Gramsci

Works

One posthumous body of notes, in two editions that read differently.

• The Prison Notebooks (written 1929–1935) contain hegemony, civil society, the war of position, the intellectuals, and the analysis of common sense.
• The 1971 Selections is the volume through which most English-language readers met him, and its thematic arrangement imposes an order the notebooks do not have.
• The complete critical edition, translated from the 1975 Italian text, restores the notebooks in their written sequence and makes the unfinished character of the thinking visible.
• The Pre-Prison Writings and the Letters from Prison supply the political context the coded notebook prose leaves out.

Central ideas

Five concepts, all of which are strategic rather than merely descriptive.

• Hegemony: leadership exercised through consent, distinguished from domination exercised through coercion. A ruling bloc secures its position by making its worldview the unremarkable background of ordinary life, which is more durable than force because it does not present itself as anything to resist.
• The integral state: political society and civil society together. Civil society — schools, churches, associations, the press — is where consent is manufactured, which is why it is a site of struggle rather than a neutral zone.
• War of position against war of manoeuvre: where civil society is dense, a frontal assault on the state fails, and the struggle has to be a long positional one inside culture and institutions.
• Organic and traditional intellectuals: every social group produces intellectuals who articulate its function and give it coherence, while traditional intellectuals appear independent of any group and are not.
• Common sense and good sense: common sense is the incoherent sediment of past worldviews deposited in a person without an inventory; good sense is the sound nucleus within it. The work is not to escape one's formation but to take stock of it.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose English cognates say something close to the opposite.

• Hegemony: rule through organised consent. Not dominance, not majority opinion, and not simply influence.
• Common sense (senso comune): the incoherent inherited worldview of a period. Not sound practical judgement, which is what he calls good sense.
• Organic intellectual: one who articulates the function of a social group. Not self-taught, not grassroots, and not a matter of credentials.

Debates and disagreements

The arguments are about the text as much as about the theory.

• Perry Anderson showed that the notebooks give at least three incompatible accounts of the relation between state and civil society, so a Gramscian position generally requires choosing one and setting the others aside. This is the sharpest textual argument about him and it has not been dissolved.
• Whether detaching hegemony from class, as the post-Marxist development does, extends the concept or abandons it.
• Whether consent under hegemony can be distinguished from consent — if agreement demonstrates hegemony and disagreement demonstrates resistance to it, it is unclear what evidence would count against the analysis.

Intellectual relationships

He argues inside Marxism and against Italian idealism at the same time.

• Lenin's use of hegemony in Russian debates is the direct source of the term, which Gramsci extends from an alliance strategy to an account of how any rule is sustained.
• Benedetto Croce is the standing interlocutor; large stretches of the notebooks are an argument with him.
• Machiavelli supplies the figure of the Modern Prince, with the party in the place of the individual.
• Althusser's ideological state apparatuses is the rival account of the same problem — structural where Gramsci's is strategic.
• British cultural studies is the route by which hegemony entered the English-speaking humanities, and the route along which much of its class-analytic content was lost.
• The Subaltern Studies historians took subaltern from him and made it a category of historiography.

How it changes this reading

Gramsci is named in the lineage of the Critical-theory and power-analytic lens, completing it alongside Foucault, Adorno and Bourdieu.

• He supplies the lens its most useful single point: the arrangements that work hardest are the ones that have stopped looking like arrangements. A frame that has become the obvious way things are is doing more work than any frame anyone is arguing about.
• The counterpart matters as much here. Common sense contains good sense, so the task is not to escape a formation — nobody stands outside one — but to take an inventory of the traces it left, which is a description of what this work's method asks of a reader.
• It is not evidence about anyone's beliefs, politics, or formation.

Useful comparisons

Four accounts of why power does not have to be experienced as power.

• Gramsci: hegemony, consent organised by an identifiable bloc in civil society, and therefore contestable by an opposing one.
• Michel Foucault: power as productive and capillary, running through discourse and practice without requiring anyone to organise it.
• Theodor Adorno: the culture industry, standardised production shaping a consciousness that experiences its own conformity as choice.
• Pierre Bourdieu: symbolic violence and misrecognition, domination reproduced through dispositions the dominated themselves hold.

Where the ideas meet

All four refuse the same reduction.

• None treats power as reducible to coercion or to explicit command.
• All four hold that participation and consent are where power is most effective.
• Each treats culture as a site of power rather than a reflection of it.

Where they part

The disagreement inside this lineage is about whether anyone is doing it.

• Gramsci's hegemony is exercised by a historical bloc and can be contested by another; Foucault's power has no such subject and no outside, which is why counter-hegemony is not a Foucauldian move. Citing both for the proposition that power works through consent conceals a disagreement about whether there is anyone to oppose.
• Bourdieu's misrecognition is embodied and pre-reflective; Gramsci's consent sits at the level of worldview and can be argued with. That is a difference about what an intervention could even consist of.
• Adorno is far more pessimistic about escape routes than Gramsci, whose entire argument is that the terrain is contestable. Reading them as a single critique loses the strategic optimism that made Gramsci's account a programme.

Limits

What this reference can carry here is narrow, and one limit is textual.

• A theory of hegemony establishes nothing about any person's beliefs being hegemonic, resistant, or organic to anything.
• The notebooks are fragmentary, censored and unfinished; a confident univocal Gramsci is an interpretive construction rather than a reading.

Criticisms

The objections are textual, methodological and strategic.

• Anderson's antinomies: the incompatible accounts of state and civil society mean that invoking Gramsci usually means invoking one Gramsci and suppressing the others.
• The consent analysis has no clear falsifier, since both agreement and disagreement can be read as confirming it.
• In cultural studies hegemony has frequently been diluted to mean dominant ideas, which drops the class analysis and the strategic content that made it an argument rather than a label.
• The war of position is charged with becoming, in practice, indefinite postponement of any decisive struggle.
• The prison conditions shaped the text materially: no sources, censorship, illness, and no author's preparation for publication. Editorial history has determined which Gramsci most readers have.

Common misreadings

Five uses this placement does not license.

• Using hegemony for dominance or for a majority view, which drops consent and its production — the entire content of the concept.
• Using organic intellectual for self-taught or grassroots rather than for one who articulates a social group's function.
• Using common sense in its ordinary English sense, which reverses his usage; his word for sound judgement is good sense.
• Citing counter-hegemony beside Foucault as though the two frameworks agreed that there is a bloc to contest.
• Quoting the notebooks as finished positions rather than as notes an author never settled.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about any person's beliefs, politics, or formation.
• It cannot convert a theory of consent into a fact about anyone's consent.