Gramsci's Common Sense

Acknowledged as one of the classics of twentieth-century Marxism, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks contains a rich and nuanced theorization of class that provides insights that extend far beyond economic inequality. In Gramsci's Common Sense Kate Crehan offers new ways to understand the many forms that structural inequality can take, including in regards to race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Presupposing no previous knowledge of Gramsci on the part of the reader, she introduces the Prison Notebooks and provides an overview of Gramsci's notions of subalternity, intellectuals, and common sense, putting them in relation to the work of thinkers such as Bourdieu, Arendt, Spivak, and Said. In the case studies of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, Crehan theorizes the complex relationships between the experience of inequality, exploitation, and oppression, as well as the construction of political narratives. Gramsci's Common Sense is an accessible and concise introduction to a key Marxist thinker whose works illuminate the increasing inequality in the twenty-first century.

“"With conceptual precision and sophistication, Kate Crehan's examination of subalternity, intellectuals, and common sense brings into focus the complex ways in which class inequality manifests itself in social life and everyday practices. An essential text in Gramscian studies, Gramsci's Common Sense will generate transdisciplinary interest across the humanities and social scientists and is of particular interest to Gramsci specialists across the globe."”

"Kate Crehan’s new book on Antonio Gramsci’s work is an astute and accessible text that attempts to connect his ideas to current events in the United States. Staying true to the Gramscian spirit, Crehan spends the first four chapters contextualizing both his life and his work in order to show how his ideas evolved. Crehan then spends several chapters showing why these ideas remain useful in today’s world; as Gramsci would have wanted, knowledge should be used for social change, not for the sake of knowing alone. What is most striking about the book is the lucid and engaging way in which Crehan writes." - Sara Salem (Antipode) "Crehan has produced a felicitous and profound intervention that could inform our understanding of both intellectual and political change. In 2016, as a new senso comune begins to develop in an age of ‘post-truth’ politics, Gramsci’s ideas are more timely than ever." - Marcos González Hernando (LSE US Centre Blog) "Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives, through its analysis of class, subalternity and intellectuals, extensively engages with the Prison Notebooks, offering new ways to describe the different practices that structural inequality can assume through race, gender, sexual orientation and religion in our globalised-capitalist society." - Mauro Di Lullo (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books) "It is because Crehan’s book is that good: that prescient, that well written, and that strong of an interpretation of Gramsci’s relevance for our times that it should be read across disciplines, by activists, politically engaged artists, filmmakers, and any cultural worker, critic, or analyst who finds themselves feeling cut off from the world at this point in our current conjuncture." - Robert Carley (Lateral) "An elegantly written and accessible examination of the meaning of concepts within Gramsci's notebooks." - Max Shock (Political Studies Review) "Crehan shows at every turn the interpretative, intellectual, and political relevance of Gramsci’s ideas to an understanding of the contemporary moment in and beyond the US." - Claudio Sopranzetti (Anthropological Quarterly) "The most positive aspect of [Crehan's] critical assessment of this rather difficult-to-understand author, especially for those reading him in English translation, is the lucidity of her text and her ability to make the reader understand even complex ideas in a direct fashion. . . . An important book for all who are attempting to understand inequality as a social phenomenon."  - Subhadra Mitra Channa (Anthropological Notebooks) "A welcome addition to the existing body of knowledge on the question of inequality and the experience of subaltern sections of the contemporary globalised world. . . . A must read reference for scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, tribal/indigenous studies, area studies and development studies." - Kasi Eswarappa (Capital & Class) "This volume urges us to see an updated Gramsci as indispensable for anthropologists and a contemporary ethnography-that is, if the former want to struggle for transformation and if the latter aspires to become the main science for predicting the shape of the future. I highly recommend this book to anthropologists and social scientists, but also to those people who need new critical tools in order to deal with and to change unfair realities." - Giovanni Pizza (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) “Gramsci’s Common Sense achieves the substantial feat of combining a sophisticated reading of Gramsci’s views on class, inequality, and ‘popular opinion’ with an accessible style that presupposes no prior knowledge of his writings.” - Robert P. Jackson (International Gramsci Journal)

Kate Crehan is Professor Emerita, College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of Community Art: An Anthropological Perspective and Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology.

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