Abstract

The article presents and discusses some findings of a research in progress on the social conditions of the international circulation of Gramsci's ideas since 1950s. Specifically, it features some results of a network analysis conducted on a large corpus of bibliographic data assembled in the Gramscian Bibliography (BG), an electronic data base created and managed by the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome. The logic beneath the article is twofold: on the one side, it is an exercise in describing and measuring the global spread of an author on whose reception has been collected a large amount of data following a more traditional approach in the history of ideas (e.g. the reception of Gramsci in English, or his reception in France); on the other side, the article attempts to test, focusing on a strategic case study, a new methodological tool useful for mapping the international circulation of concepts across different languages. A final objective of the article is to set the stage for an understanding of «Gramscism» as a global social and cultural phenomenon through the development of an empirical sociology of Gramsci's ideas.