Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937; secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1924) is one of the most important figures in recent Italian history. Indeed, since the 1960s, after a large selection of his writings was translated into English and other languages, he has also acquired international prominence in the fields of political theory and political philosophy. The writings that gained him this position are the so-called Prison Notebooks: the enduring results of his intellectual activity in the years he spent in prison, after a patently illegal arrest (he was a Member of Parliament) and an equally unlawful sentence to more than twenty years’ detention by the so-called Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State.

Kate Crehan’s book, Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives, provides both an excellent introduction to Gramsci’s intellectual contributions and deep insights into his analysis. First it briefly illustrates Gramsci’s life history and the nature of his writings—the Prison Notebooks are properly described as “a textual labyrinth” whose shape was crucially determined by the conditions under which they were produced. Then it concentrates on three main theoretical categories: subalterns, intellectuals, and common sense. The central position of these categories within Gramsci’s thought is reflected in the Notebooks‘ focus on research in two entwined directions: on the one hand, the study of a society where a mosaic of different classes, groups, and strata combines with the existence of inequalities—the latter being summarized by the fundamental distinction between subaltern and dominant groups: “rulers and ruled, leaders and led.” On the other hand, culture is recognized as a crucial factor in social evolution. Even though a Marxist political theorist could not but give prominence to material forces (“basic economic realities of production and reproduction of real life”), in Gramsci’s view, complex dynamic relations connect material forces and the various layers and forms of ideological understanding of reality, which he described as necessary media of our own experience of the world. In particular, economic and cultural foundations of society (structure and superstructures) are seen as a unity of intersecting forces entwined with class inequalities: the most elementary answers to the existence of inequalities are to be found in the body of common sense—if this were not so, a given society could not reproduce itself. Common sense, in turn, is part of culture. Culture, under Gramsci’s scrutiny, is not only high culture. Each social group generates its own culture and its own common sense, which also reflect their position of subalternity or dominance. Common sense allows people to approach everyday life by means of a set of descriptions and explanations that are accepted as self-evident truths (and Gramsci’s notion of common sense, as Kate Crehan stresses, emphasizes the held-in-common nature of the beliefs rather than their being, or pretending to be, necessarily sound truths). Culture is a network of beliefs, which extends through society. Intellectuals are a complex—and not strictly orderly—array of generators and vehicles of culture; they are present in each social strata and cannot be merely identified with what might be called “high culture” intellectuals.

To illustrate Gramsci’s view of the positions intellectuals occupy in society, Kate Crehan provides an illuminating discussion of the distinction made by Gramsci between traditional and organic intellectuals. The former (traditional intellectuals) are the product of the specific social class that has risen to dominance; they have come to occupy the sites of high culture, to preside over their evolution and to create new sites. The latter (organic intellectuals) are the product of any social class that emerges from a position of subalternity. Organic intellectuals are not peculiar to the political left, as is often believed. Any class involved in a process of freeing itself from subalternity—evolving its own common sense and its own culture—generates its own organic intellectuals.

Given this context, Gramsci also stresses an individual’s obligation to work out personally their own conception of the world, starting from the common sense in which any individual is born. This gives individuals, whichever class they belong to, the opportunity to “identify with the progressive forces propelling history forward” (p. 53). Gramsci seems to have no doubt that the proletariat is the progressive class: the subaltern class that may produce a new order and a new culture. But we cannot take for granted that that individual’s obligation will push him or her towards that class—eventually overcoming pre-existing cultural binds and fetters. Neither, we may add, can we take for granted that at a given time and in a given place, progressive forces will be the monopoly of a single class.

After this general discussion of Gramsci’s approach, Crehan’s book offers three “case studies”—Adam Smith, Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street—which, incidentally, show how not only economic themes, but also economists and their work may be the subject of analysis based on Gramsci’s categories.

Of obvious interest to historians of economic thought is the discussion of the case study of Adam Smith as an organic intellectual of a class emerging from subalternity in the eighteenth century. Gramsci’s categories appear to fit extremely well within a complex historical process that sees Adam Smith as part of an articulated intellectual movement (the Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment) that challenges traditional cultural, social, political, and economic institutions. This movement gives voice to subaltern strata, which are acquiring new strengths within the social landscape. But it is not only “pushed” by those social strata and by their demands; it also expresses its own momentum and assumes a vantage point claiming to represent universal claims: the point of view of an impartial spectator—or of the 99%, as the Occupy Wall Street movement will proclaim. Indeed, after the eruption of the French Revolution, Adam Smith’s writings came to be looked upon with much suspicion by the dominant strata, and the new class of capitalist entrepreneurs that will emerge in the nineteenth century will adopt and popularize a mutilated interpretation of Smith’s writings. Dugald Stuart turns out to be an instance of an intellectual organic to the new class of capitalist entrepreneurs. Adam Smith, being the product of a previous time—i.e., of the great movements of the eighteenth century—was to be used by subsequent generations and classes to their own purposes and included into their culture and common sense.

The chapter devoted to the history of the Tea Party movement brings the reader into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and provides instructive overviews on the flow of funds towards academic research institutes and non-academic think tanks; on the way the latter have been acting on the ‘libertarian’ side of US politics during the past decades; and on how they managed to merge with the emerging grassroots Tea Party movement after the explosion of the economic crisis of 2007–08 and the Democratic Party’s success in the presidential elections of 2008. This gives the reader a healthy intrusion into political history and into a perception of economic reality (first and foremost, taxation and government spending) by considering the various strata that form “the people.”

Also interesting is the chapter on the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. Here, Crehan shows how the movement coagulated and gained momentum through a number of specific and unplanned steps crucially inspired by a “horizontal” approach to democracy. Once more, this may be of much interest to economists and historians of economic thought: the discussion is focused on the issue of inequality and on how it drove its way to emerge as common sense in the slogan “We are the 99%,” also influencing the rhetorics of mainstream politics in the Democratic Party. The book was published in 2016, but we have no doubt that the author would agree that Donald Trump’s electoral campaign and similar subsequent political moves throughout the world have been able to profit from careful exploitation of the same issues that gave momentum to both the 99% behind the Tea Party and the 99% behind Occupy Wall Street.