This chapter investigates the precise ways in which Antonio Gramsci engaged with ancient philosophy. A brief examination of the longest discussion in the Prison Notebooks of any ancient philosopher or text, Plato’s Republic (Q8, §22), raises many questions about Gramsci’s approach to ancient philosophy. These questions motivate an investigation into Gramsci’s surprisingly minimal discussion of ancient philosophy and philosophers, which is best explained in the light of his theoretical commitments to his distinctive species of historical materialism. Rather than responding to (...) specific critical insights advanced about politics or human nature by ancient philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, Gramsci is shown to appropriate ancient philosophy into a broad-spectrum project of the history of philosophy, which interrogates the specific conditions under which historical epochs and the philosophical ideas that characterise them emerge. Tracking the conditions and characteristic ideas is revealed to be the project of the ‘specialist philosopher’, who must grasp both general methodological principles and particular historical examples. Gramsci’s treatment of ancient philosophy reveals more about his universal theories of history, and his engagement with the ideas of his contemporaries (including Benedetto Croce), than a special concern with ancient philosophy itself. (shrink)

Despite the secularization process, popular religion in modern or post-modern societies still retains a central role. In this article, we analyze the worship of Santa Rosalia and Mamma Schiavona. The former is worshiped by Romani and Tamil people; the latter, the Mary of Montevergine Sanctuary, is also venerated by groups of homosexuals and transsexuals. The reworking of religious categories made by these subaltern groups reminds us of the dynamic nature of Catholicism, which changes thanks to continuous contact with external and (...) internal elements. Through Gramsci’s interpretation of popular religion as a symbolic instrument of social recognition and affirmation in opposition to the hegemonic culture, we demonstrate that popular religion plays a central social role in the construction of worldviews, sometimes in contrast with the hegemonic culture, not only as an affirmation of a different identity but as an affirmation of presence. (shrink)

This article seeks to unravel the theoretical implications of Slavoj Žižek’s plea for a leftist Eurocentrism, focusing specifically on his defence of the ‘No’ vote in the French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitution (29 May and 1 June 2005, respectively). While most liberal commentators have read these results as a blow to the hopes of a United Europe against the overwhelming geopolitical power of the United States, Žižek argues that the French and Dutch ‘No’ votes express a deep-seated (...) desire for a radically changed idea of Europe - a desire disclosing the need to move beyond the very notion of liberal democracy in order to ‘reinvent that which is to be defended’: democracy itself. While exploring the theoretical background to Žižek’s argument on Europe through an in-depth analysis of its psychoanalytic foundations (Lacan), the article also contextualizes it within the Marxist tradition, looking particularly at Lenin’s 1915 pamphlet, ‘On the Slogan for a United States of Europe’. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relationship between epistemic difference and hermeneutical injustice, starting from an example discussed by Townsend and Townsend: the case of the Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku v. Ecuador before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. My thesis is that translation is inevitably at work in communicative exchanges involving epistemic difference, and that considering the problem of translation allows us to refine our understanding of epistemic injustice and mobilise further resources to respond to it. In a first step, (...) I will discuss McGlynn’s critique of Townsend and Townsend’s approach, and in particular the notion of discursive injustice elaborated by Kukla. Drawing on the notion of symbolic institution as theorised by the Belgian phenomenologist Marc Richir, I will show how translation is at work in this case, seeking to pinpoint the hermeneutical injustice at play. In a second step, I will reflect on the different paradigms of translation and argue for a broad, processual and layered conception of it. Building on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of translatability of languages, I will introduce the notion of epistemic translatability as that which allows translational strategies to be devised across epistemic difference in order to counter hermeneutical injustice. (shrink)

Daniel Bensaïd was a leading figure of May ’68, a Marxist thinker and an influential French public intellectual. His theoretical and political trajectory is divided into two distinct periods separated by the historical turn of 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of theussr. This also coincided with an existential turn due to his contractingaids, which brought him close to death. After this turn, he played the role of a ‘border-crosser’ between generations, intellectual currents and geopolitical areas (...) within the radical left. In the 1990s, he began a critical rereading of Marx and tried to transcend Trotskyism, confronting its legacy with other currents of critical thought, notably the Frankfurt School. Since this pivotal moment, his writings reveal a permanent and intense dialogue with the work of Walter Benjamin, which he reinterpreted in a contemporary, political perspective, rethinking the political dilemmas of the twenty-first century through a Messianic vision of history. This article emphasises the affinities between two historical constellations – 1939 and 1989 – which, in spite of their obvious differences, were equally shaped by a feeling of defeat, and allowed a fruitful ‘encounter’ between French and German philosophers. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which Gramsci’s engagement with Machiavelli and The Prince in particular result in three significant developments in the Prison Notebooks. First, I analyse how the ‘heroic fury’ of Gramsci’s lifelong interest in Machiavelli’s thought develops, during the composition of his carceral writings, into a novel approach to the reading of The Prince, giving rise to the famous notion of the ‘modern Prince’. Second, I argue that the modern Prince should not be regarded merely as a (...) distinctive figure, but rather should be understood as a dramatic development that unfolds throughout ‘the discourse itself’ of the Prison Notebooks, particularly in the crucial phase of reorganisation in the ‘special notebooks’ composed from 1932 onwards. Third and finally, I suggest that the combination of the two preceding themes is decisive for understanding the modern Prince as a distinctive form of political organisation. Rather than equated with a generic conception of the ‘ political party’, this notion was developed as a part of Gramsci’s larger argument regarding the necessity for anti-Fascist political forces in Italy in the early 1930s to grow into an antagonistic collective body guided by principles of ‘living philology’. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better understood as (...) a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity. (shrink)

Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of ‘posthegemony’. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony – temporal, foundational and expansive – characterized by different understandings of (...) the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their ‘pre-Gramscianism’, their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show how both Jan Patočka and Jürgen Habermas, starting from a reinterpretation of the idea of «lifeworld», engaged a critique of modern civilisation, aiming (with different outcomes) at a redefinition of the concept of political community. In order to achieve this goal, I firstly focus on Patočka’s understanding of modern rational civilisation and its attempt to fix the fracture between «life» and «world». At this stage, I take also advantage of Hans Blumenberg’s distinction (...) between these two terms, in order to better clarify Patočka’s stance on this problem. Secondly, I analyse Habermas’ ideas of lifeworld and system, and their uncoupling in modern societies, as well as the reemergence of this issue in Habermas’ recent works on the European economic and political crisis. Finally, I focus on the very different ways in which Patočka and Habermas tackled the ideas of conflict and crisis in contemporary world, also in view of a possible path out of this crisis through a re-constitution of Europe. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser encountered Machiavelli’s work and they both attempted to rethink the very possibility of political practice through their respective readings of the Florentine thinker. In a certain way for both Gramsci and Althusser, the reading of Machiavelli was the experimental site where they elaborated their own conceptions of politics, either in the form of Gramsci’s quest for the ‘modern Prince’, the political and organizational form of a potential hegemony of the subaltern, or in the form of (...) Althusser’s constant redefinition of a potential new practice of politics in a communist perspective. The reading of Machiavelli was for Althusser also one of the terrains upon which he attempted to confront Gramsci, something that is particularly evident in a series of Althusser’s texts in the 1970s from Machiavelli and Us to the recently published Que faire? The aim of this article is to do a comparative reading of the approaches to Machiavelli offered by Gramsci and Althusser, focusing in particular on the tensions running through Althusser’s reading of Gramsci’s writings on Machiavelli. In particular, I will offer a reading of Althusser’s extensive criticism of Gramsci in 1977–1978, linking it to his critique of Eurocommunism. Then, I will go back to Gramsci, and in particular Notebook 13, in order to bring forward not only the aspects of Gramsci that Althusser tended to overlook but also how Gramsci is in fact thinking the very question that Althusser attempted to pose, namely that of a new practice of politics for communism. (shrink)

The 2008 crisis and economic transformations fuelled significant political phenomena, such as a deep distrust of politics, electoral volatility and the decline of bipolarity and/or bipartisanship in the face of growing outsider party affirmation. In this context, the dialectical model of the Gramscian ‘social totality’ provides an analytical tool capable of analysing those ‘transition’ phases characterised by a fracturing ‘dominant historical bloc’, in itself a precursor to an organic crisis of traditional political parties’ separation of social classes.

Paulo Freire ha sido reconocido como uno de los pedagogos más importantes del siglo XX, sin embargo, su obra va más allá de la pedagogía en diversos aspectos. La vinculación de sus textos con situaciones políticas de transición o de transformación en diversos lugares del mundo como Pernambuco, Brasil o Guinea-Bisáu, antigua colonia de Portugal en África, nos hacen notar una transversalidad de su teoría que bascula hacia la filosofía política y la sociología. En este artículo se constata cómo en (...) las obras de Paulo Freire redactadas como procesos político-pedagógicos y biográficos, se encuentra un esquema organizacional del poder y de la participación de las poblaciones en las tomas de decisión frente a problemáticas sociales. Para ello se partirá de su circunstancia en Brasil, como mapa donde incardinar la obra de Freire, y de ahí se pasará a la teorización de uno de sus textos más visibles como es Pedagogía del Oprimido. En esta obra, fruto de tales circunstancias, nuestro autor establece un paralelismo entre la teoría educativa y la política. En ella también encontramos una reflexión sobre sujetos que renuevan premisas de la teoría tradicional política y que establecen el campo de aprendizaje de nuevo en forma de dialéctica. (shrink)

After highlighting the philological and theoretical fortes of Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment, the intervention questions his assumption of Gramsci’s allegedly ‘neutral’ concept of ideology. This interpretation is one-sided in that it leaves out the ideology-critique adopted via Labriola and practised throughout Gramsci’s work. Gramsci’s perspective of rendering people’s common sense more coherent opens up a more democratic perspective than Kautsky’s and Lenin’s notion that socialist class-consciousness is to be brought ‘from without’. The intervention argues that the reconstruction of a (...) ‘Luxemburg-Gramsci line’ is of importance for today’s debates and struggles. (shrink)

During the pandemic, civil society organisations adjusted their purpose to provide support to the most vulnerable. In the midst of the first wave, Superbergamo, an initiative that grew out of local activist associations, provided groceries and medicine to the elderly, the infirm and at-risk groups during the lockdown in Bergamo, Italy. This research analyses a newspaper article from Corriere della Sera published almost two years after the event, which tells the story of Stefano ‘Kino’, one of the volunteers of Superbergamo. (...) Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we show how the mainstream media normalised the story of Superbergamo to transform a critical, radical, leftist mutual aid practice, into an example of charitable volunteering. By omitting and recontextualising central elements, the article inscribed the mutual aid practice in a catholic narrative, stripping it of any critical afflatus of the status quo. Reframed within the catholic vocabulary by the Corriere della Sera’s weekly insert ‘good news’, the story of Superbergamo becomes one that reinforces the common sensical model of catholic charitable volunteering. (shrink)

This article addresses the ideological context of twentieth-century history of science as it emerged and was discussed at the threshold of the Cold War. It is claimed that the bifurcation of the discipline into a socio-economic strand and a technical-intellectual one should be traced back to the 1930s. In fact, the proposal of a Marxist-oriented historiography by the Soviet delegates at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology led by Nikolai Bukharin, set off the ideological and methodological opposition (...) that characterised the later years. Bukharin’s views on science are closely considered, as well as those of his Marxist critics, György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. It is argued that, despite the fluidity of the positions of the 1920s and 1930s, these theories soon crystallized as demonstrated by the leftist reception of Bukharin’s and his associates’ perspective in the history of science, especially in Great Britain, as well as by the anti-communist reactions. Intellectualist approaches renouncing socio-economic factors, typically those by Alexandre Koyré and Thomas Kuhn, are reconsidered in the light of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War era. Reflection on the political-cultural embedding of the history of science has often been overshadowed by claims about the objectivity and neutrality of science and its historiography. Thus, the seminal discussion of the 1930s remains one of the most lucid moments of reflection about the role of science and history of science as cultural phenomena shaped by political struggles. (shrink)

Gramsci belonged in a tradition which stemmed from Antonio Labriola, not from Croce and idealist philosophy. This tradition saw Marxism as a philosophy of praxis, a new and original philosophy distinct from both idealism and materialism. Gramsci took his lead from Labriola but also further expanded upon the latter’s approach by seeking the fundamental concepts of the new philosophy in theTheses on Feuerbach. In particular, Gramsci recovered both the concept of praxis and the concept of human nature from theTheses. With (...) the concept of human nature, he expanded even upon Marx’s formulation, by including the individual within it in a way that lays the foundation for modern social sciences based on the notion of the individual, which was, in Gramsci’s case, a socially-rich notion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Foregrounding Hegel’s political cosmology allows us to set his dialectic-speculative theory of the political world in contrast both to ideal theories and to historicist-positivist theories. Against these positions, Hegel upholds his “realism of the idea”: the claim that a rational world is neither a pre-given whole nor an unattainable ideal, but the dynamic, immanent orientation of reason that continually constructs and animates the world. Hegel’s view of the world thus provides him with a way of reconceiving the relationship between (...) philosophy and actuality. In this view, philosophy is not immune from, or external to, the world it theorizes, but is produced and checked by that world, which it, in turn, produces. (shrink)

Inspired by the thinking of authors such as Andrew Feenberg, Tim Ingold and Richard Sennett, this article sets forth substantial criticism of the ‘social uprooting of technology’ paradigm, which deterministically considers modern technology an autonomous entity, independent and indifferent to the social world (practices, skills, experiences, cultures, etc.). In particular, the authors’ focus on demonstrating that the philosophy,methodology and experience linked to open source technological development represent an emblematic case of re-encapsulation of the technical code within social relations (reskilling practices). (...) Open source is discussed as a practice, albeit not unique, of community empowerment aimed at the participated and shared rehabilitation of technological production ex-ante. Furthermore, the article discusses the application of open source processes in the agro-biotechnological field, showing how they may support a more democratic endogenous development, capable of binding technological innovation to the objectives of social (reducing inequalities) and environmental sustainability to a greater degree. (shrink)

This essay traces a Marxist notion of cultural heritage drawing on the work of twentieth-century thinkers Daniel Bensaïd and Ernst Bloch. Both authors, indeed, address the act of inheriting as a way of rethinking Marxism beyond determinist and teleological concepts of history. In particular, Bensaïd’s 1995 Marx for Our Times and a 1972 essay on cultural heritage by Ernst Bloch reimagine the handing-on of cultural inheritance as the political reactivation of untimely and non-synchronous survivals of past social formations. For this (...) reason, the heritage of Marx conveyed by these authors does not result in a nostalgic preservation of the past but in reviving unrealised possibilities of social transformation. In a comparative reading of Bensaïd and Bloch, the act of ‘inheriting Marx’ analysed in this essay hence formulates a de-commodifying conception of cultural heritage set against the violence of capital. (shrink)

Abstract This essay examines Gramsci?s writings about the First World War, primarily his immediate reflections in 1914?1918, but also relevant prison notes (1926?1937). The most striking feature of his attitude during the war years is ?Germanophilia?, a label I adapt from Croce, whose writings on the Great War also exhibited this attitude. A key common motivation was that political conflicts should not be turned into religious ones in which one portrays the enemy as an evil to be annihilated. But they (...) also had other divergent motivations. Another striking feature of Gramsci?s writings during the war years was his opposition to economic measures against Germany. He seemed to suggest that a military conflict should not be automatically expanded to include an economic war, conflating politics and economics. But later in prison he theorised that modern wars tend to be wars of position, in which military operations and industrial production are vitally connected. (shrink)

This article examines the anti-fascist rhetoric of the self-proclaimed `revolutionary liberal', Piero Gobetti, in Italy in the early 1920s. Gobetti is interesting from a rhetorical perspective for two reasons: first, for his efforts to redefine liberalism as an emancipatory ethic of struggle that extended to the revolutionary worker's movement; and second, for his rejection of fascism as essentially continuous with the anti-conflictual tendencies of the liberal parliamentary regime. An exemplary `ideological innovator', Gobetti's `paradiastolic' redescription of liberalism and his metaphorical reading (...) of fascism underscored a commitment to the value of rhetorical disputation over the meaning and form of liberty. This contrasts with contemporary approaches to fascism — and purportedly similar ideologies — which demonize or objectify in a way that forestalls such a debate. Yet, paradoxically, the cost of Gobetti's innovations was an inability to secure what Perelman calls the `universal audience', a task that preoccupied Gobetti's Marxist friend, Gramsci. (shrink)

his article develops a framework for addressing racial ontologies in transnational perspective. In contrast to simple contextualist accounts, it is argued that a globally engaged metaphysics of race needs to address transnational continuities of racial ontologies. In contrast to unificationist accounts that aim for one globally unified ontology, it is argued that questions about the nature and reality of race do not always have the same answers across national contexts. In order address racial ontologies in global perspective, the article develops (...) a framework that accounts for both continuities and discontinuities by looking beyond the referents of narrowly defined core concepts. By shifting the focus from narrow concepts to richer conceptions of race, racial ontologies become comparable through globally related but nonetheless distinct mappings between conceptions and property relations. The article concludes by showing how this framework can generate novel insights in case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. (shrink)

This article illustrates the ways in which visual representations construct the meanings of norms governing the spaces we commonly inhabit. I argue that norms regulating public spaces such as streets, parks, plazas, and beaches arise within the process of conceiving tourist representations of space that benefit hegemonic groups in society. My argument is empirically grounded on evidence from a case study on public space regulation in Acapulco, Mexico. By means of a semiotic analysis of tourist materials such as maps and (...) postcards, I show that images related to tourism represent urban space in a way that includes some elements and excludes others. By doing so, they portray a very specific image of the city and its public spaces. Because representations of space are performed upon the entire society, the imagery reproduced by tourist materials is part of the expectations that surround social actors’ actions. This is one of the mechanisms through which the tourism industry influences the regulation of public spaces. (shrink)

This contribution considers the potential of critical realism to illuminate the nature of crises, crisis management, and crisis lessons. After reviewing key aspects of critical realism in general, the analysis notes the challenge of developing critical realism in particular by identifying appropriate entry-points and standpoints for the analysis of specific explananda. It then provides a general critical realist account of the nature of crises in the social world and of learning in, about, and from crisis. A key concept here is (...) symptomatology — the exploration of the contingently necessary relation between actual symptoms and underlying causal mechanisms. This is related in turn to the crucial distinction between scientifically adequate explanations of crisis and conjuncturally ‘correct’ readings of the potential for transformative action in the face of crisis. This has important bearings on the emancipatory contribution of critical realism in the context of a continuing critique of ideology and domination. The article then provides particular critical realist accounts of the abstract possibility of crisis in the capitalist mode of production and its concrete actualization in the complex, overdetermined cases of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and the Eurozone Crisis. It ends with some general remarks on the potential of crisis as an entry-point into the analysis of the contradictory nature of social structures. (shrink)

Considering recent re-assessments of Pareto and Mosca, I discuss whether these thinkers’ socio-political orientations contribute to the ‘disfiguration’ of democracy or provide a resource for the renewal of democratic institutions. Femia presents Pareto as being in the “Machiavellian tradition of sceptical liberalism,” revealing the liberal potential of Pareto’s realist political theory. Finocchiaro ameliorates the conservative consequences of Mosca’s thought by reinterpreting him as a ‘democratic elitist,’ who holds a conception of political liberty “as a relationship such that authority flows from (...) the masses to the elites.” Highlighting the significance of internal tensions within each thinker’s work foregrounded by these readings, between the causal primacy of psychic states and the ‘mutual dependence’ of social factors, and between the elite principle and ‘balanced pluralism’, I ask whether the ‘sceptical liberal’ Pareto or the ‘democratic elitist’ Mosca elude Urbinati’s unpolitical, populist and plebiscitarian ‘disfigurations’ of democracy. (shrink)

The topics of language and subaltern social groups appear throughout Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Although Gramsci often associates the problem of political fragmentation among subaltern groups with issues concerning language and common sense, there are only a few notes where he explicitly connects his overlapping analyses of language and subalternity. We build on the few places in the literature on Gramsci that focus on how he relates common sense to the questions of language or subalternity. By explicitly tracing out these (...) relations, we hope to bring into relief the direct connections between subalternity and language by showing how the concepts overlap with respect to Gramsci's analyses of common sense, intellectuals, philosophy, folklore, and hegemony. We argue that, for Gramsci, fragmentation of any social group's 'common sense', worldview and language is a political detriment, impeding effective political organisation to counter exploitation but that such fragmentation cannot be overcome by the imposition of a 'rational' or 'logical' worldview. Instead, what is required is a deep engagement with the fragments that make up subaltern historical, social, economic and political conditions. In our view, Gramsci provides an alternative both to the celebration of fragmentation fashionable in liberal multiculturalism and uncritical postmodernism, as well as other attempts of overcoming it through recourse to some external, transcendental or imposed worldview. This is fully in keeping with, and further elucidates Gramsci's understanding of the importance of effective 'democratic centralism' of the leadership of the party in relation to the rank and file and the popular masses. (shrink)

The importance of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's development of ‘encounter’ is brought into sharp relief as key to the notion of ‘athleticism’. Here, each is developed as indispensable to the other, forming an a-radical/ana-material groundless ground to power, politics, literary sensibility, indeed sense itself. This nuanced encounter produces an acephaletic knowledge, a body-knowledge, without the Ego-I. In an age of massifying systems, drone warfare and horrific migrations, where corporate tentacles bend the rules akimbo, one finds that this turn to (...) a Deleuzian athleticism offers a different kind of political analysis, a radical difference, which, despite the odds, enables a politics of hope and indeed, of a ‘becoming-human’. (shrink)

This article analyses the intellectual and political trajectory of the Pasado y Presente group in Argentina, focusing on its main representative, José María Aricó (1931–91). Although usually described as ‘the Argentine Gramscians’, the ‘Gramscianism’ of the Pasado y Presente group was actually little more than a theoretical cover for its erratic political behaviour, which led them from Stalinism to Guevarism, from Guevarism to Maoism, from Maoism to Montoneros’s branch of Peronism, and from Peronism to Alfonsín’s Radicalism. Politically, their weakest point (...) was that they distanced themselves from Stalinism empirically, because of the popularity of foquism, without undertaking a thorough critique of Stalinism. This made them vulnerable to the ubsequent crisis of Stalinism, which they identified with a ‘crisis of Marxism’ sans phrase. What made them historically significant was that they articulated the radicalisation of a whole social layer in Latin America under the impact of the Cuban Revolution, as well as its subsequent deradicalisation and adaptation to bourgeois parliamentary democracy. The article closes with an analysis of Aricó’s intellectual legacy, particularly his well-known book Marx y América Latina (1980). (shrink)

Peter D. Thomas’s book The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism draws us to reflect on a point that Gramsci’s interpreters have often neglected: the particular structure of the Prison Notebooks, i.e., the ways in which the text was constituted and, dependent on that, the fundamental methodological criteria for its interpretation. Thomas’s book is a consummate synthesis between the deep and detailed study of the Notebooks text and the need to reconstruct some order within; between close historicalphilosophical assessment and theoretical (...) proposal within contemporary Marxist (and para-Marxist) debate. Consequently, this book confronts us – as Gramsci’s present-day readers – with a task that no-one can face alone, but that is nonetheless extraordinarily urgent: the task of intervening in the debate within the post-modern and post-Marxist Left so that the link between Marxism and philosophy is resumed, starting out from Gramsci himself. In short: a revival of Marx through Gramsci, through – in turn – a return of the philosophy of praxis as Marxism for our own day. (shrink)

This article examines Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera’s use of concepts originating in the work of Antonio Gramsci and Bolivian sociologist René Zavaleta Mercado. Zavaleta’s concept of sociedad abigarrada has a history of misappropriation in which García Linera participates by articulating it with the related concept of the estado aparente to claim that the merely ‘apparent’ state which does not effectively represent the heterogeneous social reality of a country like Bolivia is abolished with the official establishment of the Plurinational (...) State in 2009. This ideologeme of the Plurinational State as one that faithfully represents Bolivia’s abigarramiento is equated with the Gramscian stato integrale, which in Gramsci refers to the state proper plus civil society where these are thoroughly integrated to function as an organic whole. Beyond merely misusing the borrowed terms of this discursive operation, García Linera gives a prescriptive value to concepts developed for an analytical purpose to validate the existing regime. (shrink)

One of the ideas elaborated in my recent book is what I called the hermeneutical\nprinciple of the asymmetry between negative and positive evaluation: ’this\nprescribes that the textual evidence needed to justify a negative, unfavourable\nevaluation must be of a high quality, strength, and rigor, whereas for a positive\nevaluation less exacting standards are sufficient’ (Finocchiaro, 1988: 247). There,\nI applied this principle to several cases, relating in one way or another to\nGramsci: some were his critiques of other authors, some were my own critiques\nof (...) his ideas, and some were critiques by others; and the issues involved such\nquestions as the status of Marxism as a religion, as a science, and as politics.\nI believe the principle ought to be applied to book reviews. Now, Geoffrey\nHunt’s recent review of my book in this journal (Hunt, 1990) seems to me to be a\nclear violation of this principle, and therefore an answer to it will not only set the\nrecord straight, but may prove generally instructive. That is, his review devotes a\ngreat deal of space to criticizing my work, and very little to analysing, describing,\nor even summarizing it; and whatever description we find, it is largely inaccurate,\nunfair, and one-sided. In short, what he advances is a negative evaluation of my\nbook not properly and adequately documented and justified. (shrink)

This contribution is a critical and constructive engage ment with discourse ethics. First, it clarifies why discourse ethics has difficulties with the grounding and application of moral norms. Second, it turns to a positive appropriation of the formal and proce dural aspects of discourse ethics. The goal is the elaboration of an ethics that is able to incorporate the material aspects of goods and the formal dimension of ethical validity and consensuability. Every morality is the formal application of some substantive (...) good. Every ethical perspective demands its evaluation in terms of its uni versability. In order to achieve this mediation, it is suggested that we must incorporate not only the historical dimension of moral systems, but also the role of critical consciousness and the negativity embod ied by those who are victims of the existing consensus. The essay con cludes with six points that need to be considered when formulating a material ethics that is universalizable and, most importantly, that can address the massive poverty and dehumanization of those excluded from the present community of communication. Key Words: application • consensual • corporeality • discourse ethics • formal • grounding • intersubjective • Kantian • liberation • ethics • material • phronesis • procedural • validity. (shrink)

In 2010, the Eurozone became the epicentre of the world crisis. The vulnerability of Europe appears to be linked to the specific institutional arrangement which organises monetary, financial and budgetary policies within the Eurozone. This article tries to understand the evolution of theeuduring a short but decisive historical sequence in a theoretical framework that puts elements of Gramsci’s reflections on the theme of crisis, and especially his notion of ‘Caesarism’, at its centre. It addresses the current debate concerning the relationships (...) between democratic politics and neoliberalism, while focusing on how the radicalisation of the crisis put at stake the co-construction of capitalism and representative democracy in the Western world sincewwii. (shrink)

In the history of Brazilian education, it is only since the 1980s, during the redemocratization of Brazil, that proposals for public education in a socialist perspective have been presented. The past two decades have been marked by a growing interest in Gramscian thought, mainly in the educational field, making possible the elaboration of proposals for public school organization in Brazil. However, intellectuals and pedagogues in Brazil have confused the Gramscian ‘unitary school’ with what is known in Brazil as the ‘polytechnical (...) school’, a vague idea of education which is attributed to Marx and taken up by Lenin in the course of the Soviet Revolution. The two conceptions of education differ because of the varying historical contexts in which Marx, Lenin and Gramsci lived and developed their thinking on the roles of State and school. These fundamental differences have been overlooked during the diffusion of Gramscian thought in Brazil, causing confusion in the understanding of the ‘unitary school’ and the ‘polytechnical school’. (shrink)

Culture has been at the core of many recent developments in the social sciences, particularly after the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. This has also been seeping into discussions about the relation between culture and politics. The present paper proposes a specific theoretical approach in this respect. It mobilizes Castoriadis’s concept of the ‘imaginary’, as well as those of ‘collective subjectivity’ and ‘social creativity’. It also makes use of the rich case of ‘populism’, more generally, and Peronism, more specifically, so as to (...) make clear its workings in a sociological strategy that unfolds in both the theoretical and the empirically-oriented domains. The paper offers an alternative to Alexander’s and Laclau’s approaches to culture and politics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses Jacobinism and the French/Haitian revolution in its unity and diversity. It shows that the main imaginary and institutional elements of modernity – including further an...

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I discuss my personal experience of the issues that can arise when adopting critical realism in academic contexts dominated by irrealist methodological approaches. I draw inspiration for my analysis from the concept of Gramscian hegemony and the concept of ‘authenticity’. These concepts are related because hegemonic processes prevent individuals from freely expressing themselves. In my case, academic hegemony has resulted in social pressure to sacrifice my authentic critical realist self in order to achieve academic success. I also (...) discuss groupthink dynamics, suggesting that they are a mechanism by which hegemony – and denial of individual authenticity – can be achieved. This paper is meant to be a theoretical and reflexive discussion, which could be the starting point for empirical studies investigating the situation of a critical realist in a hegemonic academic context. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of the “ethical state” has been interpreted as a synonym for the “regulated society”—a future society in which everybody participates in governance following the rationalization o...

O artigo discute o trabalho docente em instituições de educação superior, a partir das mudanças na conjuntura da educação superior marcada pelo processo de mundialização do capital, da ofensiva neoliberal pós crise de 2008 e a reestruturação produtiva, levando à ruína de direitos sociais conquistados, além do processo de mercantilização e produtivismo neste espaço que tem levado ao trabalho docente elementos estranhos à educação, como meritocracia, o cumprimento de metas, a avaliação quantitativa da ciência e que parece ter estimulado a (...) concorrência intra e extra-institucional. Palavras-chave: Trabalho docente. Educação como produto. Mercantilização. (shrink)

Current notions of affect are often underpinned by unacknowledged assumptions about spontaneity, materiality and immediacy. Childhood, which has traditionally been associated with these concepts (and for this reason has not been much debated within critical theory), helps us reconsider the political impact of affect theory. This is both because feminist theory has recently reconceptualized childhood and because positing affect as moments of intensity immanent to matter raises a number of problems from a feminist point of view. A passage from Mrs. (...) Dalloway (illustrating how childhood works as a mimetic break within the project of literary modernism) will introduce an analysis of excerpts from Lisa Cartwright and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, two feminist case studies in which affect and childhood are linked. Referring to past psychoanalytical and political debates (especially by Jacqueline Rose, Juliet Mitchell and Walter Benjamin) that have anticipated some of the problems we are currently facing within feminist theory, the article investigates through childhood the politically problematic role of affect as ‘the new’ in critical theory. (shrink)

In the context of the worsening economic crisis analogies tend to be drawn between the economic and political crisis in Europe of the 1920s and 1930s and the current situation. Now as then, it is argued, there is the risk that a systemic economic crisis and the crisis of representative politics will in turn lead to authoritarian outcomes. Rarer, however, is the idea that the current political and economic crisis may lead to a “progressive” outcome. This article examines both options (...) under the light of the thinking of one of the most important interpreters of political crisis and change in the 1920s and 1930s: Antonio Gramsci. One of the central arguments in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is the crisis of parliamentarism and democratic politics. Gramsci did not limit his analysis to the crisis however. His theoretical undertaking also consisted in the attempt to imagine the conditions for moving beyond the democratic crisis in a progressive manner. What emerges is an existing continuity between the Gramscian categories of Cesarism-Bonapartism, economic-corporative State, hegemonic crisis and contemporary politics, particularly with reference to phenomena such as populism, technocracy and neo-liberalism; the utility of the conceptual category of Passive Revolution to comprehend the current forms of exerting power and building social consent; the potential fruitfulness of Gramsci’s schemata on counter-hegemonies, to understand the changes in the party-organization and the possibilities of building counter-hegemonies. (shrink)