Abstract

The essay investigates the concept of ‘State’ as it emerges in the Prison Notebooks, revealing its close relationship with some of the most original traits of the Gramscian reflection on the Marxist tradition. The analysis of the broad political and economic transformations undertaken by the capitalist system after the First World War grounds a (non-normative) theory of the State and of law, focusing on the Western societies where the bourgeoisie is able to reshape its hegemony. Moreover, the essay describes and discusses the unbridgeable gap between Gramsci’s concept of the State and any cosmopolitan reading of the Marxist doctrine, which, according to him, would neglect the crucial importance of the manifestations of political agency and of the class conflict which occur at the national level.