ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief intellectual biography of Antonio Gramsci to show both the breadth of his intellectual thinking and the important links between his intellectual contribution and his political activism. The chapter begins with an overview of Gramsci’s life, from his childhood and formative years in agricultural Sardinia, through to his contribution to Italy’s ‘red years’ in 1919-1920 and his role in the founding of the Italian Communist Party, and concludes with his arrest and imprisonment, during which time he was able to write what we now know as the Prison Notebooks. An assessment is provided of Gramsci’s key ideas including his early, idealist-influenced, journalistic writings and the much more expansive and considered theorisations set out in the Notebooks. Gramsci is above all associated with the concept of hegemony, and in this chapter, it is argued that hegemony is principally a theory of leadership that can only be fully understood when considered as a pedagogical relationship.
