ABSTRACT
Antonio Gramsci, the author of Prison Notebooks (1948), was born on the Italian island of Sardinia in 1891. In 1911, after finishing at Dettori Lyceum, Gramsci won a prestigious scholarship to attend the University of Turin. In 1915, while working as a militant journalist, Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party (or PSI). In 1921, Gramsci and fellow Italian Marxist Amadeo Bordiga left the Italian Socialist Party to found the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In 1929, Mussolini's fascist police arrested and imprisoned Gramsci. Today, Gramsci is widely regarded as one of the foremost Marxist theorists, and as one of the great thinkers of the social sciences. Before Gramsci, the German political philosopher and economist Karl Marx had argued that the ruling classes used coercion (the threat of force) and consent to get the most labor out of workers, which led to higher profits. Gramsci wrote Prison Notebooks from prison after the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ordered his arrest.
