Gramsci’s prison work grew from facing Italy’s fascist exceptional state

Evidence

Gramsci’s work was undertaken first in the very center of the great upsurge of proletarian struggle in Italy in the immediately post–First World War period, and then continued, under the most difficult circumstances of imprisonment. Gramsci was forced to ponder long and hard the difficult question of how Marxism could inform revolutionary political practice. He was also forced, by the “exceptional” nature of the Italian state, to consider deeply the question of the nature of the capitalist state in both its “normal” and its exceptional forms (it was one of those exceptions, after all—the fascist state of Mussolini—which put him behind bars). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 525

Categorization

• XREF: Explains why Gramsci theorized hegemony — the state that imprisoned him was the existential challenge driving his theory. Links to Hall’s own prison-adjacent biographies.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how much of Gramsci’s ‘normal vs exceptional state’ distinction is a direct product of his Mussolini imprisonment, versus a general theoretical claim?