The Ambiguous Legacy of Antonio Gramsci

His is one of those lives that invites counter-factual questions. A founder of the Italian Communist party, a brilliant writer and devoted militant, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by the Fascists in 1926 when he was only 35 and died in a prison hospital eleven years later, in 1937, the middle year of the Moscow trials. In his Prison Notebooks—thousands of pages, to which thousands more pages of scholarly and political exegesis have now been added—Gramsci’s focus was historical, his style reflective; he knew virtually nothing about what was happening outside his prison cell during the last decade of his life. The steady degeneration of international communism occurred, as it were, behind his back. Did Mussolini save him f...