Gramsci's Critique of Civil Society: Towards a New Concept of Hegemony by Marco Fonseca

Author:Marco Fonseca [Fonseca, Marco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: European, Political Ideologies, Political Science, World, General
ISBN: 9781317288275
Google: NhHeCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29781744
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

The potentially universalist character of bourgeois individual autonomy and political self-determination or citizenship, both historically combined within the context of nascent republicanism, was, therefore, indeed a key moment of modern politics. This, according to Gramsci, is no longer the case under modern cultural and political conditions.

The particular case of post-Risorgimento Italy, comparable to Latin America at the same time, actually illustrates quite well how the once “progressive role of the bourgeoisie” became increasingly restricted and circumspect precisely as the new hegemonic regime started to take root in the new civil society. The original ideals of popular sovereignty or republicanism mixed with a modern liberal version of the universal “rights of man” came together and were crystallized in the Spanish Constitution of 1812, adopted by the Spanish Cortes when the kingdom was under Napoleonic occupation and absolutist King Ferdinand VII had been abducted.20 Here we have a constitution that boldly provides for the “right of insurrection,” the limitation of the king’s ability to make peace, declare war or conclude treaties “without the previous consent of the Cortes,” the creation of a “Permanent Committee” to watch over the “strict observance of the Constitution during the prorogation of the legislative body,” the creation of a State Council to stamp out the power of traditional “camarillas,” the “exclusion of the highest functionaries and the members of the King’s household from the Cortes, as well as the prohibition to the deputies to accept honors or offices on the part of the King,” the abolition of the property requirement and establishment of universal suffrage, the establishment of democratic assemblies without reserved seats for the clergy or the monarchy, the separation of the judiciary from the executive, and the reestablishment of “the old municipal system, while they stripped off its medieval character” for the administration of local communes. Following Marx, Gramsci sees the Cádiz Constitution as “a true expression of historical necessity by Spanish society,” similar in many ways to the reality of the Italian south and, indeed, Latin America.21 Marx points out how this historical document was variously accused by its reactionary detractors of being “the most incendiary invention of Jacobinism” or being “a mere imitation of the French Constitution of 1791, transplanted on the Spanish soil by visionaries, regardless of the historical traditions of Spain.” The truth is, Marx tells us, “that the Constitution of 1812 is a reproduction of the ancient Fueros, but read in the light of the French Revolution and adapted to the wants of modem society” (Marx 1854).22 Both Marx and Gramsci understood quite well, long before Pocock and Skinner proposed their own reinterpretation of the liberal tradition in the 1950s and 1960s, that the virtue-driven republicanism of the Cádiz Constitution represented a bulwark against the more predatory bourgeois factions bent on pursuing primitive accumulation by any means. Is it any wonder that, right after his restoration in 1814, the first order of business for Ferdinand VII was to abolish the Cadiz Constitution? Is it surprising that the republican ideals of

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