An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought and Legacy by George Hoare & Nathan Sperber

Author:George Hoare & Nathan Sperber [Hoare, George & Sperber, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Italy, General, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781472572790
Google: irbPCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2015-11-19T21:39:44+00:00

The historical stages of hegemony

The pre-hegemonic State

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.

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