In early 1994 Lawrence and Wishart (London) will publish the third volume--Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks--of their thematic anthological edition of Antonio Gramsci's notebooks. The main themes that emerge in what might at first sight seem otherwise rather disparate material are those of ideology at its various levels and the construction of hegemony. The outline that follows of this book summarizes the editorial choices made in bringing out these factors.
The most widespread and popular of all ideologies--religion--is the topic of the opening chapter: faith, like theory, does indeed become, in Marx's words, "a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses." Though, naturally, the Catholic Church is pre-eminent in Gramsci's reflections, the categories of analysis that he forges are of more general applicability for the approach to other faiths. Distinctions are drawn between right, left, and center in particular within Catholicism, and the complex intertwining of religious and political activity is analyzed in its historical development in Italy. The divisions among the faithful and the radically-oriented individuals and movements Gramsci comments on find their analogy today in, say, liberation theology and radical black churches and, more ambiguously, in some aspects of the upsurges in non-Christian religions that lay emphasis, through a refusal of "western values", on the dignity of the human person expressed in a nationalist and newly-rediscovered popular consciousness (the conditions for which occupy some of Gramsci's reflections in the paragraphs chosen as the last part of the chapter).
The role of education in building a counter-hegemony is then dealt with in a number of notes (predominantly from outside Notebook 12 on "The Intellectuals", already almost published in its entirety in the Hoare and Nowell Smith anthology of 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks) that form the second chapter. These paragraphs deal strictly with the educational process, from elementary schools onwards, through the university, to adult education. Emphasis is consistently put on the social and historical, rather than genetic, formation of the human individual, in polemic with the "curious involutions" noted in the theories of some educationalists (like Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, an important reference point for Gramsci when, in 1917, he organized his first educational class--the "Club for Moral Life" of the Turin Socialists), but also in part with his wife and her family, much influenced by Rousseau. Gramsci, of course, had constantly in mind the experience of the [END PAGE 4] school organized by L'Ordine Nuovo and, again, some years later, the similalry short-lived Party cadre school in the period immediately before Fascism imposed its dictatorship. Through the whole of this, education is seen, not in the abstract, but as education for hegemony.
One of the important themes of the last-named school was to have been economics, as emerges from the original documents gathered together and now available in Corrado Morgia's volume Il Rivoluzionario Qualificato. It is my contention that the economics notes (above all from the second part of Notebook 10, and almost all written during an exceptionally fruitful period in the first months of 1932) are, to a great extent, Gramsci's attempt, under the near-impossible conditions of prison life, to sketch out a history of economic science. His reconstruction begins, I would say, with the original interpretation of Machiavelli as showing perhaps traits of the physiocratic position, rather than the earlier mercantilist one with which his views were normally thought more compatible, and, from a historical-philosophical perspective (typical of Gramsci but too often ignored by economists themselves), attempts to establish the autonomy, line of descent and credentials of Marxist economics. From this one can more readily appreciate the reason for the inclusion of these reflections in a Notebook dedicated not so much to Croce (as its title indicates it was first intended to be) as to philosophical problems in general. The important role that David Ricardo played for Marx is well known, but in Notebooks 10 and 11 Gramsci sheds new light; in a quite striking insight he raises the question of Ricardo's philosophical-methodological influence, rather than his accepted economic one, a stance that left Piero Sraffa, then just beginning his monumental edition of Ricardo, somewhat non-plussed. In Notebook 10, II, §57 (early 1933) Gramsci went back in part over ground already covered previously, but given the rather denser and richer nature of this note, it seems to me that this time he did so in order to draw tentative conclusions. With this in mind, this note has been placed right at the end of Chapter III ("The Nature and History of Economic Science") and not at the beginning of the "Brief Notes on Economics" ("Noterelle di economia") as did the Platone-Togliatti first edition of Gramsci.
Just after this last-named paragraph, Gramsci jotted down two notes (i.e. Notebook 10, II, §53 and §55) that, after a gap of two years since his previous notes on the topic, once again take up the question of the world economic crisis. First, however, in the order of presentation of material in Chapter IV of Further Selections there are included a number of early paragraphs (mainly from Notebook 2, but in any case dating almost exclusively from 1930) on general geo-political developments that, I hope, help to put the notes on the crisis in context. It came to me as a surprise, but is useful as a glimpse into the way Gramsci worked, that three of the crisis paragraphs (Spring 1931) are in Notebook 6 while the other, later ones [END PAGE 5] are scattered among three other Notebooks (10, II; 14 and 15--with four notes, according to Gianni Francioni's L'officina gramsciana, dating from February and one, the latter of two in Notebook 15, from May 1933). In the Platone-Togliatti edition the notes specifically on the world nature of the crisis are included in three different volumes.
Gramsci examines the role of some of the major countries in the world economy in an attempt, inter alia, to see which direction economic affairs were likely to move in, and, in the case of the United States, how the intellectual strata ("ceti") were being formed in an atmosphere at that time dominated in his view by an industrially-oriented culture. It may be noted that there are a score or more of (mostly short) paragraphs--not included in Further Selections--on land tenure and conditions of life in Italy, in particular among the peasantry. All this forms part of the reconnaissance of national social-economic territory, essential to the exercise of hegemony. While some of his comments on specific aspects have been overtaken by subsequent developments, it would nevertheless be mistaken to regard them as out-of-date; there is much in his analysis at both the international level and the national Italian level (e.g. the North-South or, more precisely, as is found in the later writings, the city-countryside difference) that acts as a real object lesson in the examination of economic trends today. A shift in the world's economic axis (hypothesized in Notebook 2, §78) from the Atlantic (Europe-United States) to the Pacific (United States-East Asia) seems to be now well underway, while the city-countryside relation can be updated and translated profitably and comprehensibly into the terms of the division between the North and South of the contemporary world.
The economic factor is never a merely technical one but an integral part of the overall discourse on hegemony: in fact, half-hidden away in §18 of the monographic Notebook 13 on Machiavelli, such that its implications tend all too often to be overlooked, Gramsci states quite explicitly that "if hegemony is ethico-political [first draft, before his work on Croce, simply: "political"], it cannot but also be economic." It would seem to me that, together with Notebook 22 on "Americanism and Fordism", a number of notes written sporadically over three or four years (principally, Notebook 6, §11; Notebook 7, §12; Notebook 8, §52 and §62; Notebook 9, §23; and Notebook 15, §74), begin to sketch out the basis for the economic component of hegemony and for hegemony in a socialist society. The notion of "social conformism" is used on a dozen of occasions in these notes in a polemically positive sense as the consonance between the new society and the new types of individual making it up; this conformism is constructed from the bottom of society up on the basis, as he says in Notebook 7, §12, "of the position occupied by the collectivity in the world of production." The link with hegemony comes over very strongly in this same paragraph when he says explicitly that "we are now dealing with a struggle between 'two conformisms'; i.e. with a [END PAGE 6] struggle for hegemony, with a crisis of civil society." It may be observed at this point that if civil society is the arena in which the combat between rival hegemonies is played out--as I believe is Gramsci's fundamental concept of civil society-- then, despite what some authoritative critics, like Norberto Bobbio, have written, in one important meaning for Gramsci, civil society does in fact encompass the economy and, while he quite rightly widened the notion, in a development and enrichment of Marxism, in this sense it either coincides with or is close to Marx's.
Included almost as asides in a number of Gramsci's economic notes--and also in some of those in Notebook 11, more generally on philosophy--are also comments on the nature of the sciences, mainly dealt with in Section III of Notebook 11 ( "Science and 'Scientific' Ideologies") which with Section IV ("The Logical Instruments of Thought") and Section V ("The Translatability of Scientific and Philosophical Languages") and associated notes from elsewhere, form Chapter V. "Sciences" is quite deliberately written in the plural since he takes the very firm stance that one must fight the prejudice (present in the "unity of science" thesis of the Vienna Circle and in some of the later writings of Karl Popper) "that, in order to be a 'science', a certain research should be grouped together with other researches in one type and that 'type' is 'science'" (Notebook 10, II, §57). As emerges from Section III of Notebook 11, the line he takes on science, as on philosophy in general, consists of a double-pronged attack on both positivism (as seen here) and idealism. While in some ways Gramsci's anti-positivism is similar to that of the Frankfurt school that was beginning its work while he was in prison (in maintaining, for example, that even the "exact sciences" at certain basic levels of interpretation must be subject to historical change and development), there are also important differences: it is simplistic to regard science and technology as just structures of domination, as some of the Frankfurt school have tended to do.
There are at times quite startling similarities between certain positions of Gramsci on science (and scientific epitemology) and those, unknown to him, expressed by Marx, in particular in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. While undoubtedly there are weaknesses in Gramsci's ideas on science, there are also positions whose implications show him as a precursor of the realist epistemology that has grown up since publication in 1962 of Thomas Kuhn's epoch-making The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To quote a striking parallel between the two: what is Gramsci's "period of struggle and polemics"-- when a new scientific outlook tries to establish itself against an older one--followed by a "classical period of organic expansion" (Notebook 10, II, §37, ii) but Kuhn's struggle between rival paradigms, followed by a period of "normal science"? [END PAGE 7]
From science Gramsci goes on, through "The Logical Instruments of Thought" to Section V of Notebook 11 on the "Translation of Scientific and Philosophical Languages," where here "scientific" is, on the whole, to be regarded in the broad sense. Although near-totally neglected, it seems to me that these are some of the most important paragraphs of all the prison writings, for he expresses, at the level of theory, what underlies his wholesale approach to the development of Marxism. Societies at a given similar stage of economic development give rise to broadly similar currents of thought, although these may be expressed in different languages, according to the predominant national culture (e.g. classical German philosophy, British classical political economy, French politics and literature). There is naturally a certain approximation in this since, as he asks, "what language is exactly translatable into another?" (Notebook 11, §48); for him "only in the philosophy of praxis is the 'translation' organic and thorough-going" (Notebook 11, §47). What he means by this comes out in the terms that he himself, as is well known, borrows from other thinkers, usually from intellectual traditions different from and often hostile to Marxism: historical bloc (Sorel), intellectual and moral reform (originally Renan), civil society, Jacobinism, hegemony, and so on. The transformation of terms--in other words, "translations"--sometimes by keeping the same word but infusing it with new meaning, is for Gramsci part and parcel of what has been called his "living Marxism": through this process--the reinterpretation in Marxist terms and subsequent incorporation into Marxism of the highest points reached in a country's philosophical and cultural trends--he shows how Marxism can be, as was by him, renewed.
It is by no means coincidental that his notes on translation were written at the same time as his major work on Croce, for it is here perhaps most of all that he puts these ideas into practice. (This theme is represented in Further Selections by Chapter VI--Notebook 10, I, in its entirety--and Chapter VII--the Notebook 10, II notes on Croce, alongside others from elsewhere that, together, coincide in so far as has been editorially possible with the aim Gramsci expresses in Notebook 10, I, §1 of examining: "1) Croce's historicism . . . his philosophy tout court; 2) his dissent from Gentile and from actualism; 3) his dissent from historical materialism, hand in hand with his obsession with it.") The notes on Croce are of course of interest in themselves as a critique of the major Italian idealist intellectual figure of the time, with interests spanning aesthetics, literary theory, historiography and philosophy (as the methodology of historiography). They are, however, of more interest than this in that it is to a large extent through his critique of Croce that Gramsci expresses certain basic tenets of his own outlook, or restates and refines certain aspects of established Marxist positions, and opens up the way for others to carry out future explorations. One such example is the philosophy-ideology nexus; whereas Croce considers ideology, as an instrument of [END PAGE 8] government, and philosophy, as a dispassionate search for truth, to function at quite different levels, Gramsci typically rejects these rigid divisions. While both maintained the necessity for a reform of society, the consequence of Croce's position was that the intellectual should keep aloof from day-to-day struggles, merely offering (as he himself did in his "minor" works and through the pages of his review La Critica) a rather detached moral guidance. While Gramsci's position was that intellectual and moral reform was a matter of social praxis and that therefore a political party was necessary to this process, Corce maintained right to the end (Quaderni della "Critica", 1950, pp. 231-22) that Gramsci's intention to found such a party "was an office that has nothing to do with the dispassionate search for the truth." Linked to this was their different view of the dialectic: the clash of forces and qualitative leap typical of the Hegelian and Marzist views was for Croce an example of "anti-history"; history for him would soon revert to type and proceed by a myriad of small steps ("reformism" in Gramsci's terminology). By ignoring or maintaining the illegitimacy of qualitative changes--including, in his Histories of Italy and Europe, those stemming from the moment of force that established a new order--his "ethico-poilitical history" remained incomplete; only by reincorporating the moment of force, developing the classical notion of the dialectic and including the most advanced notions from elsewhere (Lenin and even language factors--see Franco Lo Piparo's Lingua, Intellettuali, Egemonia in Gramsci) could it be transformed, in Gramsci's hands, to the modern theory of hegemony. At the PCI's Festa Nazionale dell'Unità in Milan a few years back, Mario Spinella noted that all translations are, of necessity, also an interpretation. Individual translators do their best, trying not to overinterpret or run the risk of misreading. But in the end, for Gramsci as for others, only the community itself can decide how ideas are best translated through social praxis.