Antonio Gramsci 1891 – 1937
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, and a founder of the Italian Communist Party. Arrested by Mussolini's regime in 1926, he spent the last decade of his life in prison, where he composed the Prison Notebooks, more than three thousand pages of fragmentary writing on politics, philosophy, history, and culture. He developed the concepts of cultural hegemony, organic intellectuals, the war of position, and the historic bloc, transforming twentieth-century Marxist political theory. He died in 1937 from injuries sustained in custody.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Italian
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Marxism, Critical Theory
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“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.”
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Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
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Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
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Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is.”
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Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“To tell the truth is revolutionary.”