This study intends to understand some concepts by Antonio Gramsci. It was necessary to take into consideration the historical moment lived by him, even if the study has not presented it in a separate way. A brief panoramic bibliographical overview as for the author's life was presented since we believe that the construction of the intellectual subject happens in the practice of their relations and his theories emerged from these. Knowing Gramsci's intellectual legacy, militant that dropped off his university degree due to financial difficulties and spent most of his life in prison, is not an easy task. Hence, we emphasized that this is an exploratory study. Although the objective was not to show the proximity and distance with Marx, these were evident in the interpretations made by this author. Marx was a theorist who influenced Gramsci and we can say that he was the starting point for the development of Gramsci's concepts. The choice for the chosen concepts to be worked on occurred owing to their reoccurrence in the pieces of work analyzed and from them there are others that are unfolded within the limits of this work. Although we have presented the concepts separatedly because of an understanding pedagogical matter, the Gramscian concepts are inter-related and complementary.