Antonio Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony: His Key Ideas Explained

By D. R. Ashworth · October 21, 2026 · 12 min read

• Ideology and Theory
• Communism and the West

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a founder of the Italian Communist Party, is the source of several ideas still in everyday use: hegemony (rule by consent as well as force), organic intellectuals, the war of position, the historic bloc, passive revolution and the subaltern. He developed them in notebooks written in a Fascist prison, and they have travelled far beyond communism, into cultural studies, postcolonial history and, later, the strategy of the radical right. One concept often credited to him, false consciousness, is not his: the phrase comes from Friedrich Engels, and its theory from Georg Lukács. Gramsci’s ideas were more subtle than those of most Marxists of his time, but they were the ideas of a committed Leninist, and his theory of consent ends with a party that becomes the measure of right and wrong.

Who Gramsci was

Gramsci was born on 22 January 1891 in Ales, Sardinia. He joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1913, wrote for its press in Turin, and after the First World War founded the weekly L’Ordine Nuovo with friends, which backed the Turin factory councils of 1919–20 (Martin, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In January 1921, at Livorno, the communists split from the Socialists to form the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I), with Gramsci among its leaders. In June 1922 he went to Moscow as the party’s delegate to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, and there met Julija Schucht, who became his wife.

Mussolini’s police arrested him on 8 November 1926. In May 1928 a special tribunal sentenced him to 20 years, 4 months and 5 days; the prosecutor is reported to have said, “We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” The sentence was reduced to 12 years in 1932. His health collapsed in prison, and he died in Rome on 27 April 1937, two days after a cerebral haemorrhage (Martin).

Between 1929 and 1935 he filled roughly 3,000 pages of notes. Accounts count the notebooks differently: 33 in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s account, 29 in the editors’ note to the standard English selection, which stresses that Gramsci wrote them at different times and “never had the chance to systematically organize” them (Marxists Internet Archive). His sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht kept them after his death and they were sent to Moscow. Selections appeared in Italy in six thematic volumes in 1948–51; the full critical edition, edited by Valentino Gerratana, followed in 1975 (Martin).

That publication history matters. The first editions were shaped by Palmiro Togliatti, the party’s leader, who presented a Gramsci acceptable to Stalin’s USSR: the editing played down his conflicts with Moscow and stressed his continuity with Soviet Leninism. Gramsci had in fact opposed the Comintern’s ultra-left “Third Period” line after 1928, and was ostracized for it by fellow communist prisoners (Martin). Because he never held power, and because his notes were fragmentary and partly written to evade the prison censor, he has been easy to claim for very different politics.

Hegemony: rule by consent as well as force

Gramsci’s central question was why the revolution that succeeded in Russia in 1917 failed in Western Europe, where Marxist theory said it should have come first. His answer was that a ruling class in a modern society does not rule by force alone. It exercises hegemony, a process of “intellectual and moral leadership” that embeds its outlook across society (Martin). The word itself was not new. Russian Marxists had used it for the leading role of the working class over its allies; Gramsci turned it into a general account of how any class holds power. (Gramsci’s term was simply hegemony, egemonia; “cultural hegemony” is the label later readers attached.)

In his notes on intellectuals he distinguished two functions. One is “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life” by the dominant group; the other is “the apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 12). Consent is produced and reproduced in civil society: churches, schools, newspapers, associations, the family. Force is held in reserve for when consent fails.

This was a real departure from the cruder Marxism of the Second International, which treated ideas as a mere reflection of economics. It is also why Gramsci matters to the question of how communist states later ruled. His notes use the phrase “dictatorship without hegemony” (Selections, p. 106) for domination that lacks this leadership. Whatever he intended by it, the phrase fits the party-states that claimed his tradition: regimes that held power for decades with the secret police and censorship rather than the consent he thought durable rule required.

Common sense and “contradictory consciousness”

Gramsci did not think ordinary people were simply duped. He described common sense as the uncritical, fragmentary set of beliefs people inherit and treat as eternal truths, the masses’ “‘common sense’ or traditional conception of the world” (Selections, p. 197). Within it lies good sense, a “healthy nucleus” of practical, realistic attitudes that can be made more coherent. Most people, he argued, live with a contradictory consciousness: they hold beliefs inherited from above that their own practical conduct contradicts (Martin). The task of a revolutionary movement was to work on that contradiction, not simply to denounce people’s views as false.

“False consciousness” is not Gramsci’s term

The phrase “false consciousness” is often attached to Gramsci, but it does not belong to him. It comes from a letter Friedrich Engels wrote to Franz Mehring on 14 July 1893: “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness” (Engels to Mehring). Engels meant that thinkers misunderstand the real motives behind their own ideas.

The concept as a theory of the working class came from the Hungarian communist Georg Lukács. In his 1920 essay “Class Consciousness,” Lukács distinguished the actual, everyday views of workers from the consciousness “‘imputed’ [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of production”, that is, the views workers would hold if they understood their objective situation. He asked Marxists “to investigate this ‘false consciousness’ concretely” as “a stage in the historical process” (Lukács, “Class Consciousness”).

The ideas are related, and Gramsci and Lukács are often read together, but they differ. Lukács’s model is closer to “people believe the wrong things”; Gramsci’s is closer to “people believe contradictory things, and the side that organizes their beliefs wins.”

Organic intellectuals

For Gramsci, intellectuals were defined by their social function, not by their education. “Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals” (Selections, pp. 5–6). He put it more briefly: “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals” (p. 9).

Organic intellectuals arise from a class and articulate its interests: managers, engineers and economists for the bourgeoisie, and, Gramsci hoped, organizers drawn from the workers themselves for the proletariat. Traditional intellectuals, such as clergy and philosophers, are remnants of an earlier order who keep their prestige and imagine themselves independent of any class (Martin). The phrase “organic intellectual” is now widely used, often loosely, for any spokesperson who emerges from the group they speak for.

War of maneuver and war of position

Gramsci borrowed his best-known metaphor from the trench warfare of 1914–18. A war of maneuver is a frontal assault on the state, as the Bolsheviks made in 1917. A war of position is the slow capture of strongholds in civil society before any bid for state power. Russia, he argued, was a special case: there civil society was “primordial and gelatinous,” whereas “in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed.” The state in the West was only “an outer ditch,” behind which stood “a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks” (Selections, p. 238, quoted in Jackson, International Socialism).

The lesson he drew was strategic: in the West a communist party would have to win hegemony first, building its own institutions, alliances and culture, before it could take and hold the state.

The “long march through the institutions”

The slogan “the long march through the institutions” is often attributed to Gramsci. It is not in his writings. It belongs to the West German student leader Rudi Dutschke and was first recorded in a 1967 conversation. The evidence that Dutschke drew on Gramsci at all is thin: Gramsci does not appear in the index of Dutschke’s biography or of his published diaries, where Mao and Lukács appear often (Frost, “Long marches, long revolutions”). The two ideas resemble each other, but the phrase should not be quoted as Gramsci’s.

Historic bloc, passive revolution, the subaltern

Three further concepts from the notebooks remain in wide use (Martin):

• Historic bloc (blocco storico): an alliance of different classes and social forces held together politically and culturally under a particular hegemony. Analysts now use it for any durable coalition that combines economic interests with a shared worldview.
• Passive revolution: deep economic and structural change carried out from above without a popular political transformation. Gramsci applied it to Italian unification and suggested it could describe Fascism.
• The subaltern: subordinate classes, such as peasants and workers, excluded from political power and from writing their own history.

The Modern Prince: hegemony and the party

Gramsci’s admirers often present him as a democratic, pluralist alternative to Lenin. His own writings complicate that picture. He called the revolutionary party “the modern Prince,” after Machiavelli: “The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism” (Selections, p. 129). And he described what the party’s hegemony would mean in moral life:

The modern Prince, as it develops, revolutionises the whole system of intellectual and moral relations, in that its development means precisely that any given act is seen as useful or harmful, as virtuous or as wicked, only in so far as it has as its point of reference the modern Prince itself, and helps to strengthen or to oppose it. In men’s consciences, the Prince takes the place of the divinity or the categorical imperative. (Selections, p. 133)

This is the core of the case that Gramsci’s theory, for all its attention to consent, points toward totalitarian rule: the party is not one actor competing in civil society but the reference point for judging every act as virtuous or wicked. It is the same claim that Lenin’s party made in practice, and which, under Stalin, was enforced by terror.

His conduct in party politics fits the same pattern. In October 1926, weeks before his arrest, Gramsci drafted a letter in the name of the Italian party’s leadership warning the Soviet Central Committee that its feuding was endangering the unity of the movement; Togliatti, then in Moscow, did not deliver it (Martin). The letter is often cited as evidence of an independent spirit, but Gramsci’s reply to Togliatti shows its limits. He insisted the letter had been “a requisition against the Oppositions,” that “our remarks were totally against the Oppositions,” and that it should not weaken “the position of the majority of the CC” (Gramsci to Togliatti, 26 October 1926). His concern was the method of the struggle, not the party’s monopoly on power.

The debate here is real. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), recast hegemony as the basis of a “radical democracy,” reading Gramsci as a route out of Leninism rather than a refinement of it (Martin). Their strongest point is that Gramsci treated consent, culture and persuasion as primary in a way Lenin did not. What the evidence shows is that he valued consent as the most durable basis of a party’s rule, not as an alternative to it. And because Gramsci died in prison, the question of how he would have governed was never tested; it is the regimes that took power in Marxism-Leninism’s name that supply the record.

How Gramsci’s ideas spread

Gramsci’s afterlife has been larger than his life.

The last row surprises many readers. Alain de Benoist, whose research group GRECE was launched in January 1968, turned away from street activism toward “metapolitics,” “borrowing Antonio Gramsci’s idea that ideological hegemony is a precondition for political victory”; in his view, “one has to work on ideas first” (Camus, in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right). In 1991 the American writer Sam Francis drew on Gramsci’s ideas of “cultural power” and “counterhegemony” for the right (Sperber and Hoare, Jacobin). Today, people on both left and right talk of winning “the culture war” in recognizably Gramscian terms, usually without knowing where the idea came from.

Misattributed and garbled quotations

Gramsci is among the most misquoted Marxists. Three examples:

• “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Gramsci did not write this. What he wrote, in a 1930 notebook, is: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Achcar). The popular version with “monsters” is a paraphrase that Slavoj Žižek describes as his own “slightly shorter, and, dare I say, pithier iteration” (Žižek, New Statesman). Gilbert Achcar notes that “cannot be born” differs from “is not yet born”: Gramsci was not promising that a new order would arrive.
• “False consciousness.” Engels’s phrase, developed by Lukács (see above).
• “The long march through the institutions.” Rudi Dutschke’s slogan, from 1967 (see above).

A fourth line, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” is genuinely Gramsci’s motto but not his coinage. It comes from the French writer Romain Rolland’s 1920 review of a novel by Raymond Lefebvre; Gramsci first used it in L’Ordine Nuovo in April 1920 and returned to it in a 1932 notebook (Haider, Viewpoint Magazine).

Why Gramsci still matters

Gramsci asked a question that Marxism had neglected: why do people accept an order that a theory says is against their interests? His answer, that power rests on consent organized through culture, education and institutions, was more realistic than Lukács’s notion of a class that simply thinks the wrong thoughts, and it is why his vocabulary has outlived the party he helped found. For the history of communism, the lesson cuts two ways. Gramsci saw that durable rule needs consent. The communist states that came to power never won it, and settled for what his own phrase calls dictatorship without hegemony. And his own conception of the party, as the measure by which every act is judged virtuous or wicked, shows that the problem was not only how those regimes were run, but what the theory asked a party to become.

For more on the thinkers behind communist ideology, see the Ideology and Theory hub; for the reception of Marxist ideas in the democracies, see Communism and the West.