Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist theorist and politician known for his influential concept of cultural hegemony. He argued that the ruling class maintains its power not only through force, but also by shaping the dominant culture and ideology. Gramsci's ideas have had a lasting impact on political theory, particularly in understanding power dynamics and resistance within society.
6 Key excerpts on "Antonio Gramsci"
eBook - ePub- Gregory Claeys(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...More recently, Gramsci’s concepts have been extended to the fields of international relations and international political economy. Despite his Leninism, Gramsci is regarded by many as a pluralistic and even democratic thinker. His arguments about hegemony, ideology, and common sense have been central to the conceptualization of popular culture as a form of resistance to dominant social groups. For some, he is even a forerunner of postmodern theories of power and discourse and anticipates a post-Marxist interest in social movements. James Martin See also Civil Society ; Class ; Communism, Varieties of ; Croce, Benedetto ; Ideology ; Italian Political Thought ; Lenin and Leninism ; Marx, Karl ; Russian Revolution, Political Thought of the ; Twentieth-Century Political Thought Further Readings Bellamy, Richard, and Darrow Schecter. 1993. Gramsci and the Italian State. Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press. Davidson, Alistair. 1977. Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London : Merlin. Femia, Joseph V. 1981. Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the. Revolutionary Process. Oxford, UK : Clarendon. Forgacs, David, ed. 2000. The Gramsci Reader. 2nd ed. London : Lawrence & Wishart. Jones, Steven. 2006. Antonio Gramsci. London : Routledge. Martin, James, ed. 2001. Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Political Philosophers. 4 vols. London : Routledge. Morton, Adam David. 2007. Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy. London : Pluto....
eBook - ePubBeyond Critique
Exploring Critical Social Theories and Education
- Bradley A. Levinson, Jacob P. K. Gross, Christopher Hanks, Julia Heimer Dadds, Kafi Kumasi, Joseph Link(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In his articulation of hegemony, Gramsci outlines the ways in which ruling groups maintain order through consent rather than coercion. Unlike Marx’s theory—which emphasized the material mode of production as a key determinant of inequality—Gramsci’s theory of hegemony focuses on the role of culture and ideology and allows for agency to a greater degree than Marx’s work does. Gramsci asserts that consciousness is contradictory, in that people consent both actively and passively to the dominant ideology of the ruling bloc (a social, cultural, political, and economic alliance of sorts). Such consent may be intentionally given for personal benefit, or it may be a consequence of being unaware of one’s domination by a given ideology. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and its emphasis on the creation of consent helps us focus on the structures of civil society to understand how domination endures. This is distinct from a focus on the mechanisms of coercion, such as standing armies, the state, and the relations of production. Through the study of the functioning of civil society, culture, and ideology in maintaining the hegemonic order (that is, the ruling order), it becomes possible to challenge the order, that is, to engage in counterhegemony. Before delving further into Gramsci’s ideas, it is helpful to understand the world in which Gramsci lived and what he was trying to make sense of in his theorizing. The Biography and Development of an Organic Intellectual The geographic and familial landscapes of Gramsci’s childhood and early adult years influenced his political and intellectual development. Born on the island of Sardinia, Italy, to a low-level civil servant and a seamstress, Gramsci was the fourth of seven children. His oldest brother, Gennaro, introduced him to socialism, and his youngest sister, Teresina, shared his love of literature...
eBook - ePubTheory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
An Encyclopedia
- R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Some subordinate hegemony to the presumed power of his secondary ideas, such as civil society, political society, or common sense. This suggests a misunderstanding of the power of hegemony and weakens its revolutionary potential. Devout Marxists decry that Gramsci displayed more interest in politics and culture than in the power of the economic base. Yet Femia points out that it is ironic that in Gramsci Marxists found a true guardian of the empirical epistemology that Marx had used to predict a design in human history that ends with the collapse of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat. Gramsci rejected the Marxist idea of an a priori dialectic to history. Instead, Gramsci argued that nothing moves people to action except ideas and ideals. Although this argument does not comply with Marx’s materialist motivation for history, it does conform to Marx’s argument that people make their own history but not necessarily as they please. Femia points out that Gramsci’s project is not averse to this latter Marxist proposition, because Gramsci’s thinking derives from first-hand experiences with demonstrations and strikes that occurred before, during, and after World War I in Turin—an industrial city that was the center of Italian communism. Because of the variety Gramsci brings to his idea of culture, there is confusion as to whether hegemony shapes culture or is shaped by it, and what exactly the relationship is between the two. Kate Crehan argues that anthropologists could learn much from Gramsci’s ideas of culture. But for the most part, anthropologists have muddled his ideas badly. Anthropologists Anthropologists have misconstrued Gramsci’s ideas because they rely on secondary interpretations of his ideas and not the writings of Gramsci himself. They are inspired primarily by interpretations of hegemony provided by Raymond Williams, an icon in the field of cultural studies...
eBook - ePubMarxism/Structuralism/Education (RLE Edu L)
Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of Education
- Madan Sarup(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Marxist intellectuals particularly are enthusiastic about Gramsci — but is this surprising, considering the central role intellectuals play in Gramsci’s work? They often justify their narrow focus on hegemony by arguing that Gramsci stressed the importance of gradual cultural transformation — as if ideas could merely be fought by other ideas. Used in this way, the concept of hegemony has tended to imply that the power of the capitalist state rests essentially on culture and consent. This form of idealism leads to scholastic academicism; there is a tendency to overrate the role played by consciousness in both the production of ideology and the overcoming of capitalist society. Moreover, there is an underestimation of the role of the armed apparatus of repression and a neglect of praxis — the unity of theory and practice. Ironically, the problem with many structuralist theories is that they also tend to neglect problems of praxis and social change. 38 Gramsci is an antidote to this; for him theory is justified only when transmuted into action....
eBook - ePubPolitical Hegemony and Social Complexity
Mechanisms of Power After Gramsci
- Alex Williams(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...In this sense hegemony, when applied to either working class or bourgeois power, refers to both practices designed to win power, and the practices used to maintain that power once won. Second, Gramsci’s development of the idea shifts its locus of interest from Tsarist Russia towards the modern European capitalist states, which featured sophisticated civil society elements, well-developed industrial sectors, and bourgeois rule, often in a form of electoral democracy. Third, this new mode of understanding hegemony subtly modifies the sense of leadership indicated by the term (Boothman 2011). As used in pre-revolutionary Russia and by the Third International, hegemony primarily indicated a mode of political leadership by the working class of an alliance of other classes. For Gramsci the idea of leadership in hegemony is nuanced to mean a more diffuse notion of intellectual and moral leadership, as well as encompassing the older meaning. In developing hegemony as a generalised theory of power in the integral states of Western Europe in the 1930s, Gramsci conceived a systematic Marxist political philosophy adequate to his political conjuncture, in the process considerably expanding the framework in which political power can be thought. In the sections which follow, each of these innovations will be considered in turn, and in relation to the broader conceptual system which Gramsci puts into place to make sense of them, including such notions as passive revolution, political common sense, intellectual and moral reform, civil society, and historic bloc. 2 Hegemony as Relation of Forces Gramsci’s hegemony plays out against a twin landscape. Most prominent is the determinate terrain of the integral state —the combination of civil society and political society, in relation to the economic. It is theorising the operations of the integral state which absorbs much of Gramsci’s attention in his prison writings...
eBook - ePub- Chantal Mouffe, Chantal Mouffe(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This explains for Luporini why the question of the state remained conceptually unresolved in Marx, constituting an absence at the heart of his theory. It is for this same reason that the question of the nation is also unresolved. Gramsci’s great originality, therefore, lies in his attempt to answer these questions and to conceptually unify Marx’s two oppositional couples by establishing a link between ‘politics – class – state’ and ‘people – nation – state’, thereby recuperating within marxist theory a whole series of elements which has been excluded from it. This is one of the most interesting areas of Gramsci’s work and its implications for his theory of politics clearly show that it is not limited to the context of Western capitalism. In this context we can locate the origin and principal meaning of the concept of hegemony, a concept which provides Gramsci with a non-revisionist answer to the problems encountered by marxist theorists and militants when it became clear that the development of capitalism was not going to cause the disappearance of those social groups which were not strictly the bourgeoisie or the proletariat and that the working class would have to pose the problem of the transition to socialism in terms which were not strictly class-based. 23 In relation to these problems, Gramsci considered the relations between class and nation and the forms of the bourgeois revolution, a line of enquiry which led him to postulate that ‘the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as “domination” and as “intellectual and moral leadership”’. 24 Hegemony, therefore, becomes, in its typically gramscian formulation, ‘political, intellectual and moral leadership over allied groups’. It is by means of this formulation that Gramsci articulated the level of analysis of the mode of production with that of the social formation in the notion of the ‘historical bloc’...
