Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist and politician, and a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy. [1] Imprisoned by the Fascist regime from 1926 until shortly before his death, he wrote the Prison Notebooks, a body of fragmentary but far-reaching analysis whose concepts, above all cultural hegemony, reshaped twentieth-century political and cultural theory. [2]
Early life and education
Gramsci was born on 22 January 1891 in Ales, on the island of Sardinia, into a family of modest means. [1] A childhood spinal condition left him with a permanent physical disability and lifelong poor health. He studied at the Dettori lyceum in Cagliari and in 1911 won a scholarship to the University of Turin, where he read linguistics and literature and encountered the industrial working class of one of Italy's main manufacturing cities. Financial hardship and illness prevented him from completing his degree. [3]
Journalism and political activity
In Turin, Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party and became a journalist, writing theatre criticism and political commentary for socialist publications including Avanti! [1] In 1919 he co-founded the weekly L'Ordine Nuovo, which became the intellectual centre of the factory council movement during the wave of worker occupations known as the Biennio Rosso. He argued that the councils were the embryonic institutions of a new workers' state.
In 1921 he was among the founders of the Communist Party of Italy, formed by a split from the Socialist Party, and he spent time in Moscow as a representative to the Communist International. He was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1924 and became the party's leader. [3]
Imprisonment and the Prison Notebooks
Despite parliamentary immunity, Gramsci was arrested in November 1926 under Benito Mussolini's Fascist government and sentenced to a long prison term; the prosecutor is traditionally reported to have demanded that his brain be stopped from functioning. [1] In captivity he filled some thirty notebooks with analysis of history, politics, culture and Italian society.
The Prison Notebooks developed the idea of hegemony: the argument that a dominant class rules not only through coercion but by establishing its worldview as common sense across civil society, in schools, churches, media and everyday culture. [2] Related concepts include the distinction between a war of manoeuvre and a war of position, the role of the organic intellectual arising from within a social class, and a critique of economic determinism in Marxist thought. Gramsci's health collapsed in prison; released in a gravely weakened state, he died in Rome on 27 April 1937. [1]
Legacy
The notebooks and his prison letters were published after the Second World War, the letters receiving the Viareggio Prize. [1] Translated widely from the 1970s onward, Gramsci's writing became foundational for cultural studies, post-Marxist political theory, subaltern studies and analyses of ideology in the social sciences. [4]
