The interpretation of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks has been compared to the deciphering of a hieroglyphic, and the comparison is particularly apt now that the critical edition of this work is available. A second major interpretative difficulty arises because the work is pervaded by the views of, and by references to, Benedetto Croce, so much so that it is no exaggeration to say, with E. J. Hobsbawm, that “the Notebooks are in one sense a long, half-rebellious, half-admiring dialogue with this intellectual father figure.” Since Croce's own views, especially those related to Marxism, are extremely obscure and excessively liable to misinterpretation, the result is a compounding of the problem.

One way out of these difficulties involves adopting certain suggestions made by Gramsci himself: “If you want to study … a world view that has never been systematically expounded by its founder … it is necessary as a preliminary to do a detailed philological work conducted with the greatest scruple for exactness, scientific honesty, intellectual sincerity, and absence of preconception and apriorism or partis pris.” This means something like burying oneself in Gramsci's notes, and, as much as one can, collating and grouping them on internal evidence; such activity is now made possible by the critical edition and addresses itself primarily to the first difficulty I mentioned.

Another suggestion deals with the second interpretative difficulty and involves essentially a distinction between method or approach and substantive theses.