Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937)

Antonio Gramsci has been one of the most influential Italian intellectuals and one of the most innovative Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. Uncomfortable with the “vulgar” interpretation of Karl Marx's thought strictly based on economism and later dogmatized by Soviet Communism, Gramsci cofounded the Italian Communist Party in 1921, splitting it by the Socialist Party. He was later arrested by the Fascists. In prison, before dying at the age of forty-six, he wrote the posthumously published Prison Notebooks, where he articulated a number of critical concepts that have proved very fertile over the years, especially in the fields of cultural studies, history and anthropology, and social theory.

Gramsci, however, did not explicitly consider himself a sociologist. Born in the small rural town of Ales, in ...