Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist and politician, a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. Born in Ales on Sardinia, he became a vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, and was imprisoned in 1926, remaining in prison until shortly before his death in 1937. There he wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis, the Prison Notebooks, on subjects from the history of Italy to fascism, Fordism and popular culture. He is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the ruling capitalist class uses cultural institutions and ideology, rather than violence or coercion, to keep its power.