‘The time of monsters’: everyone is quoting Gramsci – but what did he actually say?

Line handily sums up people’s bewilderment at state of world, but it isn’t quite what the Marxist thinker wrote

At a time when geopolitical certainties of old are crumbling away, it has become the go-to quote to make sense of the current moment in all its seeming senselessness. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” is a line attributed to the former Italian Communist party leader Antonio Gramsci.

Over the last two months alone, it has been quoted – and often mangled – by a rightwing Belgian prime minister, a leftwing British political leader, an Irish central banker and in the title of the most recent BBC Reith lecture, given by the author Rutger Bregman.

“We can’t let the monsters win,” influencers earnestly warn their followers on Instagram; on LinkedIn, business consultants post graphs that visualise the “Gramsci gap” and its relevance to corporate strategy.

The only problem is, Gramsci never said or wrote such a thing. Or at least not in the snappy wording that has made it go viral.

“The time of monsters” powerfully sums up the repulsion and disbelief many people feel about the news in 2026 – whether it’s emanating from the White House, the Epstein files or the battlefields of Ukraine. It evokes Goya’s famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters as much as contemporary pop culture.

“It has an apocalyptical feel, like when the Demogorgon appears at the end of Stranger Things,” said Peter Thomas, a historian of political thought and a Gramsci expert at Brunel University of London.

But in the notebooks that Gramsci filled with his thoughts on political theory, philosophy and linguistics after being imprisoned by the Italian fascist government in November 1926, there is no mention of monsters. In the original Italian, he wrote: “In questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

The most widely used translation of the Prison Notebooks, by the British academics Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith in 1971, renders this as: “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Not quite so pithy.

An alternative 1996 edition by Joseph Buttigieg, the late father of the former US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, talks of morbid “phenomena” instead of “symptoms”. Still, no mention of monsters.

The first recorded English use of “time of monsters” in connection with Gramsci is in a 2010 article in the New Left Review by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek titled A Permanent Economic Emergency. In this context, the quote lends poetic gravitas to the challenge that the eurozone’s banking crisis posed to the left.

However, when approached about why he had chosen to poetically refashion the original Italian, Žižek insisted the monsters were not his. “I DON’T REMEMBER anything about it, but I am sure that I took the word from somewhere else,” he told the Guardian in an email.

In fact, a French version of the same phrase predates the moment it was popularised by Žižek in English. “Dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres,” the French economist and urbanist Gustave Massiah wrote in a 2003 essay – “in this twilight monsters arise”. The phrase “dans cet interrègne surgissent les monstres” was used in the pages of Le Monde as early as 1996.

While the exact origin of Gramsci’s monsters remains elusive, there are wider reasons why the Italian intellectual’s ideas remain so potent today. Published in 1947, years after Gramsci’s death, the Prison Notebooks were written during concentrated periods in which the communist thinker was allowed pen and paper in his cell. “They distill a lot of things Gramsci had on his mind, so they are incredibly precise, at least for an Italian,”said Silvio Pons, the president of Rome’s Gramsci institute.

The notebooks did not go truly global until after the cold war, with translations into more than 40 languages, but their central idea has proven electric for activists for much longer.

“When Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks, he was trying to make sense of why there hadn’t been a socialist or communist revolution in Italy before the fascist takeover,” said Marzia Maccaferri, a political historian at Queen Mary University in London. “And the key concept to emerge from that thought process is his theory of hegemony: that the ruling class can rule not only through coercion, but also through the intersection of popular and high culture, through intellectual and civil society.”

In continental Europe, this cultural turn inspired many of the student revolutionaries of 1968, while in Britain it provided a theoretical framework that Marxist sociologists such as Stuart Hall applied to Thatcherism in the 1980s.

As early as the 1970s, however, Gramsci’s ideas were co-opted by the chief thinker of France’s Nouvelle Droite, or “new right”, Alain de Benoist. The attempt to centre far-right politics on cultural rather than racial identities can be seen in the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s dictum that “all politics is downstream of culture”, and in many of the key figures of the contemporary European far right.

The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s master’s thesis applied Gramci’s ideas to Poland’s Solidarność (Solidarity) movement; in Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s culture minister recently published a book called Gramsci è vivo (Gramsci is Alive).

The “time of monsters” quote may have captured the minds of politicians and thinkers of today but many feel it strips Gramsci of the activist zeal that he embodied for previous generations.

“Monsters are something exceptional, an inverted miracle that comes out of nowhere with no real explanation,” Thomas said. “It’s a metaphor that shuts off the possibility of trying to think through what is occurring. We get outraged or shocked at the monstrosity of these Trumpian figures, rather than trying to work out what produced it.”

Before his imprisonment, Gramsci spent two formative years in revolutionary Russia, where he is said to have witnessed proof that a new world, in spite of its struggles, could eventually be reborn.

“It was almost inconceivable for him that whatever temporary setbacks he would have to suffer, we wouldn’t eventually arrive at a victory,” Thomas said. “We probably find it a little bit harder to think like that.”