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)

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)

ABSTRACTWe can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and passages out of their historical contexts. Yet the methodological literature stresses the latter and says little about the former. This paper thus theorises the idea of textual context, distinguishes three types of textual context, and asks how we uncover the right textual contexts. I distinguish four kinds of textual-context (...) error, and offer practical tips for avoiding these errors. However, the beating heart of this paper is the history–philosophy debate: in contrast to the prevailing assumption that historical and philosophical analysis are fundamentally different, I show that a commitment to textual context, which should be entirely uncontroversial, also commits one to think philosophically. (shrink)

This paper outlines a theory of radical democratic education by addressing a key concept in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: articulation. Through their concept of articulation, Laclau and Mouffe attempt to liberate Gramsci’s theory of hegemony from Marxist economism, and adapt it to a political sphere inhabited by a plurality of struggles and agents none of which is predominant. However, while for Gramsci the political process of hegemony formation has an explicit educational dimension, Laclau and Mouffe ignore this (...) dimension altogether. My discussion starts with elaborating the concept of articulation and analysing it in terms of three dimensions: performance, connection and transformation. I then address the role of education in Gramsci’s politics, in which the figure of the intellectual is central, and argue that radical democratic education requires renouncing that figure. In the final section, I offer a theory of such education, in which both teacher and students articulate their political differences and identities. (shrink)

As a grand narrative of progress, the utopian project of modernity is primarily concerned with notions of rationalism, universalism, and the development of a metalanguage. The triumph of the Moderate Enlightenment has seen logics of domination, accumulation and individualism incorporated into the project of modernity, with these logics giving rise to globalised capitalism as the metalanguage of modernity and neoliberal economics as the grand narrative of rational progress. The project of modernity is all but complete, requiring only the formality of (...) an end. However, rather than utopia, the foreseeable endpoint of modernity is environmental collapse, with neoliberal economics also serving as a grand narrative of environmental destruction. As an anti-modern response, postmodernism has been a triumphant failure. While there is much to be gained from the postmodern critique of modernity, its incredulity towards metanarratives has left it incapable of forming an adequate response to modernity, especially in regards to action on climate change. Postmodernism is better characterized as a crisis located within modernity itself and it will be argued that rather than the pursuit of the modern or the post-modern, we need to re-imagine ourselves as proto- historical to overcome the impasse of late-capitalism. (shrink)

With the celebratory view of globalization comes the charge that it represents a kind of empire. But power works in voluntary processes, such as learning English or joining the World Trade Organization. “Network power” may explain the dynamic that drives aspects of globalization.

Research exists on how a corporation communicates during a crisis, the impact on its reputation, and how well it weathers that crisis. However, crisis communication research tends to view a company’s communication efforts from the standpoint of success or failure; looking at the communication critically to determine if the company’s power influences or silences potentially alternative voices and viewpoints is not currently part of the discussion. This article argues that critical discourse analysis techniques be added to the framework of crisis (...) communication theory in an effort to ensure that the corporation’s message or position of power does not unfairly marginalize or altogether silence alternative discourses. (shrink)

This paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides' Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation of women was intimately connected with the social and political life of the polis. In a discussion of iconography, the (...) theater industry and audience I argue that female characters became one of the means by which different groups promoted partisan interests based on class and social status. In Part III, I show how the Maiden solicits the competing interests of the theater audience. After discussing the centrality and marginality of the Maiden's character, I draw upon the funeral oration as a comparative model with which to understand the quite different role of self-sacrifice in tragedy. In addition to representing and mystifying the interests of elite, lower class and marginal groups, the play glorifies a subordinate character whose contradictory social status embodies the social position of other “marginal” members of Athenian society. The play stages a model for taking political action to transform the social system and for commemorating the tragic costs of such undertakings. (shrink)

This essay aims to introduce Giovanni Gentile to scholars of Gramsci studies broadly and Gramsci‐education studies more specifically. The largest part of the essay explores Gentile's academic life, his philosophical agenda, and his political career. Having established a basis for understanding the educational reform Gentile enacted as Mussolini's first Minister of Public Instruction, the essay then surveys the substantial contemporaneous and contemporary English‐language material about it. The essay engages this literature only lightly and briefly in conclusion, for the primary purpose (...) of illustrating the danger of eschewing it. (shrink)

This article critically engages with debates on uneven and combined development and particularly the lack of attention given in this literature to accounts of spatial diversity in capitalism’s outward expansion as well as issues of Eurocentrism. Through interlocutions with Antonio Gramsci on his theorising of state formation and capitalist modernity and the notion of passive revolution, we draw out the internal relationship between the structuring condition of uneven and combined development and the class agency of passive revolution. Interlocuting with passive (...) revolution places Antonio Gramsci firmly within a stream of classic social theory shaping considerations of capitalist modernity. As a result, by building on cognate theorising elsewhere, passive revolution can then be established as a lateral field of causality that necessarily grasps spatio-temporal dynamics linked to both state and subaltern class practices of transformation in social property relations, situated within the structuring conditions of uneven and combined development. (shrink)

Problem setting. Today political sociology requires not only critical but also structural analysis of politics, creation of corresponding theoretical and methodological tool, one of major constituents of that there are research and prognostication of political relations and processes. Recent research and publications analysis. Actually political sociology as scientific direction was formed to the к middle of ХХ of century, when a few scientific schools consisted of study of cooperation of society and politics. Louis Althusser became the classics of political sociology (...) works of followers of marxism and representatives of Frankfort school of А. Gramsci, D. Lukács, and laid the foundation of its institualization as science. The deeper sociological analysis of political relations is contained in researches by R. Dahrendorf, M. Horkheimer, H. Marcuse, Т. Adorno, J. Habermas, І. Wallerstein, P. Bourdieu. Therefore, the рaper objective was creation of theoretical model of sociological analysis of political relations. Paper main body. Social relations are considered as such, that related to the necessity of general satisfaction of various social necessities, that, in obedience to the law of increase of necessities, is basis of development of society and providing of his integrity. Thus, a social sphere is a place cooperation of people, social behavior of that determines integrity of society. Political relations are related to the necessity of imperious settlement of social relations for the sake of their optimization in the process of achievement of general aims. Accordingly, political sphere - it the place of rivalry of people and task forces for a right to realize own interests by means of power. The functional component of the political system, that includes methods, methods, directions of development of political relations, is the political mode. As a worker there was select determination of prof. J.-L. Quermonne. He determined the political regime, as "... aggregate of elements of ideological, institutional and sociological order, that assist forming of political power of this country on a certain period". Our choice is base on that description of the political mode in any state determines the actual picture of principles of organization of political sphere of society. On the basis of content-analysis of publications of 10 Ukrainian electronic MASS-MEDIA and 8 official internet-portals of state and non-state organizations in 2018 the vector model of political relations that determine the political regime in modern Ukraine is worked out. The analysis carried out in the article allowed to reach the following conclusions of the research. Political relations form the core of any social system, regulate and counterbalance the centripetal and centrifugal forces that ensure its integrity and sustainable development. The research of these relations exclusively by political scientists artificially narrows the problem. Sociological analysis allows to reveal their static and dynamic characteristics, because on the basis of research of political situations determines political plots and predicts political changes. The combination of static and dynamic analysis principles can be compared with the process of creating video. Each individual character characterizes a certain socio-political situation, the main actors and the nature and conditions of their interaction, and the sequence of such personnel forms a complete systemic understanding of the "plot", the dynamics and basic parameters of socio-political processes and relations in society. (shrink)