Antonio Gramsci

Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks in Mussolini's prisons, where the prosecutor had said the aim was to stop his brain working for twenty years. The text is fragmentary because of the conditions and coded because of the censor, so "the philosophy of praxis" means Marxism throughout. This is the rare case where you can see the limit of what could be said on every page of the source.

He was solving a specific problem. Orthodox Marxism predicted that workers in the advanced West would revolt. They did not. Many of them supported the order that subordinated them, and fascism won mass consent rather than merely imposing itself.

The ruling class rules by consent, and holds force in reserve.

Trace the mechanism

Step 1 of 6

Test yourself

01

Force works, and it is expensive

A state that has to police everyone is spending money it would rather spend elsewhere, and it is visibly a state that people do not want. Coercion is always available and it is always the second choice.

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The whole sequence

1. 01Force works, and it is expensiveA state that has to police everyone is spending money it would rather spend elsewhere, and it is visibly a state that people do not want. Coercion is always available and it is always the second choice.
2. 02So the real work happens outside the governmentSchools, newspapers, churches, publishers, unions, associations. Gramsci calls this civil society, and it is where a worldview is made ordinary. The full state, in his description, is consent protected by the option of force.
3. 03One group's interest gets restated as everybody's interestNot as a lie, and usually not cynically. What is good for the people who run things gets sincerely described, by them and eventually by everyone, as what is good for the country, the economy, or common decency.
4. 04Repeated long enough, it stops being an argument and becomes the backgroundIt turns into common sense: the inherited, unexamined mix of assumptions through which everything else is judged. You cannot argue with it, because nobody experiences it as a position. It is just how things are.
5. 05At that point people hold the arrangement in place themselvesWhere consent is secure you rarely need police, because people police themselves and each other. This is the same finding Bourdieu reaches inside the school and Foucault reaches inside the prison.
6. 06Which means opposition has to be built in the same placeNot a frontal assault on the state, which fails where civil society is thick, but a long campaign inside schools, media and culture to make a rival worldview ordinary. Gramsci calls it the war of position. You win the culture before you win the state.

The vocabulary

Hegemony is leadership by consent, as distinct from domination by force. A group is hegemonic when its view of the world has become the water everyone swims in.

Gramsci splits the state in two. Political society is the coercive apparatus: government, courts, police, army. Civil society is everything else that shapes what people think is obvious. Hegemony is manufactured in the second and defended, if it comes to that, by the first.

Common sense is his term for the incoherent inherited worldview ordinary people carry: folklore, religion, fragments of old philosophy, and ruling-class ideas absorbed without examination. He is not sneering. He also identifies what he calls good sense, the kernel of practical critical insight inside it, and the political task is to work on one until it becomes the other.

Traditional intellectuals, the professor and the cleric, imagine themselves floating above all classes while servicing the existing order. Organic intellectuals come out of a class and give its raw view of the world coherence and voice. Any group that wants to lead, or to break someone else's leadership, has to produce its own.

An organic crisis is what happens when consent breaks down and force has to come out into the open. Hence the most quoted line in the notebooks: the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.

Psychological underpinning

System justification theory, developed by John Jost, is the closest experimental analogue: the documented tendency of people, including the people worst served by an arrangement, to defend and rationalize it. Sometimes the defending gets stronger the worse the position. Read it next to hegemony and the two illuminate each other.

Primary works

• Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Hoare and Nowell-Smith, 1971). The standard English gateway.
• Stuart Hall's essays on Gramsci, for the most useful modern application.
• Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, the sharpest internal critique.

Serious objections

• Hegemony stretches to fit anything. If consent proves hegemony and dissent proves an emerging counter-hegemony, no observation could refute it. That is a problem for a theory, not a strength.
• The text is fragmentary, which means it can be quoted in support of almost any position, and both the left and the right now claim it.
• Perry Anderson shows that Gramsci uses the distinction between the state and civil society in at least three incompatible ways, and that the strategic conclusion changes depending on which one you take.
• Michels, in the elite theory cluster, argues that organization itself produces a leadership stratum with its own interests. If he is right, counter-hegemonic organizing produces a new oligarchy rather than an alternative. The tension is unresolved and it is in the open questions.

Where to go next

• Havel, whose greengrocer describes a system running on ritual compliance without belief. That is the limit case that tests this theory.
• The neoliberal thought collective, which is the best documented war of position of the twentieth century, run from the right.
• Bourdieu, for the same mechanism inside a single institution.