Antonio Gramsci’s political and philosophical legacy is marked by a series of paradoxes. A politician who was imprisoned by the fascist regime, he became a philosopher almost by necessity, producing much of his most influential work under confinement.
His writings were never organised into a single systematic work. Instead, his ideas are scattered across dozens of prison notebooks and thousands of newspaper articles published during his lifetime. Yet few Italian thinkers of the 20th century had a greater influence on Italian political and cultural life after their death.
Gramsci’s reputation as a major political thinker was shaped largely by Palmiro Togliatti, who helped publish the Prison Notebooks after the Second World War and built much of the Italian Communist Party’s political framework around Gramsci’s ideas.
Only decades later, particularly from the 1980s onwards, did the Italian left begin to distance itself from the Gramscian tradition as the economic and social conditions that had shaped his thinking changed.
A Marxism rooted in history
Gramsci developed his political ideas in Turin before the First World War, where he studied at university despite considerable financial difficulties and encountered figures including Togliatti, Umberto Terracini and Angelo Tasca.
A central element of his intellectual development was his rejection of what he saw as the limitations of the Marxism of the Second International. This version of Marxism was heavily influenced by positivism and tended to view social change as the inevitable result of historical progress.
Gramsci instead looked towards thinkers such as Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile and Georges Sorel. Their influence helped him develop a distinctive approach to Marxism based not on abstract or mechanical principles, but on the concrete historical analysis of social processes and their internal contradictions.
This approach became what could be described as Gramsci’s “concrete philosophy”: a way of thinking that starts with real historical problems rather than abstract categories.
For Gramsci, one of those problems was the incomplete development of modern Italy. He identified two fundamental divisions: between northern and southern Italy, and between the elites and the wider population.
He argued that Italy had failed to create genuine social and economic unity between its regions and that its political elites had struggled to establish a broad cultural and social consensus.
From revolution to hegemony
Gramsci believed that political transformation required more than simply taking control of the state. A successful revolutionary movement also had to establish what he called hegemony.
In Gramscian terms, hegemony describes the ability of a social class to present its own interests as representing society as a whole. This is achieved not only through political or economic power, but also through culture and intellectual influence.
This explains the importance Gramsci attached to intellectuals. He argued that political movements needed intellectuals capable of developing and communicating a coherent interpretation of society.
For the left, this meant developing a political organisation capable of understanding social and historical conditions rather than relying either on passive faith in inevitable progress or on attempts to provoke an immediate revolution.
Gramsci contrasted what he called a “war of movement” with a “war of position”. Rather than seeking a rapid seizure of power, a political movement would gradually establish itself across the institutions and cultural structures of society.
This was also part of Gramsci’s intellectual confrontation with Croce. While Croce interpreted modern history through the development of liberalism, Gramsci sought to develop an alternative historical interpretation centred on social conflict, collective action and the possibility of creating a different political order.
The role of intellectuals
For Gramsci, intellectual work was therefore inseparable from political practice. His concept of the “organic intellectual” referred to intellectuals who emerged from and articulated the worldview of a particular social group.
The Communist Party, in his conception, needed such intellectuals if it was to become more than a small revolutionary organisation. It had to develop the ability to analyse society, understand its contradictions and gradually establish a new cultural and political hegemony.
This framework also allowed Gramsci’s ideas to attract intellectuals who had either supported fascism or become dissatisfied with liberalism and bourgeois democracy. His work offered a way of connecting philosophical reflection with political practice.
Why Gramsci’s influence changed
The Gramscian framework remained particularly influential for the Italian left through much of the post-war period. But from the 1980s onwards, the economic and social structure of Western societies began to change substantially.
One of the central assumptions of Gramsci’s political theory was the existence of a proletariat that could be organised politically through the party. Yet the structure of the working population became increasingly fragmented and individualised, making traditional class identities less clearly defined.
Gramsci had analysed Fordism and American industrial organisation, but he did not live to see the emergence of neoliberalism and the transformations that followed.
As a result, some of the political conclusions associated with his work became increasingly distant from the societies in which later generations of the left operated.
The lasting relevance of Gramsci
What remains particularly significant in Gramsci’s thought is the idea that politics cannot be reduced either to economic interests or to spontaneous emotional mobilisation.
Political movements, in his view, must understand the cultural forms through which people interpret the world, the identities through which they organise themselves and the narratives through which political projects seek broader social legitimacy.
That may be the most enduring paradox of Gramsci: a thinker whose political system was built around a specific historical subject — the industrial working class — left behind a much broader method for understanding how politics, culture and power interact.
His influence ultimately extended far beyond the political circumstances in which his ideas were developed, helping make Gramsci one of the most consequential Italian thinkers of the 20th century.
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