Skip to content

2 min read

Antonio Gramsci

Summary

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician; author of the Prison Notebooks (written 1929–1935 in Fascist prison), in which he developed the concepts of hegemony (the dominance of a particular worldview across civil society) and the war of position (the slow, organic, culture-and-consent-based struggle to win hegemony, as distinct from a frontal war of manoeuvre).

Key idea in this wiki

  • Hegemony is the conceptual lens framing-and-narrative and constructive-programme apply when asking why the campaign’s preferred story is or is not yet the dominant one; the Commons Library records hegemony as the field’s foundational concept for cultural-terrain analysis [source: commons-library].
  • The war of position framing underpins the wiki’s emphasis on slow, relational, base-building work as the precondition for sustained change; it pairs with the wiki’s organizing pillar.
  • Gramsci’s organic intellectual concept — the intellectual who emerges from and is embedded in a class, rather than the traditional intellectual who stands apart — is the lineage the wiki’s training and facilitation concepts draw on.
  • The Prison Notebooks are the practitioner lineage the wiki’s thinkers/laclau-mouffe entry extends; Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is the contemporary theoretical extension of Gramsci’s hegemony concept.

Why campaigners read him

Campaigners read Gramsci because he gave the strategic left a vocabulary for why winning elections and passing bills is often not enough — the deeper task is winning hegemony, the slow organic change in cultural common sense that makes a new political order legible [source: commons-library]. The concept reframes campaigns as cultural-terrain projects; the wiki uses it in framing-and-narrative as the lens that asks whether the campaign’s story is already part of how the audience reads the world. The war of position / war of manoeuvre distinction is the strategic fork — a frontal attack is the manoeuvre, and only meaningful if a long prior position of preparation has shifted the terrain. The wiki pairs Gramsci with paulo-freire (popular education), john-gaventa (power analysis), and laclau-mouffe (hegemony theory) as the four-thinker cultural-strategy canon.

Learn more

Open Questions

  • 2026-07-03 — A primary Prison Notebooks source page is not yet in the corpus; the framing here is grounded in the Laclau-Mouffe source page and the wiki’s existing framing concept pages.

Sources & verification

Last verified: 2026-07-03