The Long March Back

To understand today’s culture wars, we have to go back to the beginning: a jail cell in Fascist Italy.

For the last decade of his life, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s regime for his role in founding the Italian Communist Party. The Marxist theorist wrote most of his consequential work — published posthumously as Quaderni del carcere in 1947 and, in English translation, as The Prison Notebooks in 1975 — in his cell. Suffering from many ailments, Gramsci died in 1937, at the age of 46, just as he was to be released. It would be decades until the rise of the New Left that his work helped inspire. But the posthumous influence of his writing has made him one of the most consequential political thinkers of the 20th century.

About the Author

Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

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To understand today’s culture wars, we have to go back to the beginning: a jail cell in Fascist Italy.

For the last decade of his life, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s regime for his role in founding the Italian Communist Party. The Marxist theorist wrote most of his consequential work — published posthumously as Quaderni del carcere in 1947 and, in English translation, as The Prison Notebooks in 1975 — in his cell. Suffering from many ailments, Gramsci died in 1937, at the age of 46, just as he was to be released. It would be decades until the rise of the New Left that his work helped inspire. But the posthumous influence of his writing has made him one of the most consequential political thinkers of the 20th century.