Keywords

• Gramsciâ€
• ™
• s intellectual and political formation in the 1910s â€
• “
• a period long deemed of limited relevance in his biography ? has recently received renewed critical and scholarly attention. The essay maps out young Gramsciâ€
• ™
• s critical fortunes and misfortunes. It opens with the earliest interpretations
• whose main aim was to establish the level of Leninism characterizing the initial expressions of Gramsciâ€
• ™
• s thought
• and then moves on to the subsequent divergence between those critics who deemed Gramsciâ€
• ™
• s early work irrelevant to the overall understanding of his thought
• and those who
• conversely
• considered it the precocious expression of a distinctive political and intellectual identity.
• The current resurgence of Gramscian studies has lately made it possible to reconstruct the path leading Gramsci into the theoretical range of communism
• thereby establishing continuities and discontinuities with his original concept of socialism