A longtime and widely respected professor of literature, Joseph Buttigieg devoted his remarkable academic career to translating the writing of the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci into English.

In his long tenure at Notre Dame, the professor founded the International Gramsci Society and came to be recognized internationally, including by the Italian government, as a leading expert on the theorist’s writing. Buttigieg’s signature contribution, however, was his authoritative translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks — a collection of thirty-three notebooks that Gramsci had filled with original reflections and theories from the prison cell where he eventually died as a captive of Mussolini’s fascist regime.

In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci wrote prolifically on the insidious ways by which the ruling class manufactures consent among the masses to remain in power. Rather than merely using force to subjugate the working class, Gramsci wrote that the bourgeoisie establishes and maintains a “cultural hegemony,” rewriting the culture’s values, philosophy, and imagination to maintain class hierarchy and exploitation.