Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better understood as (...) a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity. (shrink)

Taking for granted that Marx’s economic theory enjoys a scientific status and, furthermore, that it installed a real Copernican revolution in sociology, the present paper explores the possibility of deriving a system of law deserving the name of “scientific” in so far as it would be in keeping with the theses of the latter scientific theory. In this context, the paper argues against a claim recently sustained by Fernández Liria and Alegre Zahonero, for whom a system of right compatible with (...) Marx’s theory would be compatible, too, with the classic juridical formulations conceived during the Enlightenment. The main reason why this paper testifies against such compatibility is that the enlightened concepts of “equality”, “liberty” and “autonomy” count with the individual as the realm for their juridical application. However, Marx’s subject matter being the social means of production (and not the individuals’ production of value), we conclude that the only juridical subject that could justifiably be derived from his economic investigation would be the “social class”. Finally, the paper suggests that the only way a scientific system of law could grant a juridical status to the individual would be by taking into account the other theory that also installed a Copernican revolution in the social sciences, though this time in the field of psychology: Freud’s psychoanalysis. Key words: Copernican revolution, science, scientific. (shrink)