In this chapter we move to a discussion of Gramsci’s most famous concept, that of hegemony (egemonia). We attempt to reconstruct Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony in all its wealth and depth, arguing that it constitutes the main philosophical and political thread of Gramsci’s thought.
If hegemony has such a central place in Gramsci’s thought, then the question may be raised of why we are only addressing it in the fifth chapter. Our argument is that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony not only relies on but deepens and furthers his other major theoretical innovations: the intellectual as the organizer of culture or politics; the distinction between civil society and political society; the theory of crisis as a situation of the dissolution and constitution of the political; ideology as a mobilizing and binding factor in social movements and as a terrain of philosophical and political struggle; and the revolution of common sense as intellectual and moral reform. Thus, it is only after having encountered the other key concepts in Gramsci’s thought that a reader, in our opinion, is fully able to understand the way in which hegemony is applicable to all the other topics that Gramsci reflects on in his prison writing.
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, in this way, confers on his seemingly fragmentary theoretical incursions a new degree of coherence and consistency. At the same time, we argue, Gramsci’s reflection on hegemony is the key to understanding his theory of power – that is, the theory of the conditions of power’s emergence, of its modalities of operation, and of its historical and political consequences.
Hegemony: The exercise of leadership
Hegemony, for Gramsci, serves to stress the cultural and moral dimensions of the exercise of political power. This is not, though, the original meaning of the word, either in Ancient Greece or among the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century who resuscitated the term in the modern context.
In Ancient Greek the word derives from eghestai, which means to direct or to lead. This word later produced eghemon, which by the time of the Peloponnesian War was used to designate the city in a leading position within the alliance of Greek city-States. In the discipline of International Relations the term ‘hegemony’ is still used in a sense directly borrowed from this period of antiquity, naming a situation in which a single State is dominant on the military, economic and diplomatic planes.
In the 1880s, though, the meaning of the word was modified by Marxist Russian revolutionaries, particularly Georgi Plekhanov.1 They argued that the working class should form an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and described this alliance as one in which the workers would exercise ‘hegemony’ while the peasantry would be an ancillary force. In this case, then, hegemony served to denote a class alliance under the leadership of the proletariat (and an alliance that was understood as a stepping stone towards revolution). In the following decades, references to hegemony grew more common in revolutionary newspapers and pamphlets in Russia, with Lenin himself using the word in Bolshevik polemics against the Mensheviks before the October Revolution.2 Moreover, we can see that Lenin and the Bolsheviks attempted to put hegemony into practice during this period: their political programme was based on the incorporation of the aspiration for land redistribution among the peasantry, the desire for peace among soldiers and the demands for national autonomy on the part of the Finnish, Ukrainian and Baltic peoples.
Both the experience of 1917 and the presence of the word in Lenin’s writings are factors that led Gramsci to use ‘hegemony’ in his Prison Notebooks. However, as we will see, the term for Gramsci has entirely new implications. First, it no longer serves to designate solely the activity of the working class in its struggle against the bourgeoisie, but instead can be applied to any form of ‘directing’ political action on the part of one social group vis-à-vis others, theoretically at any point in history. Second, Gramsci’s use of hegemony stresses the cultural, moral and cognitive aspects of that leadership, and it is in this way almost completely redefined. Lastly, while we might say that hegemony was a means (to revolution) for Lenin, it is transmuted to an end (of politics) for Gramsci.
Importantly, Gramsci does not offer a single definition of hegemony that would be valid for all times and places. Instead, in the same way that we observed with his use of the word ‘State’, Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony evolves across the concrete historical situations that are described and analysed. We can term this Gramsci’s methodological historicism – that is, we can note that Gramsci’s historicism is methodological as well as philosophical (see also Chapter 3). Typically, the concepts that Gramsci uses in his analyses of politics appear for the first time in the context of a specific historical inquiry, and then are widened and refined as he applies them in subsequent passages to new objects of study.
It is therefore important to try to identify Gramsci’s uses of the word ‘hegemony’ in some of the specific historical periods he investigates in the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci uses the concept of hegemony in his notebooks on the Italian Risorgimento (see Chapter 3), where he writes of the hegemony of Cavour’s Moderates vis-à-vis the Action Party of Garibaldi and Mazzini, as well as in relation to the rural and urban bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie of the peninsula. It is important to bear in mind that the Moderates were only a fraction of the bourgeoisie, a numerically limited stratum of political actors that can be thought of as the ‘intellectuals’ of the court of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Their ‘hegemony’, which also represented the hegemony of Piedmont over the rest of Italy, was continued after unification in the process of trasformismo by which Italian political elites were molecularly incorporated into the parliamentary system.3
Gramsci’s study of the Risorgimento illustrates an important point: although the Moderate party’s hegemony relied partly on military pre-eminence (through its backing by the Piedmontese army), it also operated through a ‘power of attraction’ that refers to the general ability of a social group to attract others to identify with, and rally towards, its struggles and causes. The Risorgimento thus saw the success of the Moderates’ political project as they made war against some (Austria and the Pope), obtained the consent of others (the Action Party and the bourgeoisie) and neutralized the subaltern groups who were cast aside from the process (the peasantry and the urban working class).
In the case of the Risorgimento, then, four different sorts of entities co-existed: the directing group, the auxiliary groups, the subaltern groups and the ‘enemy’ camp. Hegemony, formally, denotes the relation, consented to on both sides, that the leading entity has to the auxiliary group or groups.4 Gramsci’s criticisms of the Risorgimento, as we have already seen, are focused on the partial or limited character of the hegemony that presided over Italy’s unification; Gramsci sees in the Risorgimento a non-national hegemony, and specifically a subnational one that reduced the majority of the population to a passive state and thus relegated it to a subaltern position.
Gramsci is particularly careful to draw a contrast between the Risorgimento and the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. According to Gramsci, the ambition of the Jacobins was to incorporate the entirety of the underprivileged groups of the country within the revolutionary project as allies in the struggle against the aristocracy. To this end, importantly, the Jacobins were willing to sacrifice some of the immediate material interests of their class – or their ‘corporatist’ interests – in order to include in their programme some demands that emanated from the popular classes. Gramsci describes the situation as follows:
The representatives of the Third Estate initially only posed those questions which interested the actual physical members of the social group, their immediate ‘corporate’ interests (corporate in the traditional sense, of the immediate and narrowly selfish interests of a particular category) … . Gradually a new elite was selected out which did not concern itself solely with ‘corporate’ reforms, but tended to conceive of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic group of all the popular forces.5
Thus ‘Jacobinism’, which as we have already seen in Chapter 3 was for Gramsci a ‘national-popular’ phenomenon, refers to a project of total or whole hegemony, rather than the partial hegemony of the sort that characterized the process of the Risorgimento. Jacobinism thus denotes the ambition on the part of the fundamental group (in this case the bourgeoisie) to hegemonize all the popular elements of society through concrete concessions, thereby achieving their active – and no longer passive – political support. Importantly, the power of attraction of the fundamental group in relation to the auxiliary strata operates through specific intermediary agents: the organic intellectuals, who in this instance are the Jacobins.
Gramsci envisages the Jacobin politics of the French Revolution as reproduced in twentieth-century Italy, only this time in a new configuration of forces in which the urban proletariat of the North would be the leading group and the peasants of the South the auxiliary group, with the industrial bourgeoisie as the adversary to overthrow. This is the main theme of Gramsci’s Alcuni temi essay, written in 1926 just before his arrest. In this text Gramsci insists on the fact that the Communist Party’s organic intellectuals must persuade, through their ideological activism, the traditional intellectuals of rural Italy of the benefits and political rationality of an alliance with the proletariat. Gramsci sees these members of the countryside petty bourgeoisie as pivotal actors, halfway between the landowners and the peasants and therefore in the position to promote support for the working class cause among the peasantry.
For Gramsci, hegemony is thus constructed through the power of attraction of the leading group and also through compromises and concessions aimed at the conscious rallying of auxiliary forces. The essential condition of hegemonic politics is the consent of the auxiliary groups. We have already covered the notion of consent in relation to the civil society–political society dichotomy (Chapter 3), the first term of which is associated with private initiatives, private actions, intellectual debates and consensual mobilization, while the latter refers to the domain of coercion enacted through administrative or military constraint. Hegemony, then, is forged in the context of civil society where the political party and its organic intellectuals (the ‘permanent persuaders’) rally to their cause various disparate social groups.
The consent–civil society coupling is thus central to Gramsci’s conception of hegemony. However, the role of coercion is less clear, and the question of whether consent can be conceived of without coercion – such that hegemony would be a purely consensual process – is a difficult one to answer. The conceptual difficulty here is compounded by the fact that Gramsci seems to alternate between two definitions of hegemony in different passages of the Prison Notebooks.
A first type of understanding of hegemony can be sketched in the following way: ‘hegemony = consent + coercion = civil society + political society’. Hegemony would in this case ‘walk on two legs’, namely those of free choice and constraint. Other passages, though, seem to run against this first definition. For instance, we find, in a famous passage, Gramsci schematizing his thinking algebraically, as we have just done above, and stating, ‘State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion’.6 This would imply a second definition or formula: ‘hegemony = consent = civil society’.
Is it possible to overcome this definitional ambiguity? We can note, first, that it is almost impossible to find in Gramsci’s notebooks a reference to a hegemonic configuration in which the ‘moment of force’ is completely absent. Thus whatever the exact definition of the word ‘hegemony’, the combination and dynamic interaction of consent and coercion is the recurrent characteristic of the situations described by Gramsci. In the historical examples above, then, we can note the decisive action of the Piedmontese army during the Risorgimento and the constant threat of the guillotine during the Jacobin Terror.
Similarly, for the proletarian revolution that Gramsci anticipates in the West, the active adherence of all the underprivileged groups in society to the working class cause will lead to an assault on the State, which is likely to be violent, even if only for a brief period. These two steps in the revolutionary process – the building of alliances and the assault on the State – correspond for Gramsci to the war of position and the war of movement, respectively (see Chapter 3). Referring to an expression used in 1925 by the then head of the Comintern Grigory Zinoviev, Gramsci mentions here the need for a ‘double perspective’: revolutionary strategy must be able to theorize both consent and coercion, both the war of position and the war of movement, as well as the relations between these terms.
Gramsci’s historical investigations are in this way an invitation to think through the interpenetration of consent and coercion. The example of present-day Western democracies might illustrate the fact that these modalities of power tend to be closely connected and mutually reinforcing: modern States enjoy the ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’ (in Weber’s phrase) exerted through the coercive element of the police and the army, but they are also constituted by the electoral mechanism as the consensual and democratic expression of a political community made up by the whole body of citizens. The coercive apparatuses of the State are, then, the means to implement public policies that have been sanctioned by elections, while the electoral mechanism itself contributes to ensuring the durability and stability of the violence of the State by making that violence, in another of Weber’s terms, ‘legitimate’.
It is highly likely that the most solid and stable hegemonic system is precisely the one in which brute force is least visible because its daily exercise has been made unnecessary by the logic of consent. In such a system the ubiquity of consensual institutional mechanisms will tend to conceal the coercive apparatuses that can remain off-stage, held back ‘just in case’. It is only in a situation of crisis, whether organic or conjunctural, that hegemony crumbles away and political violence may resurface. Following Gramsci’s logic, we can see that the resort to a range of coercive apparatuses in response to such a crisis situation is not a sign of the power of the established order, but rather a symptom of its weakness. The repressive apparatuses of contemporary States stand ready and waiting, in ‘anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed’.7 In order to describe a political landscape that is essentially coercive Gramsci uses the terms ‘domination’ (dominazione) and ‘dictatorship’ (dittatura) rather than ‘hegemony’ (egemonia) or ‘leadership’ (direzione).
The centrality of the dialectic of coercion and consent for Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony can be traced to the influence of Machiavelli’s writings. In The Prince (1532) we find the image of the centaur – half beast and half man, thus half force and half reason – as a metaphor for politics. Machiavelli asserts that a successful political operator must at times behave like a ferocious beast and at other times as a human being. Gramsci adopts in his thinking about hegemony a fundamentally Machiavellian problematic of power, which puts as central the nature and balance of the relation between force and reason (or, for Gramsci coercion and consent).8
It might at first seem surprising that a Marxist revolutionary of the twentieth century such as Gramsci has chosen to extract from the world of the Renaissance some of the most decisive categories for his reflections on politics. In particular, it might be questioned whether the modalities of ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’, fundamental as they undoubtedly are, exhaust the full range of the realities of the operation of power in a modern society. The conceptual couplet of consent and coercion – as arising from the distinction between civil society and political society – might be thought to risk neglecting more strictly economic power, including the specific constraints that force those who do not own the means of production to sell their labour power to those who do. The theme of ‘economic power’, which is so central in Marx, is much less prominent in Gramsci.9 In addition, Gramsci himself acknowledges that between consent and coercion one can identify a third term, namely corruption or fraud. For Gramsci, these forms of power will predominate ‘in certain situations when it is hard to exercise the hegemonic function, and when the use of force is too risky’.10
Hegemony: A cognitive and moral process
In the previous section, we discussed a number of the major components of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, but one of the most influential and original aspects of Gramsci’s reflections on hegemony concerns the ramifications of the hegemonic process on the very consciousness of social subjects. For Gramsci, hegemony constitutes a form of knowledge and signifies an ethical renewal. In this section, we will attempt to unpack these two dimensions in which Gramsci sees hegemony not just as the exercise of leadership but also as a fundamentally cognitive and moral process.
Gramsci recognizes that hegemony is constructed through mechanisms of political negotiation and intellectual persuasion. In this sense, it is Gramsci’s riposte to the theoretical and practical economism we discussed in Chapter 4. For Gramsci, then, a given economic landscape, including the actual or potential pre-eminence of a particular social class in the sphere of production, represents only a precondition of hegemony rather than being sufficient for its realization. To be clear, if the bourgeoisie monopolizes and becomes the master of capital in a given epoch, this only makes hegemony possible rather than necessary. Similarly, then, if the working class has the reasonable hope of expropriating the capitalist class in the future, this allows it to anticipate a future hegemony but does not mean that hegemony is in any way guaranteed. Economic facts are thus only premises and first steps for Gramsci and they do not ‘determine’ any set outcomes; Gramsci remains here keen to avoid any sort of crude ‘necessitarianism’.
The privileged – though not exclusive – terrain on which hegemony is built and actively defended is that of ideology. Hegemony thus operates chiefly at the level of the superstructure. Accordingly, the agents of hegemony are the intellectuals, whose responsibility it is to make sure hegemony and the revolution of common sense coincide. It is through the conjunction of these elements, which we discussed in Chapter 4, that hegemony corresponds for Gramsci to nothing less than a recomposition of culture.
Referring to Lenin and the 1917 Revolution, Gramsci writes that the ‘realisation of a hegemonic apparatus, in so far as it creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of knowledge: it is a fact of knowledge, a philosophical fact’.11 It should be borne in mind that, for Gramsci, ‘philosophy’, ‘ideology’ and ‘common sense’ stand in close relation to one another. The October Revolution, by overturning both the political order and the economic relations of society, thus also implied an intellectual and moral upheaval among the popular classes (and so reformed common sense) as well as among the elites (by changing the arts, science and the ‘upper level of philosophy’).
However, it is necessary to guard against an overly subjectivist interpretation of hegemony. Gramsci’s use of the expression ‘hegemonic apparatus’ suggests that any renewal of human consciousness caused by a hegemonic process is undergirded by a structure of concrete institutions both in political society (the administration, tribunals, courts and so on) and most crucially in civil society (including the school system, publishing houses, the press, radio and a number of other cultural institutions). In other words, intellectual and moral reform can only, for Gramsci, result from praxis since the culture of human beings can only be actuated through material practices.12
For Gramsci, hegemony serves less to describe a state of fact than to denote a process, namely a socio-political project that is in the course of being realized and enacted. For Gramsci, then, an expression such as ‘the hegemony of the bourgeoisie’ does not imply the limitation of the field of inquiry to the fact of the politico-cultural pre-eminence of a specific social group at a particular point in time. Rather, the expression also simultaneously refers to the process by which the hegemony of the bourgeois class is reproduced on a daily basis while being altered, extended, retracted or weakened in that process through the struggle with rival hegemonic projects.
The key to hegemonic reproduction is the educational relationship we discussed in Chapter 2; there we saw that Gramsci does not take this relationship to be reducible or limited to the site of the school or to traditional questions of schooling. Instead, as Gramsci writes, ‘this form of relationship exists throughout society as a whole and for every individual relative to other individuals. It exists between intellectual and non-intellectual sections of the population, between the rulers and the ruled, elites and their followers, leaders [dirigenti] and led, the vanguard and the body of the army. Every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship’.13
We have already seen that time and again the central individual political actor in Gramsci’s thought is the intellectual, and in particular the organic intellectual of the Communist Party, and this is certainly the case in Gramsci’s analysis of the educational relationship. Embedded in civil society, the intellectual must work tirelessly on the ‘matter’ of common sense in order to introduce and to disseminate through common sense the philosophy of praxis. This educational work opens the way to a mass revolutionary engagement with the philosophy of praxis on the theoretical level and with the practice of the Communist Party. To the ruling educational relationship that accompanies and conditions bourgeois hegemony the proletariat must, for Gramsci, struggle to counterpose an original counterhegemonic project founded on the enactment of this new educational relationship.14
What we might call ‘education towards hegemony’, referring both to the process of reforming common sense and to the proletariat’s self-training in the exercising of hegemony, entails for Gramsci a fundamental principle: the overcoming of eco-corporatist demands in order to reach the ethical-political plane. These key terms of Gramsci’s thinking on hegemony need to be unpacked carefully. By ‘eco-corporatist’ Gramsci means a group ambition that is limited to particular economic interests. Gramsci uses ‘ethical-political’ to designate the situation when eco-corporatist demands have been transformed into a universalistic outlook that takes into account the complex interrelations of the interests of a group with the demands and aspirations of the other groups in society – and in particular those groups that could stand in an auxiliary relation to a potentially hegemonic group. It is, of course, such a universalistic political outlook that must characterize any hegemonic or national-popular political project.
It can further be noted that the eco-corporatist cycle can, according to Gramsci, be itself divided into two stages. The first stage in this cycle is the defence of a given job or station and the promotion of interests that are directly attached to a particular economic activity. This stage corresponds to the defence of the interests of the banker, miner, or metalworker taken as a specific occupation within society. The second stage of the cycle involves the promotion of class-based economic interests, namely the interests of the bourgeois class or the working class. The passage from the first to the second stage represents, in Gramsci’s view, a process of distancing the interests of a group from particularism or localism, but he also asserts that this dynamic of universalization must be extended even further in order for a class to build a hegemonic project. In his 1926 Alcuni temi essay, he writes, ‘The proletariat, in order to become capable as a class of governing, must strip itself of every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice and incrustation.’15 Put differently, in order to claim hegemony the working class must learn genuinely to embody the people as a whole. Only then will the proletariat reach what Gramsci calls the ‘sphere of hegemony and ethical-political relations’.16
Gramsci takes the term ‘ethical-political’ from Croce, using it to signal the fact of ‘reaching beyond’ the economism in which the eco-corporatist state of mind remains unavoidably stuck. For Gramsci, the dynamic of universalization required to move from eco-corporatist demands to the ethical-political plane implies, importantly, the possibility of a new ethical State. This, for Gramsci, would be a State that, like Machiavelli’s centaur, is able to work both in the ‘human’ realm of morals and consent and with the ‘animal’ means of naked force. As Gramsci writes, positioning the educational relation as central to the production of the ethical State, ‘the State must be conceived of as an “educator”, in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type or level of civilisation’.17 Moreover, he contends:
the most reasonable and concrete thing that can be said about the ethical State, the cultural State, is this: every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level … . The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important State activities in this sense.18
Thus, we can see that the educational relationship defines the ethical State and as a result the dynamic of hegemonic reproduction penetrates the whole social body. The bourgeois ethical State, then, is the one that attempts to justify morally and to put into practice universalistic principles in the political realm (such as civil and political rights) without questioning the economic contradiction between capital and labour. The project of creating a proletarian ethical State as a hegemonic alternative with which all the popular elements of society are called to identify themselves must be based on enacting ‘scission’ (see Chapter 3) vis-à-vis this bourgeois historic bloc.
Hegemonic consciousness as catharsis
In order to realize the ambition of constructing a proletarian ethical State that can act as a hegemonic alternative to the existing bourgeois ethical State, the revolutionary social class must, according to Gramsci, experience the realization of its hegemonic potential. In order to realize this collective potential the individual members of the revolutionary class must achieve self-consciousness through sudden moments of self-recognition. In other words, it is necessary for a mutation of class consciousness to come about. Specifically, the change in class consciousness required must correspond to the passage from the eco-corporatist stage to the ethical-political plane. Gramsci sees this process as psychological as much as political, and terms it catharsis – a term borrowed from Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BCE) that suggests Gramsci sees this change as a moment of rare intensity resulting in the intellectual liberation of the subject. Through this process the subject of the process comes to understand that his or her economic demands are not enough in themselves and that they must instead be inscribed within a wider and more encompassing political project. Crucially, Gramsci concludes, the members of the proletariat ready themselves to construct and govern the ethical State only through such a process:
Critical understanding of self takes place … through a struggle of political ‘hegemonies’ and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working out at a higher level of one’s own conception of reality. Consciousness of being part of a particular hegemonic force (that is to say, political consciousness) is the first stage towards a further progressive self-consciousness in which theory and practice will finally be one.19
We can recognize here the centrality of Gramsci’s problematic of knowledge to his thinking on the relationship between class consciousness and self-awareness on the part of individual members of a class. This is a key stage in the process of self-knowledge that comes from the Socratic injunction to ‘know thyself’ (Chapter 4). A process of catharsis is therefore for Gramsci the catalyst of the revolution of common sense whereby the popular classes seize on and take possession of the knowledge that is created by the philosophy of praxis. This knowledge, specifically, sheds light on social contradictions by historicizing them while indicating to each individual his or her place in society and the very history of those social contradictions. It is at the point at which this knowledge – of the historical character of social contradictions and the inherent mutability of the social forms currently embodying those contradictions – has been spread through the members of the revolutionary classes that they are in a position to translate theory into ‘critical-practical activity’ or praxis (see Chapter 4).
The historical stages of hegemony
Hegemony is thus for Gramsci a truly multidimensional concept. It serves to denote not just the political leadership of a social group, but also the strategy of alliance vis-à-vis the auxiliary group or groups, the symbiosis of coercion and consent as the fundamental mechanics of power, the recasting of the ideological landscape and of cultural life, the formulation, expression and construction of a political project in a universalistic and ‘ethical’ form, an original educational relationship and the moral and cognitive mutation of consciousness.
The implications of the theory of hegemony are, accordingly, exceptionally wide and numerous. However, it is also important to bear in mind that Gramsci developed his theory without ever losing sight of concrete history. We have already mentioned the historical events of the Risorgimento, the French Revolution and the October Revolution, analyses of which are central to Gramsci’s thought. In this section we try to illustrate the trajectory of hegemony in a more synoptic way, interpreting it as developed implicitly throughout the overall movement of Gramsci’s thought in the Prison Notebooks. In this historical trajectory we can identify the key moments of the pre-hegemonic State of the medieval commune, the hegemony of the bourgeoisie and the hegemony of the proletariat in a communist society (or what Gramsci calls the ‘regulated society’).
Gramsci is particularly interested in the Italian medieval commune as a particular type of political unit that represents the very antithesis of the bourgeois hegemony of his time. On the subject of the commune, he writes, ‘It is necessary to determine what significance the “State” had in the Communal State: a limited “corporative” significance’.20 In the Middle Ages the communal city was thus for Gramsci the direct expression of particular economic interests as no social group was able to ‘universalise’ itself in the framework of a successful hegemonic project. Thus Gramsci explains that in the medieval case:
The State was, in a certain sense, a mechanical bloc of social groups, often of different race. Within the circle of political-military compression, which was only exercised harshly at certain moments, the subaltern groups had a life of their own, institutions of their own, etc., and sometimes these institutions had State functions which made of the State a federation of social groups with disparate functions not subordinated in any way.21
The notion of a ‘federation of social groups’ suggests a relatively static collection of social categories between which a central authority then acts as a more or less brutal arbiter. To this extent, pre-modern political society tends to leave social stratification unaffected since it does not embody a radical transformative project with the ambition of overturning existing social relations.
The bourgeoisie is for Gramsci the first social class in history to embrace such a transformative ambition of upturning the social relations with which it finds itself initially confronted. Thus Gramsci sees that the bourgeoisie politically expressed its newly acquired place of pre-eminence in the economic realm in the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ in England; a century later it was also the bourgeoisie that was the motor force behind the French Revolution. The bourgeoisie was also able to institute economic liberalism, secure political and civil rights, develop the modern State and ultimately to uproot the surviving relics of feudalism and absolutism in Western Europe. As Marx and Engels famously put it as early as 1848 in Chapter 1 of The Communist Manifesto, ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.’22
In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci attempts to understand the implications of this political project through the prism of his theory of hegemony. He asserts, ‘The modern State substitutes for the mechanical bloc of social groups their subordination to the active hegemony of the directive and dominant group, hence abolishes certain autonomies, which nevertheless are reborn in other forms, as parties, trade unions, cultural associations.’23 He continues:
The revolution which the bourgeois class has brought into the conception of law, and hence into the function of the State, consists especially in the will to conform (hence ethicity of the law and of the State). The previous ruling classes were essentially conservative in the sense that they did not tend to construct an organic passage from the other classes into their own, i.e. to enlarge their class sphere ‘technically’ and ideologically: their conception was that of a closed caste. The bourgeois class poses itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level.24
Gramsci thus follows Marx and Engels in recognizing that the historical force specific to bourgeois civilization, which constitutes the spring of its development and the source of its resilience, is its dynamic capacity for perpetual movement. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie has thus manifested itself in multiple forms, such as the Jacobin revolution in France, the Victorian era in Britain, or the Risorgimento in Italy, and each form is for Gramsci tied to the specific economic and political conditions that obtained in that national context at that point in time.
Furthermore we can note that Gramsci sees all national societies as continually experiencing processes of internal recomposition and contestation. The ‘passive revolution’ enacted through molecular processes of incorporation is the essential manner, for Gramsci, through which the phenomenon of hegemonic recomposition occurs.25 The bourgeois political order is never as strong, or as assured of its own future, as when its material resources and its cultural and moral power of attraction allow it to assimilate a great number of disparate social elements and to make them its auxiliaries. ‘Scission’, as the very opposite of ‘incorporation’, is conversely the major threat hanging over the social power of the bourgeoisie. To repeat, it is the scission of the working class vis-à-vis the established order, as actuated by catharsis and by the revolution of common sense, that marks the birth of a rival hegemonic project.
Between the extremes of maximal incorporation into the established order and effective scission in opposition to it, it is possible to identify various stages of what we might call hegemonic disintegration. On the subject of interwar society, Gramsci writes, ‘The bourgeois class is “saturated”: it not only does not expand – it starts to disintegrate; it not only does not assimilate new elements, it loses part of itself (or at least its losses are enormously more numerous than its assimilations).’ Thus ‘the conception of the State as pure force is returned to’.26
It should be borne in mind that for Gramsci the aftermath of the First World War triggered a profound ‘crisis of authority’ on the European continent and especially in Italy (see Chapter 3). The parliamentary political system born out of the Risorgimento would, of course, not survive this crisis: as the social strata that used to be auxiliary to parliamentarianism (i.e. the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie) withdrew their support and the subaltern classes started to display their antagonistic potential, the system fell into fascism in the early 1920s. The ‘Caesarism’ of Mussolini is thus the symptom of a hegemonic system that has fallen into a ‘decadent’ state.27 In the years following the March on Rome, the fascist regime then began to substitute coercion for consent and dictatorship for hegemony.
From proletarian hegemony to the ‘regulated society’
Although in the mid-1920s Italian Communists – including, as we have seen in Chapter 1, Gramsci himself – were apt to see in fascism only a last-ditch and reactionary embodiment of bourgeois power before the workers’ revolution, Gramsci’s conception of revolution deepened during his time in prison as it evolved in conjunction with his development of the concepts of war of position and hegemony.
We have already seen (in Chapter 3) that the war of position tends to relativize – as opposed to negate – an understanding of revolution as ‘rupture’ or as a ‘grand soir’ that embodies a single radical break-up of existing conditions. The conquest or seizure of the State – that is, the assault on bourgeois political society – of the war of movement can only follow a long-term hegemonic struggle of an ideological and cultural character carried out on the terrain of civil society. Revolution as a single event is then reconceptualized as the completion of a longer process, as opposed to a single and isolated cataclysm.
The theory of hegemony allows us to think further beyond the revolution as rupture: in the Prison Notebooks Gramsci asserts that the communist hegemonic project will have to continue after the conquest of the State. Thus he notes that a social group ‘becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to “lead” as well’.28
Having seized the repressive apparatuses of political society the working class will have to constrain itself to rule the post-revolutionary society through consent as much as coercion. The contrast between Lenin and Gramsci on the topic of hegemony can be stressed once again: for the former hegemony is a means to the end of seizing the State, whereas the latter sees hegemony as the essential way in which power itself is exerted and operates.
It might therefore be asked whether it is as a consequence impossible to think anything beyond hegemony, or whether the hegemonic form of power can be overcome in the process of the movement of history. It is important to bear in mind that in the tradition of Marxist theory ‘communism’ does not describe the social situation the day after revolution; instead, a transitional period between the fall of capitalism and the reaching of communism is to be expected (often termed ‘socialism’). In the few (very brief) of Marx’s writings in which he addresses it explicitly, communism tends to be described in terms of the free organization of work by the producers, with communist society appearing at the end of a process of the gradual disappearance, or ‘withering away’, of the State. These are perhaps the few fragments of Marx’s thought that seem to be utopian, with communism depicted as an almost anarchic state.
Gramsci devotes only a few brief passages of the Prison Notebooks to the communist stage of history, which he calls the ‘regulated society’ to escape prison censorship. Thus he contends Marx ‘initiates intellectually an historical epoch which will last in all probability for centuries, that is, until the disappearance of political society and the coming of a regulated society. Only then will his conception of the world be superseded, when the conception of necessity is superseded by the conception of freedom’.29 Communism as a historical prospect is thus so remote for Gramsci that it might be ‘centuries’ away. It might be possible to consider this cautiousness of Gramsci’s regarding the proximity of communism as a laudable sign of realism on Gramsci’s part.30 Nevertheless, we can probably discern a note of utopianism in Gramsci’s contention taken as a whole, and one that seems to run against Gramsci’s deep historicist convictions.
Elsewhere in the Prison Notebooks Gramsci writes in relation to the State and regulated society: ‘It is possible to imagine the coercive element of the State withering away by degrees, as ever-more conspicuous elements of regulated society (or ethical State or civil society) make their appearance.’31 Here the ‘regulated society’ is defined in reference to the Gramscian couplet of civil society and political society such that the regulated society corresponds to the suppression or disappearance of political society. The expression ‘regulated society’ might suggest the centrality of a rule or regulation, but we can see here that Gramsci intends it to be a rule consented to by the political community. It thus converges with the notion of ‘free organisation’ as the central principle of communism. In a different register, we might conclude, it is at the stage at which education mutates into ‘self-education’ that external constraints to individual and collective development begin to disappear.
1 See the account in Anderson, ‘Antinomies’.
2 Derek Boothman, ‘The Sources for Gramsci’s Concept of Hegemony’, Rethinking Marxism, 20:2 (2008), pp. 201–15.
3 Pierre Laroche, ‘Gramsci et le Risorgimento’, Italies, 6 (2002), pp. 313–23.
4 Portelli, Gramsci et le bloc historique.
5 Q19§24; SPN, p. 77.
6 Q6§88; SPN, p. 263.
7 Q11§12; SPN, p. 12.
8 Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
9 Anderson, ‘Antinomies’.
10 Q13§37; SPN, p. 80n1.
11 Q10II§12; SPN, pp. 365–6.
12 We can note that Gramsci’s notion of the ‘hegemonic apparatus’ served as a direct inspiration for Louis Althusser’s article of 1970 in which his influential theory of ‘ideological State apparatuses’ (ISAs) is developed; see Louis Althusser, ‘Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État’, La Pensée, 151 (1970), pp. 3–38. On the difficult issue of the intellectual relationship between Gramsci and Althusser, see Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State and Pierre Macherey, ‘Verum et factum: les enjeux d’une philosophie de la praxis et le débat Althusser-Gramsci’, in: Stathis Kouvelakis and Vincent Charbonier (eds), Sartre, Lukács, Althusser: Des marxistes en philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), pp. 143–55.
13 Q10II§44; SPN, p. 350.
14 Entwistle, Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics.
15 SPWII, p. 448.
16 Q13§18; SPN, p. 167.
17 Q13§11; SPN, p. 247.
18 Q8§179; SPN, p. 258.
19 Q11§12; SPN, p. 333.
20 Q5§123; SPN, p. 54n4.
21 Q25§4; SPN, p. 54n4.
22 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, volume 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), p. 487.
23 Q25§4; SPN, p. 54n4.
24 Q8§2; SPN, p. 260.
25 Thomas, ‘Modernity as “Passive Revolution”’.
26 Q8§260; SPN, p. 260.
27 Evelyne Buissière, ‘Gramsci et le problème du chef charismatique’, in: André Tosel (ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: Actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 207–22.
28 Q19§24; SPN, pp. 57–8.
29 Q7§33; SPN, p. 382.
30 Losurdo, ‘Comunismo critico’.
31 Q6§88; SPN, p. 263.