- Lived:
- 1891–1937 · Ales, Sardinia → Turin → Moscow → Rome → Mussolini's prisons
- Tradition:
- Western Marxism; founder of the theory of cultural hegemony
- The Big Idea:
- The powerful rule less by force than by consent — by making their view of the world feel like plain common sense — so real change means the slow work of changing what a culture takes for granted.
- In their words:
- "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" — the motto he adopted and made his own.
- If you remember one thing:
- A fascist prosecutor demanded that Gramsci's brain be stopped from functioning for twenty years; instead, in a prison cell, that brain produced the ideas every side of every culture war now uses.