Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist thinker whose radical ideas on how to build an alternative world from below remain vigorously relevant today. Gramsci s philosophy of praxis critically dissects the institutions of modern liberal democracy to reveal what is perhaps its deepest secret: it is the most successful political system in modernity at preserving an objective condition of domination while transforming it into a subjective conviction of freedom.

Based on a careful reading of Gramsci's The Prison Notebooks, Marco Fonseca shows hegemony as more than leadership of elites over...