Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist and politician, born in Ales, Sardinia, in 1891. He co-founded the Italian Communist Party in January 1921 and led it before being arrested by Benito Mussolini's Fascist government in November 1926; he remained imprisoned for most of the rest of his life. During his eleven years in prison he filled more than thirty notebooks with roughly three thousand pages of political and cultural analysis, published after his death as the Prison Notebooks. His best known contribution to social theory is the concept of cultural hegemony, the argument that a ruling class maintains power less through direct coercion than by shaping the cultural institutions, values and common sense a society treats as natural. He died in Rome in 1937.