Antonio Gramsci in Le Figaro: "A giant of thought, his ideas help us understand our society."

There is a renewed interest in Antonio Gramsci, studied and translated into every language around the world. Analysis and insights rediscover ideas and thoughts that remain highly relevant today. According to Gianni Fresu, professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Cagliari after a long teaching experience at the Federal University of Uberlândia in Brazil, "the author of the Prison Notebooks cannot be removed from contemporary political struggle, transforming his legacy into a literary memory of the past or reserving his categories for the exegesis of a clergy of specialists." Le Figaro, France's leading daily newspaper, has taken this approach, dedicating an entire page to Gramsci.

Ideas for the present

The article, titled "Antonio Gramsci, the Little Hunchback Hated by Fascism," is by Sébastien Lapaque, a writer and essayist. Mussolini described him as "a little hunchback, extraordinarily intelligent and astute."

For Lapaque, Gramsci is "a monument to the humanities" and during his harsh detention in Turi "his brain never stopped functioning." Contrary to the brutal proposition of fascist prosecutor Michele Isgrò ("We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years"). Having died in 1937 at the age of 46, he left behind a two-thousand-page masterpiece full of insights, indications, values, and stimuli for the present and the future. Le Figaro reports some ideas that remain relevant. One in particular: "The aspect of the modern crisis that is lamented as a 'wave of materialism,'" writes the founder of the Communist Party, "is linked to what is called a crisis of authority . If the ruling class has lost consensus—that is, it is no longer ruling , but solely dominant , the possessor of pure coercive force—this precisely means that the great masses have detached themselves from traditional ideologies, no longer believe in what they once believed in, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum the most varied morbid phenomena occur."

The French disorder

Lapaque applies these considerations to the social and political phenomena sweeping France today like an uncontrolled wind of rebellion: from the Yellow Vests, to the steady progression of the Rassemblement National, to urban violence, to the anti-Semitism of the banlieues. "Social groups," argues the author of the long article published in Le Figaro, "are detached from traditional parties, and a large mass is abandoned." These are dynamics and processes that Antonio Gramsci, albeit in a different historical context, had studied and interpreted, introducing, as an antidote to disorder and disillusionment, the concept of hegemony—or, in the words of political historian Peter Thomas, "the process by which social forces are integrated into the political power of an existing state." It is curious that the homeland of the Enlightenment and of a revolution that marked the history of Europe and the world, turns, in attempting to explain its crisis, to Gramsci, a "giant of thought" hated by fascism, and to his ideas that cannot be considered mere "literary memory."