GRAMSCI, Antonio. - Political figure and writer, born in Ales (Cagliari) on 23 January 1891, died in Rome on 27 April 1937. He was secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1924; arrested by the Fascist government on 8 November 1926, he spent the rest of his life in prison; weakened by the hardships endured, he died in a clinic.
In addition to the articles in *L'Ordine Nuovo*, he left unpublished his prison notebooks: from these and from the *Letters from Prison* (5th ed., Turin 1948) one can reconstruct his assiduous polemic aimed at shifting Communist theory from the mechanism of historical materialism to the “new humanism” of the philosophy of praxis. He produced penetrating pages or brief insights on the relations between North and South and between city and countryside during the Risorgimento, on the formation of intellectuals and their role within the class system, on the “subaltern” classes, on popular literature, on the cosmopolitanism of the Counter-Reformation, and on Machiavelli. His limitations in examining the history of the Catholic Church lie in the distinction he draws between the “political” Church and the institutional religious Church: according to G., “the papacy struck modernism as a reforming tendency within the Church and Catholic religion, but developed popularism, that is, the socio-economic basis of modernism” (*Il Risorgimento*, Turin 1949, pp. 72–73). In reality, what escapes G. is the unity of the *Corpus Christi mysticum*, whereas his social realism does not escape the cultural unity of the Catholic Church, whose strength consists in “the need for doctrinal union among the entire religious mass” and in struggling “so that the intellectually superior strata do not detach themselves from the lower ones” (*Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce*, ibid. 1948, p. 7); on this level he explains Catholic opposition to Croce: “Catholics understand very well that the intellectual significance and function of Croce are not comparable to those of traditional philosophers, but are those of a true religious reformer, who at least succeeds in maintaining the gap between intellectuals and Catholicism and thus, to a certain extent, makes it difficult even for a strong clerical revival among the popular masses” (op. cit., pp. 182–83). G., however, understands Catholicism as a negative social function to be overcome rather than as the spiritual union of believers. For G., in the modern age, owing to liberalism, Catholicism on a religious plane would now largely be nothing more than superstition. With the Restoration, Catholicism, having lost its integral positions in the fields of culture and politics, would have become a party opposed to other parties (*Note sul Machiavelli*, Turin 1949, p. 233 ff.).