The article reviews some of the most relevant readings of Gramsci among Latin American scholars in the period between the dictatorships and the age of democratic transitions. The central thesis is that the transfer of Gramsci’s categories – mainly “civil society” and “hegemony” and “translatability”, but also “State” and “passive revolution” – has greatly benefited the processes of democratic selfunderstanding of the Latin American Marxist Left, and at the same time this “translation” also contributed – through the mediation of figures like Norberto Bobbio – to rethink Marxism in nonEurocentric terms and thus to enrich it in decisive aspects for the critical understanding of political and institutional processes in the modern and contemporary world.
