Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Francesco Gramsci lived from 22 January 1891 to 27 April 1937 and was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist and politician, a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party and a vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism who was imprisoned in 1926 and remained in prison until shortly before his death in 1937. During his imprisonment he wrote more than thirty notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis, his Prison Notebooks a highly original contribution to twentieth century political theory drawing on thinkers from Niccolo Machiavelli and Vilfredo Pareto to Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Hegel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Georges Sorel and Benedetto Croce, and covering topics including Italian nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, the state, historical materialism, folklore, religion and popular culture. He is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, describing how the state and the bourgeoisie use cultural institutions rather than violence or coercion to maintain wealth and power in capitalist societies, and for attempting to break from the economic determinism of orthodox Marxist thought, holding a humanistic understanding of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis and an absolute historicism transcending traditional materialism and idealism, for which he is sometimes described as a neo-Marxist.