Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci (Ales, Sardinia, 1891 – Rome, 1937) was an Italian intellectual, philosopher, journalist and politician, and one of the most influential Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. He belonged to the tradition of Western Marxism, and much of his thinking, developed largely from prison, remains a reference for anyone who studies culture, power and politics. His lasting importance lies in explaining why capitalism endures not only through force, but also through the way ideas spread through society.

Gramsci was born into a large and impoverished family. His father, Francesco, was convicted of embezzlement in 1898, and the household fell into serious hardship. Gramsci suffered from poor health from childhood: a malformation of the spine stunted his growth, and for decades it was blamed on a fall in infancy, although in 2011 it was suggested that it stemmed from Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis. He had to leave school and work at the land registry office, but he finished his secondary education in Cagliari and, thanks to a scholarship, began literature studies at the University of Turin in 1911. There he moved towards socialism, shaped by the harsh conditions of Sardinian peasants and by the industrialisation of northern Italy, and began writing journalism that won him a reputation. In 1919 he helped found L'Ordine Nuovo, a weekly in which he championed factory councils as instruments of workers' self-management. He was a founder of the Communist Party of Italy at Livorno in 1921, and travelled to Soviet Russia in 1922, where he met and later married Julia Schucht.

His differences with Amadeo Bordiga's leadership eventually brought him to the head of the party, just as Mussolini's fascist regime was consolidating its power. He was arrested in 1926 and imprisoned at Turi. His confinement, which lasted until shortly before his death, produced some thirty notebooks and around three thousand pages on history, politics, linguistics and culture, now known as the Prison Notebooks. He worked with considerable intellectual independence, though under severe material and health difficulties, and often disguised his ideas in phrases meant to slip past the censors, such as the "philosophy of praxis".

His best-known idea is that of cultural hegemony. For Gramsci, a ruling class does not maintain its power through coercion alone, but by building a common sense accepted by broad sections of society, so that domination appears natural. Against this, he argued that the working class had to develop its own culture and win consent, a view of politics far more subtle than a simple seizure of the state. He distinguished between political society, the coercive apparatus, and civil society, the realm of schools, churches, media and associations where hegemony takes shape. He also developed the notion of the organic intellectual, tied to a social class, and reflected on the party as a "modern Prince", drawing on Machiavelli. His humanist Marxism rejected mechanical economic determinism and saw history as the product of human action.

Gramsci died in Rome in 1937, shortly after being released. His notebooks were published after the Second World War, and his conceptual vocabulary, from hegemony to civil society, has spread through philosophy, sociology, cultural studies and political theory around the world.