People

 Antonio Gramsci 1891–1937 - Italy

Italian political leader and theoretician. Originally a member of the Socialist party and a cofounder (1919) of the left-wing paper L’Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci helped to establish (1921) the Italian Communist party. When Benito Mussolini outlawed the party, Gramsci was imprisoned (1926–37). His posthumously published prison writings, Lettere del carcere (1947), present his theory of hegemony, which explains how a dominant class controls society and emphasizes a less dogmatic form of communism that many intellectuals preferred to the increasingly ossified version represented by the former Soviet Union. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2003 Columbia University Press

Encyclopedia Entries

Episteme Links

Columbia Encyclopedia

Gramsci, AntonioEncyclopedia Britannica

Gramsci, Antonio Free Online Dictionary of Philosophy

Questions of 

theory of hegemony, which explains how a dominant class controls society

Italian social philosopher whose Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) (1929-1935) defended a humanistic version of the political philosophy of Marx as an alternative to Italian fascism. Like Croce, Gramsci deplored authoritarian government of every variety and argued that social classes are shaped as much by their characteristic patterns of thought as by their material circumstances.

Reading

Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) (1929-1935)

The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, ed. by David Forgacs and Eric J. Hobsbawm (NYU, 2000);

  Antonio Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings, ed. by Richard Bellamy and Virginia Cox (Cambridge, 1994); 

Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, ed. by Stephen Gill (Cambridge, 1993).

Writing available on the net

Commentaries

Sue Golding, Gramsci's Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy (Toronto, 1992)

Dean Savage

Fondazione Istituto Gramsci

The International Gramsci Society

Quotations

Antonio Gramsci
In history, in social life, nothing is fixed, rigid or definitive. And nothing ever will be.
Selections from Cultural Writings