Gramsci Antonio (1891–1937), Italian political leader whose imprisonment by the Fascists for his involvement with the Italian Communist Party had the ironical result of sparing him from Stalinism and enabling him to better articulate his distinctive political philosophy. In 1917 he welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution as a ‘revolution against Capital’ rather than against capitalism: as a revolution refuting the deterministic Marxism according to which socialism could arise only by the gradual evolution of capitalism, and confirming the possibility of the radical transformation of social institutions. In 1921 he supported creation of the Italian Communist Party; as its general secretary from 1924, he tried to reorganize it along more democratic lines. In 1926 the Fascists outlawed all opposition parties. Gramsci spent the rest of his life in various prisons, where he wrote more than a thousand pages of notes ranging from a few lines to chapterlength essays. These Prison Notebooks pose a major interpretive challenge, but they reveal a keen, insightful, and open mind grappling with important social and political problems. The most common interpretation stems from Palmiro Togliatti, Gramsci’s successor as leader of the Italian Communists. After the fall of Fascism and the end of World War II, Togliatti read into Gramsci the so-called Italian road to socialism: a strategy for attaining the traditional Marxist goals of the classless society and the nationalization of the means of production by cultural means, such as education and persuasion. In contrast to Bolshevism, one had to first conquer social institutions, and then their control would yield the desired economic and political changes. This democratic theory of Marxist revolution was long regarded by many as especially relevant to Western industrial societies, and so for this and other reasons Gramsci is a key figure of Western Marxism. The same theory is often called Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, referring to a relationship between two political units where one dominates the other with the consent of that other.
This interpretation was a political reconstruction, based primarily on Gramsci’s Communist involvement and on highly selective passages from the Notebooks. It was also based on exaggerating the influence on Gramsci of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gentile, and minimizing influences like Croce, Mosca, Machiavelli, and Hegel. No new consensus has emerged yet; it would have to be based on analytical and historical spadework barely begun. One main interpretive issue is whether Gramsci, besides questioning the means, was also led to question the ends of traditional Marxism. In one view, his commitment to rational persuasion, political realism, methodological fallibilism, democracy, and pluralism is much deeper than his inclinations toward the classless society, the abolition of private property, the bureaucratically centralized party, and the like; in particular, his pluralism is an aspect of his commitment to the dialectic as a way of thinking, a concept he adapted from Hegel through Croce.
See also MARXISM. M.A.F.