Antonio Gramsci 1891 – 1937
Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) was an Italian philosopher of the Contemporary era, associated with Marxism and Critical Theory.
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.
Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891 in Ales, Sardinia, the fourth of seven children in a family of modest means. A childhood injury left him with a permanent spinal deformity. After winning a scholarship he went to the University of Turin in 1911, intending to study linguistics under Matteo Bartoli, but was drawn out of the university by socialist journalism and the factory-council movement of the immediate postwar years.
He helped found the Italian Communist Party in 1921 at Livorno, spent eighteen months in Moscow as a Comintern delegate, returned as parliamentary deputy, and was elected the party's general secretary in 1924. Arrested by the Fascist government in 1926 — the prosecutor declared that the regime must 'stop this brain functioning for twenty years' — he composed in Turi prison the more than thirty Prison Notebooks. He was released for medical reasons days before his death in Rome in 1937.
Gramsci's reflections on cultural hegemony, the war of position, the role of organic intellectuals, the Southern Question, and the relationship between civil society and the state transformed Western Marxism and shaped subsequent traditions of cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and democratic socialism. The Prison Notebooks remain among the most cited works of twentieth-century political thought.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Italian
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Marxism, Critical Theory
Selected quotes
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“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 -
Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
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“All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
Prison Notebooks -
Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is.”
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“To tell the truth is revolutionary.”
Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson , Edinburgh University Student Publications .
Antonio Gramsci by topic
Frequently asked about Antonio Gramsci
- When did Antonio Gramsci live?
- Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891 and died in 1937.
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- Antonio Gramsci was an Italian philosopher of the Contemporary era.
- What philosophical movements is Antonio Gramsci associated with?
- Antonio Gramsci was associated with Marxism and Critical Theory.
- What was Antonio Gramsci known for?
- Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, and a founder of the Italian Communist Party.
- How many quotes are attributed to Antonio Gramsci?
- There are 19 attributed quotations from Antonio Gramsci in the 1001Philosophers collection, organized by topic.
Quotes that are not actually from Antonio Gramsci
These lines are widely circulated as Antonio Gramsci, but they do not appear in Antonio Gramsci's works. Each entry below identifies the actual source.
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“To tell the truth is revolutionary.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: The first number of L'Ordine Nuovo , edited by Gramsci, appeared in 1921 with this motto of Ferdinand Lassalle on the first page. It is often misattributed to Gramsci.
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“The long march through the institutions.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Due to German student movement leader Rudi Dutschke , who coined it in 1967 as „Der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen“. See Strategy, Hegemony & ‘The Long March’: Gramsci’s Lessons for the Antiwar Movement , by Carl Davidson, April 06, 2006. It was popularized in the protests of 1968 , and Dutsch
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“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek , presumably formulation by Žižek (see below). | Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah; strict English with cognate terms and glosses: Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître
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“Due to German student movement leader Rudi Dutschke , who coined it in 1967 as „Der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen“.”
See Strategy, Hegemony & ‘The Long March’: Gramsci’s Lessons for the Antiwar Movement , by Carl Davidson, April 06, 2006. It was popularized in the protests of 1968 , and Dutschke’s posthumous 1980 work is titled Mein langer Marsch ( My long March ). See Marsch durch die Institutionen at German Wikipedia for extensive discussion. A reference to the Long March of the Chinese Communist Red Army in 1934 & 1935; note that Gramsci died in 1937. Various corruptions include “through the culture” or “slow march”.
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“Widely attributed to Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg , the editor of the English critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks asserts that the phrase does not originate with Gramsci.”
Footnote 21, page 50, reads: [“long march through the institutions” 21 ] “This phrase is not Gramsci’s, even though it is ubiquitously attributed to him.” Buttigieg, Joseph A. (2005) . " The Contemporary Discourse on Civil Society: A Gramscian Critique ". boundary 2 32 (1): 33-52. ISSN 0190-3659 . DOI : 10.1215/01903659-32-1-33 . Retrieved on 2010-06-30. The idea is connected with Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony , but does not originate with him – he called the concept a “war of position”.
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“Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah; strict English with cognate terms and glosses:”
Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters. “ Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle ”, Gustave Massiah , CEDETIM , août 2002 ( archive , 2016-03-04) “Mongo Beti, a Black, African, Universal Conscience”, Gustave Massiah , CEDETIM, August 2002 Collected in: Remember Mongo Beti , Ambroise Kom, 2003, p. 149 .
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“Original, with literal English translation (see above):”
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati. 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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“Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”
The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.
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““ Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle ”, Gustave Massiah , CEDETIM , août 2002 ( archive , 2016-03-04)”
“Mongo Beti, a Black, African, Universal Conscience”, Gustave Massiah , CEDETIM, August 2002