Antonio Gramsci and the Question of Religion by Grelle Bruce;

Author:Grelle, Bruce;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Globalization and the New World Order

There is considerable debate among scholars as to whether Gramsci’s ideas can be legitimately extended beyond his own national and historical contexts to an analysis of developments in an early twenty-first-century world that he could never have envisioned.4 As is obvious from the discussion up to this point, I am among those who believe that the relevance of Gramsci’s key ideas is not limited to Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. In my effort to relate Gramsci to the study of religion and ethics I concur with political scientist Stephen Gill, who argues for a “symptomatic” reading of Gramsci, a reading that is “productive and developmental” rather than a simple “application” of his ideas to circumstances that are very different from his own, a reading geared toward “translation” (in its broadest sense) of his ideas into terms that make sense of our own situation (2008: xx–xxi).

In his classic account of Gramsci’s life and thought, James Joll observed that Gramsci’s prison writings were more concerned with analyzing the past and searching for historical lessons than they were with prescribing specific courses of action in the present or planning the details of a new society, which in his life’s circumstances must have seemed very remote (1977: 135). One such lesson was that any major historical change, any emergence of a new ruling bloc, was marked by an intellectual and moral reform, by a change in people’s consciousness (1977: 138). There is no doubt that Gramsci was primarily concerned with Italy, and it was primarily from the Italian past that he drew examples to illustrate his key ideas. Nonetheless, he demonstrated considerable knowledge of French history and politics, along with many insights into English and American culture. Indeed, in the section of his Prison Notebooks titled “Americanism and Fordism,” he made many shrewd observations regarding how the absence of a traditional hierarchy of social classes in the United States, as contrasted with Europe, made possible the emergence of “a new human type” in conformity with the new methods for organizing factory labor pioneered by Henry Ford and engineer Frederick W. Taylor, and Gramsci speculated about the prospects that Americanism—“a certain way of life, of thought, of experiencing life”—would eventually spread to Europe and beyond (Gramsci cited in Joll 1977: 136–138; see Gramsci 1971: 277–318).

Besides his broad acquaintance with the history of Western Europe and America, Joll points out that Gramsci’s experience with the Comintern meant that he was always aware of international influences and comparisons, and he believed that hegemony could be exercised on an international scale as well as within a single country (139).5 As Gramsci himself wrote,

Every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilisations.

(1971: 350)

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