Gramsci’s thought cannot be summed up in a few lines. Let us note four closely interrelated themes here: (1) in a manner quite alien to the tradition of ‘dialectical materialism’, Gramsci saw Marxism as a ‘philosophy of praxis’ which he initially interpreted, in the days of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Turin ‘factory councils’ movement, as an affirmation of the will against the fatalism of the socialist organizations and, later, as a ‘science of politics’, Machiavellian in inspiration, the aim of which was to construct the elements of a hegemony of the producers; (2) this theme is linked to a ‘broadening’ of the ‘Marxist theory of the State’, which does not dispense with class determination, but stresses the complementary nature of the ‘balance of forces’ and the ‘consensus’ obtained through cultural institutions; (3) this explains why Gramsci devoted a considerable part of his unfinished research to a history and analysis of the function of the different types of intellectual, with a view to reforming the organic ‘bond’ which unites them to the masses when a new social class is in the ascendant; (4) there is also an ethical dimension to this critical thinking, not only in its quest for a morality or a ‘common sense’ for the workers which could free them from bourgeois hegemony, but in its effort to formulate and implement a regulative principle for political action which would be fundamentally secular and directed against all forms of messianic ideology (‘pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’).