Very interesting example of drift of meaning expressed in the problems of bridging translations.
Gramsci took civil society to be an arena of struggle with important possibilities. Whereas as Robert Magellan argues here, the term was mainly negative for Marx.
What I would appreciate is also a brief comment on how Marx contrasting the buerger and the citoyen, to understand better whether he saw a positive role in what might more loosely be called civil society.
Chris Burford
> I think this will interest you...
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> See below:
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> "...... the translation of Gramsci's mature thought
> into German often
>entails the re-translation of terms and concepts which Gramsci took from
>German in the first place and translated (giving them a new semantic value
>in the process) into Italian. This is the case, for example, with the term
>"società civile" ["civil society"]--the Hegelian and Marxian "bürgerliche
>Gesellschaft"--which the German translators rendered with the neologism
>"Zivilgesellschaft". (This neologism had been employed earlier by Sabine
>Kebir in her book Antonio Gramscis Zivilgesellschaft, Hamburg: VSA, 1991.)
>Another example is the pair of terms "struttura / superstruttura" which
>(starting with Volume 3) the German translators have consistently rendered
>as "Struktur / Superstruktur" instead of "Basis / Überbau" (see Vol. 3,
>p.A213)."
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> A brief note of mine:
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> In the beginning of the "Grundrisse der Kritik der
> Politischen
>Oekonomie" (1857/1858) Marx despises the concept of civil society as an
>irrevocable construction of the XVIII th century. So, civil society
>should be bound, in the Marxian view, to the social infrastructure, what
>would rend the expression useless, a remnant of the XVIII th century
>political thought.
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> Nevertheless, Antonio Gramsci related it to the
> superstructure too,
>without ceasing to be a great Marxist thinker. This is well explained by
>a sympathetic liberal critic, the famous Norberto Bobbio. His little book
> "Saggi su Gramsci" (Essays on Gramsci, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore,
>Milan, 1990) deals largely with the subject.
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>In solidarity,
>Roberto Magellan