Gramsci on Politics and State

Journal of Classical Sociology

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 2(2): 157–178 [1468–795X(200207)2:2;157–178;027856]

Gramsci on Politics and State

BENEDETTO FONTANA Baruch College/CUNY

ABSTRACT This article argues that Gramsci’s notion of the state is historically and conceptually rooted within a political and theoretical discourse that first emerged with the ideas and practice of the classical politics of the Greeks and Romans, a political and philosophical tradition that was later transformed and reformulated with the advent of a Christianized politics as embodied in the thought of Augustine. The article further argues that Gramsci’s conception rests on the idea that man is pre-eminently political in a double sense: as the ground for community and society, defined by the search for the ‘good life’; and as struggle and conflict, where such a search is defined by competition over a multiplicity of goods.

KEYWORDS civil society, domination, hegemony, polis, societ`a regolata

I

In the last 20 years, but especially since the end of the Cold War, the life and work of Antonio Gramsci have been the focus of intensive debate and analysis. His centrality is revealed by a mere glance at the current literature, scholarly and academic, as well as popular and political.1 Gramscian ideas (such as hegemony and dictatorship, civil society and political society, moral and intellectual leadership, culture and consent, education and reform) pervade contemporary cultural, ideological and political discourses. In the era of ‘globalization’, economic ‘interdependence’, the spread of the ‘free market’ and its attendant values and presuppositions, it has become the general consensus that the role of the state, or of the government, is waning and that the role of ‘private’ – that is, non-governmental – actors is becoming increasingly important. Homo politicus has become homo oeconomicus. Concomitantly, all political questions have now become questions of technique. The proliferation of the global market seems to mark the end of ideology, where

liberalism and its concept of civil society have apparently brought an ‘end to history’, or, in the words of a recent work on Gramsci, the world has arrived at a politics ‘beyond left and right’ (see Finocchiaro, 1999).

It is, of course, one of the ironies of history that Gramsci’s political theory is being used to proclaim the end of politics. In a sense, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, considered his major contribution to political and social thought, is being used by theorists of various ideological persuasions to emphasize four different but related notions: 1) the economic pre-eminence of civil society over the state; 2) the supremacy of the private sphere over the public sphere; 3) the increasing importance of consent and persuasion as instruments of political legitimation and social integration; and 4) the consequent perception of the decline in the role and utility of force/violence as the necessary instruments of state action.

In his magisterial work Politics and Vision (1960), Sheldon Wolin long ago noted that the idea of politics is associated with two conflicting but intimately related notions: first, politics is the activity that looks to the founding and maintaining of a common life, to the search for a common ground or space within which the search for a common good or public ends may be pursued; and, second, politics is concurrently a competitive or agonistic struggle for interest and advantage (see Wolin, 1960: 8–11). Politics and the state revolve around these two opposing poles: the search for community and harmony (consensus) and the pursuit of power (force and domination). Thus, the notion of the state generally and minimally is associated with the simultaneous generation of force (internally and externally) and its institutionalization through procedural and structural rules and regulations (see Passerin d’Entr`eves, 1969).

In this article I will try to outline what I believe are the important features of Gramsci’s concept of the state and how they relate to the problem of the state in general. I shall further argue that his notion of the state is historically and conceptually rooted within a political and theoretical discourse that first emerged with the ideas and practices of the classical politics of the Greeks and the Romans, a political and philosophical tradition that was later transformed and reformulated with the advent of a Christianized politics as embodied in the thought of Augustine. At the same time, Gramsci’s notion of the state rests on the idea that man is pre-eminently political – political in a double sense, as the ground for community and society, defined by the search for the ‘good life’, and as struggle and conflict, where such a search is defined by competition over a multiplicity of goods.

II

Gramsci was led to an analysis of the state (the state as it emerged in western history) first through his active and political work as a revolutionary and as a Marxist, and second through his historical and theoretical attempts to understand

the failure of both liberalism and socialism in Italy. In both his theoretical and practical work, Gramsci’s ultimate goal was to uncover conditions that would lead to the transformation of state and society through the formation of a particular type of consciousness, and a particular conception of the world. That is, he aimed at a generation within the proletariat and other subordinate groups of a culture and a politics which were both autonomous and hegemonic. Throughout his writings, during both the pre-prison years of active political and cultural struggle and the prison years when he was compelled to confront the failure of the revolution in the West, Gramsci often addressed the kind of cultural, political and educational institutions he thought the subordinate classes would require. In his attempt to uncover the conditions that would enable a subaltern group – whose very condition of subordination rendered it disaggregated, disorganized, scattered and mired within narrow and parochial economic interests – to emerge from its sociocultural and political subjection and acquire a coherent and conscious ‘personality’, Gramsci necessarily confronted the question of the state, its nature and characteristics, its role and function, both as a historical and political formation and as a theoretical problem (see Gramsci, 1971: 340, henceforth referred to as SPN; Gramsci, 1975, II: 1392, henceforth referred to as QC).

What Gramsci calls the ‘integral State’ (SPN: 267; QC, II: 763–4) is a sociopolitical order characterized by a hegemonic equilibrium constituted by a ‘combination of force and consent which are balanced in varying proportions, without force prevailing too greatly over consent’ (QC, III: 1638). Force and consent, domination and leadership, together embody the political such that the state is described by Gramsci as two distinct but interwoven spheres: ‘dictatorship + hegemony’ and ‘political society + civil society’ (QC, II: 763–4, 801, II: 1020). To Gramsci, both the synthesis and the interpenetration of the two spheres denote the meaning of the term ‘state’.

Hegemony in Gramsci takes many forms and works at various levels. It describes the movement from the economic-corporative to the political, from the particular to the universal, exemplified by Gramsci in his contrast between the particulare as understood by Guicciardini and the national popular will embodied in Machiavelli’s principe nuovo (Machiavelli, 1988: Chs 6, 9; see also QC, III: Ch. 13). Hegemony also means the progressive formation of alliances centered around a given social group. A group is hegemonic to the extent that it exercises intellectual and moral leadership over other groups such that the latter become ‘allies’ and ‘associates’ of the former. On the other hand, domination is the exercise of coercion or ‘armed force’ over other groups. Gramsci says that

The supremacy of a social group is manifested in two ways: as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership.’ A social group is dominant over those antagonistic groups it wants to ‘liquidate’ or to subdue even with armed force, and it is leading with respect to those groups that are associated and allied with it. (QC, III: 2010)

Coercion and persuasion, force and consent, domination and leadership, together describe and constitute the defining and essential character of the political such that the state in Gramsci is characterized by two analytically separate, but historically and mutually penetrating, spheres: civil society, on the one hand, and the bureaucratic/military/administrative apparatus, on the other. Liberals, whether classical or contemporary, see the former as the sphere of private action and private initiative and the latter as the sphere of public/political activity. Moreover, Gramsci’s distinction between the war of movement (possible in the East) and the war of position (necessary in the West) highlights and provides insight into his dichotomy between political society (the sphere of force and domination) and civil society (the sphere of hegemony).2

In Russia, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West there was a proper relation between the State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. (SPN: 238)

Civil society is the sphere of liberty and of contract where consent and persuasion are generated. In this sphere, the opposition and conflict between two different kinds of liberty (that is, what Guido de Ruggiero and Isaiah Berlin, following Hegel, both call ‘positive liberty’ and ‘negative liberty’) emerge, develop and resolve themselves at the level of Gramsci’s ‘integral State’ (see Berlin, 1967; de Ruggiero, 1967: 345–69). It is the sphere of cultural, ideological and religious conflict, where this conflict is defined by the contest of voluntary and secondary associations such as trade unions, political parties, sects and churches, schools and universities, civic organizations and interest groups of various kinds. In addition, Gramsci asserts that

[t]he massive structures of modern democracies, both as State organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the “trenches” and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely ‘partial’ the element of movement which before used to be “the whole” of war. (SPN: 243)

In the West, a direct assault (the war of movement) on the state is not possible because sedimented layers of complex associations of civil society have rendered the ‘integral State’ both politically powerful and ideologically resilient. Thus, a war of position – that is, ideological, cultural and intellectual struggle – becomes necessary to overcome the established order. Radical social and political change in the West involves sociocultural and socioeconomic ‘trench warfare’, whose purpose is to undermine the ‘ethico-political’ and ideological

structures of society. The necessity of waging a war of position in the West points to the moral and intellectual – that is, the persuasive, consensual (and thus educative) – nature of the state in the modern world. Gramsci underlines such a nature when he points to the radical and innovating activity of the bourgeoisie and to the emergence (or rather, re-emergence) of a form of political rule not seen since the fall of the ancient Roman republic. He writes that

The previous ruling classes were essentially conservative in the sense that they did not tend to construct an organic passage from the other classes into their own, i.e. to enlarge their class sphere “technically” and “ideologically”: their conception was that of a closed caste. The bourgeois class poses itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level. The entire function of the state has been transformed; the state has become an ‘educator’, etc. (SPN: 260)3

The state as educator means that now it exerts moral, intellectual and cultural force; it exercises power by presenting itself as ‘ethico-political’,4 as the representative of universal values, independent of narrow economic, social or class interests. In so doing, the dominant groups infuse the ‘entire society’ – that is, the subordinate groups – with their specific and determinate ‘personality’ (SPN: 267; QC, II: 763–4).

The notion of the state as ‘educator’ and the formation of a sociocultural ‘personality’ bring us back to the notion of hegemony, in this case specifically construed as the movement from feeling to knowledge, from desire/appetite to reason, and from the economic to the political. In other words, hegemony is precisely described by the movement from a particular (or prepolitical) to a universal (or political) consciousness (SPN: 326–36; QC, II: 1378–87).

Parallel to the formation of a critical or political – that is, hegemonic –consciousness is the development of a common language and a common grammar or structure of discourse within the subordinate class group. Indeed, to Gramsci this effort is crucial to the germination and generation of a hegemonic conception of the world.5 Such a conception must arise in opposition to that of the dominant groups, for the emergence, evolution and consequent proliferation of a Weltanschauung are rooted in and elaborated through sociopolitical conflicts and sociocultural conflicts and antagonisms. However, its primary locus is centered within the life and practical activity of the subordinate groups, giving the latter an autonomous and comprehensive interpretation of the material and social world. The formation of a hegemonic conception of the world is equivalent to the formation of the subordinate group into a determinate and political subject, and to the acquisition by such a group of moral, intellectual and cultural autonomy. Hegemony presupposes and requires – indeed, is intimately and inherently defined and characterized by – the development of such a common language and

common grammar. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (the development and elaboration of a conception of the world and a moral intellectual structure) should therefore be seen in the context of Gramsci’s attempt to formulate the discourse structure and speech so necessary to the elaboration of an autonomous personality. Gramsci explicitly identifies the necessary relation between the political and forms of speech and language. Such a relation constitutes the basis of the political and civic space envisioned as the sphere of public action (SPN: 38–43, 323–5, 348–51).

The conception of the state as educator, as the ground upon which culture and an ethical life become possible, is, of course, closely related to Hegel’s concept of the state as concrete freedom. Yet, I believe that it may be fruitful to take Gramsci’s idea further back to the classical, specifically Greek and Roman, concept of the civitas and the polis (see Fontana, 2000). Plato and Aristotle and classical political thought generally understood the state, in addition to having the obvious function of providing security and protection, as performing the fundamental task of educating and shaping what they called the ‘soul’ and character of its citizens, or what Gramsci would call their consciousness and personality. In the pre-Christian West, the Aristotelian polis or the Ciceronian civitas was seen as a totality whose negative function (that of coercion and force) and positive function (education and culture) were closely interwoven. Plato and Aristotle understood politics as a moral, intellectual and cultural activity whose purpose was to shape and enhance the material and spiritual development of man. Although the polis rested on an economic and material structure whose productive functions were deemed prepolitical and indeed anti-political, man’s fulfillment and realization of his potential could only occur within the public and open sphere of the polis. The polis is precisely an association of free and equal citizens who come together to pursue what Plato and Aristotle deemed the ‘good life’ (see Aristotle, 1994; Plato, 1994; see also Barker, 1959, 1970). This is the meaning of Aristotle’s celebrated observation that man is a political being, a zoon politikon (Aristotle, 1994: 1253a–1253b, 1278b–1279b, 1280a–1281b). For only in the polis can man develop his moral, intellectual and aesthetic potential. And only in the polis is man truly man, in the sense that only in the polis can man move from the prepolitical sphere defined by desire/appetite – that is, survival and mere life – to the political sphere defined by reason/knowledge – that is, the good life. That such a conception was an ideal not realized, far removed from the brute reality, is not the point. Gramsci, too, in his project of uncovering or establishing the bases in which the subaltern classes may develop their own state, envisions a society in which the masses form and develop their own cultural, ethical and political personality.

Like Plato and Aristotle, Gramsci understands political rule and political leadership in terms of mastery and self-mastery, discipline and self-discipline. Indeed, Gramsci’s understanding of ‘man’ bears a remarkable resemblance to the ancient Aristotelian and Ciceronian ideal. Thus, in his prison notebooks, he says historical development is a ‘continuing struggle . . . against the element of

“animality” in man. It has been an uninterrupted, often painful and bloody process of subjugating natural (i.e. animal and primitive) instincts to new, more complex and rigid norms and habits of order’ (SPN: 298; QC, III: 2160–1). These ‘norms’ and ‘habits of order’, once internalized – that is, self-directed and self-imposed – are what Gramsci calls ‘second nature’ (SPN: 298; QC, III: 2160–1). Elsewhere, Gramsci talks about the ‘active norm of conduct’, whereby he refers to the ‘dissemination of thought’ such that it is so embedded within the texture and web of society and its culture that it becomes society’s practical and everyday way of life (SPN: 298; QC, II: 1486). Moreover, Gramsci’s notion of struggle against appetite/instinct and what he calls ‘animality’ brings up two important and related points (see Fontana, 1996). First, Gramsci’s understanding of ‘second nature’ brings us back to Aristotle’s notion of education by means of habituation and praxis, or what he calls hexis and ethos (habitus). Habituation, or the training in habits through doing and acting, presupposes the conscious and rational development of self-discipline among citizens living within the political association called the polis (Aristotle, 1994: 1332a–1333a, 1334b–1339a). Second, Gramsci’s use of words such as ‘struggle’, ‘painful’ and ‘bloody’ recalls Plato’s allegory of the cave, which is itself (among other things) a metaphor for the painful and laborious process of coming to knowledge and to consciousness of one’s self and one’s world (Plato, 1994: 514A–521B). The allegory of the cave describes the process by which pre-existing and established ways of thinking and acting (‘habits’, ‘second nature’) are shed – that is, are necessarily unlearned and progressively discarded – and at the same time replaced with new ways of thinking, new habits, and with new norms such that a new ‘second nature’ is constructed. Plato, like Gramsci,6 insists on the danger and the pain inherent in the process: the terms describing the process are similar to Gramsci’s: ‘steep and rugged ascent’, ‘suffer pain and vexation’ (Plato, 1994: 515). To both Plato and Gramsci, the founding of a new order presupposes the formulating of a new conception of the world and a new way of life (a new praxis, a new ‘second nature’ and a new ‘active norm of conduct’). Of course, while Plato restricts his revolutionary idea to an aristocratic and narrow circle, Gramsci extends and expands its social and economic base. These two processes (education through habituation and education as a painful and dangerous activity) come together in Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. This is clearly evident in an early essay (first written in 1916) in which Gramsci (1977: 25) notes:

To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself, to free oneself from a state of chaos, to exist as an element of order – but of one’s own order and one’s own discipline in striving for an ideal.

In any case, the Platonic, the Aristotelian and the Gramscian ideals are visions which, in the age of globalization and privatization, would seem far removed from the stark reality of contemporary politics.

With the advent and rise of Christian political and social thought, especially as devised by St Augustine, the dual nature of the state of classical antiquity (the negative role of coercion and protection and the positive function of education, cultural action and moral and intellectual leadership) became bifurcated. The positive function was appropriated by the church and the state was left merely with the negative function. The Catholic Church and its affiliated institutions not only performed the social/cultural functions of education, social cohesion and moral and ethical leadership, but was also seen and understood as the institution whose power issued from sources that were not narrowly and merely instrumental and strategic. Religion in general was both the legitimating ideology (the source of consent and persuasion) and the social sphere separate and distinct from the political realm. In fact, classical liberals such as Croce see not only the separation between church and state, but also the conflict between the two spheres, as crucial to the rise of liberty and to the development of the modern state in the West (see Croce, 1931). Gramsci also recognizes the importance of the opposition between church and state and between religion and politics.7 In addition, the struggle between Pope and Emperor, and the fact that neither was able to gain supremacy over the other, were central to modern notions of liberty. In the East (as in Russia and other Greek Orthodox countries), it was the absence of such a conflict, and indeed the supremacy of the state over the church, that shaped and defined the despotic and all-encompassing character of the state. In any case, the negative understanding of politics as mere force, power and utility emerges in Augustine’s thought as a consequence of the radical reformulation of the nature and value of human action and human knowledge. The Christian doctrine of the fall (Adam and Eve’s eating of the tree of knowledge) and redemption (salvation through God’s grace) sees man, knowledge and action in the world as fundamentally lacking in value, such that worth and meaning in life can only be attained through the unearned grace of God (Augustine, 1972, XIV: 1, XXII: 22; see also Deane, 1963). Augustine’s notion of the two cities, the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena, both parallels and underpins the notion of the worthlessness of political action (Augustine, 1972, XIV: 1–2, 4, 6–7). Politics and its institutionalization (the state) merely express and embody the ceaseless and changeless competition for power and domination, driven by man’s libido dominandi. Thus the state is both the reflection and consequence of man’s fallen nature and the power of such a state can only establish a negative condition of earthly peace and order. As such, it possesses no cultural, moral and transformative value; it is pure coercion, pure repression and pure domination. In fact, Augustine’s polemic against Cicero is precisely to show that the state belongs to the civitas terrena, the sphere of brute force, and therefore Cicero’s (and by inference Plato’s and Aristotle’s) attempt to establish justice and virtue by means of political action is futile and counterproductive (Augustine, 1972, II: 21, XIX: 21–4). Augustine’s expressive image of the Christian as the peregrinator who merely exists in the earthly city, but whose purpose and end are given by the city

of God, subordinates the public sphere and the state to extrapolitical ends, to a private realm wherein reside all value and virtue.

To the extent that liberal and bourgeois thought views human action as driven by rational utility, it is historically and genealogically linked to the Christian and Augustinian notions of human nature and of the politics based upon it. The state is seen purely in its negative role, as coercion, force and domination. It is precisely such a view of the state that makes liberals so solicitous of individual rights and so wary of state action. The famous observations made by James Madison and his colleagues in The Federalist Papers (1999) regarding human nature and its relation to government and to factions have as their intellectual and philosophical antecedents Augustine’s critique of ancient political thought and practice. As the authors say: ‘What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. And if angels were to govern men, then neither internal nor external controls on government would be necessary’ (Madison et al., 1999: 290). Hence the connection between the state as force and man conceived as the rational maximizer of economic utility. Thus, too, the connection between the state as repressive force and the need for mechanisms to control state power.

To the extent that Marx was reacting to and built upon liberal social and political thought, he too retained a perception of the state in negative and repressive terms. In this sense, Gramsci’s idea of the integral state, under which are subsumed both civil society and political society, moral and intellectual leadership and domination, signals a return to the pre-Christian understanding of the polis and the state.

At any rate, it is interesting to note that Marx’s formulation and elaboration of his concept of class (once the latter has achieved self-conscious and coherent organization as a determinate subject) may be seen as an extension and modernization of Aristotle’s notion of the polis. In Aristotle, the polis is defined as an association of equals, of citizens defined by ruling and being ruled in turn. In Marx, the proletariat is seen as the class which, as it struggles against its antagonist (the bourgeoisie), moves away from its subordinate position and attains the knowledge and consciousness required for it to be self-directing and selfgoverning. As a consequence, through its concrete praxis and political activity (another form or method of education through habituation and the inculcation of a new ‘second nature’ and of new habits), the working class would become the universal class (or association, in Aristotle’s terms), and thus realize philosophy in history – that is to say, fulfill its moral, cultural and intellectual potential. In the same way, to Aristotle the polis is the concrete realization of the logos, for it is only in and through the polis that man’s nature as a rational and moral subject can be fulfilled (see McCarthy, 1994: 67–123). Thus, if in Aristotle the logos implies and presupposes the polis, in Marx the proletariat implies and presupposes philosophy, such that the proletariat in its self-becoming is none other than the incarnation in history of the logos (see McCarthy, 1992). All of which is to say that the working

class as a self-governing and coherent subject may be conceptualized as the Aristotelian association of equals whose realm of freedom is a truly universal space, since its existence does not presuppose and require the domination of others.8

Of course, Marx says that he stands Hegel on his feet and substitutes a material and economic category (the working class) for Hegel’s state. Hegel, by making the state the concrete realization in history of reason, historicizes Aristotle’s and Plato’s logos and traces its various (sociopolitical, cultural, ethical and philosophical) manifestations as it moves through history. Gramsci, in developing his notion of hegemony, returns to the Hegelian notion of spirit (culture) moving in history. For hegemony is precisely the synthesis of culture/knowledge and power as it moves in history and as it becomes realized concretely as a way of life and as an active practice. Thus, hegemony becomes embodied in the ‘integral State’ as it is institutionalized within political, social and cultural structures. In this sense, hegemony is the proliferation throughout the people of a particular conception of the world and of a particular way of life, which is, at the same time, the process by which a ‘great State’ (SPN: 249) is founded. For the founding of the state is the realization in history (praxis) of a hegemonic conception of the world.

III

Today, several interpretations of the state may be identified in general. First, there is the elitist notion whereby the state is perceived as a mechanism by which a ruling minority exercises power over the rest of society. Such an elite controls the state by virtue of its monopoly over all or most positions of wealth and power. Here, the particular interests of the ruling group are transformed, by its control over the institutional and economic bases of the state, into the general and universal interests of the overall society. Theorists such as Pareto (1964), Mosca (1939, 1972), Michels (1962) and, in the USA, C. Wright Mills (1956) and Lasswell and Kaplan (1950; see also Bachrach, 1967; Lasswell et al., 1965) are representative. According to the elite theory of politics, government and society are intrinsically oligarchical, such that the majority (or the masses) are never capable of ruling themselves (let alone society as a whole; see Burnham, 1970). Thus, principles and ideas regarding democracy and popular rule are mere ideological forms of legitimation designed to anchor the rule of the few over the many (what Mosca [1939: 70–4, 106–7] calls the ‘political formula’). Schumpeter, arguing and extrapolating from basically Moschian premises, redefines democracy as an ‘institutional arrangement’ (1950: 269) designed to guarantee the legitimacy and stability of modern mass society through electoral competition. The state is therefore the political organization of the socioeconomic elites that dominate the society, and its laws and policies reflect the interests of this ruling elite.

Second, there is a pluralist conception of the state9 which sees it as the product of multiple groups within society in competition with each other. At the same time, within the general and overall competitive context of a multiplicity of power centers and a plurality of interests, no group or interest is able to dominate or impose itself over the rest. The result is a picture of politics as interest group competition and as coalition politics, where alliances are kaleidoscopically shifting and changing and where majorities are constantly forming and reforming. Major representatives of this view are Robert A. Dahl (1956, 1989) and Nelson Polsby (1963). In the pluralist theory of politics, the state appears to have ‘withered away’ or, better still, appears to have hidden amid the plethora of private interest groups and associations. Similarly, politics as the competitive struggle for communal and public ends is transformed into a market competition for private utilities and goods. In effect, pluralism views the state as the simple mechanism by which private interests may be attained and secured.

Third, and closely related to the second school of interpretation, is the classical liberal notion of the state. The state is a neutral instrument such as an umpire or referee. In this case, the state merely provides security, safety and predictability. It protects ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ and, most significantly, it guarantees the contract without which private property and socioeconomic activity (most notably the competition of the ‘free’ market) would not be possible.

At the same time, the state provides the juridical-constitutional structures that provide the context within which the myriad of private and social organizations and activities can take place: it is the source of the ‘rules of the game’ such that individuals and groups within society may pursue their self-interests. The distinction between state and society is crucial to classical liberal thought. Such a distinction, in various guises and used in different ways, is found in Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Madison and Hegel. In general, classical liberalism envisions a minimal state based upon and responsible to (civil) society. It exists merely to perform the functions of internal (police) and external (war) defense. State power is seen as inherently coercive and repressive, a power from which civil society needs to be protected – hence the liberal concern with constitutionalism and with legal and procedural mechanisms by which the power of the state may be limited and circumscribed. Liberal constitutionalism may be seen as the attempt to answer the ancient Roman question: ‘sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ (Juvenal, 1965, VI: 365.31.32). In Gramsci, this state appears as the ‘nightwatchman state’ (‘veilleur de nuit’, ‘stato-carabiniere’; QC, I: 603–4, III: 2302–3).

Fourth, there is the concept of the Hegelian state whereby it is perceived as the realm of freedom and culture. The competitive struggle of narrow, economic self-interest located within civil society is transcended only within the political realm of the state. Hegel says that the essence of the state is ethical life which, in turn, is the concretization of freedom within the practice and life of the

people. The state is ‘the actuality of concrete freedom’ (Hegel, 1956: 20–50); thus men are free to the extent that they are political (that is, live in a community informed by the ethical life of the state).

Fifth, there is the Marxian conception in which the state is seen as the product of class antagonism and as the instrument of a particular class. Although Engels sometimes sees the state as the reconciler of class interests, fundamentally the state cannot be conceived without the existence of irreconcilable classes within society. Such a conception of the state emerges as a critique of Hegel’s formulation (see Tucker, 1969).

In his works, Marx provides two fundamental critiques. First, he attacks the Hegelian notion of the state as the realm of freedom and the sphere of ethics and culture. He points out that the latter are mere illusions, or ideological constructions, that veil the underlying socioeconomic inequalities and the underlying power relations of class society. That is, Marx says that Hegel’s state does not succeed in transcending the market competition of private utilities and particular appetites within civil society. Second, Marx attacks the classical liberal notion of civil society as the sphere of liberty and morality. In such a society, Marx notes, all values are market values, such that civil society is an economic version of the Hobbesian notion of the war of all against all.

Gramsci’s revision of the classical Marxist conception of the state recalls not only Hegel, but also Plato and Aristotle. The state is no longer simple coercion, no longer the organized force of the ruling class used to maintain its supremacy over subordinate groups. As Gramsci notes, no state can maintain its stability and permanence without establishing mechanisms to generate legitimating institutions by which the consent of the population is mobilized. Hence the quasi-Hegelian conception of the ‘integral State’ as a synthesis of dictatorship and hegemony, political society and civil society, in which the first element of the pairs represents the moment of force and the second the moment of consent. Hence also the conception of ‘rule’ as the synthesis of domination (organized coercion) and moral and intellectual leadership.

What now becomes central is the structure of civil society, its differentiation and articulation into relatively complex associations and institutions, and its consequent level of interwoven and sedimented layers of structures and functions. The greater the articulation and complexity of structure within civil society and the stronger the legitimating institutions, the more the state appears as ethical and cultural and the less it appears as the organization of coercion. In a very real sense, hegemony is precisely the structural and institutional proliferation throughout state and civil society of cultural, ideological and moral ways of thinking and believing. Such a proliferation and dissemination is grounded upon the transformation of habits and ‘active norms of conduct’ called for by Aristotle’s and Gramsci’s theories of education.

The above mentioned dichotomies together describe a movement from Marx and Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat to Gramsci’s hegemony and his

moral and intellectual leadership. In Marx and Lenin, rule is seen as the dictatorship of a particular class. Thus, formally speaking, there is little difference between a bourgeois and a proletarian dictatorship. The fundamental distinction rests on the class content or nature of the dictatorship; one is of the minority (or oligarchic), the other is of the majority (or democratic): both, however, constitute the organized and coercive power of the ruling class.

Although Gramsci’s formulations retain the fundamentally Marxist class character of the state and of rule generally, they nevertheless constitute a major formal and methodological break with both Marx and Lenin. Of course, to Gramsci, as a Marxist, politics, as with the ancient Greeks and Romans, is always class politics – that is, a politics of friend/enemy. In the first book of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates introduces the discussion about justice and the nature of rule, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus understand politics and the state as emerging out of the conflict between friend and foe (Plato, 1994: 331E–336A, 347E–354C). The opposition and antagonism are described and analyzed both conceptually and historically in Thucydides’ History (1985). To the ancients, the polis is always a divided and contested space. It is not one city, but two cities, torn asunder into antagonistic factions – the few and the many, the rich and the poor. Thus the polis is the physical, sociopolitical and psychological space within which the agonistic struggle for power and pre-eminence takes place between the oligarchy and the democracy. And it is precisely at the point of contact between these two great forces (the line of engagement) that state power and its various forms (tyranny or dictatorship, democracy, republic, and so on) emerge and develop. In Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Machiavelli, Hegel and Marx, no less than in Gramsci, state and society (or the ‘integral State’) are always fields of battle and conflict, sometimes bloody and brutal, most often ideological and ethicocultural. Gramsci makes a conceptual and theoretical move from dictatorship to hegemony, and from domination to moral and intellectual leadership. In so doing, he represents an attempt to modernize Marx and to westernize Lenin. Such a movement was necessary both conceptually and politically, for Gramsci was compelled to confront the consequences of his political and strategic moves, the defeat of socialism in particular and the defeat of the classical liberal state in general. Such a confrontation, I believe, inspired him to look anew at the state/ civil society dichotomy in order to account and allow for the sophisticated and articulated structures of economic and political power in the modern, especially the western, world.

IV

The Gramscian dyads direzione/dominio, civil/political society and consent/force reflect the need to account for the increasing complexity and sophistication of the modern state, especially modern mass democracies. But they also point to the problematic status of the Marxist theory of revolution. It should not be forgotten

that political conflict and class struggle, once properly understood, should culminate in socialist revolution. The failure of revolution in the West, after all, is what sparked Gramsci’s political and theoretical project in prison. What is the relation between Gramsci’s political theory and Marx’s theory of proletarian revolution? More specifically, is the notion of hegemony compatible with a theory of class war and revolution?

Revolution, in Marxism, presupposes the development of objective (economic) and subjective (political) factors. More important, it presupposes the formation of the proletariat as a conscious political subject which, in turn, means the transformation of the working class from an economic category (labor subordinated to capital) into a determinate political actor. Since the last quarter of the 19th century, the overriding problem in Marxist thought and practice was the development of a historical subject politically and culturally able to carry out the revolution Marx and Engels had originally predicted (see Lichtheim, 1970, 1974). Leninism represents the failure of such a project and the consequent attempt to engineer the revolution by means of a force outside the working class, namely the avant garde party.10 In addition, Lenin recognized the economic and political underdevelopment of tsarist society in Russia, and he thus premised and justified the seizure of power in 1917 on the expectation that it would spark revolutions throughout the West. The advent of Stalin and ‘socialism in one country’ signaled revolutionary failure and retreat in the West. Thus, in the same way that Lenin’s theory of the party underlined the political and cultural problems in Marx’s theory of revolution, so Gramsci’s theory of hegemony represents the failure of Lenin’s Bolshevism in the capitalist West. What connects Lenin’s notion of the party and Marx’s notion of the proletariat as a conscious force is Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. For Gramsci, hegemony means precisely the movement from the economic to the political, from narrow class concerns to general and universal interests. Such a movement, moreover, occurs within the sphere of civil society (considered as one element of the overall political order), in which the moral/ intellectual (and thus political) personality of the subordinate classes is formed. Such a personality, as it emerges from the battle over opposing Weltanschauungen, must be (minimally) as sophisticated and articulated as the groups against which it is struggling. Whether the subordinate groups are capable of rule (selfgovernment) is indicated by their ability to generate within civil society their own autonomous institutions.

In two brief notes on Machiavelli, Gramsci establishes a distinction between two kinds of politics, great (grande politica) and petty or small (piccola politica; QC, III: 1563–4): the first deals with ‘the founding of new States, the struggle for the destruction, the defense, and the preservation of determinate organic socio-economic structures’ (QC, III: 1564); the second deals with problems, issues, conflicts and power struggles within an already established structure. Thus, great politics is the politics that establishes or creates entirely new structures, while the second kind is the politics that occurs and is practiced within

this pre-established structure. Elsewhere in the prison notebooks, Gramsci makes a similar distinction between politics and diplomacy, where the former is political activity directed at the founding of new states, new conceptions of the world and new structures and the latter is conducted within the existing reality and preestablished equilibrium of forces (QC, I: 760–2, II: 1309–10, III: 1577, 1583–5). These distinctions are useful in looking at the changes that occur both within and among states and societies. At the same time, the distinction between the two kinds of politics is intimately related to Gramsci’s notion of the formation of hegemony and the war of position. For the seeds leading to the founding of a new structure, whether international or national, can only exist embryonically or potentially within the pre-existing structure. The strength of the structure, its resilience in terms of levels of mass support and the strength of its legitimating institutions will determine the type of war of position necessary. Gramsci realized that, in the West, in modern mass democracies where mass mobilization and mass politics occur within embedded and sedimented layers of multiple complexes of sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociopolitical institutions, the war of position is the only alternative and the battle among competing conceptions of the world is the primary form of sociopolitical activity.

Thus, the distinction between petty and great politics is central to Gramsci’s understanding of revolutionary change. The dichotomy suggests a subtle shift in meaning in the Marxist notion of revolution. While it retains the notion of revolution as entailing structural and radical change, it seems to privilege the war of position over the war of movement. Moreover, it implies that political conflict will continue after the transformation of the old structure into the new. The creation of the new structure means moving from grand (extraordinary) politics to petty (ordinary) politics – that is, the creation of a new sociopolitical order requires the creation of a politics that is ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ within the context of the new structure.

Gramsci calls the new order ushered in by the transformation of the established structure the societ`a regolata. In this society, the sphere of coercion and its bureaucratic/governmental apparatus increasingly diminish or narrow, and the sphere of the ethical and civil society correspondingly increases and widens (QC, I: 764). The state as political society is transcended, but the state as ethicopolitical, as the realm of freedom, is affirmed. The expansion of civil society and the diminution of coercive power are quite different from the liberal notion of state and society (the ‘free market’, ‘limited government’, and so on; SPN: 262–3). For liberalism, coercion and repression, although subject to controls and limitations, are necessary to the proper workings of a civil society dominated by economic competition. The new society negates the negative aspects of politics and the state as understood by Augustine and classical liberals, and in so doing civil society is transformed into a general and democratic association of equals. Gramsci redefines the notion of politics and brings it back to its original Aristotelian ideal. In the societ`a regolata, the first element in Gramsci’s equation

(‘political society + civil society = the integral State’) withers away and the second element acquires a new political meaning, where ‘political’ is now understood in its original etymological, sense concerning what is common to the members of the polis – that is, as ‘social’.

Such a vision underlines three basic points. First, the notion of future society is intimately connected to Gramsci’s distinction between the West, in which civil society is complex and multilayered, and the East, in which the state is everything and civil society extremely weak or non-existent. In the latter, socialist revolution will reproduce in new forms the power of the coercive/bureaucratic apparatus of the state. It culminates in what Gramsci calls ‘statolatry’, the domination of society by the state apparatus (QC, II: 1020–1). Statolatry emerges as a cultural and political attitude precisely in those societies where the power relation between civil society and the state is weighted heavily in favor of the latter.11 Thus, statolatry is both a critique and an attempt to understand the political and historical development of socialism in Soviet Russia (see Coutinho, 1999). Second, Gramsci’s formulation of the societ`a regolata is closely interwoven with his conceptual dyads dominio/direzione, political/civil society, force/consent and war of movement/war of position. The method by which existing state and society are analyzed provides an avenue through which the future new order may be imagined and conceptualized.

Finally, the third point brings us back full circle to the earlier discussion of the relation between hegemony and education, knowledge and self-discipline. For Gramsci’s notion of the post-liberal, post-capitalist society is intimately connected with the self-development and self-determination of the autonomous individual. Self-determination means the generation of a conscious and disciplined subject or personality able to obey the commands and rules it formulates and legislates for itself.12 The societ`a regolata is precisely that society whose members are capable of self-government both as a community and as individuals.

In sum, the development of an autonomous personalit`a is central to Gramsci’s political and intellectual enterprise. As such, it adumbrates the major Gramscian concepts on hegemony, the state and political action. Gramsci, in his project of uncovering or establishing the bases in which the subaltern classes may develop their own state, envisions a society in which the masses form and develop their own cultural, ethical and political character. Gramsci understands political rule and political leadership in terms of mastery and self-mastery, discipline and self-discipline. He sees the formation of ‘man’ as a historical process of conflict, especially the struggle against what he calls the element of ‘animality in man’. Politics and education are processes by which ‘norms’ and ‘habits of order’ are formed. The founding of a new order presupposes the formulation of a new conception of the world and a new way of life (a new praxis, a new ‘second nature’ and a new ‘active norm of conduct’). These two processes – education through habituation and education as a painful activity issuing from internal struggle (against appetite and instinct) and external conflict (against social, economic and

political antagonists) – come together in Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. A group is hegemonic and political (that is, ruling) to the extent that it has developed an independent personalit`a, both conscious and self-disciplined. In effect, hegemony describes a dual process by which the subject moves from subalternity to self-rule and self-mastery, from unconscious instinct/appetite to self-consciousness and knowledge. The process is dual and reciprocal because it occurs both internally (within the individual) and externally (within the social and political order).

VGramsci’s antinomy between domination, on the one hand, and moral and intellectual leadership, on the other, is worth citing again. ‘A social group is dominant’, Gramsci asserts, ‘over those antagonistic groups it wants to “liquidate” or to subdue even with armed force, and is leading with respect to those groups that are associated and allied with it’ (QC, III: 2010). Such a distinction at a theoretical level is quite conventional, not to say traditional (see MacIver, 1964; Passerin d’Entr`eves, 1969). Witness Plato’s linking of power to philosophy, Cicero’s relation between rhetoric and politics, and Machiavelli’s metaphor of the centaur: every state combines elements of force and consent, violence and persuasion.

But here Gramsci is not merely defining power in general or identifying the theoretical bases of rule. Nor is he referring to conflict and competition that occur within an already established sociopolitical structure. Here conflict takes place not within a given or pre-existing structure, but over the very nature of the structure, over the transformation of the structure or over the founding of an entirely new structure. Thus, power is exercised both over and against opponents who are also enemies and takes the form of domination or dictatorship, and is also exercised over opponents who are not enemies, but (possible and potential) ‘allies’ and ‘associates’, and takes the form of leadership. These two ways of exercising power – one arbitrary and despotic, the other hegemonic, moral and intellectual –correspond to Plato’s two cities, to Machiavelli’s umori diversi and to Marx’s classes. For the movement from one structure to another is characterized by uncertainty, instability, unpredictability and brute force (what Machiavelli would encompass with his metaphor of fortuna).

To sum up, Gramsci’s concept of the state combines two major schools or traditions. First, like Marx and Engels’s understanding of the state, Gramsci’s state is class-based and thus inserted within the general struggle of the classes. Second, Gramsci’s distinctions between hegemony and dictatorship and between domination and moral and intellectual leadership constitute a more textured and complex notion of politics and state. In fact, these dichotomies describe a conceptual movement away from dictatorship as the defining characteristic of class rule, and as class oppression pure and simple. And the key to this theoretical reformulation is the concept of hegemony, political power and political rule understood as the

generation and organization of consent by the transformation of narrow economic interests into those general and universal enough to attract the adherence of multiple groups. Hegemonic rule, in other words, is defined not simply by the class or group that wields power, but also by the methods and techniques employed in the exercise of power. The class content is no longer sufficient to determine the nature of rule; the form of rule is now also necessary.

In effect, Gramsci’s thought describes a trajectory that has moved from the merely social or economic to the political. In so doing, it recalls, though obliquely, the classical debates and concerns of traditional liberal and republican thought: the problem of legitimate power and differences between constitutional and despotic regimes. Thus, the concept of hegemony harks back to the Aristotelian and Ciceronian ideas of the polis and the civitas, and to the factional strife and class struggles that characterized the essential and defining nature of state and society.

Notes

This essay is dedicated to the late Dante Germino, friend and colleague. I want to thank Jack M. Barbalet, Joseph A. Buttigieg, Alastair Davidson, Frank Rosengarten, Doris L. Suarez and the anonymous readers for their kind help and for their constructive criticism.

1. The literature on Gramsci and his thought is vast and constantly growing. See, for example, Cammett and Righi (1995) and Buttigieg (1992–2002).

2. See Gramsci (SPN: 416–18) where, in a note entitled ‘Hegemony of Western Culture over the Whole World Culture’, Gramsci leaves the reader in no doubt about his fundamentally Hegelian classical conception of politics and philosophy. He says (SPN: 416):

Even if one admits that other cultures have had an importance and a significance in the process of ‘hierarchical’ unification of world civilisation (and this should certainly be admitted without question), they have had a universal value only in so far as they have become constituent elements of European culture, which is the only historically and concretely universal culture – in so far, that is, as they have contributed to the process of European thought and been assimilated by it. . . . However, even European culture has undergone a process of unification, and in the historical moment that interests us, this has culminated in Hegel and the critique of Hegel.

While this may not be an instance of what Giambattista Vico, following Diodoros Siculus, calls the ‘conceit of nations’, it is certainly what Gramsci understands by ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ as a necessary element of both hegemony and hegemonic power. One need only to substitute Hellenic culture or Romanitas for ‘western culture’ or Athens or Rome for ‘European culture’ and one finds oneself directly in the world of Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle, first, and Polybius, Cicero and Livy, second. This distinction between West and East, which corresponds to the dichotomy between consent/persuasion and force/domination respectively, pervades the history of western political thought. Beginning with Greek writers such as Herodotus, Sophocles and Aristotle through Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Hegel to Marx, Kautsky and Lenin, and up to today’s writers such as Samuel C. Huntington, a fundamental and antagonistic opposition has been made between the West – where liberty and constitutional government prevail – and the East – where slavery and despotism predominate. The distinction, while obviously geographical, is at once conceptual, political and historical. On this, see Lichtheim (1967) for an analytical and historical discussion.

3. ‘In reality’, Gramsci notes, ‘the State must be conceived of as an “educator”, in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type or level of civilisation’ (SPN: 247).

4. For Gramsci’s discussion of the concept of the ethico-political and his critique of Croce’s use of it, see Gramsci (SPN: 257–63; QC, II: 1049–50, 1214–37).

5. See Gramsci (SPN: section entitled ‘State and Civil Society’).

6. Machiavelli (1988: Ch. 6) also insists on the pain and danger inherent in reform and innovation.

7. See, for example, Gramsci (QC, II: 762–3), where he discusses Guicciardini’s formula ‘arms and religion’, meaning that the latter are ‘absolutely necessary to the life of the State’. The formula, according to Gramsci, may be translated into various other formulaic dichotomies, such as force and consent, coercion and persuasion, State and Church, political society and civil society, politics and morality (Croce’s ethico-political history), law and liberty, order and discipline, or . . . violence and fraud. In the Renaissance’s conception of politics, in every instance religion is consent and the Church was civil society, the hegemonic apparatus of the leading group, which did not possess its own apparatus, that is did not have its own cultural and intellectual organization, but felt the universal ecclesiastical organization to be such. We leave the Middle Ages only because religion is openly conceived and analyzed as an ‘instrumentum regni’.

8. In Aristotle, the liberty and self-rule of one presuppose the slavery and domination of the other. The liberty of equal citizens in the polis presupposes the domination of unequal slaves (see Aristotle, 1994: 1252a–1256a).

9. Of course, pluralism prefers to talk about government, policy-making and decision-making. Not only does it view the term ‘state’ skeptically, but it dismisses all analysis and discussion of it as quasi-metaphysical and criticizes the term for its lack of observational and behavioral precision. It prefers to rely on what it considers as empirical and scientific methods of ‘theory-building’ and quantitative measurement (see Dahl, 1963).

10. There is no space here to outline the various debates over the nature of the revolutionary party and its relation to the proletariat. Central to the debate is the nature of revolutionary or political consciousness and the way(s) it is acquired and developed. Can the working class develop revolutionary consciousness internally, on its own, or does it require assistance from an outside agent? The literature on the subject is quite large (see, for example, Magri, 1970 and Haimson, 1955). In a sense, Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual and his conception of the party as the ‘collective intellectual’ may be viewed as an attempt to synthesize the Marxian notion of the party as an instrument of (and internal to) the proletariat and the Leninist notion of the party as an avant garde (see QC, II: 1217–18, 1230–2, 1294–5, 1331–2, 1343–4, 1375–8, 1381–2; see also Fontana, 1993: 26–30, 148–52).

11. Gramsci notes, however, that state power and state action are central in establishing the social and cultural bases for the development of individual autonomy, self-government and independent social and civil associations precisely in those societies that lack such a tradition and such an experience (see QC, II: 1020).

12. Dante Germino has pointed out, in a personal communication the affinity between Gramsci’s societ`a regolata and the Italian phrase darsi una regolata, an idiom for ‘pulling oneself together’. To pull oneself together is to become conscious, self-disciplined and thereby to become selfgoverning.

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Benedetto Fontana is a political theorist in the Department of Political Science at Baruch College of the City University of New York. His research interests include ancient and medieval political theory, 19thand 20th-century political and social theory, and democratic theory. He is the author of Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli (University of Minnesota Press, 1993). He has also published in Cardozo Law Review, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Ideas and The Philosophical Forum

Address: Department of Political Science, Box B5-280, Baruch College/CUNY, 1 Bernard Baruch Way, New York, NY 10010, USA. [email: Benedetto_Fontana@baruch.cuny.edu]