This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of retreat from Marxist (...) positions on the postmodern left. Antonio Gramsci is distinguished by its range of philosophical grasp, its depth of specialized historical scholarship, and its keen sense of Gramsci's position as a crucial figure in the politics of contemporary cultural theory. (shrink)

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)

The work and ideas of Antonio Gramsci continue to attract serious and sustained scholarly attention. This review essay, which might be viewed as an appendage to the earlier, 2016 Thesis Eleven essay ‘From Marx to Gramsci’, develops some of the lines of curiosity indicated there. Does the globalization of Gramsci occur at the expense of the recognition of the particularity of his thought, its specific time and place, and its clearly revolutionary intention? What do these phenomena signify, almost a century (...) after? (shrink)

Gramsci belonged in a tradition which stemmed from Antonio Labriola, not from Croce and idealist philosophy. This tradition saw Marxism as a philosophy of praxis, a new and original philosophy distinct from both idealism and materialism. Gramsci took his lead from Labriola but also further expanded upon the latter’s approach by seeking the fundamental concepts of the new philosophy in theTheses on Feuerbach. In particular, Gramsci recovered both the concept of praxis and the concept of human nature from theTheses. With (...) the concept of human nature, he expanded even upon Marx’s formulation, by including the individual within it in a way that lays the foundation for modern social sciences based on the notion of the individual, which was, in Gramsci’s case, a socially-rich notion. (shrink)

Gramsci's concept of hegemony is often believed to be a political account of legitimation. His Marxist critics go on to accuse him of failing to offer a properly structural account of bourgeois legitimation. I argue that Gramsci's theory attempted to straddle both economic and political accounts. In so doing, he presupposed the absence of effective authority in the Italian state. In such conditions, his project was to the orize the way in which economic classes became agents that would institute political (...) order. The difficulties in applying Gramsci's formu lation today lie in this combined economic and political account and the assumption of 'organic crisis' that supported it. (shrink)