Introduction

We are leaving Gramsci behind now – farewell Antonio! ‘Thank goodness’, I hear some of you breathe a sigh of relief. ‘I didn't understand a word he was saying and not just because he spoke Italian.’ I get it: ‘cultural hegemony’ doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Remember, Gramsci wrote down many of his ideas while he was in a Fascist jail and had to use coded language in order to get his work through the prison censors and out into the world. Also, he didn't write directly about public libraries of course; they were just a detail within a much bigger picture that he was trying to paint. We now have Corrigan and Gillespie with us to explain how Gramsci's ideas are relevant to public libraries. They remind us that public libraries were a ruling class response to the threat of proletarian uprising when Europe was swept by revolutionary fervour in 1848. In Britain this was manifested by the Chartist Movement which organised mass rallies across the land. The Management library emerged from this popular discontent as an agent of social control to manage the reading habits and idle time of the working class. But, at the same time, the Management library had the potential to become a weapon in the hands of the masses during the class struggle. This contradiction has not been fully resolved which explains why, although the Management library continues to maintain the cultural hegemony of the ruling class, it has also been subject to closures in the name of neoliberal austerity politics and economics.