Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)

         Italian Marxist and social theorist. The son of a minor public official, Gramsci joined the Socialist Party in 1913, but switched to the newly-formed Italian Communist Party in 1921,being recognized as its leader by 1924. He was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926, and remained incarcerated until his death. In Prison Notebooks (1970), written between 1929 and 1935, Gramsci sought to redress the emphasis within orthodox Marxism on economic or material factors. Rejecting any form of ‘scientific’ determinism, he stressed, through the theory of hegemony, the importance of political and intellectual struggle. Gramsci insisted that bourgeois hegemony could only be challenged at the political and intellectual level, through a ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle, carried out in the interests of the proletariat and on the basis of socialist principles, values and theories.