All Thinkers

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, and political organiser. He was born in Sardinia, the island off the coast of Italy, into a poor family and grew up in significant poverty. He won a scholarship to the University of Turin, where he became involved in socialist politics. He was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and became its leader. When Mussolini's fascist government came to power, Gramsci was arrested in 1926 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The fascist prosecutor famously said at his trial: we must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years. The effort failed. In prison, Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks, a collection of philosophical and political reflections covering more than three thousand pages, which he smuggled out in fragments and which were published after his death. He died in prison in 1937, aged 46, his health destroyed by years of harsh imprisonment. The Prison Notebooks were eventually published in the 1950s and became one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century.

Origin
Italy, Southern Europe
Lifespan
1891-1937
Era
20th century
Subjects
Political Philosophy Marxism Cultural Theory Hegemony Italian Thought
Skills
Civic Media And Democracy Critical Literacy Citizenship Media Literacy Critical Thinking
Why They Matter

Gramsci matters because he developed one of the most important tools for understanding how power works in modern societies: the concept of hegemony. He showed that dominant groups maintain their power not primarily through force, though force is always in the background, but through the more subtle and more effective means of making their worldview seem like common sense. When people accept the values, assumptions, and ways of thinking of the powerful as natural, obvious, and simply the way things are, they are living inside a hegemony. Recognising hegemony, naming it, and developing alternative ways of thinking, is a form of political resistance. Gramsci also developed the concept of the organic intellectual: the person who emerges from and remains accountable to their community, helping that community understand its situation and develop the intellectual tools it needs to change it. This concept remains essential for thinking about the role of education, media, and culture in political life.

Key Ideas
1
Hegemony: power through ideas
Hegemony is Gramsci's most important concept. It refers to the way in which dominant groups maintain their power not primarily through force but through the more subtle means of making their values, assumptions, and ways of thinking seem like common sense. When ordinary people accept the worldview of the powerful as natural and obvious, they are living inside a hegemony. For example: if workers accept that the existing economic system is natural and just, that there is no alternative, they are less likely to challenge it even when it works against their interests. Hegemony is more effective than force because people who have internalised a worldview do not need to be compelled from outside.
2
Common sense: ideology without knowing it
Gramsci distinguished between philosophy, which is conscious and systematic thinking, and common sense, which is the set of fragmented, often contradictory assumptions and beliefs that people hold without examining them. Common sense is the terrain on which hegemony operates: the ideas of the powerful become part of common sense, absorbed into the unexamined background assumptions of everyday life. Gramsci argued that one of the most important tasks of progressive politics is to examine, criticise, and transform common sense, replacing inherited assumptions with more coherent and more accurate ways of understanding the world.
3
The organic intellectual
Gramsci distinguished between traditional intellectuals, who see themselves as independent of any particular class or group and who typically serve the existing order, and organic intellectuals, who emerge from a particular social group and remain connected to and accountable to that group. Every social class, Gramsci argued, produces its own organic intellectuals: people who help the class understand its situation, articulate its interests, and develop the culture and political philosophy it needs to act in the world. He believed that the working class and other oppressed groups needed their own organic intellectuals to help them develop the intellectual tools to challenge hegemony.
Key Quotations
"All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals."
— Prison Notebooks
Gramsci is challenging the idea that intellectual work is something only certain specially gifted or educated people can do. Every person uses their intellect in their daily work and life: a craftsperson applies knowledge, judgment, and skill; a farmer understands soil, weather, and plant behaviour; a parent makes complex decisions about children's needs. The difference between intellectuals and non-intellectuals in the social sense is not capacity but function: some people are paid and socially recognised to do intellectual work, while others do it without recognition. This democratisation of intellectual capacity is the foundation of his concept of the organic intellectual.
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
— Prison Notebooks
This is one of Gramsci's most quoted observations, and it describes a particular kind of political and cultural crisis. The old hegemony is losing its grip: the values and assumptions that used to seem obviously true no longer command universal assent. But no new hegemony has yet consolidated itself to replace the old one. In this period of uncertainty and instability, strange and dangerous things emerge: political movements that exploit the uncertainty without resolving it, violence, conspiracy theories, and authoritarian temptations. Gramsci wrote this in the context of the rise of fascism in Italy, but the observation has been applied to many other moments of political crisis.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Media Literacy When introducing how media shapes what seems normal and obvious
How to introduce
Ask: where do your beliefs about what is normal, fair, and possible come from? After discussion, introduce Gramsci's concept of hegemony: the ideas of powerful groups become part of common sense, absorbed into what everyone assumes to be obvious and natural. Ask: can you think of something that most people in your society accept as normal or inevitable that might actually be the result of specific political and economic choices? How would you recognise a hegemonic assumption? What would make you question something you currently take for granted?
Citizenship When discussing what kinds of change are possible and how they happen
How to introduce
Introduce Gramsci's distinction between the war of manoeuvre and the war of position. Ask: if you wanted to change something fundamental about your society, what strategy would you use? Direct confrontation with existing institutions? Or the slower work of changing how people think, building alternative institutions, and gradually shifting what seems possible? Ask: can you think of examples of each kind of strategy in recent history? Which has been more effective?
Further Reading

The best starting point is a short introduction to Gramsci's key concepts rather than the Prison Notebooks themselves, which are dense and fragmentary.

Roger Simon's Gramsci's Political Thought

An Introduction (1991, Lawrence and Wishart) is the most accessible introduction.

For a biographical account

Giuseppe Fiori's Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (1970, Schocken) is engaging and readable. The concept of hegemony is explained clearly in Stuart Hall's essay Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, freely available online.

Key Ideas
1
War of position and war of manoeuvre
Gramsci distinguished between two strategies for political change. The war of manoeuvre, like a frontal military attack, tries to seize power directly: through strikes, insurrections, or political coups. The war of position, like a long campaign that gradually builds strength and changes the cultural terrain, tries to build hegemony gradually, changing how people think about society, developing alternative institutions and culture, and slowly shifting the common sense of the population. Gramsci argued that in modern Western societies, where civil society is complex and the ruling class has deep cultural roots, the war of position is more important than the war of manoeuvre.
2
Civil society and political society
Gramsci distinguished between political society, the state and its coercive institutions, and civil society, the network of voluntary associations, cultural institutions, media, churches, schools, and organisations through which a society produces its culture and its common sense. He argued that in modern societies, hegemony operates primarily through civil society rather than through the state: schools, churches, media, and cultural institutions are more important than police and armies in maintaining the existing order. This is why cultural and intellectual work matters politically: it is in civil society that hegemony is constructed and where it can be challenged.
3
Counter-hegemony: building an alternative
Gramsci argued that challenging an existing hegemony requires building a counter-hegemony: an alternative set of values, assumptions, and ways of understanding the world that can gradually replace the common sense of the dominant group. This is a cultural and intellectual project as much as a political one. It requires developing alternative media, educational institutions, cultural productions, and intellectual traditions that embody and spread a different worldview. The goal is not simply to criticise the existing hegemony but to construct an alternative that can become the new common sense of a different kind of society.
Key Quotations
"The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is knowing thyself as a product of the historical process to date."
— Prison Notebooks
Gramsci is arguing that genuine critical thinking begins with self-knowledge, and that self-knowledge means understanding yourself as the product of history. The values, assumptions, and ways of thinking you hold did not come from nowhere: they came from your upbringing, your culture, your historical moment, and the hegemonic ideas that shaped all of these. To think critically, you must first understand how you came to think the way you do. This is uncomfortable because it reveals that much of what seems natural and obvious to you is actually the product of specific historical and social processes.
"Educate yourself, because we will need all our intelligence. Agitate, because we will need all our enthusiasm. Organise yourself, because we will need all our strength."
— Speech, L'Ordine Nuovo, 1919
This formulation from Gramsci's early journalism connects interestingly to Ambedkar's nearly identical formula of Educate, Agitate, Organise. Two thinkers in completely different contexts, working within different traditions, arrived at the same three-part programme for political change. The parallel is not coincidental: both understood that political change requires intellectual preparation, active engagement, and collective organisation, and that all three are necessary. The order matters for both: education, understanding, must come first.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Critical Literacy When examining how texts and media produce common sense
How to introduce
Introduce Gramsci's concept of civil society as the site where hegemony is produced: schools, media, churches, and cultural institutions shape the common sense of a population. Ask: take a piece of media, a news story, an advertisement, a film, and identify the assumptions it takes for granted. What does it treat as obvious and natural? Whose interests are served by these assumptions being treated as common sense? What would the same story look like if different assumptions were taken for granted?
Civic Media and Democracy When discussing media ownership and the politics of information
How to introduce
Introduce Gramsci's analysis of media as a site of hegemonic struggle. Ask: who owns the main media outlets in your country? What values and assumptions are treated as obvious and natural in mainstream media coverage? What perspectives are marginalised or excluded? Connect to the broader question: in a democracy, does it matter who owns the media? What would a genuinely democratic media landscape look like?
Research Skills When examining how to think critically about your own assumptions
How to introduce
Introduce Gramsci's argument that critical thinking must begin with examining the assumptions you hold. Ask: what are three things you believe about society, politics, or human nature that you have never questioned? Where did these beliefs come from? Can you identify the historical and cultural processes that produced them? This is Gramsci's starting point for critical elaboration: knowing yourself as a product of history is the beginning of genuine independent thought.
Further Reading

Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971, International Publishers), is the standard English translation and is more manageable than the complete notebooks. For the contemporary relevance of hegemony: Stuart Hall's The Hard Road to Renewal (1988, Verso) applies Gramscian analysis to Thatcherite Britain in ways that illuminate the concept clearly. Chantal Mouffe's edited collection Gramsci and Marxist Theory (1979, Routledge) provides the most rigorous scholarly assessment of his contributions.

Key Ideas
1
The pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will
This phrase, which Gramsci took from the French writer Romain Rolland, became one of his most famous formulations. By pessimism of the intellect he means: look clearly at how difficult the situation is, how deep the roots of the existing order are, how far we are from achieving genuine change. Do not deceive yourself about the obstacles. By optimism of the will he means: despite this clear-eyed assessment of the difficulty, act as if change is possible and necessary. The combination of intellectual rigour and practical commitment is the disposition Gramsci believed was required for genuine political engagement.
2
The Southern Question and uneven development
Long before he wrote the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci wrote on what he called the Southern Question: the relationship between the industrialised, relatively prosperous north of Italy and the agricultural, relatively poor south. He argued that this regional inequality was not accidental or the product of natural differences: it was the product of specific historical and economic processes that had developed the north at the expense of the south. This analysis of uneven development within a single nation anticipates later theories of core and periphery in global development. Gramsci argued that any genuine transformation of Italian society had to address the southern question rather than treating it as a secondary problem.
3
Hegemony and the media
Although Gramsci wrote before television, the internet, and social media, his analysis of how the media functions as a site of hegemonic struggle has proven extraordinarily relevant. The media, in Gramsci's framework, is one of the primary institutions of civil society through which common sense is produced and reproduced. Who controls the media, what values and assumptions are treated as obvious and natural in media coverage, and what perspectives are marginalised or excluded: these are not merely commercial or technical questions but political ones, central to the ongoing struggle over which worldview will become and remain hegemonic.
Key Quotations
"Hegemony is born in the factory but exercises its power beyond it."
— Prison Notebooks
Gramsci is making an important point about how hegemony is produced and where it operates. The economic relationships of production, who owns the factory, who labours in it, what the terms of that relationship are, shape the fundamental power relationships of a society. But hegemony does not stay confined to the factory: it spreads through culture, media, education, religion, and everyday life. The economic base generates ideas and cultural forms that then take on a life of their own, shaping common sense in ways that reach far beyond their economic origins.
"Every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship."
— Prison Notebooks
Gramsci is making a profound observation about the connection between power and education. Hegemony works by teaching people to see the world in certain ways: to regard certain arrangements as natural, certain values as obvious, and certain possibilities as unthinkable. Education, in the broadest sense, including formal schooling, media, religious institutions, and cultural life, is the primary mechanism through which hegemony is reproduced. This means that education is always also a political act: it either reproduces the existing hegemony or, if it teaches genuine critical thinking, begins to challenge it. This connects directly to Freire's critique of the banking model of education.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining how culture serves political functions
How to introduce
Introduce Gramsci's concept of civil society as the site where hegemony is produced and reproduced. Ask: what cultural institutions in your society, education, religion, media, arts, sports, help maintain the existing social order by making it seem natural? This is not a conspiracy theory: most people who work in these institutions do not consciously intend to serve the interests of the powerful. They simply reproduce the common sense they have themselves absorbed. Ask: what would a counter-hegemonic culture look like? What alternative institutions and cultural forms would be needed?
Global Studies When examining how hegemony operates at a global level
How to introduce
Extend Gramsci's analysis from the national to the global level. Ask: is there a global hegemony? What values, assumptions, and ways of organising economic and political life have become the global common sense? Whose interests does this global common sense serve? Connect to the work of Fanon (colonial hegemony), Ngugi (cultural hegemony in postcolonial Africa), and Freire (hegemony in education). Ask: what would a genuine global counter-hegemony look like?
Common Misconceptions
Common misconception

Gramsci's concept of hegemony means that everything is controlled by a secret conspiracy of the powerful.

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What to teach instead

Gramsci's hegemony is almost the opposite of a conspiracy. A conspiracy requires active coordination and intention. Hegemony works precisely because it does not require either: it operates through the uncoordinated actions of thousands of people who have genuinely internalised a particular worldview and reproduce it naturally in their daily work and life. A teacher who has absorbed certain assumptions about what is normal and natural teaches those assumptions without realising it. A journalist who shares the common sense of their class reproduces it without intending to. Hegemony is effective because it does not feel like power: it feels like common sense.

Common misconception

Gramsci believed that culture and ideas are just reflections of economic interests.

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What to teach instead

This was actually the view that Gramsci was arguing against within Marxist thought. Orthodox Marxism held that economic base determines cultural superstructure: culture, ideas, and institutions simply reflect the underlying economic interests of the dominant class. Gramsci argued that this was too simple: ideas and culture have their own relative independence and can, in turn, shape economic and political reality. This is why the war of position, the struggle for cultural and ideological hegemony, matters: it is not simply a reflection of economic power but a form of power in its own right.

Common misconception

Gramsci's ideas are only relevant to European or Western political contexts.

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What to teach instead

Gramsci's concepts of hegemony, organic intellectuals, and counter-hegemony have been applied across many different contexts worldwide. Postcolonial thinkers including Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha have applied hegemony to the analysis of colonial and postcolonial power. Latin American liberation theologians drew on Gramsci in developing their analysis of poverty and cultural power. Feminist scholars have applied hegemony to the analysis of gender. His framework has proven valuable wherever the question is how dominant groups maintain power through cultural means.

Common misconception

Gramsci believed that ordinary people are passive victims of hegemony who cannot think for themselves.

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What to teach instead

Gramsci had a deep respect for the intellectual capacity of ordinary people, as his statement that all people are intellectuals makes clear. He was interested in organic intellectuals precisely because he believed that oppressed groups could and did produce their own thinkers and their own cultures. His concept of common sense acknowledges that people hold complex, often contradictory mixtures of hegemonic and potentially counter-hegemonic ideas. The work of political and cultural change, in his view, is to develop and extend the critical elements that already exist in ordinary people's thinking, not to introduce consciousness from outside.

Intellectual Connections
In Dialogue With
Paulo Freire
Gramsci and Freire are two of the most important thinkers in the tradition of critical pedagogy: the argument that education is always political, that it either reproduces the existing social order or helps people develop the critical consciousness to challenge it. Freire's banking model of education is a description of hegemonic education in Gramsci's sense. Both argue that genuine education must help people develop the intellectual tools to understand and change their situation rather than to accept it as natural and inevitable.
In Dialogue With
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Ngugi's concept of the colonisation of the mind is a specific application of Gramscian hegemony to the colonial context: the colonised person who has internalised the superiority of the coloniser's language and culture is living inside a hegemony that was constructed through the institutions of colonial civil society, above all the school. Ngugi's project of decolonising the mind is a counter-hegemonic project in Gramsci's sense: building an alternative cultural foundation from within African intellectual traditions.
In Dialogue With
Frantz Fanon
Both Gramsci and Fanon analyse how power maintains itself through cultural and psychological means as well as through force. Fanon's analysis of the psychological damage of colonialism, how the colonised internalise the values and self-image of the coloniser, is a description of colonial hegemony operating at the deepest psychological level. Both thinkers argue that liberation requires a cultural and psychological transformation, not only a political and economic one.
Complements
Hannah Arendt
Both Gramsci and Arendt are concerned with how power operates through cultural and ideological means rather than only through force. Gramsci analyses hegemony: how dominant groups make their worldview seem like common sense. Arendt analyses the destruction of independent thinking in totalitarian systems. Both see the cultivation of genuine thinking and the maintenance of a genuine public sphere as essential to political freedom. Their analyses are complementary: Gramsci focuses more on class and cultural power; Arendt on political freedom and the public realm.
In Dialogue With
B.R. Ambedkar
Both Gramsci and Ambedkar analyse how ideological and cultural mechanisms maintain systems of inequality, and both develop the concept of the organic intellectual: the person who emerges from and serves their own oppressed community. Ambedkar's motto Educate, Agitate, Organise closely parallels Gramsci's own formulation. Both thinkers also identify a key obstacle to liberation: the internalisation of the dominant ideology by those it oppresses, whether as caste hierarchy in India or as capitalist common sense in Italy.
In Dialogue With
bell hooks
Bell hooks drew on Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and organic intellectuals in developing her intersectional feminist cultural criticism. Her concept of the margin and the centre echoes Gramsci's analysis of dominant and subordinate cultures. Her emphasis on the importance of cultural production by and for oppressed communities as a form of political resistance is a feminist and anti-racist application of Gramscian counter-hegemony.
Further Reading

The complete Prison Notebooks in the Columbia University Press translation (3 volumes) is the primary text for advanced study.

For postcolonial applications

Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994, Routledge) draws on Gramsci in developing postcolonial cultural theory.

For feminist applications

Christine Buci-Glucksmann's Gramsci and the State (1980) develops a feminist reading of Gramsci.

For contemporary relevance

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985, Verso) is the most important theoretical development of Gramsci's ideas in the late twentieth century.