Whatever common sense may be, it includes much else besides practically confirmed truisms. InCommon Sense: A Political History, Sophia Rosenfeld describes the backstories of modern common sense, locating its origins in debates among small groups of professors, publishers and pamphleteers in several cities on both sides of the Atlantic during the Age of Revolutions. From the eighteenth century on, champions and enemies of the rising ‘middling’ classes have brandished common sense as an ‘unspectacular instrument’ of non-coercive regulation, to promote or (...) oppose the sovereignty of ‘the people’ by hitching their conflicting claims to an unassailable guarantor of truth. After taking a beating in the first decades of the twentieth century, common sense has been resuscitated and reconstituted, to sell all manner of goods and policies. As a description of the roles that common sense has played in the modern phenomenon of populism, Rosenfeld’s book casts doubt on Hannah Arendt’s claim that common sense is what true democracy creates. At the same time,Common Sense: A Political Historycorroborates and fills out Antonio Gramsci’s account of good sense and politics. (shrink)

InThe Gramscian MomentPeter Thomas fundamentally revises the ‘textbook’ Gramsci – a theorist whose work centred on a primordial East/West distinction, focused on the superstructure, and upon the ways a ruling class secured subaltern consent to its rule. Placing special emphasis on the Notebooks from 1932, Thomas critiques readings of Gramsci by Perry Anderson and Louis Althusser, and finds that Gramsci articulated the ‘philosophy of praxis’ not so much as a synonym for, or declaration of independence from, Marxism, but rather as (...) a tendency within Marx’s legacy that Gramsci hoped to make hegemonic within the working-class movement. Two friendly amendments emerge with respect to this persuasive account. First, the emphasis on Gramsci’sphilosophyleads the author to an over-simplified account of the role of evolutionary theory within Gramsci’s own perspective and privileges ‘philosophy’ over other fields to which Gramsci’s vision was even more decisive. Is the ‘Gramscian moment’ really best analysed by looking at those intellectuals commonly deemed philosophers? And second, does not this moment also entail a more fundamental rethinking of the orthodox concepts and methods of revolutionary-left historiography than the author sometimes implies? (shrink)

This paper establishes a theoretical linkage between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. Gramsci’s critical-historicist method and its relationship to humanism, his integral understanding of Marxism, and emphasis on the moment of political practice resonate with Fanon’s articulation of the subjective and political-economic aspects of the colonial question, his activistic materialism, and his dialectically humanist universalism forged through anti-colonial struggle. Establishing this linkage presupposes engaging distinct currents of postcolonial Gramscianism in relation to each other and to the philological turn in Gramsci (...) scholarship. In turn, a Gramsci–Fanon convergence helps elucidate the specificities of (post-)colonial contexts without elevating these into a civilisational-ontological difference. Emphasising their geographical sensitivity as a meeting point, pushing Gramsci towards Fanon helps us treat the global South and imperial heartlands relationally, in historico-geographical and specifically political terms. A Fanonian Gramsci (or Gramscian Fanon) thus allows us to tackle Eurocentrism without closing doors to a counter- or postcolonial Marxism. (shrink)