coherence doesn?t guarantee truth. A person might be consistently racist or sexist and still be simply mistaken, surely? Aristotle might reply to this that even if it is comparatively easy to be consistent within a limited area of one?s beliefs (say, about the rights of women), it is much harder to be consistent across a wide spectrum of one?s beliefs. One would have to integrate ethics and psychology, physiology, sociology and the rest; and once one tries to do this, at some point the hidden inconsistencies will reappear. Achieving an overall ?fit? between one?s experience and one?s beliefs is not at all easy; and when it has been achieved, that is as close as one is ever likely to come to the truth. This is a very complex issue, and we shall have to see as we go along whether Aristotle?s method seems likely to deliver what he is looking for.

For the moment, at least this much can be said: like Plato, Aristotle is concerned to get behind what people might happen to think in order to assess their views, and to examine their foundations and their justification. Like Plato, Aristotle is concerned with how individuals ought to live, and how they ought to contribute to their communities. He, too, is concerned with the nature of moral virtues, justice, personal responsibility and moral weakness. Like Plato, he believes that ethics must be rooted in a view of the human soul. But unlike Plato, his conception of what a soul is derives in the first instance from biology, rather than from religious views about the incarnation and reincarnation of a disembodied true self. And this difference has profound implications for morality.

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Einstein's Life, from The Routledge Guidebook to Einstein's Relativity

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02:: Einstein's Life, from The Routledge Guidebook to Einstein's Relativity

'If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will

say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew. ' - Albert Einstein, 1922

'If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!' - Adolf Hitler to Max Planck, 1933

Albert Einstein was born on March 15, 1879 in the town of Ulm, and no, he didn?t flunk high school math. The town is now part of Germany, but had only joined the newly created German empire in 1871, having been part of the Kingdom of W?rttemburg before that. His parents, Hermann and Pauline, were what would be called today members of the upper middle class. His father was involved in manufacturing, a partner in a firm that produced feather beds at the time of Albert?s birth.

The family were assimilated Jews, as is evidenced by the fact that they did not give their son a biblical name. Thus, Albert grew up in a liberal atmosphere as far as religion was concerned (although he did go through an adolescent period of hyper-religiosity). He apparently had a happy childhood. His father, an easy-going man, frequently read to the family and his mother was an accomplished pianist. In addition, Albert became very close to his younger sister Maria (he called her Maja) whose 1924 memoir remains our main source of information about his early life.

He apparently was slow to start speaking. Later on he would write that at the age of two or three he decided that he wanted to speak in complete sentences, which may explain the delay. (There is an old joke to the effect that his first words, at the age of three, were ?Father, there is something terribly wrong with the state of thermodynamics.?)

Unfortunately, the feather-bed business did not prosper, and in 1880 the family moved to Munich where Hermann, in partnership with his younger brother, set up a business manufacturing electrical equipment. It was in Munich that, at the age of six, Albert started his formal schooling. Contrary to popular legend, he was a good student? there is a letter from his mother to his grandmother bragging that he was first in his class, for example. It was during this period that he began the study of the violin, a pastime that would play an important role in his public image later in life. In 1888 he moved on to a Gymnasium, where he would remain until he was 15. Again, contrary to the popular legend, he always received high marks in mathematics.

Although he was generally a good student, he was not particularly happy with the rigid, authoritarian teaching style that was the norm in Germany at the time. He also made few friends, showing an early inclination to become what his biographer Abraham Pais termed ?a man apart?. His most important educational experience, as he recounted later in life, was reading a book on Euclidean geometry and finding there an order and logical consistency that opened his mind. (I should point out that Euclid has played that same role in the lives of many boys who went on to become theoretical physicists, the author included.)

In 1894, the family business began to fail, and, leaving 16-year-old Albert behind to finish

The following is excerpted from The Routledge Guidebook to Einstein's Relativity by James Tref il. © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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Gymnasium, the family moved to Italy, eventually settling in Pavia. Alone, depressed, and worried about compulsory military service, the young man left school and joined his family in Italy, planning to study on his own for the entrance exam to the Eidgen?ssiche Technische Hochshule (ETH) in Zurich, then as now one of the world?s most prestigious technical universities. Although he did well in physics and math, he did not pass the exam, which included subjects like literary history and drawing. Consequently he took an alternate path to admission, enrolling at a school in Aarau to obtain a Matura (essentially a high school diploma). In 1896 he enrolled at the ETH and renounced his German citizenship (he became a Swiss citizen in 1901 and an American citizen in 1940).

At the ETH he made friends with fellow student Marcel Grossman, who would be important in his later life. Unfortunately, he apparently rubbed his professor, Heinrich Weber, the wrong way. Weber felt that Einstein, though bright, was too reluctant to take advice from others? not an uncommon failing in college students. In any case, when Einstein graduated in 1900 he was not offered a position as a teaching assistant at the ETH.

The next few years were difficult ones. Between periods of unemployment he had a couple of temporary teaching positions at what were essentially private high schools. This drought ended when Marcel Grossman?s father brought him to the attention of the head of the Swiss patent office, with the result that in 1902 he was appointed as a patent examiner third class, his first permanent position and one that has lived on in the folklore of science. Shortly thereafter he married Mileva Mari?, a woman who had been a fellow student in Zurich, and their first son was born in 1904.

Throughout this period Einstein found time to write a steady stream of physics papers, mostly about statistical mechanics. It was in 1905, however, a year often referred to as the annus mirabilis (year of wonders) in physics that he really came into his own. In that year he published four papers, any one of which could have earned him the Nobel Prize. Two of them, dealing with special relativity and mass?energy equivalence, will be discussed in later chapters. It is, I think, worthwhile to take a short detour to discuss the other two.

The photoelectric effect is a phenomenon that occurs when light (usually ultraviolet) is shone on a metal. As soon as the light is turned on, electrons start being ejected from the metal, and the energy of the electrons depends on the frequency (color) of the light? the higher the frequency the more energetic the electrons.

According to classical electrodynamics, there is no reason why electrons shouldn?t be ejected because of the action of the light. Light, after all, consists partly of an electric field which can exert a force on electrons. The problem is that in the classical picture the effect should be analogous to 4 Einstein?s life surf washing a piece of driftwood ashore? it should happen slowly and should not depend on the frequency of the light.

Building on Max Planck?s introduction of the idea of quantization, which will be discussed in the next chapter, Einstein suggested that light actually came in quanta as well? we now call these bundles of light ?photons?. (Planck had been unwilling to be so radical, and had only suggested that atoms absorbed and emitted light at specific frequencies while remaining agnostic as to the nature of light itself.) In this picture, the interaction between light and

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electrons is more like the collision between two billiard balls than surf washing driftwood ashore. In addition, the rules of quantization required that the higher the frequency of the light, the more energy the photon has and the more energy it can transmit to the electron. Thus, the introduction of the photon explained what is observed in the photoelectric effect.

This paper was one of the foundations of the developing field of quantum mechanics. In addition, it was the basis for the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Einstein in 1921? apparently relativity was still considered a bit too far out for the award at that time.

The other paper concerned a phenomenon known as Brownian motion. In 1827 the British botanist Robert Brown noticed that when a small particle like a pollen grain was suspended in a liquid and observed under a microscope, it jiggled around in an erratic kind of motion. Einstein realized that this obscure effect might be the solution to a long-standing debate about the nature of atoms. Throughout the nineteenth century, a debate had gone back and forth on the question of whether atoms were real, physical objects or whether matter just behaved as if it were made of atoms. In the latter case, of course, atoms would simply be mental constructs. Einstein realized that if atoms were real, when one bounced off a pollen grain it would exert a tiny force? if the atom bounced to the right the grain would recoil to the left, for example. On average, as many atoms will hit on the left as on the right, so these forces would cancel out over time.

Einstein noted, however, that at any given moment there could be more atoms hitting on one side of the grain than the other. Thus, the pollen grain would be subject to shifting forces, producing just the kind of erratic motion Brown had observed. Since mental constructs can?t exert physical forces, this result was crucial in resolving the old debate.

In 1905, as well, Einstein completed his thesis (on molecular sizes) and was awarded a PhD at the University of Zurich. Not a bad output for a single year!

His reputation growing, Einstein started to move into academe. In 1908 he was appointed as a privatdocent at the University of Bern. This position allowed him to teach, but paid so little that he had to keep his day job at the patent office. It wasn?t until 1909 that he obtained his first real faculty position? an associate professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Zurich. (We have records of faculty debates in which his future colleagues argue, in effect, that he was such a good scientist that the fact that he was Jewish should be ignored.) The position, of course, allowed him to resign from the patent office. Shortly thereafter, in 1910, his second son was born.

At Zurich, Einstein continued to publish papers in theoretical physics (11 papers in two years? an impressive output) and dabbled in experimental physics. Then, in a move that still puzzles his biographers, in 1911 he accepted a professorship at Karl Ferdinand University, a German language institution in Prague. He stayed there only a little over a year, and in 1912 he was back in Zurich, this time with a senior appointment at the ETH. It is clear that by this time Einstein had developed a growing reputation in the world of physics, and he received numerous inquiries from universities throughout Europe, garnering enthusiastic letters of support from luminaries like Max Planck and Marie Curie. Throughout this period, Einstein was also slowly working his way through the concepts that would result in the theory of general relativity, which

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we will discuss in Chapter 9.

This rapid hopping around between institutions was somewhat atypical of career paths in European universities at the time. It was much more common for people to enter a university as an undergraduate and remain at the same place, holding positions in graduate school, the junior faculty, and, eventually, the senior faculty. Today, however, Einstein?s career track wouldn?t look unusual at all. Physics students are routinely encouraged to apply for graduate training away from their undergraduate institutions and then, as often as not, will do post-doctoral fellowships at several other places before finally settling down. This kind of varied experience makes sense in a world in which all branches of science are becoming increasingly international.

In any case, after just three semesters in Zurich, Einstein left to take up a prestigious appointment in Berlin. The details of that appointment illustrate what a hot prospect the young theorist had become. His primary appointment was as a member of the Prussian Academy, but he was also made a professor at the University of Berlin, where he could 6 Einstein?s life teach if he wanted to, and promised the directorship of a new research lab. In fact, the promised new physics institute was created in the Kaiser Wilhelm Gessellschaft, a major research institute, in 1917. Even today, an appointment like this would be quite a plum. Einstein wrote to a friend ?I could not resist the temptation to accept a position which frees me of all obligations so that I can devote myself freely to thinking?.

Einstein would stay in Berlin until 1932. Unfortunately, soon after his arrival there he and Mileva separated, and she returned to Zurich with the boys. His professional life flourished, however. In 1915 he presented the field equations that make up the heart of general relativity to the Prussian Academy (the paper was published in 1916). Throughout the war years he continued to publish important papers. He also became involved with pacifist, and, to a lesser extent, Zionist organizations? political activities that would remain important throughout the rest of his life. Also, in 1919 he divorced Mileva (the divorce agreement stipulated that she would receive his Nobel Prize money, should it be awarded). He then married his distant cousin, Elsa Einstein L?wenthal, whom he had known since childhood.

During this period he also began what would be a lifelong project to present the results of his theories to the general public. In 1917, the publishers Vieweg in Braunschweig, Germany, published his popular book On the Special and General Theories of Relativity, a book that was to go through multiple expansions as time went on. The book was translated into English by Methuen publishers in London in 1920, and later brought out by Holt (now Holt, Rinehart, and Winston) in the United States. In 1993, Routledge brought the book out in its classic series, and this companion volume will be part of that long history.

The early Berlin years were full of what can only be described as professional administrative duties. In 1916 Einstein succeeded Max Planck as president of the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gessellschaft), the society of professional physicists. He also served on boards of various scientific institutions in Germany and Holland. Then as now, these are the sorts of things you would expect for a man who was nearing the top of his profession. But as the war wound down, events were in motion that would change Einstein?s life forever.

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As we shall discuss in Chapter 13, general relativity makes predictions that can be verified experimentally. Einstein showed that the theory could explain a small but troubling anomaly in the orbit of Mercury, but, more importantly, he predicted that light passing near a massive body like the sun would be bent by a specified amount. The bending itself wasn?t new? Newton had made a similar prediction? but the amount of predicted bending was (basically, relativity predicted twice as much deflection as did Newton). In those days, the only way this prediction could be verified was to observe stars near the sun during an eclipse. The war prevented several eclipse expeditions from being undertaken, but in 1919 the British astronomer (later Sir) Arthur Eddington was able to mount one. The details will be discussed in Chapter 13, but the result was stunning. Einstein?s predictions were verified.

It?s hard to overstate the effect this turn of events had on the life of someone the New York Times called ?the suddenly famous Dr Einstein?. Headlines blared ?Revolution in Science: Newton Overthrown?, and Einstein became a household name all around the world. Historians have speculated about why this unusual ?canonization? occurred. Coming as it did at the end of World War I, the news broke on a populace that was weary, searching for a sign of hope. To people who had seen an entire generation of young men slaughtered senselessly in the trenches, the sudden appearance of a man who seemed to paint a new picture of the universe must have seemed little short of miraculous.

In addition, there seemed to be something almost magical about relativity? the legend that only a dozen men in the world understood it was born about this time. Given the outpouring of theoretical papers after 1919, that legend certainly wasn?t true then, and it certainly isn?t true today. Special relativity is routinely taught to tens of thousands of undergraduates every year, and the general theory to hundreds of graduate students. Human beings always need to sense a distance between themselves and their heroes, and the mathematical difficulty of general relativity seemed to provide just that sort of separation. Einstein?s accomplishments seemed otherwordly, clouded in mystery. Popular descriptions of the man pictured him almost as a priest rather than a scientist. One biographer suggested that he was seen as a ?new Moses?, bringing the word of God to humanity. In our modern world we can see a bit of this sort of attitude in the treatment of cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

Einstein was not only admired, but loved. A good illustration of this is an essay written by humorist Robert Benchley in 1936. Titled ?Taking up Cudgels?, it can be found in his book My Ten Years in a Quandary. It is a hilarious ?defense? of general relativity against a competing theory, and concludes with these words addressed to the author of that theory:

Who asked you to butt in on this? We were gett ing along very nicely with Prof . Einstein, who has proven himself to be an extremely pleasant gent leman? He also plays the violin. What do you play?

This veneration of Einstein culminated in 1999 when Time Magazine named him the ?person of the century?, calling him ?the embodiment of pure intellect?.

In any case, Einstein enjoyed, but was not overwhelmed by, his newfound fame. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s he traveled extensively, visiting the United States, South America, and Japan, among other places. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the visit to Japan has come to play

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a part in a minor scholarly debate about the genesis of special relativity. It was while he was en route to Japan, in fact, that he was notified that he would be awarded the Nobel Prize.

As we mentioned above, the Prize was not given for relativity, his most important contribution to science, but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, one of the founding documents of the new field of quantum mechanics. This new science grew in stages. In 1913 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885?1962) explained the behavior of the hydrogen atoms in quantum terms, and in the years that followed what is now known as the ?old? quantum theory was developed. We don?t have the space to go into this in detail, but the central point was that it described the world inside the atom as a place where everything came in little bundles (quanta), but in which things like electrons could be thought of as something like miniature billiard balls in comforting analogy to the Newtonian world view. In 1925, however, the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901?1976), joined later by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger (1887?1961), developed the modern version of quantum mechanics. The central differences between this new way of describing the world and the old, comfortable classical physics, were that (1) in the new quantum mechanics it is impossible to know two things about some pairs of quantities that describe a particle (its position and velocity, for example) with infinite precision, and (2) the properties of a particle (such as its position) can only be described in probabilistic terms. In other words, the old Newtonian idea that you can describe a billiard ball as being in a specific place and moving at a specific speed doesn?t work in the quantum world. We have to say that the quantum billiard ball has a certain probability of being in various places and moving at various speeds. It was this proposition that caused Einstein to get off the quantum mechanics train.

It has always been something of a curiosity that a man who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics became one of its severest critics. These criticisms were played out dramatically in debates with Niels Bohr at what were called the Solvay conferences. (The conferences, held in Brussels starting in 1911, were sponsored by chemical manufacturer Ernest Solvay. They are still going on today.) It was at the 1927 Solvay Conference that Einstein delivered his famous ?God does not play dice? statement, a statement that expressed his dismay with the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics described above. Less famous is Bohr?s response? ?Albert, stop telling God what to do.? This kind of playful badinage illustrates the fact that the two men were good friends and had a deep respect for each other.

The debate took on a stylized form. Einstein would propose a thought experiment that seemed to show that, for example, the position and velocity of a quantum particle could be determined simultaneously, despite the dictates of the new quantum mechanics. Bohr would go off and ponder the proposal and then come back to show why the experiment wouldn?t work as Einstein predicted. In the end, Bohr usually prevailed and Einstein went back to the drawing board to try again.

In 1935, however, Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published a paper that would have profound effects on the way people thought about quantum phenomena. The so-called EPR paper struck at one of the core principles of quantum mechanics? the idea that if a particle is not being measured it must be described as a probabilistic combination of all the states it could be in. For example, a quantum mechanical glove would have to be described

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as the sum of a certain probability of being right handed and another probability of being left handed.

The EPR argument was simple. Suppose (to use the above example) we knew that a particular system emitted two quantum mechanical gloves, and that there was some law that told us that if one glove was right handed the other had to be left handed. Suppose further that the system emitted two gloves, one going north and one going south, and we waited until the gloves were so far apart that light could not travel from one to the other in the time taken up by the experiment. Now suppose we measure the northward moving glove and find it is right handed. Then, EPR argued, 10 Einstein?s life we would know that the southward moving glove was left handed even though we hadn?t measured it. EPR argued that this showed that there was a more complete description of the state than that given by quantum mechanics. This idea? that we could get back to a Newtonian picture if we could find the right description of the quantum state? came to be called the ?hidden variable? theory.

For a while EPR remained one of those unsolved puzzles that exist in every science. Then, in 1964, the Irish physicist John Bell (1928?1990) showed that there were experiments that would give different results if particles were described in terms of probabilities, as required by quantum mechanics, or described in terms of hidden variables (i.e. as having a definite state even though not being measured). In the 1970s several experimental groups actually carried out these experiments and the results were unequivocal; quantum mechanics was right and hidden variable theory was wrong.

The reason for this turn of affairs was that there is an unspoken assumption in the hidden variable argument presented above, and that is the assumption that the act of measurement is ?local?. In other words, we assume that making a measurement on the northward moving glove cannot affect the southward moving glove if they are separated as stated. It turns out that this assumption is wrong. When two particles (such as our gloves) are once described by a single probability distribution (as they are at the time of emission) they never stop being described that way. We say that they become ?entangled?, so that measuring the northward moving glove does indeed affect the southward moving glove, even though no signal passes between them.

The concept of entanglement has generated what some authors call a ?second quantum mechanical revolution?. It is actually being developed to play a major role in cryptography and communication security. We can only wonder what Einstein would have made of this, but the concept of entanglement implicit in the EPR argument may have been his most important contribution to quantum mechanics.

Meanwhile, as all of this travel and work in physics went on, storm clouds were gathering in Germany. As early as 1920 ugly anti-Semitic incidents began to intrude on public and scientific discussions of relativity, to the point where some scientific meetings Einstein attended had to be guarded by the police. Nevertheless, during the 1920s Einstein enjoyed his life in Berlin, purchasing a summer cottage outside of the city and pursuing his hobby of sailing. In 1930 to 1932, he made two extended visits to the United States, spending his time at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Because of his fame, he was frequently in the company of prominent scientists like Edwin Hubble as well as Hollywood personalities? he struck up a

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friendship with Charlie Chaplin, for example. There is a wonderful photograph of Einstein and his wife at the world premiere of City Lights, with Chaplin sitting between them.

The Nazis took over the Reichstag in July of 1932, and by this time Einstein had already realized that he would have to leave Germany. In December of that year the Einsteins left for their second trip to Cal. Tech. When they left their country home, Einstein is supposed to have stopped his wife and said ?Turn around. You will never see it again.? Indeed, he never again set foot in Germany.

The minute it became clear that Einstein was available, offers of professorships poured in from universities all over the world. There was a short period of travel, including stays in America, England, and Belgium (where the government had to supply him with a security detail because of the fear of Nazi assassins). While in the United States he be began a series of conversations with Abraham Flexner, who was in the process of creating the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and eventually Einstein decided to make Princeton his home. When he started salary negotiations, he is supposed to have named a low salary, asking Flexner if he could live on less. Flexner is supposed to have replied ?Oh, I think we can do better than that.? Einstein?s starting salary at the Institute was $15,000, which comes to about $2,500,000 in 2013 dollars, an amount matched in academe today only by university presidents and football coaches.

Before we go on to discuss Einstein?s career at Princeton it is probably worthwhile to spend a few minutes contemplating the colossal stupidity of the Nazi regime in its treatment of science. Germany had spent several centuries creating the greatest university system the world had ever known. Anyone in the world who aspired to intellectual or scientific prominence had to spend time in Germany. The country?s universities had much the same scientific status as American universities do today. And then, in a few years, the Nazis destroyed the entire system. When Max Planck, the senior scientific spokesman in the country, met with Hitler to warn him about the consequences of his policies, the reply he got was the quote at the beginning of this chapter.

One of the more bizarre manifestations of anti-Semitism in that country was the so-called Deutsche Physik movement. (Technically, this should be translated as ?German Physics?, but is more often called ?Aryan Physics?.) The Aryan Physics movement wasn?t some wacko fringe group. It was led by two Nobel Laureates, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. Reading their manifestos is a strange experience? it?s something like reading a physics textbook written by Richard Wagner. They really weren?t for anything, as far as I can tell, but were clearly opposed to relativity, Einstein, and what they called ?Jewish physics?. I suppose it could be interpreted as a sort of left-handed compliment to Einstein that an entire movement was created to oppose his ideas.

At the scientific level, the movement was completely unsuccessful in its attempts to suppress relativity. Perhaps the best evocation of the men in this movement can be found in historian Russell McCormmach?s novel Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist. The novel explores the feelings of an older physicist in the early twentieth century, a man unable to understand the fundamental changes going on in his field or the younger men who were driving them. It?s not

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hard to see that a physicist who had spent his career in the comfortable Newtonian world, surrounded by the luminiferous ether, would resent these newfangled ideas couched in complex mathematics coming from some punk kid at the patent office. I sometimes wonder whether some of my colleagues feel that way about string theory.

In any case, by 1933 Einstein was safely ensconced in Princeton, where he would spend the rest of his life. With the exception of the EPR paper discussed above, by this time his major contributions to physics were behind him. He played a small role in initiating the Manhattan Project during World War II, as we will discuss in Chapter 7, and was even offered the Presidency of the new state of Israel, which he wisely declined.

The physics problem that was at the center of his attention in those years is a deep one, and one that is still basically unsolved. I will state the problem here in its modern form and discuss it more fully in Chapter 14. It concerns the unification of forces, or what has come to be called unified field theory.

Today, physicists recognize four forces that are, singly or in concert, responsible for everything that happens in the universe. They are the familiar forces of electromagnetism and gravity? what I like to call the nineteenth-century forces? and the strong and weak forces, which operate only inside the nucleus? think of them as twentieth-century forces. The force you feel when you push on something, for example, is generated by the electrical forces between atoms in your hand and the thing you?re pushing on. The strong force is what holds the nucleus together, while the weak force is responsible for some types of radioactive decay. The question is whether these forces are really distinct or whether they can be thought of as aspects of a single underlying unified force.

In the 1930s, the strong and weak forces were just starting to be understood (remember that the existence of the neutron wasn?t proved until 1932), so Einstein concentrated his attention on gravity and electromagnetism. Despite repeated attempts to find a single theory that unified these two forces, he was ultimately unsuccessful. In Chapter 14 we will see that modern unified field theories do indeed unify three of the four forces? the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces? in the so-called Standard Model. We shall see, however, that this formulation is entirely stated in quantum terms. Gravity, for which our best theory remains General Relativity, is essentially a force that depends on the geometry of space-time. As such, it has not yet been incorporated into a generally accepted theory with the other three forces. The split between quantum mechanics and relativity remains an important? some would say the important? unsolved problem in theoretical physics. As he did with the EPR paper, Einstein?s work pointed the way toward the future of physics.

During the last years of his life, Einstein?s health began to deteriorate due to the growth of an abdominal aneurism. He died on April 18, 1955. His statement to his doctors when he refused treatment near the end was simple: ?I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.?

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Gramsci Before the Prison Notebooks, f rom The Routledge Guidebook to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

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03:: Gramsci Before the Prison Notebooks, f rom The Routledge Guidebook to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

Antonio Gramsci (1891?1937) was one of the original members of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista d?Italia, PCd?I), taking part in its founding congress in Livorno in January 1921. Before that, he had left his native Sardinia to study philology and linguistics at the University of Turin, and had become engaged in the politics of the Italian labour movement and joined the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI). Starting in the years of the First World War he worked as a journalist and theatre critic for the socialist press in Turin, and was an active participant in the struggles of the working class of the city. He played a leading role in the wave of strikes and occupations of the Fiat car factories which took place in the so-called ?red two years? or biennio rosso of 1919?20. He saw the factory occupations as the possible beginning of a socialist revolution in Italy, inspired by the revolution which the Russian Bolsheviks had made in October 1917. Along with other young socialist intellectuals Gramsci founded the journal L?Ordine Nuovo (The new order) and his articles for that journal developed the idea of factory councils as the institutions through which the workers could run the factories and which could be the basis of a new type of socialist state. Critical of the failure of both the PSI and of the trade unions to defend and extend the factory council movement, Gramsci joined the PCd?I at its foundation, became one of its leaders, and was sent to Moscow in May 1922 by the party as its delegate to the executive committee of the Communist International (Comintern). It was while in Moscow, recovering his health in a sanatorium, that he met Julia Schucht, who was to become his wife and mother of their two children. In November 1923 Gramsci left Moscow for Vienna, and returned to Italy in May 1924, having been elected as a deputy (member of parliament) for the region of the Veneto in the elections of April 1924. Gramsci became secretary general of the PCd?I in August 1924. Since the March on Rome of October 1922 the fascists had taken power in Italy, and after having survived the crisis provoked by the fascist assassination of the socialist deputy Matteotti in April 1924, the fascists went on to consolidate their power through the violence of their armed gangs of squadristi and the intimidation of their opponents.

Antonio Gramsci?s Prison Notebooks, or Quaderni del carcere to give them their title in the original Italian, are a series of notes and reflections written over a period of more than six years from 1929 to 1935, years spent in jail following the prison sentence handed down to Gramsci by a tribunal (a Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State) convened by the fascist government headed by Benito Mussolini. After what was essentially a show trial in June 1928, having been arrested in November 1926 despite his parliamentary immunity as a deputy elected to the Italian parliament, Gramsci was condemned to prison on trumped-up charges of subversion for twenty years, four months and five days, and similar sentences were handed down to the other leaders of the PCd?I with whom Gramsci was put on trial. He started writing his Notebooks in February 1929, as soon as he had been able to get permission to write in prison, and filled twenty-nine notebooks (school exercise books) with his reflections on history, politics, philosophy and culture, as well as a further four notebooks filled with translations from German, English and Russian texts, which Gramsci used as language exercises.

Gramsci?s Prison Notebooks are an undoubted classic of twentieth-century political thought, and they have had a huge influence over all fields of social and political thought and cultural

The following is excerpted from The Routledge Guidebook to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks by John Schwarzmantel. © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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theory. Gramsci is one of the Italian thinkers who have been most translated and studied throughout the world, and the Prison Notebooks have made concepts like hegemony familiar in a range of intellectual disciplines. This influence was a long time coming. Gramsci died in 1937, and the Notebooks, retrieved from Gramsci?s last place of confinement by his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht and sent by her to the Soviet Union, remained in an archive in Moscow until they were returned to Italy at the end of the Second World War. Large sections of the Notebooks were first published in Italian in the years 1948 to 1951, while Gramsci?s letters from prison first appeared in published form in 1947. But it was only in 1975 that the first complete Italian edition of the Notebooks appeared, with full scholarly apparatus and identification of the many sources referred to in the course of more than 2,300 printed pages of Gramsci?s notes. For reasons more fully explained in the next chapter, the Notebooks are not an easy text to read: constrained by the circumstances of his imprisonment, Gramsci was often forced to be allusive and cryptic in his references, and the Notebooks are composed of hundreds of separate sections of paragraphs, some long, some short, which cover a massive range of subjects. Compared with other classic texts of political and social theory, it appears as an assemblage of fragmentary reflections, and certainly not as a polished text revised for publication, with a beginning, middle and end of a coherent argument. A substantial English-language edition of parts of the Prison Notebooks was published in 1971 entitled Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and it is this edition which provides the structure for the present guide. While approaching the Notebooks through this set of selections does impart a particular perspective to the analysis of Gramsci?s Notebooks (in a way privileging the political, historical and philosophical aspects at the expense of the themes of culture and popular beliefs which are also important), the justification remains that the Hoare/Nowell-Smith edition is still the way in which most English-speaking readers initially approach Gramsci?s Prison Notebooks. The present guide is therefore oriented to that set of selections, designed to help readers encountering the text through that edition, while making reference also to the full text of the Notebooks in both the 1975 Italian edition and to the as yet incomplete English translation, which at the moment (2014) covers only the first eight of the twenty-nine Notebooks, as well as to other English-language translations.

The remainder of this introductory chapter seeks to explain briefly Gramsci?s political career and writings before his imprisonment. The next chapter gives an overview of the main themes of the Notebooks, and then discusses the structure and nature of Gramsci?s prison writings, explaining the way in which they were written and the periodization of their composition. After that, the successive chapters of this guide follow the thematic ordering of the Selections from the Prison Notebooks (hereafter SPN), with chapters on intellectuals and education; history and modernity; politics and the state; and finally philosophy and Marxism. The only departure from the ordering of SPN is in the discussion of Gramsci?s views on Americanism and Fordism, which are dealt with here in the chapter on history and modernity, whereas the SPN puts these in the section dealing with politics. The aim of the following chapters is mainly expository. It is hoped to give a clear explanation of Gramsci?s ideas, with the addition of some critical analysis of how those ideas stand up in the conditions of contemporary twenty first- century politics. A concluding chapter offers a brief and selective review of some of the ways in which Gramsci?s Prison Notebooks have influenced wider political and social analysis, and takes up the way in

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which Gramsci presents the themes of the national and the global, the crisis of the nation-state, and his ideas of cosmopolitanism, themes which have become ever more topical since his day. If the present guide helps to clarify Gramsci?s ideas and assists readers in their study of the Selections, and hopefully directs them to the complete version of the Notebooks, then it will have served its purpose. In the light of the discovery of new sources of documentation and helped by the work of scholars engaged in the preparation of the new (Italian) national edition of Gramsci?s works, and the cooling of Cold War passions and distortions, it should be possible to arrive at a more balanced and dispassionate treatment of this classic of twentieth-century political and social thought.

THE EARLY GRAMSCI

Understanding the content of the Prison Notebooks requires some grasp of Gramsci?s own life and political career, so it is necessary to give a short account of Gramsci?s development before he was imprisoned in 1926 by the fascist regime, which was to keep him in prison effectively for the rest of his life, until 1937. Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891, and came to Turin as a student, to study (primarily) philology, though as his fellow student, and later leader of the PCd?I, Palmiro Togliatti observed, wherever there were lectures on interesting subjects, Gramsci was to be found there: ?I would bump in to him?, Togliatti wrote, ?wherever there was a Professor who enlightened us on a series of essential problems'. Gramsci did not complete his studies at the University of Turin, committing himself to a career as a socialist journalist and organizer in the city of Turin, writing first for the socialist paper Avanti! (Forward!) and then joining with a group of other young comrades to set up the socialist paper L?Ordine Nuovo, which proclaimed its mission to be an organ of working-class culture and education, with those involved in it known as the ordinovisti, the ?new order people'. The core ideas of the ordinovisti are important for understanding the ideas of the Prison Notebooks, since there is continuity between the early Gramsci and the late Gramsci, in the same way, it can be argued, as there is continuity between the young Marx of the 1844 Paris Manuscripts and the later Marx of Capital (Das Kapital). In his early writings in the period of L?Ordine Nuovo Gramsci was concerned to articulate the idea that the working class could express and develop its own culture, and that Marxism did not represent a form of economic determinism but expressed such a new culture. Just as the French Revolution had been preceded by a long period of intellectual critique and undermining of traditional ideas, so too the socialist revolution was bound up with a process of intellectual renewal and transformation. This is well il lustrated in Gramsci?s article on ?Socialism and Culture?, written for the socialist paper Il Grido del Popolo (The cry of the people) on 29 January 1916. In that article Gramsci wrote that ?every revolution has been preceded by a long process of intense critical activity, of new cultural insight and the spread of ideas through groups of men initially resistant to them, wrapped up in the process of solving their own, immediate economic and political problems, and lacking any bonds of solidarity with others in the same position? (PPW 10). He illustrated this with reference to the French Revolution and the ideas of Enlightenment figures like D?Alembert and Diderot. For Gramsci, ?the Enlightenment was a magnificent revolution in itself ? it created a kind of pan-European unified consciousness, a bourgeois International of the spirit? (PPW 10). But in the present situation of 1916, Gramsci wrote, a similar process was occurring, not a ?bourgeois International? but a new socialist

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consciousness: ?The same phenomenon is occurring again today, with socialism. It is through a critique of capitalist civilisation that a unified proletarian consciousness has formed or is in the process of formation? (PPW 11). This article illustrates themes which were to be much more fully explored in the Prison Notebooks, namely the importance of ideas and forms of consciousness, and the need to form a new intellectual perspective as a precondition for radical political change. There is also the idea of getting beyond a limited perspective concerned just with ?immediate economic and political problems?, and the need to articulate a broader philosophy which rises above what Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks would refer to as the ?economic-corporate level?.

One other theme was also raised in Gramsci?s early journalistic writings which receives a far deeper and more extended analysis in the Prison Notebooks, namely the idea of Marxism not as a form of economism in which politics was determined by economics, but of Marxism as precisely the expression of human will and creative action, encapsulated in the term which Gramsci developed in the Notebooks, ?the philosophy of praxis?. The most famous expression of this idea in the pre-prison writings came in his article on the Bolshevik Revolution, which he saluted as ?The Revolution against Capital?. In that article Gramsci startlingly refers to Marx?s Capital as being ?more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat?, at least in the way in which it had been interpreted in Russia (PPW 39). Instead of just passively waiting for the unfolding of history along a path determined by the iron laws of economics, with socialist revolution deferred until after the development of capitalism, or as Gramsci put it, in opposition to the idea that ?a bourgeoisie had to develop, the capitalist era had to get under way and civilisation on the Western model be introduced, before the proletariat could even start thinking about its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution?, the Bolsheviks had shown a different path through their own actions (PPW 39). In Gramsci?s words, ?They are living out Marxist thought ? the real, undying Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism, but which, in Marx, was contaminated by positivist and naturalist incrustations? (PPW 40). Here again there is a core idea which received more extensive treatment in the Notebooks, the idea of the importance of practice and the rejection of the ?positivist and naturalist incrustations? which had, for Gramsci, distorted the nature of Marxism. It is true that in these early writings of Gramsci his use of Marx and Marx?s writings was rather a polemical one, making an appeal to Marxism as a way of criticizing the passivity of Italian socialists and their failure to exploit the potentialities of the situation in the way the Bolsheviks had done in Russia in 1917. A careful study by Francesca Izzo of Gramsci?s various readings of Marx shows that it was only with the Prison Notebooks that Gramsci engaged fully with some of the core ideas of Marxism, above all with the philosophy of Marxism (Izzo 2008). In his early journalistic and political writings, Gramsci was using Marx as an intellectual weapon in polemics against a range of political adversaries, in perhaps a rather superficial way, using Marxist ideas against liberal, conservative and nationalist politicians, for example against the Italian Prime Minister Giolitti and his protectionist economic policies which aimed at sealing an alliance between northern industrialists and southern landowners. Similarly Gramsci used Marxist ideas in opposition to nationalists like Corradini who sought to transform the idea of class struggle into the nationalist framework of the struggle of nation-states against each other, with Italy as a ?proletarian nation?. As Izzo makes clear, it was only in the Notebooks that Gramsci made a ?true

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and real ?return to Marx??, grappling with issues of base and superstructure, and reformulating ?historical materialism? (not a term Marx himself ever employed) as the philosophy of praxis. In the Notebooks he explored the philosophical implications of Marx?s work in ways which he did not do and could not do in those early writings, written as those journalistic articles were under the pressure of events, from day to day. It was with reference to Marx?s 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and The Poverty of Philosophy that these ideas were developed. Those writings were the key texts on which Gramsci drew in the Notebooks and which ?constitute the source, the laboratory on which Gramsci drew in his discussion of critics of the philosophy of praxis, above all Croce?. While it is true that this more profound engagement with Marx and Marxism comes only with the Prison Notebooks, the idea of freeing Marxism (and political analysis generally) from the deterministic and economistic ?incrustations? of pre-1914 Marxism, and seeing Lenin as the example of such a voluntaristic and creative Marxism is one which is certainly an important element in the Notebooks but also finds some expression in Gramsci?s early articles, such as ?The Revolution against Capital? quoted above. In the early writings, Gramsci invokes the Marx of The Communist Manifesto and of The Holy Family, using these writings as examples of an activist creative perspective. In an article of 4 May 1918, also written for Il Grido del Popolo, Gramsci wrote that ?Marx did not write some neat little doctrine; he is not some Messiah who left us a string of parables laden with categorical imperatives and absolute, unchallengeable norms, lying outside the categories of time and space. His only categorical imperative, his only norm: ?Workers of the world, unite!?? (PPW 54).

In his early journalistic writings, first for the periodical Il Grido del Popolo, then for the socialist newspaper Avanti! (whose editor at an earlier stage had been Mussolini), and finally for the journal L?Ordine Nuovo (whose first issue appeared in March 1919), Gramsci gave an analysis of the events of the day, and in those journalistic writings certain themes appear which he was to develop further in his Prison Notebooks. In his early writings Gramsci developed a critique of Italian society and of the failure of the Italian bourgeoisie to be a truly modernizing force. In Gramsci?s analysis, the true face of capitalist modernity was realized through liberalism and a liberal society as represented by the Anglo-Saxon countries of England and the USA. In those societies a tradition of individualism spread ideas of autonomy and self-reliance. A truly liberal society, marked by civil liberties, was most conducive to the development of capitalism, and hence provided the best conditions for the growth and eventual victory of socialism. Gramsci?s Anglophilia even led him to praise Baden-Powell?s Boy Scout movement for fostering qualities of self-reliance and individualism. Evidently Gramsci neglected or overlooked the imperialist ideology which the Boy Scout movement also developed. The corollary of his positive view of liberal capitalism as realized in Britain and the USA was his critique of Italy and the Italian character. Gramsci contrasted the Italian love of games of chance and the hope for fortune?s wheel to bring a windfall with the English belief that individuals had to work for and deserve any reward (clearly this was before the period of the National Lottery in Britain). In Gramsci?s analysis, Italy had not become a properly liberal society. The politics of Giolitti (the Italian prime minister) were marked by compromise, by economic protectionism rather than free trade, and by an endeavour to form an alliance of northern industrialists and southern landlords, with some attempt to co-opt the reformist leaders of Italian socialism into the alliance, and Gramsci saw this as the opposite of a progressive liberalism which would foster capitalist development. In an

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article written for Avanti! on 16 May 1918, Gramsci wrote of liberalism as ?a precondition for socialism, both ideally and historically? (Rapone 2011, 352). So for him Italy was a backward society in which the bourgeoisie was far from economically productive and dynamic. The character of the Italian people was marked by sentimentalism rather than force of character, and what was needed was greater discipline and stress on work rather than hoping for windfall gains from games of chance.

It is also interesting to note in these early journalistic writings of Gramsci his hostility to Jacobinism and to democracy, compared with his early praise for liberalism. In the Prison Notebooks Jacobinism was praised as the politics which in the French Revolution had led the urban poor to support the demands of the peasantry, and which had pushed the revolution forward. In the early writings, by contrast, Gramsci?s use of the term ?Jacobinism? is much more negative, seeing Jacobinism as the politics of an intolerant minority, imbued with abstract ideas which it was foisting on the population as a whole, so that ?Jacobin democracy is the negation of liberty and of autonomy?. He saw the Jacobins as the typical leaders of a bourgeois revolution, not in tune with the masses, and imposing their own ideas in an authoritarian fashion. This was linked with a critique (by Gramsci) of ?democracy?, as seen as an abstract idea: he stated that ?democracy is our worst enemy?, because it tried to pacify or tone down ideas of class struggle. Gramsci in these early writings was scornful of the defenders of democracy, whom he saw as articulating abstract ideas in a sentimental way, invoking the ?sacred principles of 1789? and ideals of justice, fraternity and liberty without seeing how those ideas were historically formed and situated, so that they were not universal truths. The defenders of democracy had come to justify the First World War, legitimizing it as a democratic war, and preaching a gospel of democracy which elevated these vague ideals to the status of eternal truths. By contrast liberalism and the society it promoted were frankly capitalistic and bourgeois, and hence provided the ground for the development of socialism.

However, Gramsci changed his ideas on these matters in response to two crucial sets of events, the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917, and the experience of the factory councils and wave of working-class action which culminated in the workers? takeover of the Turin factories in 1920. With regard to the Russian revolutions, notably the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Gramsci stressed the need for leadership, and the need for discipline and order to be provided by a revolutionary state. Whereas his earlier stance had been to some degree an anti-statist one, in following events in Russia in and after 1917 he came to argue that ?society cannot live without the state?, and he stressed the creative role of a revolutionary minority leading the masses, saluting Lenin as ?the greatest statesman of contemporary Europe?. Gone was his critique of Jacobinism seen as a tactic of minority revolution typical of bourgeois revolutions, to be replaced by a new emphasis on the need for a proletarian state, of a highly disciplined kind: the need for ?a very strong socialist state? (uno stato socialista saldissimo), with a necessarily military character. Gone too was his earlier more positive attitude to liberalism, which Gramsci now saw as in fundamental and possibly terminal crisis, at any rate irrelevant to the challenge of building a new proletarian order which he thought had been put on the agenda by the Bolshevik Revolution ? and which was of immediate relevance to Italy. The Russian Revolution showed the need for a new type of state, the dictatorship of the proletariat,

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and had indicated the institutional framework for realizing that state ? the organs of the soviets, councils of workers, soldiers and peasants. In the course of his engagement with the factory councils which had briefly taken over control of the factories in Turin in August 1920, Gramsci came to develop his idea of a new type of state, with the factory councils (or internal commissions) as the organs of both anti-capitalist struggle and the nucleus of a form of state distinct from that of parliamentary democracy. The impact of these two events, Bolshevik Revolution and the biennio rosso of 1919?20, changed Gramsci?s perspective on liberalism, democracy and Jacobinism. Liberalism was now seen as irrelevant and outmoded rather than a factor of capitalist development. Democracy was no longer seen as the worst enemy, but as something which could be realized, not in the form of parliamentary democracy but in a new type of state whose organs at the base were the factory councils, supplemented by organs of popular power in the locality, culminating in a ?National Congress of delegates of workers and peasants?. This system of representation was based on the unit of production, and as Rapone says this meant that ?in place of the generic citizen, bearer of equal rights, the point of reference was man as worker [l?uomo quale specifico soggetto lavoratore], so that economic function coincided with political capacity?. Finally, Gramsci?s earlier anti-Jacobinism was replaced by a new concern with the importance of political leadership, as manifested by the Bolsheviks, showing the need for a political party to organize and discipline the mass movement which had arisen in the Russian Revolution and more widely in the crisis of post-war Europe. Through the control of production and mass mobilization witnessed in the red two years the working masses were developing the new culture and confidence which Gramsci saw as necessary for a socialist society. But this needed to be complemented by political leadership and organization of the mass movement, through the agency of the political party. These were all themes which the Prison Notebooks deal with in a wider historical and also philosophical perspective, but the later discussion cannot be understood without some knowledge of Gramsci?s practical and political experiences prior to his imprisonment.

It was through his engagement in the factory councils movement of the biennio rosso of 1919?20, and through his membership, and then leadership, of the newly formed (in January 1921, at the Livorno Congress) PCd?I (Partito Comunista d?Italia) that Gramsci acquired the political experience and knowledge on which he reflected in the Prison Notebooks, so that both of these episodes and formative experiences need at least a brief explanation in order to understand the themes of the Prison Notebooks. The red two years of 1919?20 were years of worker militancy, marked by strikes and occupation of the factories, notably in Turin, which Gramsci himself had previously described as the city in which ?the proletariat has reached a point of development which is one of the highest, if not the very highest, in Italy? (article of 18 December 1917, quoted in Giasi 2008a, 154), where ?within an area of a few thousand square metres there were concentrated tens and tens of thousands of workers? as he wrote in that article. The factory council movement developed in Turin towards the end of 1919, and it was in Turin that a general strike broke out in April 1920, the so-called ?clockhands strike?, provoked by a dispute over the adoption of daylight saving time. In September 1920 the occupation of the factories in Turin began, and ?shortly thereafter nearly all Italian heavy industry was taken over?. Gramsci and his colleagues on L?Ordine Nuovo were actively involved in the workers? occupation of the factory, but above all sought in the pages of that journal, which in November 1920

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became a daily newspaper, to theorize the movement of the factory councils and explain its significance. In Gramsci?s articles of the time he explains that the factory councils were institutions different from the socialist political party and from the official trade unions, as indeed they were. The factory councils were open to all workers in the plant or factory, they elected committees which were charged with the running of the factories, defying the employers? attempts to shut the factories down and stop production. The ordinovisti, in particular Gramsci, saw the factory councils as the manifestation of the workers? capacity to organize and maintain industrial production, thus showing that the employers were superfluous, and production could go ahead without them. But Gramsci?s analysis of these factory councils went further: his articles of the time argue that these councils were organizations of worker power which were, at least potentially, basic institutions of a new proletarian state. They were genuinely original institutions organized at the point of production through which the working class could affirm its power and its autonomy. Since this present text focuses on the Prison Notebooks, there is not space to discuss fully Gramsci?s views, but some quotations can illustrate the core of his ideas. The factory councils movement was part of the general militancy of workers throughout Europe in the period after the War and the Russian Revolution, inspired by the idea of soviets (councils of workers, peasants and soldiers) to create a model of council communism, the direct rule of the producers.

In his articles in L?Ordine Nuovo on the factory councils Gramsci argued that the councils were institutions of a different type from the traditional institutions of working-class politics, party and union: ?Revolutionary organisations (the political party and the trade union) grow up on the terrain of political liberty and bourgeois democracy?, Gramsci wrote, but ?we say that the present period is revolutionary?, since the working class was ?beginning with all its energies (despite the errors, hesitations and setbacks only natural in an oppressed class, with no historical experience behind it, which has to do everything for itself, from scratch) to generate working-class institutions of a new type? (PPW 165). The factory councils were the basis of a new type of state: ?institutions devised to take over the role of the capitalist, in administrating and running industry; and to guarantee the autonomy of the producer in the factory, on the shop-floor? (PPW 113). Gramsci?s articles during the biennio rosso expressed the belief that proletarian revolution was imminent, indeed actually occurring, and that the factory councils could be the institutions of a new type of state, based directly on the producers. He wrote of ?a determination on the part of the proletarian masses to introduce proletarian order into the factory, to make the factory the basic unit of the new State and to build the new State in a way that reflects the industrial relations of the factory system? (PPW 170). Against the reluctance of the PSI, the Italian Socialist Party, to give effective leadership to the factory council movement, and against the fear by union leaders that the factory councils were undermining union power, Gramsci saw the factory council as ?the most appropriate organ for mutual education and for fostering the new social spirit that the proletariat has managed to distil out of its fruitful, living experience in the community of labour? (PPW 118).

However, the factory council movement ended in defeat, though this was masked by an agreement in September 1920 which spoke of workers? control, though this was never realized, and two years after the return to work came the March on Rome of October 1922, which brought

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Mussolini and the fascists to power. As John Cammett, one of the first historians to bring Gramsci?s work to an English-speaking public, writes, ?The industrialists had lost their faith in the ?liberal state?, and had become receptive to political expedients of quite a different order ? The hour of fascism was at hand? . Gramsci?s Prison Notebooks contain some allusions to the Turin movements and to L?Ordine Nuovo discussions, for example in the passage where Gramsci discusses the need for a new type of intellectual, ?closely bound to industrial labour?: he writes that ?on this basis the weekly Ordine Nuovo worked to develop certain forms of new intellectualism and to determine its new concepts, and this was not the least of the reasons for its success? (SPN 9; Q12, §3, 1551). It would not be correct to oppose the ?early? Gramsci with his stress on factory councils to the ?later? Gramsci of the Prison Notebooks where the role of the political party is given much greater attention. Gramsci?s criticisms of the political party in the early writings were directed to the PSI because of its failure to see the potential of the factory council movement. In his writings on Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti insisted on the fact that Gramsci?s writings on the factory councils did not mean that he neglected or ignored the need for a political party. Indeed it was Gramsci?s critique of the failure of the PSI to play a decisive role in the years of the factory council movement that led him to call for the ?renewal? of the PSI, in an article of 8 May 1920, and to take part in the Congress of Livorno of January 1921 in which the Italian Communist Party was formed (the PCd?I, Partito Comunista d?Italia ? it changed its name in 1944 to PCI, Partito Comunista Italiano). Nevertheless, one of the core themes of the Prison Notebooks is the reflection on the defeat of the working-class movement and the subsequent victory of fascism, and the implications of both for political action and the need for a new type of political party.

The PCd?I formed in January 1921 was in its initial years marked by a radical intransigence and sectarianism, under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga. Bordiga?s stance was one of hostility to parliamentary politics, a form of ?ultra-leftism? which meant that he was opposed to the politics of the United Front which the Comintern proclaimed from 1921 on, when it first became clear that the wave of revolution stimulated by the Bolshevik Revolution had receded and that revolution in western Europe was no longer a realistic possibility. Here we can only give a brief outline of Gramsci?s political thought and activity in the years from 1921 to his arrest in November 1926, highlighting those points important for understanding the issues handled in the Prison Notebooks. From being in many respects a political ally of Bordiga, Gramsci changed to acceptance of the policy of the United Front, which was an attempt, carried out with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the parties of the Communist International (Comintern), to form alliances with the socialist parties of their respective countries in an attempt to stave off the wave of reaction which in Italy took the form of fascism. Gramsci supported the policy of the ?Bolshevization? of communist parties, namely the insistence that communist parties everywhere had to accept the Bolshevik model of democratic centralism and the ban on factions, which the Bolshevik party itself had adopted after 1921. From 1922 to 1923 Gramsci was in Moscow, as the delegate of the PCd?I to the Comintern. He left Turin in May 1922 and once in Russia had to spend some time (indeed six months) in a sanatorium on the outskirts of Moscow (Serebranyi Bor, or Silver Wood) to recover from nervous exhaustion, and it was there that he met Julia Schucht, who was to become his wife. Recent research has suggested that before meeting Julia, Gramsci had come into contact with her elder sister Eugenia, who had been a patient in the

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sanatorium for almost three years when Gramsci arrived there in July 1922. It seems that Gramsci had an amorous relationship with Eugenia, and that several emotionally charged letters which previous researchers thought directed to Julia were in fact addressed to Eugenia, though this was not evident since the letters were addressed to ?Dear Comrade? or ?Dearest? (Carissima). The latest research suggests that Gramsci transferred his affections from Eugenia to her younger sister Julia in the autumn of 1923, shortly before Gramsci left Moscow for Vienna. Their first child, Delio, was born on 10 August 1924.

Gramsci was present in Moscow for the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (held in November?December 1922). This Congress, as E. H. Carr says, ?marked an important point in the transformation and consolidation of Soviet policy. It was the end of the dramatic period of the Communist International? and this Congress ?was driven still further along the road of retreat? (Carr 1966, 437). It urged that the PCd?I should fuse with the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) in order to implement the policy of the United Front (though this fusion was never carried out). In June 1923 the Comintern decided to create a new Executive Committee for the PCd?I, and Bordiga resigned from the leadership of the party. In September 1923 Gramsci, who had been expecting to return to Italy, was ordered initially to go to Berlin, but this was changed to Vienna, in the wake of arrests by the fascist police in Italy of the leaders of the PCd?I, so that Gramsci was effectively leader (in exile) of the Italian party. He arrived in Vienna on 3 December 1923, remaining there until April 1924 when he was able to return to Italy, having been elected as deputy (member of parliament) for the regio