Hegemony, Passive Revolution and the Modern Prince PDF

Preview

Summary

Thesis Eleven http://the.sagepub.com/ Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince Peter D Thomas Thesis Eleven 2013 117: 20 DOI: 10.1177/0725513613493991 The online version of this article can be found at: http://the.sagepub.com/content/117/1/20 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com A...

Description

Thesis Eleven http://the.sagepub.com/

Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince Peter D Thomas Thesis Eleven 2013 117: 20 DOI: 10.1177/0725513613493991 The online version of this article can be found at: http://the.sagepub.com/content/117/1/20

Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Thesis Eleven can be found at: Email Alerts: http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://the.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://the.sagepub.com/content/117/1/20.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Aug 7, 2013 What is This?

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at Brunel University on August 8, 2013

Article

Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince

Thesis Eleven 117(1) 20–39 ª The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0725513613493991 the.sagepub.com

Peter D Thomas Brunel University, UK

Abstract 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. Keywords Gramsci, hegemony, modern Prince, passive revolution, political modernity

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has become influential in a wide range of humanistic, social-scientific and historical disciplines. It represents a singular ‘success’ of the vocabulary of the Marxist tradition, continuing to find a much wider audience than integrally related concepts such as the dictatorship of the proletariat or the abolition of the capitalist

Corresponding author: Peter D Thomas, Department of Politics and History, Brunel University, Marie Jahoda Room 229, Uxbridge, London UB8 3PH, UK. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at Brunel University on August 8, 2013

Thomas

21

state. Frequently, however, the word seems to have very different when not directly contradictory meanings ascribed to it, leaving new and old readers alike uncertain as to its precise theoretical significance or contemporary relevance. According to one influential interpretation, hegemony for Gramsci involves a leading social group securing the (active or passive) ‘consent’ of other social strata, rather than unilaterally imposing its decrees upon unwilling subjects. It relies more upon subtle mechanisms of ideological integration, cultural influence or even psychological dependency, than upon the threat of censure or violence. In this version, hegemony-consent is conceived as the opposite of domination-coercion, according to presuppositions that effectively reduce hegemonic politics to an unmediated ethical relationship. This reading has accompanied the reception of the Prison Notebooks from the outset, beginning with the PCI’s attempt to present Gramsci as the theorist of a ‘different’ communism after the rupture of 1956.1 This interpretation now constitutes a sort of ‘beginner’s guide’ to the meaning of hegemony, in its most widely diffused and generic forms. It is particularly prevalent, albeit often contested, in the academic fields of cultural studies, sociology and anthropology.2 A second interpretation regards Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as the forerunner of a theory of the political constitution of the social via a ‘logic of equivalence’, or a unifying process of the articulation of heterogeneity in the formation of a ‘political subject’. Hegemony here figures fundamentally as a theory of the unification of the diverse in a composite socio-political body, on whose unity alone ‘true’ politics can arise. This version posits Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in the radical-liberal tradition of the collective political agent, whether conceived as groups, class, caste or, most frequently, ‘the people’. Historically, this reading emerged from the encounter between communist and liberal thought in the Italian post-war constitutional process.3 Insofar as the concept of hegemony is to be found in contemporary international discussions in political philosophy, it is often represented in these terms.4 A third interpretation builds further upon the presuppositions of the first two readings, arguing that hegemony-consent is a political technique proper to the terrain of civil society, while the state is the locus of domination-coercion. Hegemony works away surreptitiously at the foundations of bourgeois rule in a molecular or even rhizomatic fashion in civil society; direct confrontation on the terrain of the state is deferred to a future that remains indeterminate, when not declared to be unnecessary. In effect, this version presents Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a form of ‘anti-politics’, which finds its strength instead in the valorization of the ‘social’. Derived from readings of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, often inflected by the experience of Western Maoism and later leftwing Eurocommunism, this interpretation is frequently operative in contemporary discussions in political science and political theory.5 Finally, a fourth interpretation situates the contemporary significance of the term of hegemony on the terrain of geopolitics, in accordance with an established usage that stems back at least as far as Thucydides.6 Hegemony is here configured at the level of a now open, now hidden, struggle for influence and power between states, prior to but sometimes including the outright declaration of military hostilities. This version effectively inscribes Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a critical perspective within a tradition of political realism that regards the state as the key political actor of modernity. Precedents for this

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at Brunel University on August 8, 2013

22

Thesis Eleven 117(1)

usage can be found in the debates of the early Third International, though in more complicated forms.7 Today, this interpretation is often encountered as an established ‘image of Gramsci’ in mainstream discussions in International Relations, though increasingly contested by ‘new’ neo-Gramscian perspectives.8

Hegemony and Herrschaft Each of these readings reduces Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to an already known figure in the history of modern political thought. The first interpretation represents Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a type of inverted Hobbesianism, with consent functioning as the motor of an ethical foundation of the political. The second interpretation of hegemony as a logic of equivalence depicts Gramsci as minor variant of the great modern tradition of theories of political unity, as a thinly disguised Rousseauean vision of politics as the transition from the ‘will of all’ to the ‘general will’. The third interpretation presents the diversity and richness of existing civil society as the potential foundation for an alternative mode of socialization, in a type of arrested Hegelianism that stops at §255 of the Philosophy of Right, before civil society is revealed to find its foundation in the state. The fourth interpretation represents Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a communist version of the broadly Kantian presuppositions of modern international law, or even, in its later Schmittian variant, as a clash between irreconcilable values, often more menacingly telluric than cosmopolitan. The combination of these perspectives yields a certain ‘traditional’ or at least widespread interpretation of the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks. This reading understands the politics of hegemony to involve, in the first instance, the securing of consent of a significant proportion of political actors in a given social formation; second, their unification into a ‘collective political subject’; third, the engagement of this newly constituted ‘political subject’ in a battle against another such subject formed by a similar process, each seeking to enlarge their occupation of the ‘peripheral territory’ of civil society until they possess sufficient forces to launch an assault upon the ‘centre’ of the state apparatus; and, in a final moment, the clash of hegemonically constructed states in competition on the international terrain, in a geopolitical repetition of the originary domestic process. The concept of hegemony, that is, is thought to provide primarily a description of the organic emergence of modern state power and geopolitical competition.9 What these readings have in common, despite their very different theoretical antecedents, histories and disciplinary locations, and what allows them to be articulated as a ‘total’ theory of hegemony in the manner indicated above, is the presupposition that the concept of hegemony is fundamentally a general theory of political power. Such a general theory can then be deployed either in order to contest existing power relations and structures, or, in a mirror-image inversion, to delineate the preconditions of their legitimation. In the first case, Gramsci then appears as a superannuated forerunner of Foucault, as an ‘archaeologist’ of the forms of the modern state. In the second and by far the most significant case, Gramsci is forced to step forward, to modify a famous Crocean phrase, as the ‘Weber of the Proletariat’.10 In both cases, hegemony effectively comes to denote stability, integration, and legitimation, even if in the form of the

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at Brunel University on August 8, 2013

Thomas

23

negative legitimation that resists but simultaneously thereby also ‘acknowledges’ the existing social order (rather than the delegitimation of a revolutionary rupture that negates it). Hegemony is thus inscribed within a ‘typology of domination’ of Weberian dimensions.11 As a form of ‘democratic domination’, it is represented as a novel addition to the forms of legitimate Herrschaft alongside Weber’s classic trio of charismatic, traditional and legal-bureaucratic domination.12 In some readings, hegemony is even called upon to play the role of an Aufhebung of pre- and early-modern techniques of the political, synthesizing their respective strengths in a new political practice adequate to the consolidation and completion of the parliamentary democratic order as a system of political integration and equilibrium.

Lineages of passive revolution Like most half-truths, such interpretations can claim at least some foundation in fact, pointing to various citations cruelly ripped from their context that seem, at first glance, to support the main lines of the respective argumentation. Similarly, like most halfreadings, they sprang not fully-grown from the transparent obviousness of a definitive text, but were produced by a complex process of the always uncertain reading and creative misreading of Gramsci’s ‘radically incomplete’ Prison Notebooks in different historical conjunctures, as Guido Liguori’s survey of the Italian reception amply attests (2012).13 We can in fact trace back quite precisely the articulation of these different interpretations into a general theory of hegemony to the emergence of a particular understanding of the role of the concept of ‘passive revolution’ in the conceptual architecture of the Prison Notebooks.14 In its broadest sense, the notion of passive revolution for Gramsci signified a distinctive process of (political) modernization that lacked the meaningful participation of popular classes in undertaking and consolidating social transformation. This concept, now a central point of reference not only for Gramsci scholarship but also in such diverse academic fields as international relations, historical sociology and even ethnography (see e.g. Morton 2007, 2010; Tug˘al 2009), surprisingly had not been prominent at all in the immediate post-war reception of the Prison Notebooks.15 The belated valorization of this concept, in the debates of Italian Gramscianism in the late 1970s, coincided with the short but intensely lived season of Eurocommunism and the PCI’s still-born ‘historic compromise’. As Fabio Frosini has noted, the concept of passive revolution played a central role in the Istituto Gramsci conference of 1977, ‘Politics and History in Gramsci’. Here, and increasingly in the following years, a particular interpretation of passive revolution was deployed as an etherizing agent upon the entire articulated chain of concepts of the Prison Notebooks. It fundamentally transformed the understanding of hegemonic politics. Hegemony was effectively subordinated to passive revolution, as a mere ‘mechanism’ of its realization or contestation. As Frosini argues, it led to a reading of hegemony ‘in the light of the primacy of stability over instability’ (Frosini 2008: 667), rather than the relational – that is, dialectical – integration of those polarities in a dynamic theory of political transformation. Thus, Gramsci’s thought could be re-inscribed in the main currents of modern political thought, enacting a transition from a supposedly irrationalist ‘conflictualist’ model to the claimed ‘consensualism’ characteristic of liberalism’s anthropological foundations and culmination as a theory

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at Brunel University on August 8, 2013

24

Thesis Eleven 117(1)

and practice of transcendental ordering.16 The concept of passive revolution was interpreted as a description of political modernity as the construction of an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratic Weberian ‘iron cage’ [stahlhartes Gehause]; hegemony became ¨ ‘a mere occasion for the transformation of the parties of the workers’ movement into parties of government’ (Frosini 2008: 667). Although not often remembered today, these were the theoretical foundations of the various post-Marxist readings of Gramsci that came to prominence throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, on an international scale.17

A typology of hegemony New scholarship over the last 20 years, however, benefitting from a full study of the 1975 critical edition of the Prison Notebooks and freed from at least some of the instrumentalizations and polemics that marked earlier debates, has provided us with a very different understanding of the development of Gramsci’s central concepts. There have been important philological contributions from around the world, by scholars in Germany (Haug 2006), Brazil (Coutinho 2012 [1999]; Bianchi 2008; Del Roio 2005), France (Tosel 1991, 2009), Mexico (Kanoussi 2000), Canada (Ives 2004), the USA (Buttigieg 1992, 1995; Fontana 1993; Green 2011) and the UK (Morton 2007). Above all, the flourishing of a new Gramscian research culture in Italy over the last 20 years has given rise both to innovative philological and theoretical work, particularly in the initiatives of the International Gramsci Society, and also to new historical studies on the political and intellectual context of Gramsci’s ideas, promoted by the Fondazione Gramsci and the ongoing work on the new Edizione nazionale of Gramsci’s collected writings.18 In many respects, this new season of studies takes up again, after the interruptions of the 1980s and 1990s, the ‘unfinished business’ bequeathed to Gramsci scholarship by the path-breaking earlier works of figures such as Alastair Davidson in Australia, John Cammett in the USA, Christine Buci-Glucksmann in France and Nicola Badaloni, Paolo Spriano and Leonardo Paggi in Italy. These studies emphasized the necessity of interpreting Gramsci’s thought in its integral historical context, as the precondition for any creative extension to contemporary concerns (Davidson 1977; Cammett 1967; Buci-Glucksmann 1980 [1975]; Badaloni 1975; Spriano 1979; Paggi 1970, 1984). Unfortunately, however, much of this new research remains the preserve of specialists, particularly given the lack of regular translations into English of nonAnglophone Marxist scholarship. We thus confront a stark discrepancy between the widely diffused images of Gramsci in the Anglophone world and these new, more philologically and historically rigorous, understandings of his thought. Basing myself upon the recent intense season of historical, philological and theoretical research on the historical and political context of the Prison Notebooks, I would like to propose here an alternative ‘typology of hegemony’, or rather, more precisely, a dialectical presentation of its constitutive elements. Synthesizing what I regard as the most significant results of readings that have attended to the transformative dimensions of the Prison Notebooks, I will attempt to thematize the central ‘component parts’ of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, conceived as a developing research project rather than fixed definition or closed system. Gramsci’s fully articulated concept of hegemony involves four integrally and dialectically related ‘moments’: first, hegemony as social

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at Brunel University on August 8, 2013

Thomas

25

and political leadership; second, hegemony as a political project; third, the realization of this hegemonic project in the concrete institutions and organizational forms of a ‘hegemonic apparatus’; and fourth, ultimately and decisively, the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. These four moments constitute a ‘dialectical chain’ along which Gramsci deepens his researches throughout the Prison Notebooks; beginning from the ‘primordial fact’ of hegemony as leadership, an immanent and expansive dynamic leads him to uncover the determinations of hegemonic political practice as the foundation for a new type of politics that could move beyond the forms of domination of political modernity.19 Taken in its totality, this typology of hegemony provides us with both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power, and, and, even more importantly and centrally, a theory of alternative political organization. In other words, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony does indeed offer, as many interpretations have surmised, an analysis of the forms of economic, social and political domination in the modern world. Building upon debates in Russian social democracy, Gramsci develops the concept of passive revolution in order to analyse a decisive stage in the production of the ‘hegemonic fabric of modern sovereignty’ (Frosini 2012). The concept of passive revolution itself, however, was only an intermediary stage in Gramsci’s research into the nature of hegemony as a political practice, representing not its culmination but only a provisional moment in its elaboration. As an analytical concept, passive revolution was a strategic intervention that aimed to highlight an historical failure of hegemony. It represented the structural inability of the bourgeois political project (particularly in the ‘West’, but also internationally) to realize fully the potentials of this new political practice and theory (originally essayed in the ‘East’, but of international significance). Far from resulting in the immobilism of an aestheticized image of modernity as an irrevocable passive revolution, the fully d...