{"history":[],"article":{"id":"1d7606a0-ee88-4895-8d66-02ae3d12ec76","title":"Prison Notebooks","slug":"prison-notebooks","content":":::summary\n![Exhibition of the Quaderni del carcere, Sardinia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Antonio///Gramsci///-///Quaderni%2C///1929-1935.jpg)\n**Name:** Prison Notebooks \n**Author:** Antonio Gramsci \n**Country:** Italy \n**Language:** Italian \n**Pub Date:** 1929 \n**English Pub Date:** 1971 \n**Isbn:** 9780717802708 \n**Oclc:** 6991462 \n:::\n\n# \nThe **Prison Notebooks** are a series of [essays](https://bliptext.com/articles/essay) written by the Italian [Marxist](https://bliptext.com/articles/marxism) [Antonio Gramsci](https://bliptext.com/articles/antonio-gramsci).\nGramsci was imprisoned by the Italian [Fascist](https://bliptext.com/articles/fascist) regime in 1926.\nThe notebooks were written between 1929 and 1935, when Gramsci was released from prison to a medical center on grounds of ill-health.\nHis friend, [Piero Sraffa](https://bliptext.com/articles/piero-sraffa), had supplied the writing implements and notebooks.\nGramsci died in April 1937.\nGramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment.\nThe original Prison Notebooks are kept at the Fondazione Gramsci in [Rome](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome).\nThese notebooks were initially smuggled out of prison, catalogued by Gramsci's sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, and sent to [Moscow](https://bliptext.com/articles/moscow) for safekeeping.\nThey were returned to Italy after World War II and have since been preserved by the Gramsci Foundation.\nAlthough written unsystematically, the Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th century [political theory](https://bliptext.com/articles/political-theory).\nGramsci drew insights from varying sources – not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as [Niccolò Machiavelli](https://bliptext.com/articles/niccol-machiavelli), [Vilfredo Pareto](https://bliptext.com/articles/vilfredo-pareto), [Georges Sorel](https://bliptext.com/articles/georges-sorel) and [Benedetto Croce](https://bliptext.com/articles/benedetto-croce).\nHis notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including [Italian history](https://bliptext.com/articles/history-of-italy) and [nationalism](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-nationalism), [the French Revolution](https://bliptext.com/articles/the-french-revolution), [Fascism](https://bliptext.com/articles/fascism), [Taylorism](https://bliptext.com/articles/taylorism) and [Fordism](https://bliptext.com/articles/fordism), [civil society](https://bliptext.com/articles/civil-society), [folklore](https://bliptext.com/articles/folklore), [religion](https://bliptext.com/articles/religion) and [high](https://bliptext.com/articles/high-culture) and [popular culture](https://bliptext.com/articles/popular-culture).\nSmuggled out of the prison in the 1930s, the first edition was published in 1947 and won the [Viareggio Prize](https://bliptext.com/articles/viareggio-prize) a few months later.\nGramsci's posthumous award of the Viareggio Prize was followed by a memorial from the [Constituent Assembly of Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/constituent-assembly-of-italy) on April 28, 1947.\nThe first translation into English was printed in the 1970s, by the Scottish poet and folklorist [Hamish Henderson](https://bliptext.com/articles/hamish-henderson).\nIdeas in [Marxist theory](https://bliptext.com/articles/marxist-theory), [critical theory](https://bliptext.com/articles/critical-theory) and educational theory that are associated with Gramsci's name include:\n# [Antonio Gramsci, depicted in 1922 | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Gramsci///1922.jpg]\n\n# Background\nA supposed assassination attempt on [Benito Mussolini's](https://bliptext.com/articles/benito-mussolini) life on 31 October 1926, on 8 November led to the establishment of secret police powers under Mussolini's regime.\nThese powers were used to arrest Gramsci, in spite of his [parliamentary immunity](https://bliptext.com/articles/parliamentary-immunity).\nFollowing a [show trial](https://bliptext.com/articles/show-trial) in May 1928, Gramsci was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.\nFollowing his trial, Gramsci was brought to a prison in [Turi](https://bliptext.com/articles/turi-apulia), where he spent the first five years of his sentence and began writing the Prison Notebooks in February 1929.\nBy this time, his health had started to decline.\nWhen his health permitted, Gramsci spent much of his time in prison reading Marxist texts and commentary on them, though access to these texts was censored by the prison.\nHe wrote extensively during this period, filling his notebooks with small handwriting.\n\n# Concepts\n\n## Hegemony\n[Hegemony](https://bliptext.com/articles/hegemony) was a concept previously used by Marxists such as [Vladimir Ilyich Lenin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-ilyich-lenin) to indicate the political leadership of the [working-class](https://bliptext.com/articles/working-class) in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the 'inevitable' [socialist](https://bliptext.com/articles/socialist) revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century.\nCapitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever.\nCapitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also [ideologically](https://bliptext.com/articles/ideology), through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the [bourgeoisie](https://bliptext.com/articles/bourgeoisie) became the '[common sense](https://bliptext.com/articles/common-sense)' values of all.\nThus a consensus culture developed in which people in the [working-class](https://bliptext.com/articles/working-class) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.\nThe working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat.\nLenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that [cultural hegemony](https://bliptext.com/articles/cultural-hegemony) be achieved first.\nIn Gramsci's view, any class that wishes to dominate in modern conditions has to move beyond its own narrow ‘economic-corporate’ interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership, and to make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces.\nGramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’, taking a term from [Georges Sorel](https://bliptext.com/articles/georges-sorel).\nThis bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, [social relations](https://bliptext.com/articles/social-relations) and ideas.\nIn this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the [superstructure](https://bliptext.com/articles/[base](https://bliptext.com/articles/base-politics)-and-superstructure) in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the [base](https://bliptext.com/articles/base-politics).\nGramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to religion, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values.\nHe was impressed by the power [Roman Catholicism](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-catholicism) had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated.\nGramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in [Renaissance humanism](https://bliptext.com/articles/renaissance-humanism) to the elements of the [Reformation](https://bliptext.com/articles/protestant-reformation) that had appealed to the masses.\nFor Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognize it as an expression of their own experience.\nFor Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a \"crisis of authority\" the \"masks of consent\" slip away, revealing the fist of force.\n\n## Intellectuals and education\nGramsci gave much thought to the question of the role of intellectuals in society.\nFamously, he stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals.\nHe claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/mass-media).\nFurthermore, he distinguished between a traditional [intelligentsia](https://bliptext.com/articles/intelligentsia) which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks organically.\nSuch organic intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather [articulate](https://bliptext.com/articles/articulation-sociology), through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves.\nThe need to create a [working-class culture](https://bliptext.com/articles/working-class-culture) relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who would not simply introduce Marxist ideology from outside the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical the status quo of the already existing intellectual activity of the masses.\nHis ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of [critical pedagogy](https://bliptext.com/articles/critical-pedagogy) and [popular education](https://bliptext.com/articles/popular-education) as theorized and practised in later decades by [Paulo Freire](https://bliptext.com/articles/paulo-freire) in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of [Frantz Fanon](https://bliptext.com/articles/frantz-fanon).\nFor this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice to this day.\n\n## State and civil society\nGramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state, which he claims rules through force plus consent.\nThe state is not to be understood in the narrow sense of the government; instead, Gramsci divides it between political society, which is the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control, and [civil society](https://bliptext.com/articles/civil-society), which is commonly seen as the private or non-state sphere, differentiated from both the state and the economy.\nThe former is the realm of force and the latter of consent.\nHe stresses, however, that the division is purely conceptual and that the two, in reality, often overlap.\nGramsci claims that hegemony lies under modern capitalism and that the [bourgeoisie](https://bliptext.com/articles/bourgeoisie) can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by [trade unions](https://bliptext.com/articles/trade-unions) and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere.\nThus, the bourgeoisie engages in [Passive Revolution](https://bliptext.com/articles/passive-revolution) by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change.\nGramsci posits that movements such as [reformism](https://bliptext.com/articles/reformism) and [fascism](https://bliptext.com/articles/fascism), as well as the '[scientific management](https://bliptext.com/articles/scientific-management)' and [assembly line](https://bliptext.com/articles/assembly-line) methods of [Frederick Taylor](https://bliptext.com/articles/frederick-winslow-taylor) and [Henry Ford](https://bliptext.com/articles/henry-ford) respectively, are examples of this.\nDrawing from [Machiavelli](https://bliptext.com/articles/niccol-machiavelli), he argues that The Modern Prince – the revolutionary party – is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society.\nFor Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that the only tactic capable of undermining bourgeois hegemony and leading to socialism is a war of position (analogous to [trench warfare](https://bliptext.com/articles/trench-warfare)); this war of position would then give way to a war of movement (or frontal attack).\nGramsci saw war of movement as being exemplified by the storming of the [Winter Palace](https://bliptext.com/articles/winter-palace) during the [Russian Revolution](https://bliptext.com/articles/october-revolution).\nDespite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from identifying political society with civil society, as was done by the [Jacobins](https://bliptext.com/articles/jacobin-politics) and Fascists.\nHe believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a regulated society and defines the [withering away of the state](https://bliptext.com/articles/withering-away-of-the-state) as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself.\n\n## Historicism\nGramsci, like the early [Marx](https://bliptext.com/articles/karl-marx), was an emphatic proponent of [historicism](https://bliptext.com/articles/historicism).\nIn Gramsci's view, all meaning derives from the relation between human practical activity (or [praxis](https://bliptext.com/articles/praxis-process)) and the objective historical and social processes of which it is a part.\nIdeas cannot be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin.\nThe concepts by which we organise our knowledge of the world do not derive primarily from our relation to things, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts.\nAs a result, there is no such thing as an unchanging [human nature](https://bliptext.com/articles/human-nature), but only an idea of such which varies historically.\nFurthermore, philosophy and science do not reflect a reality independent of man, but rather are only true in that they express the real developmental trend of a given historical situation.\nFor the majority of Marxists, truth was truth no matter when and where it is known, and scientific knowledge (which included Marxism) accumulated historically as the advance of truth in this everyday sense.\nOn this view, Marxism does not belong to the illusory realm of the superstructure because it is a science.\nIn contrast, Gramsci believed Marxism was true in the socially pragmatic sense, in that by articulating the [class consciousness](https://bliptext.com/articles/class-consciousness) of the [proletariat](https://bliptext.com/articles/proletariat), it expressed the truth of its times better than any other theory.\nThis anti-[scientistic](https://bliptext.com/articles/scientism) and anti-[positivist](https://bliptext.com/articles/positivism) stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce.\nHowever, Gramsci's historicism was an absolute historicism that broke with the Hegelian and idealist tenor of Croce's thinking and its tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical destiny.\nThough Gramsci repudiated the charge, his historical account of truth has been criticised as a form of [relativism](https://bliptext.com/articles/relativism).\n\n## Critique of economism\nIn a famous pre-prison article entitled \"The Revolution against [Das Kapital](https://bliptext.com/articles/das-kapital)\", Gramsci claimed that the [October Revolution](https://bliptext.com/articles/october-revolution) in Russia had invalidated the idea that socialist revolution had to await the full development of capitalist [forces of production](https://bliptext.com/articles/productive-forces).\nThis reflected his view that Marxism was not a [determinist](https://bliptext.com/articles/determinism) philosophy.\nThe principle of the causal primacy of the [forces of production](https://bliptext.com/articles/forces-of-production), he held, was a misconception of Marxism.\nBoth economic changes and cultural changes are expressions of a basic historical process, and it is difficult to say which sphere has primacy over the other.\nThe [fatalistic](https://bliptext.com/articles/fatalism) belief, widespread within the [workers’ movement](https://bliptext.com/articles/labour-movement) in its earliest years, that it would inevitably triumph due to historical laws, was, in Gramsci's view, a product of the historical circumstances of an oppressed class restricted mainly to defensive action, and was to be abandoned as a hindrance once the working-class became able to take the initiative.\nBecause Marxism is a philosophy of praxis, it cannot rely on unseen historical laws as the agents of social change.\nHistory is defined by human praxis and therefore includes human will.\nNonetheless, will-power cannot achieve anything it likes in any given situation: when the consciousness of the working-class reaches the stage of development necessary for action, historical circumstances will be encountered which cannot be arbitrarily altered.\nIt is not, however, predetermined by historical inevitability as to which of several possible developments will take place as a result.\nHis critique of [economism](https://bliptext.com/articles/economic-determinism) also extended to that practised by the [syndicalists](https://bliptext.com/articles/syndicalism) of the Italian trade unions.\nHe believed that many trade unionists had settled for a reformist, gradualist approach in that they had refused to struggle on the political front in addition to the economic front.\nWhile Gramsci envisioned the trade unions as one organ of a counter-hegemonic force in capitalist society, the trade union leaders simply saw these organizations as a means to improve conditions within the existing structure.\nGramsci referred to the views of these trade unionists as vulgar economism, which he equated to covert reformism and even liberalism.\n\n## Critique of materialism\nBy virtue of his belief that human history and collective praxis determine whether any philosophical question is meaningful or not, Gramsci's views run contrary to the [metaphysical](https://bliptext.com/articles/metaphysics) [materialism](https://bliptext.com/articles/materialism) and 'copy' theory of perception advanced by [Engels](https://bliptext.com/articles/friedrich-engels) and Lenin, though he does not explicitly state this.\nFor Gramsci, Marxism does not deal with a reality that exists in and for itself, independent of humanity.\nThe concept of an [objective](https://bliptext.com/articles/objectivity-philosophy) universe outside of human history and human praxis was, in his view, analogous to belief in [God](https://bliptext.com/articles/god); there could be no objectivity, but only a universal [intersubjectivity](https://bliptext.com/articles/intersubjectivity) to be established in a future communist society.\nNatural history was thus only meaningful in relation to human history.\nOn his view philosophical materialism, like primitive common sense, resulted from a lack of critical thought, and could not, as Lenin claimed, be said to oppose religious superstition.\nDespite this, Gramsci resigned himself to the existence of this arguably cruder form of Marxism: the proletariat's status as a dependent class meant that Marxism, as its philosophy, could often only be expressed in the form of popular superstition and common sense.\nNonetheless, it was necessary to effectively challenge the ideologies of the educated classes, and to do so Marxists must present their philosophy in a more sophisticated guise, and attempt to genuinely understand their opponents’ views.\n\n# Translations\nThere have been different English translations of Prison Notebooks.\n

ISBN 0-2310-6082-3.

ISBN 0-2311-0592-4.

ISBN 978-0-2311-3944-1.

\n\n# Citations\n\n## Sources","current_revision":null,"created_by":"kACnuQmH5k9Nr5VNVEpVeg7XpvUmMctD","created_at":"2025-01-26T12:46:55.833Z","updated_at":"2025-01-26T12:46:55.833Z","search_vector":"'notebook':2 'prison':1","search_content":" \n \n**Name:** Prison Notebooks \n**Author:** Antonio Gramsci \n**Country:** Italy \n**Language:** Italian \n**Pub Date:** 1929 \n**English Pub Date:** 1971 \n**Isbn:** 9780717802708 \n**Oclc:** 6991462 \n \n\n# \nThe **Prison Notebooks** are a series of [essays](https://bliptext.com/articles/essay) written by the Italian [Marxist](https://bliptext.com/articles/marxism) [Antonio Gramsci](https://bliptext.com/articles/antonio-gramsci).\nGramsci was imprisoned by the Italian [Fascist](https://bliptext.com/articles/fascist) regime in 1926.\nThe notebooks were written between 1929 and 1935, when Gramsci was released from prison to a medical center on grounds of ill-health.\nHis friend, [Piero Sraffa](https://bliptext.com/articles/piero-sraffa), had supplied the writing implements and notebooks.\nGramsci died in April 1937.\nGramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment.\nThe original Prison Notebooks are kept at the Fondazione Gramsci in [Rome](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome).\nThese notebooks were initially smuggled out of prison, catalogued by Gramsci's sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, and sent to [Moscow](https://bliptext.com/articles/moscow) for safekeeping.\nThey were returned to Italy after World War II and have since been preserved by the Gramsci Foundation.\nAlthough written unsystematically, the Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th century [political theory](https://bliptext.com/articles/political-theory).\nGramsci drew insights from varying sources – not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as [Niccolò Machiavelli](https://bliptext.com/articles/niccol-machiavelli), [Vilfredo Pareto](https://bliptext.com/articles/vilfredo-pareto), [Georges Sorel](https://bliptext.com/articles/georges-sorel) and [Benedetto Croce](https://bliptext.com/articles/benedetto-croce).\nHis notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including [Italian history](https://bliptext.com/articles/history-of-italy) and [nationalism](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-nationalism), [the French Revolution](https://bliptext.com/articles/the-french-revolution), [Fascism](https://bliptext.com/articles/fascism), [Taylorism](https://bliptext.com/articles/taylorism) and [Fordism](https://bliptext.com/articles/fordism), [civil society](https://bliptext.com/articles/civil-society), [folklore](https://bliptext.com/articles/folklore), [religion](https://bliptext.com/articles/religion) and [high](https://bliptext.com/articles/high-culture) and [popular culture](https://bliptext.com/articles/popular-culture).\nSmuggled out of the prison in the 1930s, the first edition was published in 1947 and won the [Viareggio Prize](https://bliptext.com/articles/viareggio-prize) a few months later.\nGramsci's posthumous award of the Viareggio Prize was followed by a memorial from the [Constituent Assembly of Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/constituent-assembly-of-italy) on April 28, 1947.\nThe first translation into English was printed in the 1970s, by the Scottish poet and folklorist [Hamish Henderson](https://bliptext.com/articles/hamish-henderson).\nIdeas in [Marxist theory](https://bliptext.com/articles/marxist-theory), [critical theory](https://bliptext.com/articles/critical-theory) and educational theory that are associated with Gramsci's name include:\n# [Antonio Gramsci, depicted in 1922 | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Gramsci///1922.jpg]\n\n# Background\nA supposed assassination attempt on [Benito Mussolini's](https://bliptext.com/articles/benito-mussolini) life on 31 October 1926, on 8 November led to the establishment of secret police powers under Mussolini's regime.\nThese powers were used to arrest Gramsci, in spite of his [parliamentary immunity](https://bliptext.com/articles/parliamentary-immunity).\nFollowing a [show trial](https://bliptext.com/articles/show-trial) in May 1928, Gramsci was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.\nFollowing his trial, Gramsci was brought to a prison in [Turi](https://bliptext.com/articles/turi-apulia), where he spent the first five years of his sentence and began writing the Prison Notebooks in February 1929.\nBy this time, his health had started to decline.\nWhen his health permitted, Gramsci spent much of his time in prison reading Marxist texts and commentary on them, though access to these texts was censored by the prison.\nHe wrote extensively during this period, filling his notebooks with small handwriting.\n\n# Concepts\n\n## Hegemony\n[Hegemony](https://bliptext.com/articles/hegemony) was a concept previously used by Marxists such as [Vladimir Ilyich Lenin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-ilyich-lenin) to indicate the political leadership of the [working-class](https://bliptext.com/articles/working-class) in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the 'inevitable' [socialist](https://bliptext.com/articles/socialist) revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century.\nCapitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever.\nCapitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also [ideologically](https://bliptext.com/articles/ideology), through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the [bourgeoisie](https://bliptext.com/articles/bourgeoisie) became the '[common sense](https://bliptext.com/articles/common-sense)' values of all.\nThus a consensus culture developed in which people in the [working-class](https://bliptext.com/articles/working-class) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.\nThe working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat.\nLenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that [cultural hegemony](https://bliptext.com/articles/cultural-hegemony) be achieved first.\nIn Gramsci's view, any class that wishes to dominate in modern conditions has to move beyond its own narrow ‘economic-corporate’ interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership, and to make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces.\nGramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’, taking a term from [Georges Sorel](https://bliptext.com/articles/georges-sorel).\nThis bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, [social relations](https://bliptext.com/articles/social-relations) and ideas.\nIn this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the [superstructure](https://bliptext.com/articles/[base](https://bliptext.com/articles/base-politics)-and-superstructure) in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the [base](https://bliptext.com/articles/base-politics).\nGramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to religion, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values.\nHe was impressed by the power [Roman Catholicism](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-catholicism) had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated.\nGramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in [Renaissance humanism](https://bliptext.com/articles/renaissance-humanism) to the elements of the [Reformation](https://bliptext.com/articles/protestant-reformation) that had appealed to the masses.\nFor Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognize it as an expression of their own experience.\nFor Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a \"crisis of authority\" the \"masks of consent\" slip away, revealing the fist of force.\n\n## Intellectuals and education\nGramsci gave much thought to the question of the role of intellectuals in society.\nFamously, he stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals.\nHe claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/mass-media).\nFurthermore, he distinguished between a traditional [intelligentsia](https://bliptext.com/articles/intelligentsia) which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks organically.\nSuch organic intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather [articulate](https://bliptext.com/articles/articulation-sociology), through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves.\nThe need to create a [working-class culture](https://bliptext.com/articles/working-class-culture) relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who would not simply introduce Marxist ideology from outside the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical the status quo of the already existing intellectual activity of the masses.\nHis ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of [critical pedagogy](https://bliptext.com/articles/critical-pedagogy) and [popular education](https://bliptext.com/articles/popular-education) as theorized and practised in later decades by [Paulo Freire](https://bliptext.com/articles/paulo-freire) in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of [Frantz Fanon](https://bliptext.com/articles/frantz-fanon).\nFor this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice to this day.\n\n## State and civil society\nGramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state, which he claims rules through force plus consent.\nThe state is not to be understood in the narrow sense of the government; instead, Gramsci divides it between political society, which is the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control, and [civil society](https://bliptext.com/articles/civil-society), which is commonly seen as the private or non-state sphere, differentiated from both the state and the economy.\nThe former is the realm of force and the latter of consent.\nHe stresses, however, that the division is purely conceptual and that the two, in reality, often overlap.\nGramsci claims that hegemony lies under modern capitalism and that the [bourgeoisie](https://bliptext.com/articles/bourgeoisie) can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by [trade unions](https://bliptext.com/articles/trade-unions) and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere.\nThus, the bourgeoisie engages in [Passive Revolution](https://bliptext.com/articles/passive-revolution) by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change.\nGramsci posits that movements such as [reformism](https://bliptext.com/articles/reformism) and [fascism](https://bliptext.com/articles/fascism), as well as the '[scientific management](https://bliptext.com/articles/scientific-management)' and [assembly line](https://bliptext.com/articles/assembly-line) methods of [Frederick Taylor](https://bliptext.com/articles/frederick-winslow-taylor) and [Henry Ford](https://bliptext.com/articles/henry-ford) respectively, are examples of this.\nDrawing from [Machiavelli](https://bliptext.com/articles/niccol-machiavelli), he argues that The Modern Prince – the revolutionary party – is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society.\nFor Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that the only tactic capable of undermining bourgeois hegemony and leading to socialism is a war of position (analogous to [trench warfare](https://bliptext.com/articles/trench-warfare)); this war of position would then give way to a war of movement (or frontal attack).\nGramsci saw war of movement as being exemplified by the storming of the [Winter Palace](https://bliptext.com/articles/winter-palace) during the [Russian Revolution](https://bliptext.com/articles/october-revolution).\nDespite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from identifying political society with civil society, as was done by the [Jacobins](https://bliptext.com/articles/jacobin-politics) and Fascists.\nHe believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a regulated society and defines the [withering away of the state](https://bliptext.com/articles/withering-away-of-the-state) as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself.\n\n## Historicism\nGramsci, like the early [Marx](https://bliptext.com/articles/karl-marx), was an emphatic proponent of [historicism](https://bliptext.com/articles/historicism).\nIn Gramsci's view, all meaning derives from the relation between human practical activity (or [praxis](https://bliptext.com/articles/praxis-process)) and the objective historical and social processes of which it is a part.\nIdeas cannot be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin.\nThe concepts by which we organise our knowledge of the world do not derive primarily from our relation to things, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts.\nAs a result, there is no such thing as an unchanging [human nature](https://bliptext.com/articles/human-nature), but only an idea of such which varies historically.\nFurthermore, philosophy and science do not reflect a reality independent of man, but rather are only true in that they express the real developmental trend of a given historical situation.\nFor the majority of Marxists, truth was truth no matter when and where it is known, and scientific knowledge (which included Marxism) accumulated historically as the advance of truth in this everyday sense.\nOn this view, Marxism does not belong to the illusory realm of the superstructure because it is a science.\nIn contrast, Gramsci believed Marxism was true in the socially pragmatic sense, in that by articulating the [class consciousness](https://bliptext.com/articles/class-consciousness) of the [proletariat](https://bliptext.com/articles/proletariat), it expressed the truth of its times better than any other theory.\nThis anti-[scientistic](https://bliptext.com/articles/scientism) and anti-[positivist](https://bliptext.com/articles/positivism) stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce.\nHowever, Gramsci's historicism was an absolute historicism that broke with the Hegelian and idealist tenor of Croce's thinking and its tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical destiny.\nThough Gramsci repudiated the charge, his historical account of truth has been criticised as a form of [relativism](https://bliptext.com/articles/relativism).\n\n## Critique of economism\nIn a famous pre-prison article entitled \"The Revolution against [Das Kapital](https://bliptext.com/articles/das-kapital)\", Gramsci claimed that the [October Revolution](https://bliptext.com/articles/october-revolution) in Russia had invalidated the idea that socialist revolution had to await the full development of capitalist [forces of production](https://bliptext.com/articles/productive-forces).\nThis reflected his view that Marxism was not a [determinist](https://bliptext.com/articles/determinism) philosophy.\nThe principle of the causal primacy of the [forces of production](https://bliptext.com/articles/forces-of-production), he held, was a misconception of Marxism.\nBoth economic changes and cultural changes are expressions of a basic historical process, and it is difficult to say which sphere has primacy over the other.\nThe [fatalistic](https://bliptext.com/articles/fatalism) belief, widespread within the [workers’ movement](https://bliptext.com/articles/labour-movement) in its earliest years, that it would inevitably triumph due to historical laws, was, in Gramsci's view, a product of the historical circumstances of an oppressed class restricted mainly to defensive action, and was to be abandoned as a hindrance once the working-class became able to take the initiative.\nBecause Marxism is a philosophy of praxis, it cannot rely on unseen historical laws as the agents of social change.\nHistory is defined by human praxis and therefore includes human will.\nNonetheless, will-power cannot achieve anything it likes in any given situation: when the consciousness of the working-class reaches the stage of development necessary for action, historical circumstances will be encountered which cannot be arbitrarily altered.\nIt is not, however, predetermined by historical inevitability as to which of several possible developments will take place as a result.\nHis critique of [economism](https://bliptext.com/articles/economic-determinism) also extended to that practised by the [syndicalists](https://bliptext.com/articles/syndicalism) of the Italian trade unions.\nHe believed that many trade unionists had settled for a reformist, gradualist approach in that they had refused to struggle on the political front in addition to the economic front.\nWhile Gramsci envisioned the trade unions as one organ of a counter-hegemonic force in capitalist society, the trade union leaders simply saw these organizations as a means to improve conditions within the existing structure.\nGramsci referred to the views of these trade unionists as vulgar economism, which he equated to covert reformism and even liberalism.\n\n## Critique of materialism\nBy virtue of his belief that human history and collective praxis determine whether any philosophical question is meaningful or not, Gramsci's views run contrary to the [metaphysical](https://bliptext.com/articles/metaphysics) [materialism](https://bliptext.com/articles/materialism) and 'copy' theory of perception advanced by [Engels](https://bliptext.com/articles/friedrich-engels) and Lenin, though he does not explicitly state this.\nFor Gramsci, Marxism does not deal with a reality that exists in and for itself, independent of humanity.\nThe concept of an [objective](https://bliptext.com/articles/objectivity-philosophy) universe outside of human history and human praxis was, in his view, analogous to belief in [God](https://bliptext.com/articles/god); there could be no objectivity, but only a universal [intersubjectivity](https://bliptext.com/articles/intersubjectivity) to be established in a future communist society.\nNatural history was thus only meaningful in relation to human history.\nOn his view philosophical materialism, like primitive common sense, resulted from a lack of critical thought, and could not, as Lenin claimed, be said to oppose religious superstition.\nDespite this, Gramsci resigned himself to the existence of this arguably cruder form of Marxism: the proletariat's status as a dependent class meant that Marxism, as its philosophy, could often only be expressed in the form of popular superstition and common sense.\nNonetheless, it was necessary to effectively challenge the ideologies of the educated classes, and to do so Marxists must present their philosophy in a more sophisticated guise, and attempt to genuinely understand their opponents’ views.\n\n# Translations\nThere have been different English translations of Prison Notebooks.\n ISBN 0-2310-6082-3. \n ISBN 0-2311-0592-4. \n ISBN 978-0-2311-3944-1. \n ISBN 978-0-2311-3944-1. \n\n# Citations\n\n## Sources","revisionCount":0},"hasMore":false,"nextCursor":null}