Antonio Gramsci Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

By developing a critical consciousness and engaging in political struggle, the organic intellectual can help to challenge the dominant culture and create alternative ways of thinking and acting. The subordinate class, for example, may resist the dominant culture by creating their own counter-culture, which challenges the values and beliefs of the ruling class. Rather, it involves the consent of the subordinate class, who come to accept the values and beliefs of the ruling class as their own. The ruling class does this by creating a dominant culture that promotes its values, beliefs, and interests as if they are natural and universal. According to Gramsci, the ruling class uses its control over institutions such as the media, education, and the legal system to promote its own interests and worldview. In their view, various hegemonic formations co-exist, and aradical democratic politics does not require working classleadership.

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• He wrote storiesfor his young sons and reminisced about his own childhood in Sardinia.Initially, with other party members in the prison, he took part inreading groups and political conversations.
• To await trial Gramsci was transferred from Rome, via Naples andSicily, to the island of Ustica, where he was confined in a privatehouse with other communists (including Bordiga).
• But nowhe presented the party as the vehicle of a “total and integralconception of the world” that, in advance of the revolutionitself, would organize across civil society.
• In theNotebooks he was further suggesting that hegemony described ageneral condition applicable to both bourgeois and proletarian formsof rule.

🔍 To see how Gramsci fits within the broader Marxist tradition, visit the Marxist Theory page for a structured overview of classical and neo-Marxist thought. npvip It is true that many members of the working classes see through bourgeois ideology, for example the lads in Paul Willis’ study realised that education was not fair. Even though factors such as mass unemployment and falling wages may create the preconditions for revolution, ideas play a central role in determining whether or not change will actually occur.

Introduction to Philosophy of the Human Person

This idea—with its potential for variation in empirical focusand application—was developed across different notes and topics,sometimes as a methodological device to analyze historical situations,at other times alongside different concepts to make strategicobservations. But it hadalso been employed by Italian political thinkers in the nineteenthcentury to imagine gradually building consent across the nation forthe new state—“making Italians”—rather thanrelying exclusively on the exercise of force. The unplannedinterruption brought by his arrest and imprisonment permitted him toexplore many of these issues in much greater depth. Although hebelieved it unlikely in the short term, Gramsci argued the PCd’Ineeded to develop its own supporting intellectuals if it was toundertake an inclusive national strategy to overcome the agrarianbloc. Croce, especially, hadperformed a “national function” by endorsing liberalism,helping to prevent radical southern intellectuals from joining withpeasants in opposition to the conservative agrarian bloc.

He noted the influence of southernintellectuals, such as Benedetto Croce and Giustino Fortunato, inideologically legitimating the liberal regime. Economic crises did not lead automatically to political instabilitybecause forces could be found to support the regime. Gramsci now began tounderline the view that the received model of revolution—aviolent seizure of power in the midst of a catastrophiccrisis—needed to be adapted to conditions that had not appliedin Russia. These topics werecentral points of reference in Gramsci’s mature thinking abouthegemony in the Notebooks.

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4 Ideology and Common Sense

Marxistsociologists such as Nicos Poulantzas (1968 ) and, later, BobJessop (1990) found in hegemony a resource to explore the permutationsof the capitalist state and its shifting class coalitions. Through the late 1960s and 70s, as western states experienced economicand ideological crises, Gramsci’s analyses were appliedseparately from communist strategy or philosophical idealism. This endorsedTogliatti’s own view of the PCI as a pragmatic, mass-based partypursuing its own “Italian road to socialism”; operating asa “collective intellectual” to mobilize the proletariatand its allies in a uniquely national and democratic project (seeTogliatti 1979). The initial reception of Gramsci’s writings was shaped by theItalian Communist Party (Partito comunista italiano, or PCI),particularly by its leader since the mid-1920s, Palmiro Togliatti, whoemphasized their significance for a renewed communist strategy.