GRAMSCI, ANTONIO. - Politician and writer, b. at Ales (Cagliari) on 23 Jan. 1891, d. at Rome on 27 Apr. 1937. From 1924 he was secretary of the Italian Communist Party; arrested by the fascist government on 8 Nov. 1926, he spent the rest of his life in prison; ill from the hardships he had suffered, he died in a clinic.
Besides the articles in L'Ordine nuovo he left, unpublished, his notebooks written in prison: both from them and from the Lettere dal carcere (5th ed., Turin 1948) one can reconstruct his assiduous polemic aimed at raising communist theory from the mechanism of historical materialism to the "new humanism" of the philosophy of praxis. He wrote acute pages or simple sketches on the relations between north and south and between city and countryside during the Risorgimento, on the formation of intellectuals and their role in the class system, on the "subaltern" classes, on popular literature, on the cosmopolitanism of the Counter-Reformation, on Machiavelli. His limitations in examining the history of the Catholic Church lie in the confusion he introduces between the Church as "politics" and the Church as a religious institution: according to G., "the papacy struck modernism as a reformist tendency of the Church and of the Catholic religion, but it developed popularism, that is, the economic-social basis of modernism" (Il risorgimento, Turin 1949, pp. 72-73). In reality G. misses the unity of the Corpus Christi mysticum, whereas his social realism does not miss the cultural unity of the Catholic Church, whose strength consists in sensing "the necessity of the doctrinal union of the whole religious mass" and in struggling "so that the intellectually superior strata do not detach themselves from the inferior ones" (Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, ibid. 1948, p. 7); on this plane he explains the opposition of Catholics to Croce: "Catholics understand very well that the meaning and the intellectual 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 separation between intellectuals and Catholicism and therefore in making, to a certain extent, even a strong clerical revival among the popular masses difficult" (op. cit., pp. 182-83). G., however, understands Catholicism as a bad social function to be overcome and not as a spiritual union of believers. For G. in the modern age, through the work of liberalism, Catholicism on a religious plane would by now be for the most part nothing but a superstition. With the Restoration, Catholicism, from integral positions in the field of culture and politics, would have descended to being a party opposed to other parties (Note sul Machiavelli, Turin 1949, p. 233 ff.).