Abstract
This text proposes an understanding of hegemony not as a concept, theory or historical narrative, but as a distinctive method of political work. It thematises this strategic perspective in terms of four central dimensions of Gramsci’s political thought in the Prison Notebooks: the goal of constructing a new order, the nature of self-emancipatory politics as the production of historical progress, the method of leadership conceived as fragility and experimentation, and the organisational form of the party as a pedagogical laboratory. Taken in their productive dialectical interaction, these four perspectives enable us to restore political strategy to the centre of the notion of hegemony, and offer a sophisticated perspective well placed to dialogue with some of the central concerns of contemporary radical social and political movements.
Introduction
From the time of his apprenticeship as a militant journalist in the workers’ movement in Turin during and after wwi, Antonio Gramsci was committed to a vision of emancipatory politics as the construction of a ‘New Order’ [Ordine nuovo] – the title of his most significant early experiment in revolutionary cultural and political organisation.1 Political strategy and social transformation remained central in the readings developed in the early, postwar reception of the posthumously published Prison Notebooks. This was not limited to what has been felicitously described as Togliatti and the pci’s ‘Operation Gramsci’ aimed at building a mass party in the new Italian Republic, but was also operative more widely in the memory of Gramsci as an anti-fascist activist and revolutionary Marxist. It has served as inspiration for a galaxy of renewals of the radical Left on an international scale.2
In the wide-ranging discussions that have marked the increasingly global diffusion of Gramsci’s thought since the 1970s, however, it has increasingly been thought that Gramsci’s key contribution to the pursuit of a new social order should be sought in a more mediated theoretical register, namely, in the development of a novel understanding of the nature of modern political, social and cultural power, encapsulated in the notion of hegemony.3 Indeed, for many interpreters, the great strength of Gramsci’s theorisation of hegemony has been that it appears to offer something like a sophisticated ‘metatheory’ of political modernity, comparable in its range and depth to the now classical theoretical paradigms elaborated by figures such as Hobbes, Rousseau or Weber. For some readers, Gramsci’s theory surpasses these in its distinctive capacity to comprehend key features of the types of societies that emerged from the wreckage of the twentieth century, in both metropolitan centres and their supposedly post-colonial peripheries.
Large scale historical narratives and sophisticated theories have been developed on the basis of this reading, such as those proposed in different ways by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Stuart Hall, Giovanni Arrighi, Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee, among many others.4 Gramsci can certainly be read as a ‘theorist’ in this sense, with different interpretations of particular passages and famous notes in the Prison Notebooks forming the basis for the development of sometimes very different overall theories and understandings of hegemony. Understood in the sense that the aforementioned theorists have in common – as a general theory capable of being applied on different geographical terrains and in diverse academic disciplines – the notion of hegemony will continue to provide significant currents of contemporary leftist politics and theory with powerful ways of analysing the mechanics of securing, justifying and potentially overturning political orders in general.
However, this text will propose a different reading of the significance of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks and its possible political meanings for us today. For as much recent scholarship has reminded us, Gramsci was neither a political theorist, philosopher, nor historian in any conventional sense, however interesting some of his reflections may be for those contemporary disciplinary identifications.5 He was instead a political organiser and strategist, and his many other concerns were consistently shaped by these overriding political concerns. Whatever the undeniable and enduring conceptual, theoretical and historiographical importance of Gramsci’s experimentations with the notion of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks, it may be that his most innovative – and most ‘actual’ – usage of it instead consists in the way that he attempted to understand hegemony as a novel way of doing politics, as an organisational practice, and as a method of anti-fascist struggle.
This reading attempts to understand Gramsci’s usage of hegemony from the ‘visual angle’ of the central political challenges of the current conjuncture: increasingly global imperialist wars and their dislocations, the international struggle against Apartheid and the genocide in Gaza, wide ranging crises of authority in many national formations, the collapse of social-democratic and left populist electoral formations, the rise of aggressive nationalisms and the extreme far right – but also, crucially, the cycles of emancipatory political movements (around gender, sexuality, racialisation, ecology, exclusion and exploitation) over the last 30 years that have been seeking creative resolutions to the end of neoliberalism’s belle époque. These movements today constitute our shared front lines in the struggle against an expanding ‘new world disorder’. Such conditions of generalised contestation – both the crisis of the established order on the right and innovations from the left – are not entirely dissimilar to the conditions encountered by Gramsci and his fellow ordovinisti over a century ago. Their example reminds us that it is crucial to develop a diagnosis of the maladies of the former by means of the resources provided by the latter, for it is only on this positive basis that we will be able to develop constructive proposals for modes of intervening within and against the current conjuncture that lead beyond it to the genuinely new order of revolutionary transformation on a global scale.
When the notion of hegemony is understood not primarily as a theoretical paradigm, but instead as a distinctive and strategic method of political work, we can begin to understand how the Prison Notebooks outline a sophisticated perspective which dialogues with central concerns of contemporary radical social and political movements. This paper will thematise this strategic method of political work in terms of four central perspectives that are prominent throughout Gramsci’s intellectual and political evolution, from Turin to Moscow to Turin; or from Ordine nuovo, to the early years of the Third International, to the Prison Notebooks. I have elsewhere characterised the interaction of these perspectives in an Aristotelian sense as an ‘aitiology of emancipatory politics’: that is, the aitiai, or causes – final, material, efficient and formal – or the perspectives that can help us to provide an account of what something is. In this case it is the goal, nature, method and form of contemporary self-emancipatory politics.6 These are the goals of constructing a new order, the nature of self-emancipatory politics as the production of historical progress, the method of leadership conceived as fragility and experimentation, and the organisational form of the party as a pedagogical laboratory. Taken in their productive dialectical interaction, these four perspectives enable us to restore political strategy to the centre of the notion of hegemony.
1 New Order
Gramsci and his collaborators on Ordine nuovo were not alone in their urge to ‘make it new’; many others of their generation were caught up in the desires of political and artistic revolts, from the European-wide upsurge on the left during and after wwi to the Italian Fascist ‘revolution’ on the right that followed in their wake, from the ‘high’ artistic European modernisms to the first significant stirrings of mass revolutionary national liberation movements in the colonised world. What is distinctive about Gramsci’s developing conception of how such a new order can emerge, however, is his understanding of the temporality of the New. He views it neither as the irruption in the present of the totally unprecedented (a theory of miraculous event), nor as the simple negation of the past by the present (a theory of teleological superannuation). These were the theological figures explored by some of his near contemporaries, such as Lukács, Benjamin, Schmitt and Bloch. Gramsci’s new order is theorised not as a state that might be achieved in the future, but actively, as a new process of ordering in the present, as dis- and relocations internal to the existing situation, in which the new is ‘pre-figured’ (or in Gramsci’s precise formulation, ‘pre-seen’) in struggles against the old.7
This conception of prefiguration is not a theory of the actualisation of a latent potential, in which a partial social element, marginal or excluded from the existing political order, ‘expands’ and progressively displaces its antagonist. The new order of hegemonic politics is not a process in which the compromised Old is replaced by a pristine New. This is because, according to the theory of the integral state that Gramsci develops in the Prison Notebooks, there is no element – either social or political – that is not already a function of, and functional to, the existing state order. To imagine the construction of a new order as the becoming universal of a previously ‘mere’ particularity would thus constitute nothing more than a formalist ruse by means of which the old order continues to subsist within the new one. This is precisely the condition that Gramsci had diagnosed in his critique of the fatalism that had deformed the prior Italian socialist tradition, and which he later extended in his carceral writings into an analysis of the relation between passive revolution and subalternisation.8
The new order of hegemonic politics instead aims to construct the relations of force and institutional forms capable of representing a radical and viable alternative to the existing order. As this construction is forced to occur within the determining coordinates of the existing political order of the bourgeois integral state, it is a construction that can only occur as simultaneously a deconstruction of the reigning relations that block its emergence. ‘Pre-figuration’ of the future therefore is here just as much ‘re-figuration’ of the present. Hegemony in a strategic sense is the name of this mode of prefigurative struggle: the goal of a new order occurs within this struggle itself, as a new practice of ordering, and not at some end point of a liberated society lying beyond it.
From these insights Gramsci derives his conception of a new order of formerly subaltern social classes and groups as a potentially – but only potentially – autonomous new order.9 The political autonomy of the subaltern social classes is not given from the outset, but must be actively constructed and strengthened in modes of struggle against the existing order that are never entirely freely chosen, but always constrained by the existing order itself. For this reason, Gramsci insists the construction of a new order can only be thought concretely as the conjunction of moral and intellectual reform (conceived as subtraction from the principles governing the existing political order) with a concrete economic programme (understand in an expansive political-economic sense, as the conscious self-regulation of society’s reproduction). It is precisely this dynamic that is condensed in Gramsci’s vibrant metaphor of the modern Prince as a ‘concrete utopia’ – not a messianic moment deferred to the horizon, but an expansive practice within the present, a politics that simultaneously prefigures and enacts in concrete terms.10
The notion of the new order, conceived as a new practice of ordering already underway, reflected the still undiminished revolutionary enthusiasms that emerged in the midst of the crisis of classical imperialism in the first world war and its aftermath. It could appear as a realistic political strategy because it theorised political relations of force that were already operative, attempting to provide them with theoretical coherence, consistency and direction. In other words, it was a ‘timely’ conception and intervention. Even when the simulacra of Fascist counter-revolutions latter appeared to drain the modernising impulse of its progressive force, the active sense of constructing the New, as relation and institution, remained the utopian dream that nourished repeated attempts to renew self-emancipatory politics throughout the long dark night of the twentieth century.
To envisage the goal of emancipatory politics today as the construction of a new order, as a new practice of ordering, can seem like nothing if not ‘unrealistic’ and ‘untimely’. For well over thirty years, so the story goes, emancipatory politics has laboured in a minoritarian key, focused on immediate resistance to this or that injustice – civil, ethnic, gendered economic or ecological – without any totalising strategic vision.
It is surely time to put this fairytale to bed. The multiplicity of movements over the last 30 years, and particularly those over the last decade, have not been isolated instances of reactive and particularistic protest or rehearsals for some ‘real revolution’ to come. In their generational learning processes, complicated inheritances and creative extensions, these movements have represented moments in the emergence of a new critical imaginary of the Left. One broader in its concerns and sometimes even more radical in its demands than the oppositional cultures that preceded it. The clearest example of this is the centrality assumed in contemporary radical discourses and activity by themes of social reproduction initially highlighted by socialist feminists, in stark discontinuity with the patriarchal structures of older leftist political cultures. Leftist practice today impatiently posits an immediate relation between means and ends, seeing the intersection of demands against injustice as constitutive of their nature as demands. To recognise the ensemble of these movements as experimentations in new practices of ordering in the here and now is thus also to project them beyond the present, in their prefigurative capacity to construct our possible futures amidst the struggles of the present.
2 Historical Progress
The new order that self-emancipatory politics aims to bring into being is characterised unashamedly in the Prison Notebooks as an instance of ‘historical progress’.11 It is true that few concepts today have fallen out of fashion quite so decisively as that of progress, however it is defined, and for good reasons. It is not only the association of notions of progress with generations of reformisms – the type of naïve faith in an historical destiny that Walter Benjamin condemned so forcefully in German social democracy – that seems to compromise this notion.12 Nor is it only the observation, theorised by recent currents of critical theory on the basis of an older critique of Enlightenment rationality, that notions of (linear or normative) progress have been and remain complicit with histories of colonialism, eurocentrism and domination.13 It is also the fact that a banalised conception of progress, cynically masked as ‘modernisation’, figures among the weapons of the dominant politics of order of our time. Progress and modernisation have been regularly invoked as battle slogans in neoliberalism’s drive over the last thirty years to roll back the reforms secured by popular struggles in the postwar period, just as today they are routinely called upon to justify automation and artificial intelligence in capital’s restructuring of labour relations. Given so many betrayals and deformations, it is thus unsurprising that many engaged in emancipatory politics today may feel that the word ‘progress’ leaves only a bad taste in one’s mouth.
For Gramsci and his generation of internationalist revolutionaries, standing at the high tide of popular struggles in the early twentieth century, the problem of historical progress was posed in very different terms. For those figures, historical progress was not understood in terms of the teleological guarantees of an abstract philosophy of history, but as the very stakes of their struggles contesting the immanent limits of bourgeois political modernity. Rather than simply given by the flow of time, progress was something that had to be produced through the resolution of the actually existing contradictions of political modernity: between the egalitarian rhetoric of the bourgeois revolution and its substantial continuity with the hierarchies of the feudal order, between the declaration of political liberty and the reality of enduring relations of disenfranchisement.
Historical progress was fundamentally understood not as a linear accumulation directed towards a predetermined goal, but in the comparative perspective of a learning process and of concrete problem solving.14 To understand hegemonic politics as the production of historical progress is thus to conceive of it as immanent critique. It begins from existing contradictions to valorise the critical acts and practices capable of resolving them. Crucially, it aims to increase the capacity of the popular classes so in a way that might increase the capacity of the popular classes to act politically, without any guarantee that they will in fact do so. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this critique was focused on the claims of classical liberalism and its belated adoption of democratic legitimation. If popular sovereignty was affirmed in theory but not in practice, hegemonic politics aimed to build the expansive institutions in which meaningful popular participation in political deliberation and determination could occur; if slavery was abolished on the basis of an inalienable claim to personal liberty, hegemonic politics aimed to extend that claim to the regulation of the ‘normal’ labour relations still entrapped within the servitude of private property of the means of production of social wealth: in other words, the system of wage slavery. In each of these instances, hegemonic politics aimed to force bourgeois society to progress beyond itself, in an immanent sublation of its own constitutive limits.15
This conception of historical progress is not a normative one, at least not in the sense in which normativity is commonly understood today. Normativity in contemporary political philosophy is sometimes invoked in the aestheticised sense of the realisation of a ‘model’, a formalisation of the ‘ought’ as moral prescription, or in terms of justification of a given order.16 Rather than recommending ‘how things ought be’, this concrete conception of historical progress is better understood in terms of the Machiavellian tradition of the ‘concrete fantasy’ in which Gramsci’s thought was formed. For this approach, the realistic reformulation of a supposedly moral imperative involved recognising that the desire for transformation overcoded in moral (and ultimately legalistic) appeals was not in itself an abstract utopia, but an already operative element in any given situation; one that needed to be valorised and developed on its own concrete terms, without reference to any supposedly justifying instance.17 So too, for Gramsci, progress was not an ideal towards which to aim, but in Viconian terms a concrete ‘making’ whose efficacy was to be verified in comparative terms. Rather than a determining ideal at the end of a process, this conception of historical progress is thus better comprehended as a categorical perspective from which to begin, from which consequences can be drawn and on the basis of which responsibilities are assumed.
In the political cultural of international Communism in the early twentieth century, the conception that the popular classes could engage in purposive, independent political action was a ‘heresy’ of what Gramsci sardonically characterised as the ‘religion of liberty’, or of nineteenth century liberalism’s betrayed promises.18 Even when negated by Fascist counter-revolution and Stalinist corruption, this notion of the transformation of the unfinished emancipatory tasks of the bourgeois revolutions into practices of self-emancipation remained an orienting perspective that defined a continuity of the revolutionary tradition at the moment of its deepest defeats.
Today, to argue that the nature of emancipatory politics consists in the production of historical progress is equally heretical. It represents an explicit refusal of the ruling order’s declaration of the impossibility of any alternatives to its daily production of what can only be characterised as sheer ‘historical regress’. Attempts to propose solutions to the concrete problems that prevent an improvement in the life conditions of the subaltern classes and social groups thus do not need to rely upon any philosophy of history or normative guarantee. It is the acts of resistance of contemporary movements themselves – against the atomisation by legal mandate of institutions of collective popular deliberation such as trade unions, against the divisions promoted by mobilisations around ideologies of racism and sexism, against the originary accumulation undertaken by renewed commodification in the private and public spheres alike, against the threat of extinction posed by state sanctioned environmental destruction – that demonstrate the possibility that the future could be different from the present, Indeed, it can be unashamedly ‘better’ than the present, if the dynamics condensed in those acts were to be generalised as a new beginning for society at large. To advocate historical progress today is thus not to fall into any easy ideology of a fatalistic ‘progressivism’. It is rather to understand contemporary oppositional movements as the actually-existing alternatives to the current order.
3 Leadership
While the post New Left explosion of references to hegemony have most frequently understood it in terms of the paradigms of domination or sovereign power, the Bolshevik tradition understood hegemony’s strategic significance instead as synonymous with social, cultural and political leadership (in Gramsci’s Italian translation, direzione).19 Even when this affiliation has been noted, the overwhelming influence of the notion of hegemony as a system of power has still often tended to understand leadership in this context in terms of a conventional conception of supremacy, command and authority; in short, the notion that leadership is a concentration of power in an hierarchical relationship that consigns ‘mere’ followers to a lesser and derivative condition. Such an understanding of leadership is ultimately compatible with a Weberiannotion of charismatic power as self-foundational, with all its decisionisticconsequences.20
Hegemony or leadership in the Bolshevik debates both before and after the October Revolution, however, focused not in the first instance on the achievement of power as a capacity to issue commands. Rather, it was primarily a strategic response to the necessarily temporally disjointed process of mobilisation of the subaltern classes and social groups. The notion of a struggle for hegemony in Lenin’s writings, for instance, does not signify a bid for a (political or governmental) power that could be however provisionally or definitively attained (a process that Lenin discusses with the very different vocabularies of seizure of the vlast, insurrection and dual power). Hegemony for Lenin instead consists in the active process of mobilising the ‘followers’ of a political programme. It is a mobilisation that, in a Machiavellian sense, creates those who will receive and act upon its message in the very act of calling them forth.21
For this perspective, the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ among the popular classes did not signify the dominance of the industrial working class over, for instance, the peasantry. Rather, it meant the ‘prestige’ (to use the term from Italian historical linguistics with which Gramsci sometimes comprehends this process) of the proletariat’s political programme among the peasantry and other subaltern classes.22 Hegemony in this sense ‘occurs’ when the wider popular classes recognise the political programme of a leading class or social group as a rethinking of their own interests and the forms of their potential satisfaction. It was precisely this more expansive sense of leadership that characterised the post-revolutionary developments of hegemonic politics in the early 1920s in Soviet Russia, and which makes at least this dimension of hegemony irreducible to a merely mechanical conception of an ‘alliance’ between ‘fundamental’ and ‘non-fundamental’ classes.23
In Gramsci’s pre-carceral and carceral writings, this relational understanding of hegemony is accentuated and elevated to the level of a conscious political method. Precisely insofar as hegemonic leadership is a capacity to mobilise and activate followers, it is not a self-referential source of power but depends upon those following it to maintain its hegemonic status. Rather than the sovereign command that emanates from the nature of the political community’s hierarchical structure (Bodin) or which grounds its own decision (Schmitt), this is an image of the risk of the proposal that seeks assent, the fragility of the tentative foray that hopes for reinforcement, and above all, the productive difference between leaders and those they hope to inspire to follow them. This type of hegemonic leadership does not command, nor does it merely seek to persuade or receive consent. It aims actively to empower and to mobilise.
Herein lies Gramsci’s reformulation of what he characterises, following Machiavelli and in polemic with the elitist theorists of his day, as the ‘primordial fact of politics’. ‘There really are the governed and governors, leaders and the led’, he freely admits; but that recognition is only the beginning of the real problem.24 The question becomes how this given condition is to be comprehended not as an obstacle to self-emancipatory politics, but as a productive resource for its development. Gramsci insists that everything depends on whether this distinction is regarded as permanent and inevitable, or as the expression of the possibility of historical movement. The relationship between leaders and followers is thereby reformulated not as given once and for all, and not as a qualitative difference of type. Rather, it is much more similar to the constitutive temporal difference between an avant-garde and those it seeks to inspire. Between the moment of proposal and its operationalisation, or between political formulation and its ‘sedimentation’ in social movements, there exists a productive tension that drives emancipatory politics forward in an exploratory mode.
This conception of leadership is thus not the static relation of hierarchical command, but the exposed and fragile relationality of the experimental hypothesis.25 Hegemony, instead of the self-assurance proper to sovereign power, actively works to remind itself of the possibility of its own failure in those moments when leadership no longer works, when the followers refuse to continue to travel along the path indicated by their leaders and instead propose an alternative project, themselves assuming a hegemonic role. To engage in hegemonic politics is to accept the possibility of just such a ‘successful failure’ at every moment: the failure to produce the productive tension between the political initiative and its social base, but also the failure that results precisely from the fine tuning of this tension and its reversal of polarities. Hegemonic politics aims to put itself out of business, enabling those who yesterday were led to become their own leaders today.
The understanding of hegemonic leadership as risk, as fragility, and as dynamic differentiation represents a distinct understanding of the nature of the empowerment represented by and in emancipatory movements. Above all, it signals the autonomous nature of hegemonic politics from the ‘normal’ forms of political power comprehended within the paradigm of modern sovereignty. The Bolshevik and later Gramscian development of this perspective signified a new understanding of the nature of leadership, not as a mechanism of domination, but as a learning process and as an ethico-political relation of self-emancipation.
To imagine leadership in these terms today is to rediscover the essentially strategic dimensions of hegemony as a method of political work. In a time when the mere mention of leadership is still regarded by some with suspicion – or, on the other hand, is all too easily asserted by others in entirely fetishised and ultimately sovereign forms – this understanding of hegemony reminds us that leadership is both ‘normal’ and inevitable. An intervention in the life of a political movement – a proposal for this or that priority, for the short- or long-term value of this or that action – is always an instance of leadership, however brief or modest. What is decisive is not the temporal endurance or nominal authorship of any such intervention, but its openness to experimentation and the risks that are always implicit in its nature as proposal and as hypothesis. It is precisely such risks that the plurality of contemporary emancipatory movements encounter as they intersect with each other in the rhythms of the recurrent mobilisations that define our times.
4 Pedagogical Laboratory
If the strategic perspective of hegemony aims towards the development of a new process of ordering, and not merely the rearrangement or justification of an existing order; if the nature of hegemonic politics consists in the production of historical progress, as the concrete and immanent critique of the current state of affairs; if leadership as intervention is a method for undertaking such a dynamic and partisan project; hegemonic politics nevertheless still confronts a potentially disabling paradox. By taking its distance from the reigning sovereign forms of politics, does hegemony not run the risk of simply falling behind them? Might hegemony, that is, not come to represent anything more than an ephemeral moment prior to the affirmation of sovereignty, destined to be ‘transmogrified’ into its antagonist precisely insofar as it seeks to make its own dynamic endure? Is hegemonic politics incapable of any form of durable institutionalisation, without losing the distinctive features that make it what it is?
This was the paradox that Gramsci confronted in his carceral solitude. It was a solitude that was not merely the physical separation of confinement but an ideological ‘aloneness’ from the sectarian isolation into which so many of his fellow leaders of the international Communist movement fell in the early 1930s. The Prison Notebooks are in large part an extended attempt to find the strategic perspectives and forms that would be able to make of hegemonic politics a realistic and viable alternative to the sectarianism of the grotesque ‘revolutionary purity’ of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist ‘Third Period’. Present from the outset of his carceral researches as their guiding horizon, Gramsci intensified this dimension of his project in 1932 with the formulation of the Machiavellian notion of the ‘modern Prince’ and its articulation with his long standing call for the Italian anti-Fascist movement to understand its potential as a form of constituent struggle.26 The result was a distinctive conception of political organisation not as an administrative ‘apparatus’ of order, condensing ‘machine’ of force or ‘monopoly’ of command, but as a ‘pedagogical laboratory’ of self-emancipatory politics.27
Gramsci’s notion of the modern Prince can be regarded as the concrete mythological expression of such a conception. The modern Prince is a pedagogical laboratory because its dynamic of combination and communication creates the conditions for a learning process of the already-existing potentials for self-emancipation among the subaltern classes and social groups. This is a Socratic pedagogical mode, guidance rather than instruction in the process of critical reflection on already existing but dimly comprehended capacities. The modern Prince and its institutional concretisation in the dynamic of a constituent assembly of anti-fascist forces, conceived as an organisation of struggle, provided forms in which the subaltern classes could discover collaboratively their own capacities for self-governance. Its function was to make endure and make productive the differences, tensions and conflicts that are constitutive of hegemonic politics as an intervention in the historical process. As an expansive process of moral and intellectual reform, it was situated simultaneously in the midst of, outside, and beyond the relations of subalternisation inherent to the modern bourgeois integral state: a space in which the subaltern social groups could reforge themselves into autonomous political forces.
The reformulation of political organisation as a pedagogical laboratory of self-emancipation was for Gramsci linked to the needs of the anti-fascist struggle in the 1930s. It was a viable form in which the subaltern classes could rediscover their potential for social and political autonomy. It was an attempt to provide an institutional vehicle for the ‘unprecedented concentration of hegemony’ that he saw as the concrete and actual form of revolutionary praxis in unpropitious conditions.28 Neglected in Gramsci’s own time, its spirit soon deformed in the Italian Communist Party’s capitulation to the postwar constitutional process and resulting republican order, the modern Prince has remained a tantalising but still abstract utopian figure.
To think of the organisation of self-emancipatory politics today as a type of pedagogical laboratory is to rediscover a language for the learning and cross-fertilisation already occurring in so many of the contemporary intersectional socio-political movements. Anti-racist protests, feminist struggles and ecological movements each in their own way confront the consequences and causes of state inflicted or endorsed violence. The pedagogical laboratory of hegemonic politics in this sense represents an attempt to develop the dynamic institutional forms in which the subaltern classes and social groups, precisely in their diversity and divisions, can collectively unlearn the habits of subalternity, enabling them to discover new forms of conviviality, mutuality and collective self-determination, or what Gramsci calls the ‘active and conscious co-participation’ and ‘compassionality’ of ‘living philology’.29 The organisation of hegemonic politics, by providing an institutional context in which the fragility and risk of learning processes can be valorised, represents a concrete way for subaltern social groups and classes to rehearse the conditions of their own self-emancipation.
Conclusion
When conceived as an articulated theory of the structure of self-emancipatory politics, synthesising a new process of ordering, an affirmation of the necessity of historical progress, a proposal of pedagogical leadership and a new practice of political organisation, hegemony can no longer be reintegrated within the main currents of modern political thought. It is not ‘just’ another theory of political modernity or the nature of political, social and cultural power in general. Hegemony in this sense is not a state or condition to be achieved, definitively or provisionally, but a new way of doing politics. It is a strategic method of political work that aims to overcome the defining contradictions of political modernity itself, not in general or in the long term, but concretely, today, in the midst of our ongoing contemporary struggles for self-emancipation from the increasingly aggressive imperialism of the new world disorder.
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This text provides a thematic overview of some of the main arguments for a strategic understanding of hegemony developed in Thomas 2023, particularly chapter three (pp. 128–77). Previous versions were presented at: the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 18 (Sociology of Communications and Media Research) conference ‘Communication, Capitalism and Critique: Critical Media Sociology in the 21st Century’ at the Politecnico di Torino (2022); the seminar series ‘Gramsci d’urgència, Comprendre i sentir la realitat per transformar-la’, organised by the Associació d’Estudis Gramscians de Catalunya, the Centre d’Estudis d’Unitat Popular and the Fundació Neus Català at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (2023); the Visiting Professor Doctoral Programme in the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the Università di Cagliari (2024); and the Universidad de Verano de Anticapitalistas in Segovia (2025). I am grateful to participants at those events for comradely comments and criticisms. References to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are given to the Italian critical edition (Gramsci 1975). I follow the internationally established standard of notebook number (Q), number of note (§), and page reference. Dates of the composition of individual notes are given according to the chronology established by Gianni Francioni and the revisions contained in Cospito 2011.
See Chiarotto 2011.
I have attempted to trace the emergence of this reading of hegemony, from the Italian postwar reception to the latter international diffusion of Gramsci’s thought, in relation to the ‘simulacrum’ of ‘passive revolution’ in Thomas 2023, particularly pp. 132–50.
See Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Hall 1988, Arrighi 1978, Guha 1997, Chatterjee 1986; 2004; 2020.
In a burgeoning season of recent new historical, philological and theoretical studies of the Prison Notebooks, some of the most significant to have emphasised Gramsci’s political contexts and aims include Bianchi 2019, Douet 2022, Descendre and Zancarini 2023, Fresu 2024 and Liguori 2024.
See Thomas 2023, particularly pp. 5–7.
On Gramsci’s distinctive concept of ‘previsione’, see Badaloni 1981, and for a creative extension of this perspective to contemporary global politics, Hart 2024.
For this reason, among many others, Gramsci’s thought cannot be reduced to a valorisation of ‘civil society’, which he instead conceives precisely as a ‘ruse’ of the bourgeois integral state. Despite repeated critiques of its conceptual and philological limitations, the shadow of Bobbio 1990 continues to fall across many contemporary discussions of this theme.
Gramsci outlines the torturous emancipatory pathway of subaltern social groups in the note ‘History of Subaltern Classes’, Q3 §90, 372–3 (August 1930), re-written a few years later in Q25, §5, 2287–89. The collection of texts meticulously edited and analysed by Green and Buttigieg in Gramsci 2021 enables the pathway of Gramsci’s own thinking on these questions to be reconstructed. For a creative attempt to think about the ‘phases’ of (relative) autonomisation in relation to recent global politics, see Chalcraft 2025.
See Q13, §1, p. 1561 (May 1932), where Gramsci explicitly links the process of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ to ‘a programme of economic reform’.
This theme is extensively explored in Burgio 2002.
See Benjamin 2003.
See, for example, Chakrabarty 2000; Allen 2016.
I am using the notion of a learning process [Lernprozess] in the processual sense developed in Holzkamp 1995. Albeit formulated in different terms, the notion of problem solving is also central to Jaeggi’s (Jaeggi 2025) recent attempt to defend a (normative) notion of progress in terms of social change.
The constitutive limits of liberalism and their critique in the critical communist tradition is highlighted in Losurdo 1997.
See for example Forst 2017, which conceives the relation between normativity and justification in terms that are effectively variants of Weber’s late notion of a type of ‘democratic’ justification of domination [Herrschaft] (which remains domination, however democratically justified). On this dimension of Weber’s thought, see Szelenyi 2016.
See for example Gramsci’s notes on the contradictory role of utopias in the development of the political imaginaries of subaltern social groups, and particularly his discussion of the nineteenth century movement gathered around Davide Lazzaretti in Tuscany: Q3 §12, 297–9 (May 1930); Q25, §1, 2279–83 (July–August 1934).
Q10I, §13, p. 1238 (late May 1932).
This affiliation was highlighted by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith in their notes to Gramsci 1971 (p. 55). The most comprehensive account of the many dimensions of hegemony as leadership in the Russian revolutionary movement is Brandist 2015.
On the self-foundational dimensions of Weber’s notion of charismatic power, see Farris 2013, particularly pp. 197–201.
See Lih 2006 and 2024, which have fundamentally redefined out understanding of Lenin’s varying political vocabularies and agitational practice.
On the importance of Gramsci’s university study of historical linguistics for his later political vocabulary, see Lo Piparo 1979; Ives 2004; Schirru 2011; Carlucci 2013.
For this reason, Laclau and Mouffe’s repeated assertion that the notion of an alliance of pre-constituted (economic) classes constitutes the central feature of Lenin’s notion of hegemony might say more about the subjectivist presuppositions and consequences of their own theory than it does about the function of hegemony in the Russian revolutionary movement. See Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 134.
Q15, §4, p. 1752 (February 1933). Attempts to reduce Gramsci to a variant of the elitist paradigm need to neglect the way in which his conception of self-emancipatory politics as a pedagogical relation works to deconstruct these hierarchies, including (and perhaps especially) in their supposedly democratic-representative forms. See Finnochiaro 1997.
The notion of revolutionary politics as an experimental hypothesis, or ‘wager’, was central to the thought of Daniel Bensaïd; see Bensaïd 2009, and for an overview of his evolving thought, Russo 2024.
On the evolution of Gramsci’s notion of the modern Prince, see Frosini 2013. I have explored the relation between the modern Prince and Gramsci’s ‘constituentism’ in Thomas 2020. On Gramsci’s new conception of politics in the later phases of the Prison Notebooks project, see Antonini 2019 and 2020.
For my initial explorations of the articulation of pedagogy and experimentation in Gramsci, see Thomas 2012 and 2013. The notion that experimentation is a distinctive feature of Gramsci’s understanding of political organisation is powerfully developed in Sotiris 2019.
Q6, §138, p. 802 (August 1931).
Q11, §25, p. 1429 (July–August 1932).
