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Book No. – 4 (Political Science)
Book Name – Western Political Thought (Shefali Jha)
What’s Inside the Chapter? (After Subscription)
1. THE CENTRALITY OF THE POLITICAL
2. HEGEMONY AND CIVIL SOCIETY
3. PASSIVE REVOLUTION AND THE STATE
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LANGUAGE
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937): Hegemony in Civil Society as a Basis of the Modern State
Chapter – 13
Table of Contents
- Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891 to a lower-middle-class family.
- Sardinia, located between Spain and Italy, had a backward economy mainly based on agriculture.
- The Sardinian society was described as superstitious and fatalistic, with a largely peasant population looked down upon by urban inhabitants of northern Italy.
- Gramsci suffered from a physical handicap after falling at age four, developing into a hunchback, making him a target for teasing and persecution by his peers.
- At age 11, Gramsci’s father was imprisoned for embezzlement, and Gramsci had to work as an office boy to support his family.
- He resumed his schooling and won a scholarship to the University of Turin in 1911, a modern industrial city home to Fiat.
- Gramsci came into contact with the Italian working class in Turin and studied language and literature at the university.
- He began writing for socialist weeklies like Il Grido del Popolo and Avanti!, but grew dissatisfied with their reformist line.
- In 1919, Gramsci, along with Palmiro Togliatti and Angelo Tasca, launched the Ordine Nuovo newspaper.
- Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1913, but after the split in 1921, he became a member of the Communist Party (PCI).
- In 1926, Gramsci spoke at the Italian Communist Party’s national Congress in Lyons.
- In November 1926, he was arrested by the fascists under Mussolini, who had been in power since 1921.
- Gramsci was tried along with 21 other political prisoners and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
- The National Fascist Party (PNF) won the 1924 general election, and Mussolini began to crush all opposition by 1925, including closing newspapers and arresting oppositional groups.
- Gramsci spent his prison years writing the Prison Notebooks, filling 29 notebooks in total.
- The notebooks were written in three phases:
- Seven notebooks between 1929 and 1931.
- Ten notebooks between 1931 and 1933.
- Twelve notebooks after 1933.
- After Gramsci’s death in 1937, his writings were not published until 1947.
- Letters Gramsci wrote from prison were published in 1947, and his Prison Notebooks were published in six volumes between 1948 and 1951.