• The Prison Notebooks contain three layers of evidence regarding Gramsci’s acquaintance with Mosca and Mosca’s influence on Gramsci.

• The most extensive and deepest layer involves conceptual structure of Gramsci’s political theory, and it is deeply buried in the Notebooks.

• This layer contains discussions and analyses where there is no explicit mention of Mosca and his ideas, which will be examined in later chapters.

• The second layer consists of explicit comments on Mosca, which will be analyzed presently.

• The third layer includes three passages providing documentary evidence of Gramsci’s direct acquaintance with Mosca’s major works.

• The analysis will begin with this last group of documentary evidence.

Gramsci’s Direct Acquaintance with Mosca’s Works

• One passage proving Gramsci’s direct acquaintance with Mosca’s works is found in the notes on the Italian Risorgimento.

• Gramsci classifies secondary literature on the subject and pays special attention to nine books and several articles from the fall of the Historical Right in 1876.

• These bibliographical references correspond almost exactly to footnotes in Mosca’s Theory of Governments.

• This suggests that Gramsci had the second edition of Mosca’s book (1925) when writing his notes on the Risorgimento.

• The discovery is credited to Valentino Gerratana, the editor of the critical edition of the Prison Notebooks.

• The second Gramsci passage refers to transformism, particularly the assimilation of socialist intellectuals into more moderate institutions in the 1890s.

• Gramsci quotes a passage from Guglielmo Ferrero’s 1895 book on reactionary politics, which he attributes to Mosca’s Elements of Political Science (1923).

• The long quotation from Ferrero, though provocative, establishes that Gramsci read Mosca’s Elements in prison.

• Gramsci may have also been acquainted with Mosca’s Notes on Constitutional Law (1908), which discusses modern European constitutions and the Italian constitution.

• Evidence for this includes lists of books Gramsci compiled in 1929, where Mosca’s book is mentioned.

• Although it’s uncertain if Gramsci read Mosca’s constitutional law book in prison, it’s likely he did.

• Mosca’s book may explain Gramsci’s remarks on the relation between the concepts of state and civil society.

• Gramsci gave considerable thought to Mosca’s major works, as indicated by explicit remarks in the Prison Notebooks.

• Gramsci’s comments on Mosca are not as frequent or polished as his comments on others like Croce, Bukharin, and Machiavelli.

• Nine passages contain direct discussions of Mosca, but only six distinct passages remain after some early notes were expanded and revised.

• Gramsci’s remarks can be grouped into three clusters: general methodological issues, general substantive issues, and Theory of Governments.

• Gramsci’s comments reveal more about his own thinking than about Mosca’s, as Gramsci approaches others’ views with a theoretical, evaluative, and problem-oriented interest.