This book analyses Antonio Gramsci’s usage of the concepts of Bonapartism and Caesarism, both in his pre-prison writings and in the Prison Notebooks. My work aims to fill a gap in the scholarship on Gramsci, by investigating a hitherto neglected aspect of his thought. However, this investigation also represents a contribution to the history of political thought and to intellectual history more broadly, notably to the history of the concepts of Caesarism and Bonapartism.
While many scholars have referred to these categories in their interpretations of Gramsci’s work, they have not always engaged in serious analysis of their meanings.1 An analysis of them can be valuable not only in grasping specific aspects of his thought, but also in better understanding the wider sense of his intellectual commitment.
In the pre-prison articles, the deployment of the categories of Caesarism and Bonapartism is linked predominantly to episodes of early twentieth-century Italian or European history and to Gramsci’s own political activity. Nevertheless, these references are also relevant on a more general level, since they contribute to the evolution of his understanding, for example, of the role and the nature of political parties, of power relations among different social groups, and of the transformation of the state with the advent of authoritarian regimes.
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci’s investigation of the categories of Caesarism and Bonapartism is more organic and articulated. On the one hand, the Caesarist-Bonapartist pattern is closely connected to the historical dimension of Gramsci’s thought in prison. This is the case both with situations from the past (such as, for instance, the Second French Empire or the Italian Risorgimento) and, especially, with cases from recent times (‘modern’ ones, as he says). This model is essential to Gramsci’s understanding of the interwar period and of the ‘totalitarian’ systems that characterise it. However, Bonapartism and Caesarism are also valuable on account of their location ‘at the crossroads’ of different lines of research in the notebooks. These concepts are intertwined with key categories such as ‘war of position’, ‘organic crisis’, ‘passive revolution’ and ‘modern prince’. More generally, the Caesarist-Bonapartist model relates crucially to Gramsci’s reflections on ‘hegemony’ and on its transformations in the passage from a nineteenth-century political scenario to a twentieth-century one.
Approaching Gramsci’s writings from the point of view of Caesarism and Bonapartism also helps to illuminate his attitude towards Marxism and the Marxian legacy. This approach allows us not only to contextualise Gramsci’s account within the intellectual and political panorama of his time, but also to highlight the specificity of his ‘philosophy of praxis’ and the role of his reassessment of Marx in this framework. Furthermore, it stresses the continuity between the pre-prison texts and the Notebooks.
With regard to Gramsci’s role within the history of Bonapartism and Caesarism, his account represents an unavoidable (but often underestimated) point of reference for the study of the complicated development of these concepts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 These concepts (whose ‘life’ has been relatively short in comparison to other political categories, spanning roughly the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century)3 have had a limited success among intellectual historians and historians of political thought, especially in recent times. If some interest in the topic was registered in the 1970s and in the 1980s, in the subsequent decades only a few (albeit important) contributions on the theme were published.4 Furthermore, the attention dedicated to the history of Caesarism and Bonapartism has been very uneven in terms of their ‘focalisation’. Not only is a comprehensive history of the categories still lacking, but scholars have mostly focused on specific linguistic areas and on specific readings of the concepts.5
In this context, an analysis of Gramsci’s understanding is a desideratum from many points of view. In the first place, the investigation of his reading of Caesarism and Bonapartism could contribute to the revival of interest in these categories, and especially in their (complex and sometimes contradictory, but always fascinating) usage in the twentieth century, by promoting a balanced and contextualised (non-ideological) reading of their significance.6 In particular, it could shed meaningful light on the role of the Caesarist-Bonapartist model within a Marxist framework, which follows a quite independent and consistent line of development. Last but not least, Gramsci’s reflection on Caesarism and Bonapartism could represent the starting point for a (critical) reassessment of other related concepts, such as the categories of ‘totalitarianism’ or, more recently, ‘populism’. As the latter is one of the most disputed political concepts of our times,7 analysing it from the perspective of its ‘forerunners’ (as are, I argue, Caesarism and Bonapartism) may offer a new and unexpected insight into the (historical and conceptual) presuppositions and potential consequences of populism.
This work reconstructs the evolution of Gramsci’s thought on Bonapartism and Caesarism in a diachronic way, from the early newspaper articles to the late prison notes. Methodologically speaking, it relies on the achievements of the Gramsci scholarship, notably Italian, of the last two decades, which has inspired a growing number of publications, as well as a new critical (‘national’) edition of Gramsci’s works, in the course of publication.8
The book is structured in thirteen chapters. The first chapter (The Concepts of Bonapartism and Caesarism from Marx to Gramsci), which has a preliminary character, provides a brief sketch of the history of the categories of Bonapartism and Caesarism from their origins to Gramsci. In particular, I focus on the role of Marx in elaborating these concepts and on the interpretation of the Caesarist-Bonapartist model within Marxist thought across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
Chapters 2–5 are devoted to Gramsci’s pre-prison writings. In Chapter 2 (The Pre-Prison Writings), I offer an overview of the (small number of) interpretations of the Caesarist-Bonapartist model in the pre-prison texts. I then examine Gramsci’s early readings of Marx, which are fundamental for understanding why and how he develops his conception of Caesarism and Bonapartism. Subsequently, in Chapter 3 (Socialism and Romanticism), I analyse the usages of these categories in Gramsci’s journalistic articles from the post-war period. I show that the category of Bonapartism is primarily used for the sake of his controversy with his fellow members of the PSI (and, after the formation of the PCd’I in 1921, with former comrades), with a clear strategic perspective. On the other hand, Caesarism is employed in a comparative fashion, in order to highlight the weakness of the ‘Caesarist’ solution proposed by Mussolini, through historical and literary comparisons. Chapter 4 (Crisis and Balance: Between Revolution and Restoration) studies the issue of the ‘catastrophic crisis of capitalism’ promoted by the Comintern since 1919 and Gramsci’s progressive detachment from this doctrine. Ultimately, he instead adopts the formula of a ‘balance of class forces’, which is strictly connected to the Marxist reading of Bonapartism. In the following chapter (Bonapartism, Caesarism and Fascism in Gramsci’s Journalistic Works), the Gramscian interpretation of Fascism in 1924–26 is at stake; moreover, by summarising his use of the Caesarist-Bonapartist model in the pre-prison writings, I also concentrate on Gramsci’s debt to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire.
Chapter 6 (Towards the Prison Notebooks) turns to the presence of Caesarism and Bonapartism in the Prison Notebooks, which constitute the object of analysis of the remainder of the chapters. I provide, in this initial chapter, an overview of the occurrences of these concepts in Gramsci’s prison writings and an account of the texts by Marx to which he had access in prison. The concept of Bonapartism constitutes the focus of Chapter 7 (The Meanings of ‘Bonapartism’). Here I develop two lines of investigation. On the one hand, I show that in the Prison Notebooks we can detect a polemical meaning of the category comparable to that found in the pre-carceral writings, linked to the concept of Cadornism. On the other hand, Bonapartism is also connected to Gramsci’s reflections on the civil and military bureaucracy and on its political role, from the Risorgimento onwards.
The following chapter (Between Bonapartism and Caesarism) introduces the key notes on Caesarism contained in notebook 13, the ‘special’ notebook in which the reflection on the Caesarist-Bonapartist model is most fully presented. On the basis of a close comparison to the first drafts of these notes, I try to demonstrate the originality and the richness of Gramsci’s developing understanding of their significance. In Chapter 9 (Gramsci and the Theory of Caesarism), I concentrate on Gramsci’s ‘theory’ of Caesarism. I deal first with Gramsci’s critique of Weber’s formula of the ‘charismatic leader’, taken up and expanded by Robert Michels. Subsequently, I stress the relevance of the formula of the ‘balance of forces’ for the definition of the concept of Caesarism in a non-deterministic perspective. I then reconstruct Gramsci’s taxonomy of Caesarism such as it emerges from Q 13, § 27. While highlighting the role of analogies in this argument, I formulate some observations regarding the structure of this taxonomy.
In the following chapter (Caesarism and Historical Analysis), Gramsci’s conception of historical development is analysed (as well as his ‘worries’). Against the background of a reconstruction of the Prison Notebooks’ ‘plural temporalities’, Louis Napoleon’s Second French Empire is conceived as the archetype of Caesarism: rather than Julius Caesar’s or Napoleon Bonaparte’s regimes, this is the real point of reference for Gramsci’s evaluation of contemporary Caesarist phenomena. I show also how this interpretation of Caesarism is closely connected to another pivotal Gramscian category, that of ‘passive revolution’. Chapter 11 (Hegemony and Modernity) is devoted to the reconstruction of Gramsci’s conception of early twentieth-century politics and of its peculiar dynamics. More specifically, I address the question of the analysis of Fascism from a Caesarist perspective. I then consider the characterisation of the ‘organic crisis’ and the new, ‘post-Jacobin’ form of hegemony after 1870, of which the Caesarist-Bonapartist model is an important element. Contemporary Caesarisms – that is, those forms of Caesarism that Gramsci saw at work in his own historical context – are thoroughly investigated in Chapter 12 (Contemporary Caesarism(s)). In the first place, I reflect on the ‘totalitarian’ conceptions of the world, by explaining the meaning of the term ‘totalitarian’ in Gramsci’s language. The main concrete historical references are represented by the two opposite one-party systems, fascist Italy and the USSR. In this perspective, the complexity of Gramsci’s reading stands out. He develops a multilayered analysis, according to which Fascism and Communism represent two forms of ‘alternative modernities’, which try to address (in profoundly different ways!) the radical transformations going on at the economic, social and political levels. A crucial element in this regard is represented by the analysis of so-called ‘black parliamentarism’. Furthermore, in the last part of this chapter, I propose a comparison between Caesarism and the issue of the modern prince, which highlights how Gramsci understood the distinctive features of politics in the 1930s. The final chapter (Caesarism, Bonapartism and the ‘Return to Marx’ in the Prison Writings) returns to Gramsci’s relationship to Marx, by reassessing previously existing narratives of a ‘return to Marx’ in the Prison Notebooks; it concludes by providing an overall assessment of the usage of the categories of Bonapartism and Caesarism in Gramsci’s carceral writings.
To conclude, the research developed in this book firstly aims to provide the reader with a (still missing) thorough investigation, beginning from Gramsci’s early writings, of a circumscribed but remarkable aspect of his reflection, notably his interpretation of Caesarism and Bonapartism. Yet it also aspires to put forward a more general reading of the author’s thought, focused on the issue of ‘modernity’, conceived both theoretically and historically, as the cornerstone of his understanding of past and present political, economic and social dynamics, as well as of the elaboration of his own revolutionary project. In a broader perspective, this analysis is also a contribution towards a wider (and, in part, yet to be written) history of the categories of Bonapartism and Caesarism.
Finally, yet importantly, this work is of some importance also for contemporary political and intellectual debates. Indeed, there are, regrettably, numerous analogies between Gramsci’s age and our situation in the early twenty-first century. Consequently, I believe that an historical analysis, such as the one proposed here, provides us with stronger conceptual means to face the substantial challenges of our own time.
For a critical discussion of the secondary literature on these categories in Gramsci’s thought before and after his imprisonment, see, respectively, Chapter 2 (section 1) and Chapter 6 (section 1).
Scarce attention has been paid to Gramsci in the secondary literature on Caesarism and Bonapartism; the few exceptions are the contributions of Luisa Mangoni (1976 and 1979) and Benedetto Fontana’s chapter in Baehr and Richter 2004. See also my contributions on the topic in Antonini 2013a, 2016 and 2019b, which anticipate the research contained in this book.
On this point, however, see Richter 2005, which stresses the fact that Caesarism and Bonapartism are part of a broader conceptual family, which includes categories such as tyranny, despotism and dictatorship.
The very first contributions are by Gollwitzer 1952 and Momigliano 1956. As regards the bibliography between the 1970s and the 1980s, it includes Griepenburg and Tjaden 1966, Abendroth 1967, Groh 1972, Kitchen 1973, Hanisch 1974, Botz 1976, Mangoni 1976 and 1979, Wistrich 1976, Hammer and Hartmann 1977, Rapone 1978, Bluche 1980, Wippermann 1981 and 1983 (a more theoretical approach is the one adopted in Poulantzas 1970). More recent publications include: Mackenbach 1994, Cervelli 1996, Baehr 1998, Cassina 2001, Ceretta 2003, Baehr and Richter 2004, Richter 2005, Riosa 2007, McDaniel 2016 and 2018. See now also Prutsch 2019.
One of the most interesting features of these concepts is the fact that they have been adopted by intellectuals from diverse backgrounds and, due to their intrinsic complexity, have been employed to analyse a range of backgrounds. Scholars have seldom acknowledged this ‘trans-ideological’ character (as well as their ‘transnational’ use, i.e. their application in a variety of national contexts).
This is a major flaw within many of the contributions from the 1970s and the 1980s, especially those devoted to the interpretation of the categories of Caesarism and Bonapartism in the Marxist framework (see, in particular, the works by Wippermann).
Significantly, it was made the Cambridge Dictionary ‘Word of the Year’ in 2017.
As regards the new critical (‘national’) edition and its articulation, see the specific section on the website of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci. See also the bibliographical indications contained in the ‘Note on the text’ and the ‘List of abbreviations’. On the recent developments of Gramsci scholarship, both with regard to the editions of the texts and to the secondary literature, see the articles contained in three special journal issues: Studi Storici 2011, 52, no. 4 (‘L’edizione nazionale e gli studi gramsciani’), Laboratoire italien. Politique et société 2016, 18 (‘Gramsci d’ un siècle à l’ autre’), International Gramsci Journal 2018, 2, no. 4 (‘Readings and Applications of Gramsci / The National Edition of Gramsci’s Writings’). See also Vacca 2011. Notable examples of single-authored contributions include Thomas 2009, Frosini 2010b, Carlucci 2013a, Liguori 2015 and Cospito 2016 (the last two are translations of previous Italian publications, respectively Liguori 2006 and Cospito 2011c).