I'm a pessimist because

of intelligence, but an
optimist because of will

Antonio
Gramsci
_________________________________________________________

1891-1937
Researched by: Irene V. Javier

An Introduction to Gramsci's Life and

Thought
Antonio Gramsci was born on January 22, 1891 in Ales in the province of Cagliari in
Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven children born to Francesco Gramsci and Giuseppina
Marcias. His relationship with his father was never very close, but he had a strong affection
and love for his mother, whose resilience, gift for story-telling and pungent humor made a
lasting impression on him. Of his six siblings, Antonio enjoyed a mutual interest in literature
with his younger sister Teresina, and seems to have always felt a spiritual kinship with his
two brothers, Gennaro, the oldest of the Gramsci children, and Carlo, the youngest. Gennaro's
early embrace of socialism contributed significantly to Antonio's political development.
In 1897, Antonio's father was suspended and subsequently arrested and imprisoned for five
years for alleged administrative abuses. Shortly thereafter, Giuseppina and her children
moved to Ghilarza, where Antonio attended elementary school. Sometime during these years
of trial and near poverty, he fell from the arms of a servant, to which his family attributed his
hunched back and stunted growth: he was an inch or two short of five feet in height.

For the next few years, Gramsci devoted most of his time to the development of the factory
council movement, and to militant journalism, which led in January 1921 to his siding with
the Communist minority within the PSI at the Party's Livorno Congress. He became a
member of the PCI's central committee, but did not play a leading role until several years
later. He was among the most prescient representatives of the Italian Left at the inception of
the fascist movement, and on several occasions predicted that unless unified action were
taken against the rise of Mussolini's movement, Italian democracy and Italian socialism
would both suffer a disastrous defeat.
The years 1921 to 1926, years "of iron and fire" as he called them, were eventful and
productive. They were marked in particular by the year and a half he lived in Moscow as an
Italian delegate to the Communist International (May 1922- November 1923), his election to
the Chamber of Deputies in April 1924, and his assumption of the position of general
secretary of the PCI. His personal life was also filled with significant experiences, the chief
one being his meeting with and subsequent marriage to Julka Schucht (1896-1980), a violinist
and member of the Russian Communist Party whom he met during his stay in Russia.
Antonio and Julka had two sons, Delio (1924-1981), and Giuliano, born in 1926, who lives
today in Moscow with his wife.
On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in accordance
with a series of "Exceptional Laws" enacted by the fascist-dominated Italian legislature,
committed to solitary confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. This began a ten-year odyssey,
marked by almost constant physical and psychic pain as a result of a prison experience that
culminated, on April 27, 1937, in his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke
that killed him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that were never
properly treated in prison.
Yet as everyone familiar with the trajectory of Gramsci's life knows, these prison years were
also rich with intellectual achievement, as recorded in the Notebooks he kept in his various
cells that eventually saw the light after World War II, and as recorded also in the
extraordinary letters he wrote from prison to friends and especially to family members, the
most important of whom was not his wife Julka but rather a sister-in-law, Tania Schucht. She
was the person most intimately and unceasingly involved in his prison life, since she had
resided in Rome for many years and was in a position to provide him not only with a regular
exchange of thoughts and feelings in letter form but with articles of clothing and with
numerous foods and medicines he sorely needed to survive the grinding daily routine of
prison life.
After being sentenced on June 4, 1928, with other Italian Communist leaders, to 20 years, 4
months and 5 days in prison, Gramsci was consigned to a prison in Turi, in the province of
Bari, which turned out to be his longest place of detention (June 1928 -- November 1933).
Thereafter he was under police guard at a clinic in Formia, from which he was transferred in
August 1935, always under guard, to the Quisisana Hospital in Rome. It was there that he
spent the last two years of his life. Among the people, in addition to Tania, who helped him
either by writing to him or by visiting him when possible, were his mother Giuseppina, who
died in 1933, his brother Carlo, his sisters Teresina and Grazietta, and his good friend, the

economist Piero Sraffa, who throughout Gramsci's prison ordeal provided a crucial and
indispenable service to Gramsci. Sraffa used his personal funds and numerous professional
contacts that were necessary in order to obtain the books and periodicals Gramsci needed in
prison. Gramsci had a prodigious memory, but it is safe to say that without Sraffa's assistance,
and without the intermediary role often played by Tania, the Prison Notebooks as we have
them would not have come to fruition.

Contributions
Gramscis key intellectual contribution to Marxist thought is his elaboration of the social
function ofculture, and its relationship to politics and the economic system. While Marx
discussed only briefly these issues in his writing, Gramsci drew on Marxs theoretical
foundation to elaborate the important role of political strategy in challenging the dominant
relations of society, and the role of the state in regulating social life and maintaining the
conditions necessary for capitalism. He thus focused on understanding how culture and
politics might inhibit or spur revolutionary change, which is to say, he focused on the
political and cultural elements of domination (in addition to, and in conjunction with the
economic element). As such, Gramscis work is a response to the false prediction of Marxs
theory that revolution was inevitable, given the contradictions inherent in the system of
capitalist production.
In his theory, Gramsci viewed the state as an instrument of domination that represents the
interests of capital and of the ruling class. He developed the concept of cultural hegemony to
explain how the state accomplishes this, arguing that domination is achieved in large part
by a dominant ideology expressed through social institutions that socialize people to consent
to the rule of the dominant group. He reasoned that hegemonic beliefs--dominant beliefs-dampen critical thought, and are thus barriers to revolution.
Gramsci viewed the educational institution as one of the fundamental elements of cultural
hegemony in modern Western society, and elaborated on this in essays titled The
Intellectuals, and On Education. Though influenced by Marxist thought, Gramscis body
of work advocated for a multi-faceted, and more long-term revolution than that envision by
Marx. He advocated for the cultivation of organic intellectuals from all classes and walks
of life, who would understand and reflect the world views of a diversity of people. He
critiqued the role of traditional intellectuals, whose work reflected the worldview of the
ruling class, and thus facilitated cultural hegemony. Additionally, he advocated for a war of
position, in which oppressed peoples would work to disrupt hegemonic forces in the realm
of politics and culture, while a simultaneous overthrow of power, a war of maneuver, was
carried out.

Gramscis collected works include Pre-Prison Writings published by Cambridge University

Press, and The Prison Notebooks, published by Columbia University
Press. An abridge version,Selections from the Prison Notebooks, is available from
International Publishers.

One never really

knows, who ones
enemy is

Jurgen
Habermas
__________________________________________________________________________________________

1929-2004

Researched by: Irene V. Javier

________________________________________________________

An Introduction to Habermas' Life and

Thought
________________________________________________________
Jrgen Habermas was born in Dsseldorf, Germany, on June 18, 1929. He grew up in
nearby Gummersbach, where his father was director of the local seminary. He was 16 when
World War II ended. At that time he experienced a sense of revulsion with the Germans'
"collectively realized inhumanity, " which characterized, he believed, their lack of response to
the revelations in the Nrenberg trials about the Nazi death machine. His own very different
reaction, one of shock and horror, constituted what he described as "that first rupture, which
still gapes."
He entered the University of Bonn in 1946. Here he began to speculate about the meaning of
such concepts as reason, freedom, and justice, in part by reading such German philosophers
as Hegel and Marx, as well as 20th-century Marxists, particularly the Hungarian Georg
Lukcs.
Habermas obtained his Ph.D. in 1954 with a dissertation on the philosopher Friedrick von
Schelling. Shortly thereafter he moved to the University of Frankfurt where, until 1959, he
served as assistant to Professor Theodor Adorno, who was associated with the Institute for
Social Research. The Frankfurt Institute, originally established in the 1920s, had resumed its
activities there several years earlier after moving to the United States during the Nazi period.
The Frankfurt School became famous as a movement of philosophical and social thought. It
breached traditional boundaries that separate literary criticism, philosophy, psychoanalysis,
and social science and attempted to understand critically the various elements comprising
modern society. In time Habermas would become the successor to the tradition of the
Frankfurt School.
Even before he came to Frankfurt, Habermas had begun publishing criticism and social
commentary which ranged over a variety of areas, from analyses of Konrad Adenauer's
postwar Germany to commentaries on Marx. This wide range of topics continued throughout
Habermas' career. As he developed more powerful ideas, and as these ideas appeared in books
rather than scattered among many periodicals, his impact became widespread. As he once
commented, "There has never been any need to complain about lack of attention among the
scholarly and political public."
Habermas' overall goal was to construct a social theory that could affect the emancipation of
people from arbitrary social constraint. Over the course of his writing (more than 200 articles
and books) he pursued this goal in a variety of ways.
Habermas grew up in Gummersbach, Germany. At age 10 he joined theHitler Youth, as did
many of his contemporaries, and at age 15, during the last months of World War II, he was
sent to the Western Front. After the Nazi defeat in May 1945, he completed his secondary
education and attended the Universities of Bonn, Gttingen, and Zrich. At Bonn he received
a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1954 with a dissertation on Friedrich Schelling. From 1956 to 1959
he worked as Theodor Adornos first assistant at the Institute for Social Research. Habermas
left the institute in 1959 and completed his second doctorate (his habilitation thesis, which
qualified him to teach at the university level) in 1961 under the political scientist Wolfgang
Abendroth at the University of Marburg; it was published with additions in 1962

as Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). In

1961 Habermas became a privatdozent (unsalaried professor and lecturer) in Marburg, and in
1962 he was named extraordinary professor (professor without chair) at the University of
Heidelberg. He succeededMax Horkheimer as professor of philosophy and sociology at the
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt University) in 1964.
After 10 years as director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg (197181), he returned to
Frankfurt, where he retired in 1994. Thereafter he taught in the United States at Northwestern
University (Evanston, Illinois) and New York University and lectured worldwide.
As a prominent voice within West Germanys postwar skeptical generation, Habermas
participated in the major intellectual debates within the country in the second half of the 20th
century and beyond. In 1953 he confronted Martin Heidegger over the latters rediscovered
Nazi sympathies in a review of Heideggers Einfhrung in die
Metaphysik(1953; Introduction to Metaphysics). In the late 1950s and again in the early
1980s Habermas engaged with European-wide antinuclear movements, and in the 1960s he
was one of the leading theorists of the student movement in Germanythough he effectively
broke with theradical core of the movement in 1967, when he warned against the possibility
of a left fascism. In 1977 he protested against curbs on civil liberties in domestic
antiterrorist legislation, and in 198587 he participated in the so-called historians debate
on the nature and extent of German war guilt by denouncing what he regarded as historical
revisionism of Germanys Nazi past; he also warned of the dangers of German nationalism
posed by Germanys reunification in 198990. Although he endorsed the Persian Gulf
War (1991) as necessary to protect Israel and the bombing of Serbia (1999) by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as necessary to prevent the genocide of ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo, he opposed the Iraq War (2003) as unnecessary and illegal. He also
promoted the creation of a constitutional supranational democracy in the European Union,
opposed human cloning, and warned against the reaction of religiousfundamentalists of all
kinds, both within and outside the West, to destructive secularization.

Contributions
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas showed how modern
European salons, cafs, and literary groups contain the resources for democratizing the public

sphere. In his 1965 inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University, Erkenntnis und Interesse
(1965; Knowledge and Human Interests), and in the book of the same title published three
years later, Habermas set forth the foundations of a normative version of critical social
theory, the Marxistsocial theory developed by Horkheimer, Adorno, and other members of
the Frankfurt Institute from the 1920s onward. He did this on the basis of a general theory of
human interests, according to which different areas of human knowledge and inquirye.g.,
the physical, biological, andsocial sciencesare expressions of distinct, but equally basic,
human interests. These basic interests are in turn unified by reasons overarching pursuit of its
own freedom, which is expressed in scholarly disciplines that are critical of unfree modes of
social life. In his rethinking of the foundations of early critical social theory, Habermas
sought to unite the philosophical traditions of Karl Marx and German idealism with
thepsychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the pragmatism of the American logician and
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
Habermas took a linguistic-communicative turn in Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns (1981; The Theory of Communicative Action). Drawing on the work
of analytic (Anglo-American) philosophers (e.g.,Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L.
Austin), Continental philosophers (Horkheimer, Adorno, Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Alfred Schutz, and Gyrgy Lukcs), pragmatists (Peirce and G.H. Mead),
andsociologists (Max Weber, mile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and Niklas Luhmann), he
argued that human interaction in one of its fundamental forms is communicative rather than
strategic in nature, insofar as it is aimed at mutual understanding and agreement rather than
at the achievement of the self-interested goals of individuals Such understanding and
agreement, however, are possible only to the extent that the communicative interaction in
which individuals take part resists all forms of nonrational coercion. The notion of an
ideal communicationcommunity functions as a guide that can be formally applied both to
regulate and to critique concrete speech situations. Using this regulative and critical ideal,
individuals would be able to raise, accept, or reject each others claims to truth, rightness, and
sincerity solely on the basis of the unforced force of the better argumenti.e., on the basis
of reasonand evidenceand all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain
mutual understanding. Although the ideal communication community is never perfectly
realized (which is why Habermas appeals to it as a regulative or critical ideal rather than as a
concrete historical community), the projected horizon of unconstrained communicative action
within it can serve as a model of free and open public discussion within liberaldemocratic societies. Likewise, this type of regulative and critical ideal can serve as a
justification of deliberative liberal-democratic political institutions, because it is only within
such institutions that unconstrained communicative action is possible.