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Thinkers

Antonio Gramsci

Marxist · Europe · 1891 to 1937

Italian Marxist who held that rulers keep power by shaping common sense, and who wrote his notebooks in prison.

What it is

Antonio Gramsci (1891 to 1937) was an Italian Marxist, journalist and political leader. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party and a sharp critic of Mussolini. He was arrested in 1926, and while in prison he wrote the Prison Notebooks, more than thirty notebooks and some three thousand pages of history and analysis.

Born in Ales on the island of Sardinia, he studied at the University of Turin and worked as a journalist and organiser. He was not a professional philosopher, but he became one of the most influential theorists of how power works in modern capitalist societies. He died in 1937, shortly after he was released from prison.

The main ideas

  • Hegemony. Gramsci held that a ruling class does not govern only by force. It aims for consensual domination, by spreading its leadership and its way of seeing across society, so that its rule seems natural.
  • State and civil society. In developed countries, he argued, rule rests on winning agreement through schools, churches, newspapers and other institutions of civil society. Force stays in reserve for moments of crisis, when consent fails.
  • Who counts as an intellectual. He widened the word to cover anyone whose social job is to communicate with and educate others, such as technicians, managers and officials, not only scholars and artists.
  • Organic and traditional intellectuals. Organic intellectuals grow out of a particular class and give its way of working a general voice. Traditional ones, such as philosophers or clergy, carry prestige from an older age.
  • Thought and action. For Gramsci, ideas are never separate from the struggle to shape society, and all inquiry is tied up in the making of a way of life.
  • Revolution in his own time. Most of his writings assess the immediate political situation and the prospects for revolution in Italy between the world wars.

What it looks like in practice

Think of how a certain view of what is normal, such as how a successful person looks and works, spreads through films, schools and workplaces without anyone ordering it. Gramsci would ask whose interests that picture serves and how it keeps people consenting to it, even when it does not help them. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The Prison Notebooks, written in prison in more than thirty notebooks, are his main work.
  • His articles from before prison, on culture, factories and party strategy, are collected in several volumes.

Questions and criticism

  • Not a systematic philosopher. Most of his writings assess the political situation of the day, and the Notebooks were written in prison, under censorship and in fragments.
  • What counts as consent? If rule works through consent, it is fair to ask how to tell real agreement from habit or pressure.
  • A flexible concept. Hegemony has been applied to many cases, and it is fair to ask whether it explains everything or too much.

Close neighbours

Karl Marx is the thinker he set out to apply and adapt, and neo-Hegelian philosophy shaped his early writing. The page on Georg Lukács shows another founder of Western Marxism.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Edward Said · He took up Gramsci's idea of cultural leadership to explain how views of the East were spread.

Influenced by

  • Karl Marx · He reworked Marx's thought around culture, ideas and the winning of consent.

Other Marxist thinkers

Sources we used

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