I Hate the Indifferent: Antonio Gramsci's 1917 Text, and Why It's Still Quoted

In February 1917, La città futura came out in Turin: a one-off special issue Antonio Gramsci edited from cover to cover for the Piedmont young socialist federation of the Italian Socialist Party. It opens with a short piece, now known by the line that starts it: “I Hate the Indifferent.” Its target is a behaviour, not a group of people: whoever refuses to take a side, Gramsci argues, still ends up carrying the weight of what history decides without them.

Context: 1917, in the middle of a war

The special issue came out while the First World War was still going on, which places the text at a precise moment. Before editing La città futura, Gramsci had already been a working journalist at the Turin desk of Avanti! since December 1915, the Italian Socialist Party’s paper. In the special issue he paired his own writing with pieces by Benedetto Croce, Gaetano Salvemini and Carlini, aimed at the political education of the federation’s young members.

The text is often mixed up, mistakenly, with another paper carrying Gramsci’s name: L’Ordine Nuovo, which only began in 1919, first as a weekly, then as a daily from 1921. The confusion is understandable: both papers bear Gramsci’s name, but in two distinct stretches of his career, two years apart.

From a dictionary word to a civic fault

In everyday Italian, as the Treccani dictionary defines it, indifference means a lack of interest or emotional involvement in something. It’s ordinarily a private word, for a mood or a reaction. Gramsci keeps that register and moves it onto public ground. In the text, indifference gets described through two images: a lead weight, then the marsh that surrounds the old city, dead weight that holds back anyone who might want to move. Indifference, he writes, still produces effects in history by staying passive, letting events settle wherever they settle. In the text’s terms, whoever stayed out shares the responsibility for what happens alongside whoever acted directly.

Worked example: in November 2017 the Fondazione Gramsci named a project linked to an exhibition on the prison notebooks, held in Florence from the 28th to the 30th, after “I Hate the Indifferent” — a sign that the phrase is still put to work, a century later, to talk to younger audiences about civic participation.

Why it’s still quoted today

The text closes by tying hatred of indifference to the idea of a “future city” built by citizens who consciously take part, set against chance and fate. It’s this closing move, more than the 1917 polemic around it, that keeps the quote alive: an appeal to take part that needs no background in wartime Turin or socialist politics to land. The same thread, approached with different tools, runs through the Recaps on popular sovereignty and citizenship and on the principles the Italian Constitution hands to citizens, not only to institutions; for the historical backdrop the text grew out of, World War 1 is the direct setting.

It should stay separate from another title that only resembles it in its keyword: Alberto Moravia’s Gli Indifferenti, a 1929 novel published in English as The Time of Indifference. Moravia tells indifference as the private unease of a middle-class family, in a novel far from Gramsci’s themes and form.

Common misconceptions

The most common mix-up is about the paper: the text ran in La città futura in 1917, before L’Ordine Nuovo existed. The word “hate” trips people up too, but it targets a behaviour, not a person.