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 Sardinia, to small-bourgeois parents, he soon realized that his delicate constitution was arguably counterbalanced by his intellectual curiosity and will to learn. Humpbacked since the age of four, he won a scholarship at the University of Turin, where he focused on linguistics. Immediately involved in politics, he dropped out of the university to pursue a career as a literary critic and, above all, political columnist and agitator. Between 1917 and 1920, he firmly supported the Russian Revolution, conceiving it as a movement aimed at focusing on, emphasizing, and defending the cognitive and material interests of the working classes, whose mass actions could eventually give them the power to change the existing social order. The concrete effects of his thoughts in that historical period were exemplified in his collaboration with Palmiro Togliatti and other Italian neo-Marxists who aimed to mobilize and give voice to, in particular, factory workers in northern Italy. After the foundation of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci went to work at the Communist International in Moscow and returned to Italy only in 1924 to be in charge of the party and to found the Italian newspaper L'Unità (The Unity), which is still in circulation today. With the drastic advent of Fascism, Gramsci and other party leaders were incarcerated in 1928. In prison, he started studying and articulating his critical thoughts by collecting fragmentary notes on a daily basis since 1929, and when he died for prison-exacerbated fragile physical conditions and increased illnesses, he had twenty-nine notebooks, which were posthumously published by Einaudi (Turin) in 1949 and later translated into many languages worldwide.

Notwithstanding the unquestionable lack of an organic conceptual synthesis, these notebooks have represented a highly influential intellectual source for a variety of scholars in the social sciences and cultural studies. Much of their success is related to the concept of hegemony, through which Gramsci aimed to explain the economic underdevelopment of southern Italy and the failure of the project of a working-class revolution in Italy. Gramsci identified in the moral and civic—that is, exquisitely cultural, not merely economic—dominance of the industrial and rural bourgeoisie the conformism (and lack of revolutionary impulses) of the subaltern class. By offering an insightful explanatory model of the power-making dynamics of the dominant class and by articulating in great details the crucial political role of intellectuals in unveiling them and therefore to “speak for” the(ir) lower classes, Gramsci unconsciously opened up a [Page 688]whole stream of research and critical thought on the relationships between society and culture. His theoretical reflections turned out to be particularly fitting and fertile in the analyses of the modern societies, where the institutions of the state and civil society are highly structured and complexly interweaved, where the consensus of the popular masses is crucially necessary to rule, and where any wide social reform requires a process of both symbolic and material struggle. Over the years, Gramsci's intellectual influence, particularly but not exclusively related to his elaboration of the concept of cultural hegemony, has arguably been mostly evident in the field of British (sometimes explicitly called “Gramscian”) cultural studies (as explicitly recognized by Stuart Hall) and, more recently, of (Indian) subaltern studies.

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