Images of Gramsci

Connections and Contentions in Political Theory and International Relations

Andreas Bieler, Adam Morton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317998662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

A comprehensive reassessment of the relevance of Gramsci's theory and practice at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Whilst commentaries on Antonio Gramsci and arguments surrounding his political and intellectual legacy have proliferated, little attention has been hitherto directed to linking the connections and contentions between Political Theory and International Political Economy. This volume brings together leading authorities engaged in common debates to produce, for the first time, a major collection that clarifies, addresses, and lays bare the manifest connections and contentions within political and international theory surrounding the legacy of Antonio Gramsci.

In Part I, scholars examine various approaches to Gramsci's thought, including his methodological principles, the specific conception of civil society he offers, his writings on war and cultural struggle, the spatial dimension of his thinking, and his philosophy of history. Part II focuses on very new developments in Gramsci scholarship concerning the questioning of contemporary world order. This includes reflections on his relevancy to issues of globalising capitalism, transformations in the state, revolutionary praxis, orientalism and empire, as well as European regionalism.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the leading Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. (CRISPP)

Gramsci and the Secret of Father Brown

Anne Showstack Sassoon

Keep a journal…It…encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience. (Mills 1967)

Moving from the particular to the general is often viewed with great suspicion in the social sciences. To raise issues of authenticity, intuition or of the ‘feel’ and ‘smell’ of the matter under investigation runs the risk of scholarly ridicule. Reflecting on a narrow range of experiences, one’s own or those of others, can, of course, not only be misleading but self-indulgent. Yet careful testing of general claims against particular phenomena also has a long theoretical lineage. Overgeneralisation and theoretical abstraction can be equally misleading. Given the socially and historically constructed methodological hierarchies and divisions of labour embedded in the human sciences, in which philosophy and mathematics sit at the apex, the uneasy relationship between general and particular is unsurprising.

It can be argued that the content and form of Gramsci’s work in prison largely override these hierarchies and divisions of labour. Severely constrained by being confined, but avoiding to a large extent political prohibitions and unhampered by academic straightjackets, Gramsci’s creativity in going against the grain of so much taken-for-granted thinking on the left derives from combining rigour with an intellectual openness which allowed him to engage with the widest possible array of sources of knowledge (Buttigieg 1992: 15). That the backdrop was a catastrophic defeat, at the very moment when the Russian Revolution was supposed to have initiated the triumph of progress, makes his contribution all the more precious.

This article summarises work in progress that is a result of many years of thinking about major methodological issues in Gramsci’s writings that are relevant for re-thinking contemporary political relationships, in particular popular diffidence toward politics, politicians and policy-makers.¹ It investigates Gramsci’s aim to go beyond the dichotomy between rationalism and irrationalism. It argues that this theme in his work has profound implications both for understanding his writings and for their use in contemporary political analysis. It does this by drawing on some unusual material: his notes on Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, his criticism of Conan Doyle, and his critique of positivism and populism, notably in his writings on the palaeontologist Cuvier and the criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Consideration of Gramsci’s way of working and how this contributes to making his approach so fertile is connected to a longstanding interest in intellectual practice and the possible usefulness of taking seriously details, small hints, serendipity, intuitions, the occasional to make new connections and to open up innovative questions which may lead to wider political and social understandings – questions and understandings which could be missed if boxed into models or pre-conceived schema (Sassoon 2000e). It reflects a desire to reach out to different genres as potential sources of understanding that may supplement other modes of discourse.

It must be stressed that this line of research does not argue that the general derives from the particular. Indeed, it acknowledges the possibly ‘conservative’, indeed potentially ‘reactionary’ – meant in their historical sense – appropriation of the particular. Going from the particular to the general and back has, of course, a respectable philosophical pedigree – Marx himself could be mentioned – but one which is too often forgotten, certainly with the continued dominance of forms of positivism and scientism in the social sciences. It is certainly questionable whether contemporary debates about postmodernism adequately answer these concerns.

Gramsci and the Tension between the Particular and the General

Gramsci is one writer who offers help in finding ways to go beyond a number of theoretical and political dilemmas. What is striking in his approach is the way in which, at the same time as he poses general questions about philosophy, history and politics, he uses small pieces of information to lead to some profound and original approaches to social and historical analysis and, in contemporary terms, to go beyond the box of accepted political thinking, to make new connections. The pieces, some ‘larger’ than others, that do not fit pre-conceived schema are treated as seriously or even more seriously than those that do. For example, support from the popular classes for the fascist regime was regrettable, but it signified more than a ‘mistake’. Far from simply betraying ‘false consciousness’ or tyrannical rule or a combination of these, such support indicates that sections of the population find that their needs are being answered when previously they were not. The pieces that do not fit, in this case the left’s prognosis of who should ‘reasonably’ oppose fascism according to a particular socio-economic model, provide clues to wider patterns and possible insights and lead to new questions. Gramsci developed the concept of passive revolution in order, in part, precisely to explain how fascism was able to maintain support amongst wide sections of the population. Indeed, Gramsci’s very way of working in prison reflected this use of the particular or small pieces of information. For example, a book review or a reference in an article often sparked off wider thinking and a denser web of connections;² connections that are increasingly apparent, as others have noted, in later, redrafted versions of notes that reflects a fundamental aspect of his ideas on philosophy, history and politics.³

At this point, what may appear a surprising connection can be made – between Gramsci’s approach and the practice of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytical practice takes seriously any material that is brought to an analytical session by the analysand. Everything is useful, although such ‘accidental’ or ‘occasional’ material does not in and of itself provide an explanation. The professional interpretive and generalising self-reflective capacity of the analyst (most important as the practice of psychoanalysis has developed) is essential to make full use of it.⁴

Alongside this order of concerns, an observation by Gramsci that draws on experience made a strong impression when working on his concept of the intellectuals (Sassoon 2000b,d). In this note, Gramsci attempts to explain why it is so difficult for ‘those in the know’, perhaps above all the left, to convince the population, say in a small village in the Italian south, without much or any formal education, that there was a better way to understand the world, to explain why they were subaltern, and to convince them that they should join a progressive political cause (Gramsci 1971: 339, Q11§12; 341, Q11§12). Gramsci argues that in fact popular resistance to enlightened ideas should not surprise us. Indeed this resistance was most ‘rational’. It made ‘good sense’.

If we were to put ourselves in the shoes of the person listening to the sophisticated analysis offered by a politician, or an intellectual, we might well think that today one set of intellectuals or politicians presents one analysis and sure enough tomorrow another lot will appear with other ideas, all argued articulately. What is the person with what Gramsci would consider fragmentary common sense to do? The ‘person in the street’ has, Gramsci would argue, the potential but not the tools or skills to engage with the more articulate and better educated (Sassoon 2000c,d). Better, we might well think, to hold onto what we ‘know’, what is ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’, that is, cling to the conservatism that stems from tradition and experience, while confronting the contest of ideas and flux of uncontrolled and uncontrollable events. Distrust of experts and politicians is anything but a new phenomenon.

At the same time, from a wider perspective, there are the many references in the Prison Notebooks to the limitations of Enlightenment thinking. In particular, Gramsci criticises the rationalistic models based on examples abstracted from the French Revolution and the succeeding period promoted by those Italian Risorgimento thinkers seeking to transform Italy, because these models did not take into account the specificities of Italian history and society (e.g. Gramsci 1971: 55-84, Q19§24). Gramsci’s critique of the misuse of Enlightenment thought and of examples drawn from French history and of the inadequacy of the ensuing political strategies had a contemporary political objective. The Soviet example could not, he argued, serve as a model for socialist change in realities so different from that of 1917 Tsarist Russia (Gramsci 1971: 238, Q7§16). Of course, Gramsci himself draws extensively on historical examples, but he suggests that they must be translated from one time and place to another and firmly rooted in national specificities (Gramsci 1971: 84-85, Q19§28). The particular therefore must be used with great care.

Despite this critique, it can also be demonstrated that Gramsci is neither a populist nor an anti-rationalist. This leads to a long and complex discussion of the relationship between philosophy, common sense and good sense in Gramsci (Cirese 1981). In this context, Gramsci’s attempt to put himself in the shoes of the person with whom he might disagree and who, in his judgement, is subordinate to the dominant hegemony, at least in part because of a lack of advanced intellectual skills and knowledge, reflects something profound in his thought. Gramsci criticises ‘common sense’ and nonetheless insists that popular culture is an essential starting point to be analysed in order to extract the ‘good sense’ within it. This ‘good sense’ is valued but anything but obvious, taken for granted, or in and of itself an adequate basis for an alternative hegemony (Gramsci 1971: 198–199, Q3§48; 223–233, Q3§42, Q3§119, Q7§80, Q1§133–134; 348, Q10II§44; 396–397 Q16§9; 419–425, Q11§13). Today it is easily forgotten how novel this appreciation of the significance of common sense and popular culture was in Gramsci’s time and even more easily overlooked the extent to which Gramsci analysed and criticised its limitations. Yet the very paradoxes of popular culture allow for lessons to be learned from the elements of ‘good sense’ contained within it, for example, in Gramsci’s terms from ‘non-artistic’ literature like detective novels (Gramsci 1985: 372, Q21§13).

Lessons from Father Brown

A conversation about some of these issues with a friend led me to Carlo Ginzburg, another writer concerned with the tension between the particular and general, and his essay ‘Clues’ (Ginzburg 1992a). In a rich and complex discussion, Ginzburg says his aim is to help to overcome what he considers the arid dichotomy between rationalism and irrationalism (Ginzburg 1992b: ix, 158). He offers no solution but makes some fascinating connections. He links inter alia the influential late nineteenth-century Italian art historian Morelli, who argued that it was the detail in a painting, for example the ear lobe in a portrait, where the copier or the follower, of, say Rembrandt, went wrong; Freud, who Ginzburg demonstrates, in a real piece of intellectual detective work, was familiar with Morelli; Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes; and the palaeontologist Cuvier. No mention of Gramsci – although in the preface to the Italian collection where the Italian version of this essay is found, Ginzburg’s familiarity with Gramsci’s work is made explicit (Ginzburg 1992b: ix.).⁵

Discussing this intriguing concatenation of characters with an Italian psychoanalyst friend, she explained that it was well known, at least in psychoanalytic circles, that Freud was indeed fascinated with Sherlock Holmes. Thus an interest in Gramsci’s use of the particular and possible parallels with psychoanalytical methods arrived at detection and the use of clues, to Gramsci’s references to G.K. Chesterton and Father Brown, and to Cuvier. To mirror his own way of working in prison, making use of hints and suggestions, an examination of his particular, rather brief comments, taking seriously Gramsci’s fascination with detective novels (Gramsci 1985: 369–374, Q21§12–13), can shed light on much wider methodological and philosophical issues in Gramsci’s work and far beyond.

Re-reading Gramsci’s notes on Chesterton and Conan Doyle (Gramsci 1975: 19, Q1§24; 697–678, Q6§17; 1820–1822, Q15§58; 2126–2127, Q21§10; 2130, Q21§13; 2705, Q6§17n2; Gramsci 1985: 370–374, Q21§ 13) and a relevant letter from prison to his sister-in-law Tatiana (Gramsci 1994: 353–354), in which he vaunts the superiority of the writings of a politically reactionary Catholic writer in contrast to Conan Doyle, the enlightened physician, I found that I should not have been so surprised that a passage in a fictionalised preface which lends its name to a collection of stories, The Secret of Father Brown (Chesterton 1974: 7–14), encapsulated so well aspects of Gramsci’s ideas.

In this introductory chapter, published in the same period as Gramsci’s imprisonment, Chesterton sets up an encounter between the English detective Father Brown, visiting his friend, retired sleuth and – we eventually find out – former famous criminal, the hospitable Frenchman Flambeau, now living in a modest, dilapidated Spanish castle, and an affluent, refined, well-educated upper-class American traveller who has leased another castle nearby. The keen, curious but polite American asks Father Brown to explain the difference between his methods and those of other famous detectives such as Dupin or Sherlock Holmes. Expressing surprise that Father Brown always managed to arrive at the identity of the murderer, notwithstanding the fact that Father Brown’s method, unlike that of other detectives, is never explained, the American surmises that, rather than make use of ‘detective science’, Father Brown can only have employed what the American considers its opposite – the occult. What was Father Brown’s secret?

To the American’s incredulity, Father Brown answers,

‘I had murdered them all myself … so, of course, I knew how it was done … I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully … I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.’ (Chesterton 1974: 11)

Calmed by what he considers a figure of speech, the American nonetheless provokes Father Brown to exclaim against this reduction of his method to metaphor.

‘I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders. I didn’t actually kill the men by material means … I meant that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realised that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action.’ (Chesterton 1974: 12; emphasis original).

When the American stares at him as if he were ‘a wild animal’ and declares that he simply cannot understand this account of ‘the science of detection’ (Chesterton 1974: 12), Father Brown replies with continued ‘animated annoyance’.

‘That’s it’, he cried, ‘that’s just where we part company. Science is a great thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a dry impartial light, in what I should call a dead and dehumanised light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his ‘criminal skull’ as if it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros’s nose. When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don’t deny the dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it’s the very reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it’s actually suppression of what we know. It’s treating a friend as a stranger, and pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It’s like saying that a man has a proboscis between the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: International Relations as Political Theory
• Part I: Approaches to Gramsci
• Part II: Approaches to World Order
• Index