Antonio Gramsci
1891–1937 · Marxism · Prominent
Gramsci was an Italian Marxist whom Mussolini's police jailed for eleven years, and he filled the Prison Notebooks from 1929 until illness stopped him in 1935. Why do the poor consent to rule by the rich? His answer: power holds through schools, newspapers and common sense long before it needs police, a grip he called hegemony. Revolutionaries have to win that ground first, in a patient war of position, before they take the state.
Signature
The position Gramsci is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Polity
- leans Illiberalism
- Knowledge
- Power-Knowledge
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Society
- leans Collectivism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Meaning
- leans Constructed (25 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Opposition
- strongly leans Sublation (9 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Polity
- leans Illiberalism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (25 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Gramsci refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Vanguardism / Communal Order
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Freedom
What is the highest good? - Perception
- Conceptual Mediation
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Power-Knowledge
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Non-Utilitarian Consequentialism
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Social Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Linear Progressive
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Economy
- State Socialism / Stateless Communism
What is the ideal organization of economic life? - Authority
- Collective Will / Sacred Tradition
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Law
- Revolutionary
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Human Nature
- Socially Constructed
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Class
What is your primary bond and loyalty?