ABSTRACT
The prison notebooks Antonio Gramsci wrote during his long incarceration are rooted in very different political realities to those of the early twenty-first century. Nonetheless, the writings of this early twentieth century Italian revolutionary can still help us untangle the complex workings of power in contemporary societies. It is important, however, to begin with a caution. As a number of those who have engaged in depth with Gramsci’s work, such as Joseph Buttigieg (1992) and Stuart Hall (1988), stress it is above all from Gramsci’s approach to the workings of power that we can learn; Gramsci never provides us with readymade theoretical templates which we can apply in any simple way to our times and our questions. Gramsci himself, I like to think, would have agreed with Wittgenstein, who writes in the Preface to Philosophical Investigations, “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own” (Wittgenstein 1968: viii). It is, above all, the roads down which Gramsci sends us, not necessarily the particular destinations at which he arrives, that are so useful. Here the road down which I want to travel is one that begins with the concept of “expertise” and the role played by experts and expertise in the modern world, a topic to which Gramsci repeatedly returns in the Prison Notebooks.
