Tronti and Gramsci on the Young Tronti’s Research Programme

This article reviews, for the first time, all the research, published and unpublished, by the young pre-operaismo Tronti (as well as his key cultural sources, from Ugo Spirito to Galvano Della Volpe), from his 1956 undergraduate thesis, supervised by Ugo Spirito and Lucio Colletti, to an essay written in 1961 for Società, which symbolically closes his pre-operaismo phase. The author reconstructs the formation of the Tronti–Gramsci relationship, between 1958 and 1959, through two fundamental writings. Those texts outline not only all the issues around Gramsci’s thought (that anticipate by a few decades criticisms from, for example, Bobbio, Del Noce, Biagio de Giovanni and Althusser and Laclau), but also the fundamental aspects of a critical reflection on Gramsci and his philosophy.