From the periphery of modernity: Antonio Gramsci's Theory of Subordination and Hegemony

Political Theory

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 370-391

  Urbinati, Nadia ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0032371023     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591798026003005     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci's Political Thought. Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 171-2.
2. John A. Davis, "The South, the Risorgimento and the Origins of the 'Southern Problem,' " in Gramsci and Italy's Passive Revolution, ed. idem (London: Harper and Row, 1979), 67-103; Sidney G. Tarrow, Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967).
3. John A. Davis, "The South, the Risorgimento and the Origins of the 'Southern Problem,' " in Gramsci and Italy's Passive Revolution, ed. idem (London: Harper and Row, 1979), 67-103; Sidney G. Tarrow, Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967).
4. Antonio De Viti De Marco, "La questione commerciale e gli interessi del Mezzogiomo" (The Commercial Question and the Interest of the Italian South) in Antologia della questione meridionale (An Anthology on the Southern Question), ed. Bruno Caizzi (Milan: Edizioni di Comunitá, 1959), 225-34. I discussed this topic in Le civili libertá. Positivismo e liberalismo nell'Italia unita (Civil Liberties: Positivism and Liberalism in Nineteenth Century Italy) (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 109-47.
5. Antonio De Viti De Marco, "La questione commerciale e gli interessi del Mezzogiomo" (The Commercial Question and the Interest of the Italian South) in Antologia della questione meridionale (An Anthology on the Southern Question), ed. Bruno Caizzi (Milan: Edizioni di Comunitá, 1959), 225-34. I discussed this topic in Le civili libertá. Positivismo e liberalismo nell'Italia unita (Civil Liberties: Positivism and Liberalism in Nineteenth Century Italy) (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 109-47.
6. Gaetano Salvemini, "La questione meridionale" (The Southern Question) (1898), in idem, Opere, vol. 4, tome 2 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), 71-89.
7. I use the term "Idealism" to designate a humanistic approach pivoting around the normative idea that political emancipation envisions also an individual self-emancipation from the domain of every form of necessity not reducible to a reasonable control. Idealism implies thus an antithetical dualism between inward and externality. I do not assume the concept as referring to the Idealist ontology professed by Hegel and his philosophical school. "Idealism" has here a broader connotation and designates a long-lasting and inwardly articulated tradition that combines together Socratic and Stoic sources. Among the early modern and modern teachers one would include Giordano Bruno and the Humanists, Spinoza, Kant, the early Romantics, and partly Hegel and Marx. As Gramsci writes on many occasions, self-culture, self-dependence, and moral autonomy are the main values an individual should aim at, and the main cultural goals a society should promote. Whereas the Idealist system produced a teleological picture of human history and predicted the time when human emancipation would be completely achieved, the humanistic vision fostered the notion of a perennial confrontation between the human aspiration for freedom and self-dependence and the many and always new forms of necessity. While the former wanted to close the searching process to break the cycle of human unhappiness, the latter rests within the human praxis and testifies of a restless effort toward a goal that is always a little bit ahead of any human accomplishment. Gramsci's maxim on "the optimism of the will and the pessimism of the intelligence" describes the second condition, not the first one. See the appendix for definitions of abbreviations of Gramsci's writings.
8. See, for instance, Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin & Humanity, 1977).
9. Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1993), 157, 161, 163.
10. See, above all, Michael Walzer, "Antonio Gramsci's Commitment," in The Company of Critics. Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 95.
11. Following Lichtheim, Bellamy and Schecter argue that it is wrong to ascribe to Gramsci's hegemony a character of pluralism and democratic articulation because his model was one of "functional differentiation" or "functional organicism"; Gramsci and the Italian State, 161. However, I tend to agree with Chantal Mouffe and her pluralist interpretation, at least because Gramsci did not produce a comprehensive social theory but elaborated ideas that, very frequently, contradict each other; Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. idem (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 168-204.
12. Following Lichtheim, Bellamy and Schecter argue that it is wrong to ascribe to Gramsci's hegemony a character of pluralism and democratic articulation because his model was one of "functional differentiation" or "functional organicism"; Gramsci and the Italian State, 161. However, I tend to agree with Chantal Mouffe and her pluralist interpretation, at least because Gramsci did not produce a comprehensive social theory but elaborated ideas that, very frequently, contradict each other; Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. idem (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 168-204.
13. Gramsci never completely abandoned this position nor totally rejected regionalism. As he wrote in 1923, to consider the Southern question a national question did not mean to think in terms of centralization: "The real tendencies of the peasant class . . . have always had in their programs the slogan of local autonomy and decentralization" (SPW, 162).
14. "Why can't one recall," wrote Gramsci in 1919, "that Sardinian miners are paid starvation wages? Why should it be prohibited to recall that two-thirds of the inhabitants of Sardinia (especially women and children) go without shoes in the winter and summer . . . because the price of hide has gone sky-high due to the protective tariffs that enrich the Turin industrialists and leather manufacturers?" Antonio Gramsci, Scritti 1915-1921, ed. Sergio Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1968), 103-4.
15. Massimo L. Salvadori, Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 78.
16. Palimiro Togliatti, Gramsci (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967), 205.
17. The word "disintegration" (disgregazione) should be read as having two meanings, a moral one and a political one: as denunciation of conditions of suffering and injustice, and as the identification of the critical point from which to begin the transformation of the entire society.
18. Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 27, 614-17.
19. As Gramsci wrote in 1918, Italy's only chance of becoming a nation lay in educating Italians to become responsible citizens with a clear sense of their rights and duties (SG, 186-9).
20. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James Strachery (1930; reprint, New York: Norton, 1989), 12-17.
21. Gramsci's observation recalls that of Alexis de Tocqueville: in Europe, intellectuals "suddenly draw general conclusions" from Descartes's method, while in America philosophy has never separated itself from people's daily lives. In Europe, democracy never became common sense, because from the beginning it took the form of a forced imposition of principles shared only by a narrow circle of savantes. Democracy was decreed by the "authority of the masters" and left the empirical realm of everyday life generally untouched. By contrast, the Americans "have needed no books to teach them philosophic method, having found it in themselves." They were democratic in their mores (common sense) not in obedience to a decree of Reason; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), 430-1.
22. Norberto Bobbio, introduction to Rodolfo Mondolfo, Umanesimo di Marx. Studi filosofici, 1908-1966 (Turin: Einaudi, 1968), xlv.
23. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 119-20.
24. Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci. Life of a Revolutionary, trans. T. Nairn (London: NLB, 1970), 26.
25. Dante Germino, Antonio Gramsci. Architect of a New Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1990), 128
26. Fiori, Antonio Gramsci. Life of a Revolutionary, 19.
27. Leonardo Paggi, Le strategie del potere in Gramsci. Tra fascismo e socialismo in un solo paese 1923-1926 (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1984), 14-15.
28. J. L. Stanley and C. Stanley, eds., From Georges Sorel. Essays in Socialism and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 73.
29. Walzer, "Antonio Gramsci's Commitment," 90.
30. Fiori, Antonio Gramsci. Life of a Revolutionary, 59-60.
31. Salvadori, Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia, 136.
32. Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution. A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 152-4.
33. Walzer, "Antonio Gramsci's Commitment," 95.
34. Piero Gobetti, Opere complete (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1969), 1003.
35. Walzer, "Antonio Gramsci's Commitment," 95.
36. Ibid., 99.