A Typology of Hegemony Peter D.

Thomas Istanbul December 2012 Gramscis concept of hegemony has become influential in a wide range of humanistic, socialscientific and historical disciplines. It represents a singular success of the vocabulary of the Marxist tradition, continuing to find a much wider audience than integrally related concepts such as the dictatorship of the proletariat or the abolition of the capitalist state. Frequently, however, the word seems to have very different when not directly contradictory meanings ascribed to it, leaving new and old readers alike uncertain as to its precise theoretical significance or contemporary relevance. According to one influential interpretation, hegemony for Gramsci involves a leading social group securing the (active or passive) consent of other social strata, rather than unilaterally imposing its decrees upon unwilling subjects. It relies more upon subtle mechanisms of ideological integration than direct recourse to arms. In this version, hegemony-consent is conceived as the opposite of dictatorship-coercion, according to presuppositions that effectively reduce hegemonic politics to an unmediated ethical relationship. This reading has accompanied the reception of the Prison Notebooks from the outset, beginning in the early years of the Italian republic and continuing until today, constituting a sort of beginners guide to the meaning of hegemony. 1 Today, this interpretation is particularly prevalent, albeit often contested, in the academic fields of cultural studies and anthropology.2 A second interpretation regards Gramscis concept of hegemony as the forerunner of a theory of the political constitution of the social via a logic of equivalence, or a unifying process of the articulation of heterogeneity. Hegemony here figures fundamentally as a theory of the unification of the diverse in a composite socio-political body, on whose unity alone true politics can arise. This version posits Gramscis concept of hegemony in the radicalliberal tradition of the collective political agent, whether conceived as groups, class, caste or people. Historically, this reading emerged in the encounter between communist and liberal thought in the Italian post-war constitutional process.3 Insofar as Gramscis thought is to be found in contemporary international discussions in political philosophy, it is often represented in these terms.4 A third interpretation builds further upon the presuppositions of the first two readings, arguing that hegemony/consent is a political technique proper to the terrain of civil society, while the state is the locus of coercion and domination. Hegemony works away surreptitiously at the foundations of bourgeois rule in a molecular or even rhizomatic fashion
1

A detailed reconstruction of the different interpretations of the concept of hegemony in the Italian debate can be found in Liguori, Guido 2012, Gramsci conteso. Interpretazioni, dibattiti e polemiche 19222012, Rome: Editori Riuniti University Press. See also DOrsi, Angelo (ed.) 2008, Egemonie, Naples: Edizioni Dante & Descartes. 2 For a critical reading of this line of reception, see Crehan, Kate 2002, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology, London: Pluto Press. 3 On populist readings of hegemony on the Italian road to socialism, see Liguori 2012, particularly pp. 133 68. For critical remarks on the later exportation of this perspective in international debates, see Casarino Cesare and Antonio Negri 2008, In Praise of the Common: a Conversation on Philosophy and Politics , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1624. 4 The most influential proposal of this reading was Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic Politics, translated by W. Moore and P. Cammack, London: Verso. For an example of its influence, see Critchley, Simon 2007, Infinitely Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London: Verso. This act of the aggregation of the political subject is the moment of hegemony (p. 104).

in civil society; direct confrontation on the terrain of the state is deferred to a future that remains indeterminate, when not declared to be unnecessary. In effect, this version presents Gramscis concept of hegemony as a form of anti-politics, which finds its strength instead in the valorisation of the social. Derived from readings of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, often inflected by the experience of Western Maoism and later left wing Eurocommunsim, this interpretation can often be found in contemporary discussions in political science and sociology.5 Finally, a fourth interpretation situates the contemporary significance of the term hegemony on the terrain of geopolitics, in accordance with an established usage that stems back to at least Thucydides. Hegemony is here configured at the level of a now open, now hidden, struggle for influence and power between states, prior to but sometimes including the outright declaration of military hostilities. This version effectively inscribes Gramscis concept of hegemony within a tradition of political realism in regarding the state as the key political actor of modernity, providing a critical qualification of this dominant perspective. Precedents for this usage can be found in the debates of the early Third International, albeit in more complicated forms.6 Today, this interpretation is often encountered as an established image of Gramsci in mainstream discussions in International Relations, though it is increasingly contested by new neo-Gramscian perspectives.7 Each of these readings reduces Gramscis theory of hegemony to an already known figure in the history of modern political thought. The first interpretation represents Gramscis theory of hegemony as a type of inverted Hobbesianism, with consent functioning as the motor of an ethical foundation of the political. The second interpretation of hegemony as a logic of equivalence depicts Gramsci as minor variant of the great modern tradition of theories of political unity, as a thinly disguised Rousseauean vision of politics as the transition from the will of all to the general will. The third interpretation presents the diversity and richness of existing civil society as the potential foundation for an alternative mode of socialisation, in a type of arrested Hegelianism that stops at 255 of the Philosophy of Right. The fourth interpretation represents Gramscis theory of hegemony as a communist version of the Kantian (and neo-Kantian) presuppositions of modern international law, or even, in its later Schmittian variant, as a clash between irreconcilable values, often more menacingly telluric than cosmopolitan. The combination of these perspectives yields a certain traditional or at least widespread interpretation of the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks. This reading understands the politics of hegemony to involve, in the first instance, the securing of consent of a significant proportion of political actors in a given social formation; second, their unification into a collective political subject; third, the engagement of this newly constituted political subject in a battle against another such subject formed by a similar process, each seeking to enlarge their occupation of territory in the civil society of the social formation until they possesses sufficient forces to conquer the social formations centre, in the institutions of the state apparatus; and, in a final moment, the clash of hegemonically
5

This interpretation was most influentially formulated in Bobbio, Norberto 1990 [1969], Gramsci e la concezione della societ civile, in Saggi su Gramsci, Milan: Feltrinelli. For critical readings of its presuppositions, see Anderson, Perry 1976, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, New Left Review, I, 100: 5 78; Opratko, Benjamin 2012, Hegemonie, Mnster: Verlag Westflishces Dampfboot; and Thomas, Peter D. 2009, The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, Leiden: Brill, particularly pp. 15996. 6 On geopolitical uses of the concept of hegemony, see Anderson 1976; and Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 1980 [1975], Gramsci and the State, translated by David Fernbach, London: Lawrence and Wishart. 7 The first generation of neo -gramscian theory in International Relations is collected in Gill, Stephen (ed.) 1993, Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A representative example of newer approaches in the field is Morton, Adam David 2007, Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy, London: Pluto.

constructed states in competition on the international terrain, in a geopolitical repetition of the originary domestic process. What these readings have in common, despite their very different theoretical antecedents, histories and disciplinary locations, and what allows them to be articulated as a total theory of hegemony in the manner indicated, is the presupposition that the concept of hegemony is a generic theory of political power, conceived as a process transcendental ordering. Such a general theory can then be deployed either in order to contest existing power relations and structures, or, in a mirror-image inversion, to delineate the preconditions of their legitimation. In the first case, Gramsci then appears as a superannuated forerunner of Foucault, if not even Deleuze. In the second and by far the most significant case, Gramsci is forced to step forward, to modify a famous Crocean phrase, as the Weber of the Proletariat.8 In both cases, hegemony effectively comes to denote stability, integration, and legitimation, even if in the form of the negative legitimation of the resistance that acknowledges the existing social order (rather than the revolutionary rupture that negates it). Hegemony, that is, is inscribed within a typology of domination of Weberian and more broadly neo-Kantian dimensions. It is represented as one of the forms of Herrschaft alongside the charismatic, traditional and legal-bureaucratic, or perhaps even as the Aufhebung of these pre- and earlymodern techniques of the political, synthesising their respective strengths in a new political practice of domination adequate to the consolidation and completion of the parliamentary democratic order as a system of political equilibrium and integration. Like most half-truths, such interpretations can claim at least some foundation in fact, pointing to various citations cruelly ripped from their context that can be argued to support the main lines of the respective argumentation. Similarly, like most half-readings, they sprang not fully-grown from the transparent obviousness of a text, but needed to be produced by a complex process of the always uncertain reading and creative misreading of Gramscis Prison Notebooks in different historical conjunctures, as Guido Liguoris Gramsci conteso amply attests. Basing myself upon the recent intense season of historical, philological and theoretical research on the historical and political context of the Prison Notebooks, 9 their peculiar architecture, and the Leitmotiv of Gramscis thought in development, I would like to propose here an alternative typology of hegemony. I will attempt, albeit in a highly schematic and far too brief way, to delineate the distinctiveness of Gramscis theory of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks as an integrated political project. I will argue that hegemony for Gramsci involves four integrally and dialectically related moments, or component parts: first, hegemony as social and political leadership; second, hegemony as a political project; third, the realisation of this hegemonic project in concrete institutions and organisational forms; and forth, ultimately and decisively, the social and political hegemony of the workers movement. These four moments constitute a dialectical chain along which Gramsci deepens his researches in the Prison Notebooks; beginning from the primordial fact of hegemony as leadership, an immanent and expansive dynamic leads him to uncover the determinations and presuppositions of hegemonic political practice as the foundation for a new type of politics, beyond the modern forms of domination.10
8

For a suggestive comparison of Webers and Gramscis concepts of modernity in their respective political histories, see Portantiero, Juan Carlos 1981, Los usos de Gramsci, Buenos Aires: Folios ediciones. 9 Foremost among these new works has been the collaborative research of the International Gramsci Society, involving hundreds of scholars from around the world. See Liguori, Guido and Pasquale Voza (eds) 2009, Dizionario gramsciano 1926-1937, Rome: Carocci. 10 The development of these moments is thus dialectical in the sense of an open-ended experiential discovery of necessary presuppositions, rather than in terms of formalistic closure or synthesis; in Hegelian terms, the Bildungsroman-dialectic of The Phenomenology of Spirit rather than the system-dialectic of the Science of Logic.

Taken in its totality, this typology of hegemony provides us with both a sophisticated political analysis of the emergence of modern state power, and a theory of alternative political organisation. In other words, Gramscis concept of hegemony does indeed offer a concrete analysis of the forms of economic, social and political domination in the modern world, translating the perspectives of a typology of domination into an absolute historicist register and explaining their social and political presuppositions in concrete terms. Gramscis reason for undertaking this analysis of the forms of domination, however, is not in order to encourage immobilism in the face of the overwhelming obstacles of modernity conceived as a passive revolution, or a rationalised and bureaucratic iron cage [stahlhartes Gehuse]. Rather, Gramscis concept of hegemony aimed to set to work a vigorous antithesis, autonomous and intransigent, that could contest capitalist modernity. 11 In other words, the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks aims to contribute to the development of a prefigurative theory of a politics of another type of the subaltern classes, intent upon forging their own conception of the world and founding their own new integral civilisation.12 First, hegemony as social and political leadership: as has often been emphasised and just as frequently forgotten, Gramsci inherited the notion of notion of hegemony as social and political leadership directly from the debates of Russian social democracy and from Lenin in particular.13 In that context, hegemony meant the capacity of the working class to provide political leadership to all the other popular classes in Russia in the struggle against Tsardom. Following the October revolution, this approach to mass politics underwent a further development in the politics of the United Front and the NEP.14 Later, as head of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci worked to translate this perspective into his own political reality, as a political leadership of the working classes that aimed to resolve the fundamental socio-economic and political problems confronting the Italian people. Upon imprisonment by the Fascist regime, in the Prison Notebooks, particularly in the early phases of his researches, Gramsci attempted to use the Russian concept of hegemony as an analytic tool in order to understand the ways in which the Italian and European ruling classes, historically, had consolidated their political power. Crucially, these historical reflections were formulated against the background of Gramscis experience of workers hegemony in Russia; politics here provided the lens with which to read history. Thus, at the same time as his early historical studies, and increasingly in the following years, he attempted to think about the lessons that could be learnt from this history by left wing forces that were seeking to establish their own hegemonic project. What was decisive for Gramsci was to understand politics not as a practice of management or governance, but as a practice of leadership in the widest sense. He distinguished between at least two different types of leadership: in the case of bourgeois politics, the type of leadership that structurally maintains a distance between the leaders and the led, which is the logic of the passive revolution; and in the case of proletarian politics, the type of leadership that aims to help the masses to express, deepen and strengthen their self-engagement for socio-political transformation. This type of leadership for Gramsci included the leaders learning from the masses themselves, in an ongoing process in which the

11

Q 15, 62, p. 1827. References to Gramscis Prison Notebooks [Quaderni del carcere] follow the internationally established standard of notebook number ( Q), number of note (), followed by page reference to the Italian critical edition: Gramsci, Antonio 1975, Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana, Turin: Einaudi. 12 Q 11, 27, p. 1434. 13 In addition to Anderson 1976, see also Boothman, Derek 2008, The Sources for Gramsci's Concept of Hegemony, Rethinking Marxism, 20:2 and Brandist, Craig 2012, The cultural and linguistic dimensions of hegemony: aspects of Gramsci's debt to early Soviet cultural policy, Journal of Romance Studies, 12:3. 14 See Buci-Glucksmann 1980 and Paggi, Leonardo 1984, Le strategie del potere in Gramsci. Tra fascismo e socialismo in un solo paese 192326, Rome: Editori Riuniti.

educators themselves are educated, to use the profound words of Marxs Theses on Feuerbach. It is against the background of this notion of the distinctive nature of proletarian hegemony that Gramsci develops the second decisive moment of his dialectical theory: hegemony as a political project. For Gramsci, a genuinely hegemonic project is not simply propaganda, or generic influence. Rather, as a project, hegemony involves the concretisation of leadership in the form of a political project that builds upon and intervenes into an historical dynamic that is already underway. It involves active and continuous agitation and organisation on the widest range of fronts, from the explicitly political, to the social, to culture and religion, conceived in a broad sense as our common ways of thinking and seeing. Again, the comparison to the historical emergence of the European bourgeoisie as a hegemonic class in the long nineteenth century was decisive. The bourgeoisies hegemonic project had been prosecuted by putting politics in command, with an encompassing conception of the world and organisational instances reinforcing each other. In terms of the striving of the subaltern social groups for hegemony, Gramsci poses the question of how a hegemonic project could be constructed out of the immense richness of all the different interest groups sometimes even conflicting interest groups that constitute what he comes to call the subaltern social groups, or popular classes in the broadest sense; that is, all the groups or classes that are oppressed and exploited by the current organisation of society. 15 As he develops this line of research, Gramsci increasingly emphasises that hegemony as a project involves something similar to the most rigorous forms of modern scientific experimental practice; hegemony, that is, is a research project for the creation of new proletarian knowledge. Political actors aiming to build a hegemonic practice must continually make propositions, test them in practice, correct and revise them and test their modified theses once again in concrete political struggles. This process results in an ongoing dialectical exchange and interchange between the existing political conjuncture and attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders of a political movement and those who participate in them. A political project of hegemonic politics represents a type of pedagogical laboratory for the development of new forms of democratic and emancipatory political practice.16 Gramsci went further, however, and argued that it was not enough to think of leadership generally, and nor was it enough to think of a project in abstract terms. Rather, it was necessary to construct concrete institutions of a hegemonic project. This is the third central moment of his concept of hegemony. This perspective involved the further development of the concept of hegemony that Gramsci had inherited from the Russian debates, and its translation into his own, genuinely new notion of a hegemonic apparatus.17 With this strategically decisive concept, Gramsci attempts to think the dialectical relationality of a series of structured institutions and organisational forms of political and seeming nonpolitical life, capable of translating their varying modes of socio-political experience into the terms of comprehensibility of the others. Here, Gramsci previous analyses of the hegemonic apparatuses built by the European bourgeoisie throughout long nineteenth century make a decisive contribution. He notes that then expansion of the hegemonic apparatus of the bourgeoisie had involved not merely explicitly political forms such as political parties, an electoral programme, but also the articulation of these demands with the full range of social
15

For an exploration of the development of the complex meaning of the notion of subaltern social groups in the Prison Notebooks, see Green, Marcus 2011, Rethinking the Subaltern and the Question of Censorship in Gramscis Prison Notebooks, Postcolonial Studies, 14:4. 16 On the notion of hegemonic politics as the production of new intellectualities, see Sotiris, Panagiotis 2013, Hegemony and mass critical intellectuality, International Socialism Journal, 137. 17 For a detailed account of the development and novelty of the concept of hegemonic apparatus, see Bollinger, Stefan and Juha Koivisto 2001, Hegemonialapparat, in Das historisch-kritische Wrterbuch des Marxismus 5, edited by W.F. Haug, Hamburg-Berlin: Argument.

life, from the class struggle in production, to literary forms, to quotidian cultural practices. Gramsci observes the complex ways in which the bourgeoisie had emerged from its subaltern condition in feudalism in order to become a social group able to offer leadership to the society as a whole, creating the new forms by means of which and through which it was able to win to its cause many other social groups excluded from previous distributions of power. This historical formation of a bourgeois hegemonic apparatus occurred concretely in initiatives such as newspapers, publishing houses, educational institutions, social associations, sporting clubs and cultural networks; in short, the wide variety of activities that structure and organise modern societies in their complexity, as an organisation from above of associations from below, in the paradigm of modern transcendent sovereignty.18 Would it be possible, Gramsci seems to ask continuously throughout the Prison Notebooks, to conceive the formation of an alternative network of proletarian hegemonic apparatuses, one that would not be dedicated to reinforcing the current organisation of society and its inequalities, but which would rather open the way towards the abolition of exploitative and oppressive social relations? Is it possible to conceive a dynamic process of constituent power that does not conclude in the ossification of a constitutional form? In the words of Marxs reflections on the Paris Commune, Gramsci was thinking about the formation of hegemonic apparatuses that would be expansive rather than repressive, which would begin a process of permanent revolution in the midst of capitalist domination sites of counter power, in our contemporary and less precise vocabulary.19 What could be the preconditions for such a process, based upon a realistic assessment of the fundamental structures of the current socio-political order? As Gramsci develops this analysis of the institutional forms of previous and possibly future hegemony, the notion of a hegemony of the workers movement the fourth fundamental moment in his integral concept of hegemony remained his fundamental perspective; indeed, as his prison researches progress, he argues for the hegemony of the working class movement with increasing urgency. It is only in this context that we can understand the close relationship between Gramsci formulation, in the Prison Notebooks, of the concepts of subaltern social groups and the modern Prince, on the one hand, and his forthright proposal, in carceral colloquia and letters in the same period (that is, from 1932 onwards), of the need for a constituent assembly: all of these concepts aim to think the organisational conditions for a political leadership of the workers movement in the antifascist struggle.20 At first sight, this argument may seem wilful or forced, given that it has often been claimed that Gramsci is a theorist of the cultural superstructures, and a strong critic of economic determinism. Sometimes, it has even been asserted that Gramscis concept of hegemony represents the beginning of a post-Marxism that rejects the Marxist critique of political economy. 21 These readings, however, neglect the deeper context and totality of Gramscis Prison Notebooks. As Alberto Burgio has emphasised, throughout Gramscis historical, political and philosophical researches in prison, he continually notes that the modern world, with its new forms of freedom and unfreedom, is fundamentally distinguished from all other previous social formations because it is an organisation for the production, accumulation and expansion of immense amounts of social wealth, and new forms of social
18

On Gramscis attempt to analyse the hegemonic (material) constitution of the modern state, see Frosini, Fabio 2012, Reformation, Renaissance and the state: the hegemonic fabric of modern sovereignty, Journal of Romance Studies, 12:3. 19 See Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich 19752005, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 22, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p. 334. 20 The most recent historical research on Gramscis proposal of a constitutent assembly is synthesised in Vacca, Giuseppe 2012, Vita e pensieri di Antonio Gramsci, Turin: Einaudi. 21 For an analysis of Gramscis deep engagement with the critique of political economy throughout the Prison Notebooks, see Krtke, Michael 2011, Antonio Gramsci's Contribution to a Critical Economics, Historical Materialism 19:3.

wealth.22 Labour is no mere element or component part of this organisation, or simply the activity of one class or class fraction (for instance, the supposedly traditional industrial working class of Fordism). Rather, labour, for Gramsci, as for Marx, is a social relation that determines, and is overdetermined by, all other social relations in our societies. Labour, that is, figures for Gramsci as one of the central nodal points in which are condensed and expressed the structures and contradictions of modern society. Modern capitalist society, from the everyday activities that constitute its content to the social and political relations of command that seek to function as their form, is dedicated to the accumulation of capital by means of the private property of the means of production by one class that is, the bourgeoisies successful claim to the juridical right to appropriate the surplus-value produced in the distinctively unequal equality of the wage labour-capital relation. Any movement to transform this society must therefore reckon accounts with this fundamental organising principle, which continually produces, reproduces and overdetermines the relations of subalternity that traverse capitalist society, both within and without strictly economic relations. In the first and not the last instance, such a revolutionary movement must challenge the dominance of one minoritarian class, on the basis of the interests of all other classes in the society, by addressing directly and forcefully what the Communist Manifesto refers to as the property question, the material basis for subalternity in all its forms. Such a coalition of the rebellious subalterns, engaged in acts of self-liberation of hegemonic politics, is summarised by Gramsci with the name of the modern Prince a pedagogical laboratory for unlearning the habits of subalternity and discovering new forms of conviviality, mutuality and collective self-determination. Leadership, or in other words, dynamic movement founded upon instability rather than equilibrium; politics as a tendentially unifying project of knowledge formation, rather than assertion of known verities; institutions of constituent power and their immanent expansion, rather than constitutional limitation; labour as fundamental social relation of the modern world, which it is the task of a militant communist movement to politicise. Far from a left-wing variant of the state-centric dimensions of modern political thought, Gramscis dialectical chain of hegemonic politics represents a radical alternative. In a period in which new but still fragile conceptions of the world are beginning to circulate, of mass experiences of popular mobilisation of an entire generation, from the ongoing Arab Revolutions, to Occupy, to anti-Austerity struggles around the world, Gramscis concept of hegemonic politics and the formation of a modern Prince represents a prefigurative vocabulary for confronting the challenges of the present.

22

Burgio, Alberto 2002, Gramsci storico. Una lettura dei Quaderni del carcere, Rome-Bari: Laterza.