Antonio Gramsci
Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought Series Editor: James Martin, Professor of Politics, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK The aim of this series is to provide authoritative guides to the work of contemporary political thinkers, or thinkers with a strong resonance in the present, in the form of an edited collection of scholarly essays. Each volume will offer a range of focused chapters by leading experts, surveying significant aspects of a key thinker of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and covering principal areas of debate, impact and enduring relevance. Providing greater content than a brief introduction but more accessible than a specialist monograph, the series offers a one-stop location for readers seeking critical exploration and thematic discussion around a significant contributor to contemporary political thought. Titles include: Saul Newman ( editor ) MAX STIRNER Martin Plot ( editor ) CLAUDE LEFORT Thinker of the Political Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought Series Standing Order ISBN 978 0230 25189 2 You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England.
Antonio Gramsci Edited by Mark McNally Lecturer in Politics, School of Media, Culture and Society, University of the West of Scotland
Selection and editorial matter Mark McNally 2015 All remaining chapters respective authors 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-55365-5 ISBN 978-1-137-33418-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137334183 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
In memory of Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, Carlos Nelson Coutinho and Frank Rosengarten
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Contents Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors ix x Introduction: The Life of a Reflective Revolutionary 1 Mark McNally Part I Historical Context 1 Gramsci, the United Front Comintern and Democratic Strategy 11 Mark McNally 2 Morbid Symptoms: Gramsci and the Crisis of Liberalism 34 James Martin Part II Key Debates 3 Intellectuals and Masses: Agency and Knowledge in Gramsci 55 Benedetto Fontana 4 Gramsci, Language and Pluralism 76 Alessandro Carlucci Part III Major Conceptual Issues 5 Gramsci s Marxism: The Philosophy of Praxis 97 Peter D. Thomas 6 Conceptions of Subalternity in Gramsci 118 Guido Liguori Part IV Contemporary Relevance 7 Gramsci and the International : Past, Present and Future 137 Andreas Bieler, Ian Bruff and Adam David Morton 8 Gramsci and Subaltern Struggles Today: Spontaneity, Political Organization and Occupy Wall Street 156 Marcus E. Green vii
viii Contents 9 The Historical Bloc: Toward a Typology of Weak States and Contemporary Legitimation Crises 179 Darrow Schecter 10 Gramsci, Hegemony and Post-Marxism 195 David Howarth Conclusion: Contemporary Themes 214 Mark McNally Bibliography 225 Index 241
Acknowledgments I would like to thank James Martin who as editor of the Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought series first proposed this volume to me and has provided useful advice and support throughout. Thanks are also due to the editorial and production team at Palgrave Macmillan, and especially the Politics Commissioning Editor, Amber Stone-Galilee and the Politics and Public Policy Editorial Assistants, Andrew Baird and Jemima Warren. I am grateful to Critica Marxista for granting us permission to republish material in Chapter 6 which first appeared in this journal. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Carnegie Trust which allowed me to dedicate time to research and work on my own contributions to the volume. ix
Notes on Contributors Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is author of Globalisation and Enlargement of the European Union (2000) as well as The Struggle for a Social Europe: Trade Unions and EMU in Times of Global Restructuring (2006). He is also coeditor (together with Bruno Ciccaglione, John Hilary and Ingemar Lindberg) of Free Trade and Transnational Labour (2014) and maintains the blog on Trade unions and global restructuring at http://andreasbieler.blogspot.co.uk/. Ian Bruff is Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. He has published widely on European varieties of capitalism, neoliberalism and social theory, and is currently researching the political economy of neoliberalism in Europe. He recently completed a large cross-country project on the diversity of contemporary capitalism(s) with Matthias Ebenau, Christian May and Andreas Nölke which produced two German-language collections in 2013 (with Westfälisches Dampfboot and the journal Peripherie ) plus an English-language special issue in 2014 (the journal Capital & Class ) and an English-language volume in 2015. Alessandro Carlucci is lector in Italian at the University of Oxford where he also teaches courses on the history of the Italian language. He taught courses in Italian cultural history (especially the periods of the Risorgimento and fascism) at Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Exeter and the University of Reading. He has published articles on Gramsci in various journals, including the Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia, Belfagor, Studi Storici and the Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure. He is the editor of New Approaches to Gramsci: Language, Philosophy and Politics (a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies, 2012) as well as the author of Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony (2013 and 2015). Benedetto Fontana teaches Political Theory and American political thought at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli (Turkish translation, Hegemonya ve Iktidar: Gramsci ve Machiavelli Arasindaki ilişki Üzerine ) and the coeditor x
Notes on Contributors xi of Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy. He is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. He has published in various journals: boundary 2, Cardozo Law Review, European Journal of Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Italian Culture, Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Journal of Political Power, Memoria: Revista mensual de política y cultura, The Philosophical Forum, Rivista di studi italiani, and Storia del pensiero politico. His research focuses on Antonio Gramsci s political thought, on Machiavelli and his Romans, and on the relation between politics and rhetoric. Marcus E. Green is Associate Professor of Political Science at Otterbein University in Ohio. His research and teaching interests include critical theory, environmental political theory, subaltern politics and Marxian political thought. He has published articles in Historical Materialism, Postcolonial Studies and Rethinking Marxism, and he is the editor of Rethinking Gramsci (2011). He is also coeditor of the journal Rethinking Marxism and Secretary of the International Gramsci Society. He is currently working on a manuscript that examines Gramsci s concept of subalternity. David Howarth is Reader in Political Theory in the Department of Government at the University of Essex and Co-Director of the Centre for Theoretical Studies. His publications include Discourse (2000), Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (2007), which was coauthored with Jason Glynos. He has recently completed two books, Poststructuralism and After (2012) and (together with Steven Griggs) a volume on The Politics of Airport Expansion in the United Kingdom (2012). He is also conducting research into the relationship between faith, politics and public space in contemporary liberal democracies, in which he is exploring the impact of faith schools on the development of democratic citizenship. Guido Liguori teaches the History of Political Thought at the University of Calabria and is president of the Italian section of the International Gramsci Society. He has participated in many workshops and conferences on Gramsci in Australia, the United States and Latin America. He is the author of several books in Italian, including Gramsci Conteso (a history of interpretations of Gramsci), Sentieri Gramsciani (now translated in Brazil) and La Morte del PCI (an analysis of the death of the Italian Communist Party that has also been translated in France). Liguori is also editor of the Dizionario Gramsciano 1926 1937 which included 650 entries from
xii Notes on Contributors 60 specialists from various countries. He is currently working on Marxist and communist political thought in Italy from Labriola to Berlinguer. James Martin is Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely on Gramsci and Italian political thought in the twentieth century. He is the author of Gramsci s Political Analysis (1998), Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution (2008) and editor of Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments (2003), The Poulantzas Reader (2008) and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political (2013). He has recently published Politics and Rhetoric: A Critical Introduction (2014). Mark McNally is Lecturer in Politics in the School of Media, Culture and Society at the University of the West of Scotland. McNally has applied Gramsci s ideas to political and ideological movements in historical and contemporary settings, especially in relation to 20thcentury Ireland and the Alternative Globalization Movement. He is co-editor of Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance (2009) and he has published widely on both the nature and application of Gramsci s political thought in academic journals including European Journal of Political Theory ; History of Political Thought, History of European Ideas, Journal of Political Ideologies and Nations and Nationalism. Adam David Morton is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Australia. His research interests include state theory, the political economy of development, historical sociology and Marxism in their relevance to the study of modern Mexico. He is the author of Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (2007) and Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (updated edition, 2013) which was awarded the 2012 Book Prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA) International Political Economy Group (IPEG). His blog site, For the Desk Drawer, covers the broad themes of political economy, historical sociology and geography studies at http://adamdavidmorton.com/ and he is editor of the new blog site Progress in Political Economy (PPE) that is fast becoming a central forum for political economy debates at http://ppesydney.net/. Darrow Schecter is currently a reader in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. His recent books include Beyond Hegemony: Towards a New Philosophy of Political Legitimacy (2005), The History of the Left from Marx to the Present: Theoretical Perspectives ( 2007), The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas (2010) and Critical Theory in
Notes on Contributors xiii the Twenty-First Century (2013). He is currently working on a book entitled Critical Theory and Sociological Theory. Peter D. Thomas teaches the History of Political Thought and Political Philosophy at Brunel University, London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (2009), and coeditor of Encountering Althusser. Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (2012) and In Marx s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (2013). He serves on the editorial board of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and is a coeditor of the Historical Materialism book series.