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)

Great critical theorists from Marx and Engels to Adorno and Horkheimer not only came from the margins but also stayed faithful to the plight of the marginalized. They refused to compromise about the struggle for equality and tried to universalize its emancipatory essence. From Marx to Benjamin, critical philosophers who showed fidelity to the cause were denied a career in European universities and made impoverished, stateless, and homeless. Marginalization and critical theory are inseparable; yet, today, Marxism is institutionalized, and the (...) Frankfurt School's Critical Theory is gentrified. Critical Theory from the Margins, however, revives the Critical Theory that endorses criticism, aiming to negate dominant regimes of truth. It is unapologetic in its fidelity to the universalist struggles of the minoritized. In that spirit, Saladdin Ahmed shows that capitalism imposes a totalitarian social mode of existence and neoliberalism perpetuates fascism as a class of ideology across nationalist and religious movements. This book, then, is both a theorization and an argument in favor of the application of the episteme of the silenced as the essence of the critical education necessary for achieving universal emancipation. (shrink)

Although Gramsci developed his conceptual methodology out of concrete historical analysis, there is a significant tension between his account of the Risorgimento, which plays into a narrative of Italian exceptionalism, and concepts such as historical bloc, hegemony and passive revolution, which point towards European wide convergence in capitalist state dynamics after 1848. This article shows a de-alignment between Gramsci’s account of the Risorgimento and Marx’s analysis of the meaning of 1848 in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte. At the same (...) time, Gramsci’s conceptual methodology both re-aligns his argument with Marx and significantly develops Marxist analysis of politics. However, Gramsci’s conceptualisation of the role of intellectuals, especially the problematic distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals, does provide support for the kind of exceptionalist argument he offers of the Risorgimento. Therefore, this article reconstructs Gramsci’s account of the intellectuals in order to integrate it better into his analysis of a historical bloc composed of both conservatism and liberalism. (shrink)

In this article we investigate the value and utility of Machiavelli’s work for Community-Based Natural Resource Management. We made a selection of five topics derived from literature on NRM and CBNRM: Law and Policy, Justice, Participation, Transparency, and Leadership and management. We use Machiavelli’s work to analyze these topics and embed the results in a narrative intended to lead into the final conclusions, where the overarching theme of natural resource management for the common good is considered. Machiavelli’s focus on practical (...) realities produces new, sometimes unsettling, insights. We conclude that this focus helps to understand the development and performance of management regimes and their consequences and that institutional design should be seen as an ongoing process, which requires a constant adaptation of these institutions. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explore the effects of the political developments that followed the financial crisis of 2008, particularly after the uprisings of 2011, on the field of philosophy and more specifically on philosophical practice. Philosophical practice concerns not only methodology and forms of argumentation but also and mainly the dispositive of the philosopher him/herself, that is the place he/she occupies and from which h/she speaks. Drawing from Gramsci’s and Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli an argument is developed according to which (...) certain conjunctures produce the possibility of a void both at the political and the philosophical level; a void which can disrupt the normal reproduction of political relations of power and of the dominant philosophical discourse. The task of materialist philosophy, which in those circumstances becomes even more urgent, is not to devote itself in securing the piece on the field of the philosophical and political battle but in contrast to point out the possibility of the emergence of the void and articulate philosophical positions aimed to intensify the rupture and thus to produce effects tending to realise the possibility of radical change. (shrink)

There is confusion among scholars of Bohr as to whether he should be categorized as an instrumentalist (see Faye 1991) or a realist (see Folse 1985). I argue that Bohr is a realist, and that the confusion is due to the fact that he holds a very special view of realism, which did not coincide with the philosophers’ views. His approach was sometimes labelled instrumentalist and other times realist, because he was an instrumentalist on the theoretical level, but a realist (...) on the level of models. Such a realist position is what I call phenomenological realism. In this paper, and by taking Bohr’s debate with Einstein as a paradigm, I try to prove that Bohr was such a realist. (shrink)

This paper, drawing on original sources, provides an overview of and a discussion on those writings and ideas, in Antonio Gramsci's huge corpus of work, that are relevant to the education of adults. This should provide a fitting tribute to this major social theorist of the 20th century on the 70th anniversary of his death. Among the topics discussed are those of adult education for industrial democracy, adult education and cultural preparation, adult literacy, prison education, adult education and the Southern (...) Question with specific reference to immigration, and, most important of all, adult education in the context of an intellectual and moral reform. (shrink)

This article carries out a critical analysis of the discourse/practice of Business Ethics that has developed to an unprecedented extent in the last decade or so. It argues that in the late-modern global political economy (GPE) there develops a form of a Gramscian hegemony of transnational capital and the discourse/practice of Business Ethics can be seen as a form of moral leadership in the context of the emerging hegemonic order.

This article carries out a critical analysis of the discourse/practice of Business Ethics that has developed to an unprecedented extent in the last decade or so. It argues that in the late-modern global political economy (GPE) there develops a form of a Gramscian hegemony of transnational capital and the discourse/practice of Business Ethics can be seen as a form of moral leadership in the context of the emerging hegemonic order.

This contribution argues, first, that pre-national forms of state were not displaced or supplanted by a new, national form. What we call the nation-state was not the successor to imperial or city-states but was itself a form of the European imperial city-states that had driven the expansion of capitalism in previous centuries. It argues, second, that national states emerged only after 1945 and only in a handful of states where, through welfare reforms and market and industry regulation, investment and production (...) were made to serve the expansion and integration of national markets. Third, with the dismantling of Keynesian policies in these states, pre-national (pre-Keynesian) structures are resurfacing. What scholars describe as the emergence of ‘post-national spatialities’ and of ‘global cities’ and city regions represents the resurgence of a durable and historically dominant form of state: the imperial city-state form. The ‘re-scaling’ of nation-states and growing prominence of ‘global cities’ and ‘city regions’ are heralding the end of the brief history of actually existing nation-states and the re-deployment of the imperial city-state model. (shrink)

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)

A spectre is haunting linguistics and education: the prematurely buried legacy of Basil Bernstein, Michael Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan and Karl Marx. On the one hand, this spectre seems to demand that we treat both language and learning as natural wholes, instead of reducing them to natural sciences like phonetics or neuroscience and social sciences like discourse analysis and curriculum studies and then trying to hook them up again through interdisciplinary links. On the other, this spectre requires us to work in (...) a world where knowledge is already profoundly fragmented, where choosing to learn one fragment rather than another does make a difference in the health and welfare of the teacher and especially of the learner. Let this paper serve as a manifesto defending the maligned work of Halliday and Hasan, and also as a manual to demonstrate how their analytical approach exposes the fragmentation of knowledge and shows how it can be overcome. (shrink)