Marxist, journalist, political leader and social theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was a small, disabled, chronically ill man from a poverty-stricken Sardinian background. He was also someone about whom the Italian fascist state famously declared: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years.”

Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned in 1926 at the age of 35, ten years before Benito Mussolini declared his empire in Africa. During concentrated periods, in which he was allowed pen and paper in his cell, he wrote copious notes in 33 school exercise books. Gramsci recorded his thoughts on theory and strategy, ranging across history, politics, philosophy and culture.

These writings would become his major work, the Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere). In the words of political theorist John Schwarzmantel, the “fundamentally political text” of the Prison Notebooks examines “the forces acting to preserve and to change the nature of a political and social order”.

Gramsci was writing in the face of the collapse of the revolutionary hopes of the 1920s and early 1930s. But he rejected the dominant Marxist thinking of his day. Classical Marxism, he argued, was overly materialist and fatalistic, seeing history propelled forward by the shifting structures of economic production. Gramsci proposed a more humanistic version of Marxism.

He emphasised how people could be conscious actors in the processes of history. He stressed the important historical role of the battle of ideas. These battles, he thought, could lead to cultural shifts – shifts that were necessary before a successful revolutionary transformation could occur.

In political philosophy, international relations, sociology, cultural studies and beyond, his conceptual tools have been adapted and repurposed to shed light on topics ranging from international political economy to gender power relations. As Schwartzmantel observes, Gramsci has inspired thinking about civil society as “the sphere of diversity and difference characteristic of liberal-democratic society” and “the arena for struggle against one-party rule in communist systems”.

Perhaps surprisingly, given his staunch leftist orientation, Gramsci has also become a source of ideas and strategies for a resurgent radical right.

The young Gramsci, impressed by the Turin working-class movement, joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1913. After the first world war, he became co‐founder and editor of the influential newspaper L’ordine nuovo (The New Order), where he published polemics urging workers to educate themselves, organise and form an alliance with the peasants.

Over half a million Italians were killed in the brutal combat of the Great War. Deep dismay at these losses and the inspiration of the Russian revolution of October 1917 converged in........

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