Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, famously wrote in his Prison Notebooks, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.” This phrase speaks not only to Gramsci’s time, but to our own: when older sociopolitical and economic structures are collapsing, but no new stable order has yet emerged. In such transitional moments, Gramsci argued, uncertainty, instability and reactionary forces dominate, creating a breeding ground for extremism, authoritarianism and political “monsters” - figures or movements that thrive in times of disorder. Source: insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/higher-ed-gamma/2025/03/17/old-world-dying-and-new-one-struggling-be-born #gramsci #sociology #criticaltheory #hegemony #socialchange