Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales, Sardinia, and studied at the University of Turin, where he joined the Socialist Party and wrote as a journalist. In 1919 he co-founded the weekly L'Ordine Nuovo, which promoted workers' factory councils, and in 1921 he helped found the Communist Party of Italy, later becoming its leader and a deputy in parliament. Arrested by the Fascist government in 1926, he spent the rest of his life in prison or under guard, filling about thirty notebooks with reflections on politics, culture and history. He died in Rome in 1937.

Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, published after the Second World War, made him one of the most cited Marxist thinkers. His ideas shaped the postwar Italian Communist Party, the Eurocommunist turn toward parliamentary politics, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, and are used by scholars across the political spectrum to analyze consent and power. Orthodox Marxist-Leninists criticized readings of Gramsci that downplay revolution and party discipline. Some conservative commentators cite him as a source of left-wing strategies to influence education, media and culture, a reading many Gramsci scholars dispute. Liberal critics note his loyalty to a Leninist party during the early Soviet period. His prison letters, published after the war, are also widely read as literature, and his long imprisonment made him a symbol of opposition to Fascism.