Abstract
<jats:p xml:lang="en">This innovative reading of Antonio Gramsci’s writings casts into relief the enduring influence of books he read as a youth (e.g., the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Divine Comedy), and other important formative experiences such as a 1912 debate on socialist faith and his organization in 1917 of the Club of Moral Life. It also identifies and explores key elements of his thought that traverse and bind together his youthful writings and his prison notebooks: liberty understood as a fundamental value, the right (based on collective well-being, economic and social equality) to fulfill oneself as a person; his pedagogical commitment; the “disinterested” pursuit of knowledge, understood as an act of personal liberation; the transformation of inherited common sense into rational good sense; ethics; Gramsci’s unceasing struggle to free all from all forms of domination; and his desire to steer the course of history in a positive direction.</jats:p>