Prison Notebooks

The notes written by the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci in Mussolini's prisons, where he was held from 1926. Working under censorship and illness, he filled some thirty notebooks with fragments on history, politics, philosophy and culture, published only after his death. Their central question is why revolution succeeded in Russia but failed in Western Europe. Gramsci's answer is hegemony: ruling groups govern not only through force but through the consent they win in civil society, by way of schools, churches, the press and common sense. In the West, he argues, a frontal war of manoeuvre against the state must give way to a long war of position for cultural and moral leadership. Further ideas include organic intellectuals who rise from and speak for a class, passive revolution, the historic bloc, the party as a Modern Prince modelled on Machiavelli, and notes on Americanism and Fordism. Marxist critics have argued over whether he gives culture too much weight against economics.

Hegemony, civil society and the war of position are among the most used ideas in political and cultural theory, and the notebooks remain the place to see how they were first worked out.