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2013 117: 20Thesis Eleven Peter D Thomas

Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince

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Article

Hegemony, passiverevolution and themodern Prince

Peter D ThomasBrunel University, UK

AbstractGramscis concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, includinga theory of consent, of political unity, of anti-politics, and of geopolitical competition.These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of politicalpower and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research onthe Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better under-

stood as a dialectical chain composed of four integrally related moments: hegemony associal and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as thesocial and political hegemony of the workers movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern statepower and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project isencapsulated in Gramscis notion of the formation of a modern Prince, conceived asboth political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alter-native to the dominant forms of political modernity.

KeywordsGramsci, hegemony, modern Prince, passive revolution, political modernity

Gramscis concept of hegemony has become influential in a wide range of humanistic,social-scientific and historical disciplines. It represents a singular success of the vocabulary of the Marxist tradition, continuing to find a much wider audience than integrallyrelated concepts such as the dictatorship of the proletariat or the abolition of the capitalist

Corresponding author:Peter D Thomas, Department of Politics and History, Brunel University, Marie Jahoda Room 229, Uxbridge,London UB8 3PH, UK.Email: [email protected]

Thesis Eleven117(1) 2039

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state. Frequently, however, the word seems to have very different when not directly con-tradictory meanings ascribed to it, leaving new and old readers alike uncertain as to its precise theoretical significance or contemporary relevance.

According to one influential interpretation, hegemony for Gramsci involves a leadingsocial group securing the (active or passive) consent of other social strata, rather thanunilaterally imposing its decrees upon unwilling subjects. It relies more upon subtlemechanisms of ideological integration, cultural influence or even psychological depen-dency, than upon the threat of censure or violence. In this version, hegemony-consent isconceived as the opposite of domination-coercion, according to presuppositions that effec-tively reduce hegemonic politics to an unmediated ethical relationship. This reading hasaccompanied the reception of the Prison Notebooks from the outset, beginning with thePCIs attempt to present Gramsci as the theorist of a different communism after the rup-ture of 1956. 1 This interpretation now constitutes a sort of beginners guide to the mean-ing of hegemony, in its most widely diffused and generic forms. It is particularly prevalent,albeit often contested, in the academic fields of cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. 2

A second interpretation regards Gramscis concept of hegemony as the forerunner of atheory of the political constitution of the social via a logic of equivalence, or a unifying process of the articulation of heterogeneity in the formation of a political subject.Hegemony here figures fundamentally as a theory of the unification of the diverse in acomposite socio-political body, on whose unity alone true politics can arise. This version posits Gramscis concept of hegemony in the radical-liberal tradition of the collective political agent, whether conceived as groups, class, caste or, most frequently, the people.Historically, this reading emerged from the encounter between communist and liberalthought in the Italian post-war constitutional process. 3 Insofar as the concept of hegemonyis to be found in contemporary international discussions in political philosophy, it is oftenrepresented in these terms. 4

A third interpretation builds further upon the presuppositions of the first two readings,arguing that hegemony-consent is a political technique proper to the terrain of civil soci-ety, while the state is the locus of domination-coercion. Hegemony works away surrep-titiously at the foundations of bourgeois rule in a molecular or even rhizomatic fashion in

civil society; direct confrontation on the terrain of the state is deferred to a future thatremains indeterminate, when not declared to be unnecessary. In effect, this version pre-sents Gramscis concept of hegemony as a form of anti-politics, which finds its strengthinstead in the valorization of the social. Derived from readings of the New Left in the1960s and 1970s, often inflected by the experience of Western Maoism and later left-wing Eurocommunism, this interpretation is frequently operative in contemporary dis-cussions in political science and political theory. 5

Finally, a fourth interpretation situates the contemporary significance of the term of hegemony on the terrain of geopolitics, in accordance with an established usage that stems

back at least as far as Thucydides.6

Hegemony is here configured at the level of a nowopen, now hidden, struggle for influence and power between states, prior to but sometimesincluding the outright declaration of military hostilities. This version effectively inscribesGramscis concept of hegemony as a critical perspective within a tradition of politicalrealism that regards the state as the key political actor of modernity. Precedents for this

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usage can be found in the debates of the early Third International, though in more com- plicated forms. 7 Today, this interpretation is often encountered as an established image of Gramsci in mainstream discussions in International Relations, though increasingly con-

tested by new neo-Gramscian perspectives.8

Hegemony and HerrschaftEach of these readings reduces Gramscis theory of hegemony to an already known figurein the history of modern political thought. The first interpretation represents Gramscistheory of hegemony as a type of inverted Hobbesianism, with consent functioning as themotor of an ethical foundation of the political. The second interpretation of hegemony as alogic of equivalence depicts Gramsci as minor variant of the great modern tradition of theories of political unity, as a thinly disguised Rousseauean vision of politics as thetransition from the will of all to the general will. The third interpretation presents thediversity and richness of existing civil society as the potential foundation for an alternativemode of socialization, in a type of arrested Hegelianism that stops at 255 of the Philo- sophy of Right , before civil society is revealed to find its foundation in the state. The fourthinterpretation represents Gramscis theory of hegemony as a communist version of the broadly Kantian presuppositions of modern international law, or even, in its later Schmittian variant, as a clash between irreconcilable values, often more menacinglytelluric than cosmopolitan.

The combination of these perspectives yields a certain traditional or at leastwidespread interpretation of the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks . Thisreading understands the politics of hegemony to involve, in the first instance, thesecuring of consent of a significant proportion of political actors in a given social for-mation; second, their unification into a collective political subject; third, the engage-ment of this newly constituted political subject in a battle against another such subjectformed by a similar process, each seeking to enlarge their occupation of the peripheralterritory of civil society until they possess sufficient forces to launch an assault upon thecentre of the state apparatus; and, in a final moment, the clash of hegemonicallyconstructed states in competition on the international terrain, in a geopolitical repetition

of the originary domestic process. The concept of hegemony, that is, is thought to provide primarily a description of the organic emergence of modern state power and geopolitical competition. 9

What these readings have in common, despite their very different theoretical ante-cedents, histories and disciplinary locations, and what allows them to be articulated as atotal theory of hegemony in the manner indicated above, is the presupposition that theconcept of hegemony is fundamentally a general theory of political power. Such ageneral theory can then be deployed either in order to contest existing power relationsand structures, or, in a mirror-image inversion, to delineate the preconditions of their

legitimation. In the first case, Gramsci then appears as a superannuated forerunner of Foucault, as an archaeologist of the forms of the modern state. In the second and byfar the most significant case, Gramsci is forced to step forward, to modify a famous Cro-cean phrase, as the Weber of the Proletariat. 10 In both cases, hegemony effectivelycomes to denote stability, integration, and legitimation, even if in the form of the

22 Thesis Eleven 117(1)



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negative legitimation that resists but simultaneously thereby also acknowledges theexisting social order (rather than the delegitimation of a revolutionary rupture that negatesit). Hegemony is thus inscribed within a typology of domination of Weberian dimen-

sions.11

As a form of democratic domination, it is represented as a novel addition to theforms of legitimate Herrschaft alongside Webers classic trio of charismatic, traditionaland legal-bureaucratic domination. 12 In some readings, hegemony is even called uponto play the role of an Aufhebung of pre- and early-modern techniques of the political,synthesizing their respective strengths in a new political practice adequate to the consoli-dation and completion of the parliamentary democratic order as a system of political inte-gration and equilibrium.

Lineages of passive revolutionLike most half-truths, such interpretations can claim at least some foundation in fact, pointing to various citations cruelly ripped from their context that seem, at first glance,to support the main lines of the respective argumentation. Similarly, like most half-readings, they sprang not fully-grown from the transparent obviousness of a definitivetext, but were produced by a complex process of the always uncertain reading and crea-tive misreading of Gramscis radically incomplete Prison Notebooks in different his-torical conjunctures, as Guido Liguoris survey of the Italian reception amply attests(2012). 13 We can in fact trace back quite precisely the articulation of these differentinterpretations into a general theory of hegemony to the emergence of a particular under-standing of the role of the concept of passive revolution in the conceptual architectureof the Prison Notebooks .14 In its broadest sense, the notion of passive revolution for Gramsci signified a distinctive process of (political) modernization that lacked the mean-ingful participation of popular classes in undertaking and consolidating social transfor-mation. This concept, now a central point of reference not only for Gramsci scholarship but also in such diverse academic fields as international relations, historical sociologyand even ethnography (see e.g. Morton 2007, 2010; Tug al 2009), surprisingly had not been prominent at all in the immediate post-war reception of the Prison Notebooks .15

The belated valorization of this concept, in the debates of Italian Gramscianism in the

late 1970s, coincided with the short but intensely lived season of Eurocommunism and the PCIs still-born historic compromise. As Fabio Frosini has noted, the concept of passive revolution played a central role in the Istituto Gramsci conference of 1977, Pol-itics and History in Gramsci. Here, and increasingly in the following years, a particular interpretation of passive revolution was deployed as an etherizing agent upon the entirearticulated chain of concepts of the Prison Notebooks . It fundamentally transformed theunderstanding of hegemonic politics. Hegemony was effectively subordinated to passiverevolution, as a mere mechanism of its realization or contestation. As Frosini argues, itled to a reading of hegemony in the light of the primacy of stability over instability

(Frosini 2008: 667), rather than the relational that is, dialectical integration of those polarities in a dynamic theory of political transformation. Thus, Gramscis thought could be re-inscribed in the main currents of modern political thought, enacting a transitionfrom a supposedly irrationalist conflictualist model to the claimed consensualismcharacteristic of liberalisms anthropological foundations and culmination as a theory

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and practice of transcendental ordering. 16 The concept of passive revolution was interpreted as a description of political modernity as the construction of an increasingly ratio-nalized and bureaucratic Weberian iron cage [ stahlhartes Geh ause ]; hegemony became

a mere occasion for the transformation of the parties of the workers movement into par-ties of government (Frosini 2008: 667). Although not often remembered today, these werethe theoretical foundations of the various post-Marxist readings of Gramsci that came to prominence throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, on an international scale. 17

A typology of hegemony New scholarship over the last 20 years, however, benefitting from a full study of the1975 critical edition of the Prison Notebooks and freed from at least some of theinstrumentalizations and polemics that marked earlier debates, has provided us with avery different understanding of the development of Gramscis central concepts. Therehave been important philological contributions from around the world, by scholars inGermany (Haug 2006), Brazil (Coutinho 2012 [1999]; Bianchi 2008; Del Roio 2005),France (Tosel 1991, 2009), Mexico (Kanoussi 2000), Canada (Ives 2004), the USA(Buttigieg 1992, 1995; Fontana 1993; Green 2011) and the UK (Morton 2007). Aboveall, the flourishing of a new Gramscian research culture in Italy over the last 20 yearshas given rise both to innovative philological and theoretical work, particularly in theinitiatives of the International Gramsci Society, and also to new historical studies onthe political and intellectual context of Gramscis ideas, promoted by the FondazioneGramsci and the ongoing work on the new Edizione nazionale of Gramscis collected writings. 18 In many respects, this new season of studies takes up again, after the inter-ruptions of the 1980s and 1990s, the unfinished business bequeathed to Gramscischolarship by the path-breaking earlier works of figures such as Alastair Davidson inAustralia, John Cammett in the USA, Christine Buci-Glucksmann in France and NicolaBadaloni, Paolo Spriano and Leonardo Paggi in Italy. These studies emphasized thenecessity of interpreting Gramscis thought in its integral historical context, as the precondition for any creative extension to contemporary concerns (Davidson 1977;Cammett 1967; Buci-Glucksmann 1980 [1975]; Badaloni 1975; Spriano 1979; Paggi

1970, 1984). Unfortunately, however, much of this new research remains the preserveof specialists, particularly given the lack of regular translations into English of non-Anglophone Marxist scholarship. We thus confront a stark discrepancy between thewidely diffused images of Gramsci in the Anglophone world and these new, more phi-lologically and historically rigorous, understandings of his thought.

Basing myself upon the recent intense season of historical, philological and theore-tical research on the historical and political context of the Prison Notebooks , I would liketo propose here an alternative typology of hegemony, or rather, more precisely, adialectical presentation of its constitutive elements. Synthesizing what I regard as the

most significant results of readings that have attended to the transformative dimensionsof the Prison Notebooks , I will attempt to thematize the central component parts of Gramscis theory of hegemony, conceived as a developing research project rather thanfixed definition or closed system. Gramscis fully articulated concept of hegemonyinvolves four integrally and dialectically related moments: first, hegemony as social




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and political leadership; second, hegemony as a political project; third, the realization of this hegemonic project in the concrete institutions and organizational forms of ahegemonic apparatus; and fourth, ultimately and decisively, the social and political

hegemony of the workers movement. These four moments constitute a dialecticalchain along which Gramsci deepens his researches throughout the Prison Notebooks ; beginning from the primordial fact of hegemony as leadership, an immanent and expansive dynamic leads him to uncover the determinations of hegemonic political practice as the foundation for a new type of politics that could move beyond the forms of domination of political modernity. 19

Taken in its totality, this typology of hegemony provides us with both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power, and, and, even more importantly and centrally, a theory of alternative political organization. In other words, Gramscis conceptof hegemony does indeed offer, as many interpretations have surmised, an analysis of theforms of economic, social and political domination in the modern world. Building upondebates in Russian social democracy, Gramsci develops the concept of passive revolutionin order to analyse a decisive stage in the production of the hegemonic fabric of modernsovereignty (Frosini 2012). The concept of passive revolution itself, however, was only anintermediary stage in Gramscis research into the nature of hegemony as a political practice, representing not its culmination but only a provisional moment in its elaboration.As an analytical concept, passive revolution was a strategic intervention that aimed tohighlight an historical failure of hegemony. It represented the structural inability of the bourgeois political project (particularly in the West, but also internationally) to realizefully the potentials of this new political practice and theory (originally essayed in theEast, but of international significance). Far from resulting in the immobilism of anaestheticized image of modernity as an irrevocable passive revolution, the fully developed concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks should be understood as a contribution tothe development of a prefigurative theory of a politics of another type of the subalternsocial groups, intent upon forging their own conception of the world and founding their own new integral civilisation ( Q 11, 27, p. 1434). 20

Hegemony as social and political leadershipAs has often been emphasized and just as frequently forgotten, Gramsci inherited theconcept of hegemony as social and political leadership directly from the debates of Russian social democracy, and especially from Lenin (Anderson 1976; Shandro 2007;Boothman 2008; Brandist 2012). 21 In that context, hegemony meant the capacity of theworking class to provide political leadership to all the other popular classes in Russia inthe struggle against tsardom. Following the October revolution, this approach to mass politics underwent a further development in the politics of the United Front and the NEP(Buci-Glucksmann 1980; Paggi 1984). As head of the Italian Communist Party, after

having engaged with the debates on hegemony in Russia during his work at the Commu-nist International in 19223, 22 Gramsci worked to translate this perspective into hisown political reality, in at least two senses.

First, he sought to develop the concept of hegemony in the sense of a politicalleadership by the Italian Communist Party of the working classes, which aimed to

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resolve the fundamental socio-economic and political problems confronting the Italian people. Second, he began to use the concept of hegemony in order to analyse the histor-ical formation of modern state power, comprehending it as a particular crystallization

or condensation in Poulantzass sense of hegemonic relations of force. Both the LyonTheses, as well as Some Aspects of the Southern Question, represent a significant sum-mary of this phase of Gramscis work (Gramsci 1978). Upon imprisonment by the fascistregime, Gramsci devoted particular attention to extending the second sense of his pre-carceral research, seeking to understand the ways in which not only the Italian but alsothe wider European ruling classes had historically consolidated their political power.This is particularly evident in the early phases of the Prison Notebooks , especially in the passages in his first notebook that analyse the hegemonic relations that had shaped theItalian Risorgimento (Q 1, 44: 4054). Crucially, these historical reflections wereformulated against the background of Gramscis experience of workers hegemony inRussia, and his perception that it represented a new mode of political activity and orga-nization (the first translation alluded to above). Politics here provided the lens withwhich to read history: Western political modernity was assessed in terms of its lackof the political principle and practice of workers hegemony developed in the East,which Gramsci believed had opened a new phase in the history of socio-politicalorganization.

Just as significantly, Gramsci immediately began to extend these historical reflectionsto the present. Thus, at the same time as he analysed the relations of the Action Party and the Moderates in the process of Italian state formation, for example, Gramsci com- plemented these historical studies with reflections on contemporary politics, both interms of the causes for the rise of Italian fascism and, even more significantly, in terms of possible alternative forms of proletarian hegemony. What was decisive for Gramscithroughout the deepening of this line of research was to understand that hegemonic politics could not be a practice of management or governance, but could only becoherently developed as a practice of leadership in the widest sense. He distinguished between at least two different types of leadership: in the case of bourgeois politics, thetype of leadership that structurally maintains a distance between the leaders and theled, which ultimately constitutes the logic of passive revolution; and in the case of

proletarian politics, the type of leadership that aims to help the masses to express, deepenand strengthen their self-engagement for socio-political transformation. 23 This type of leadership for Gramsci included the leaders learning from the masses, in an ongoing process in which the educators themselves are educated, to use the profound words of Marxs Theses on Feuerbach (translated by Gramsci at an early stage in his incarcera-tion; see Gramsci 2007).

Hegemony as a political project

It is against the background of this notion of the non-unitary nature of hegemony, divided between bourgeois and proletarian practices of leadership that are substantivelyincommensurable, that Gramsci developed the second decisive moment of his dialecticaltheory: hegemony as a political project. Throughout the Prison Notebooks , Gramsci isinsistent that a genuinely hegemonic project cannot be reduced to mere propaganda,




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or generic influence. Rather, as a project, hegemony involves the articulation of differentmodes of social, cultural and economic leadership into the form of an overall political project. It involves active and continuous agitation and organization on the widest range

of fronts, from the explicitly political, to the social, to cultural and religious practices,conceived in a broad sense as common ways of thinking and seeing in a given socio-cultural formation. Again, the comparison to the historical emergence of the European bourgeoisie as a hegemonic class in the long 19th century was decisive. The bourgeoi-sies hegemonic project had been prosecuted by putting politics in command of a wider project of social transformation, with an encompassing conception of the world and organizational instances reinforcing each other. Gramsci found in the Jacobins a decisiveexample of such a totalizing form of politics, while noting their limitations ( Q 1, 44:4054; Q 8, 21: 9513).

In terms of the striving of the subaltern social groups for hegemony, Gramsci posed the question of how a hegemonic project could be constructed out of the immenserichness of all the different interest groups sometimes even conflicting interestgroups that constitute what he came to call the subaltern social groups, or popular classes in the broadest sense; that is, all the groups or classes that are oppressed and exploited by the current organization of society. 24 As he developed this line of research,he increasingly emphasized that hegemony as a project involves something similar to themost rigorous forms of modern scientific experimental practice; hegemony, that is, isrepresented as a research project for the creation of new proletarian knowledge ( Q 11,34: 14489). Political actors aiming to build a hegemonic project must continuallymake propositions, test them in practice, correct and revise them and test their modified theses once again in concrete political struggles. This process results in an ongoingdialectical exchange and interchange between the existing political conjuncture and attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders of a politicalmovement and those who participate in them. A political project of hegemonic politicsthus comes to represent a type of pedagogical laboratory for the development of newforms of democratic and emancipatory political practice. 25

Hegemonic apparatusThe third central moment of Gramscis concept of hegemony is constituted by hisanalysis of the institutions and organizational forms of leadership in political modernity.This perspective involved the development of what can be regarded as Gramscis gen-uinely new addition to the concept of hegemony, with its extension and specification inthe notion of a hegemonic apparatus (see Bollinger and Koivisto 2001 and 2009). Withthis decisive concept, Gramsci attempted to think the dialectical relationality of a seriesof structured institutions and organizational forms of political and seeming non-polit-ical practice. He analysed the hegemonic apparatuses built by the European bourgeoisie

leading up to and particularly in the wake of the French Revolution. As he frequentlynoted, the expansion of the hegemonic apparatus of the bourgeoisie had involved notmerely explicitly political forms such as political parties, electoral programmes and constitutional forms, but also the articulation of these instances with the full range of modern social life ( Q 6, 137: 801). In a series of notes, Gramsci observed the complex

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ways in which the bourgeoisie had emerged from its subaltern condition in feudalism inorder to become a social group able to offer leadership to the society as a whole, creatingthe new forms by means of which and through which it was able to secure the (active or

passive) support for its cause of many other social groups excluded from previous dis-tributions of power. This historical formation of a bourgeois hegemonic apparatusoccurred concretely in initiatives such as newspapers, publishing houses, educationalinstitutions, social associations, sporting clubs and cultural networks, in variablearticulations, depending upon the specific social formation; 26 in short, the wide varietyof activities that structure and organize modern societies in their complexity as orga-nizations from above of associations from below, according to the paradigm of modern transcendent sovereignty. The decisive transition in this element of Gramscisresearch was the attempt to conceive of the formation of an alternative network of proletarian hegemonic apparatuses, one that would not be dedicated to reinforcing thecurrent organization of society and its inequalities but which would rather open the waytowards the abolition of exploitative and oppressive social relations. This necessitated reflection on the distinctive form of a proletarian hegemonic apparatus, corresponding toand reinforcing its radically non-bourgeois content. To use the words of Marxs reflec-tions on the Paris Commune, Gramsci was attempting to theorize the formation of hege-monic apparatuses that would be expansive rather than repressive (Marx and Engels19752005, vol. 22: 334), which would begin a process of permanent revolution in themidst of capitalist domination, as an autonomous mode of organization of an antagonis-tic political power. 27

Hegemony of the workers movementThis analysis of the institutional forms of different types of hegemonic projects isaccompanied by the fourth moment of Gramscis integral concept of hegemony: thenotion of a hegemony of the workers movement. Central to his political activism beforethe Prison Notebooks , as his carceral researches progressed Gramsci argued for thehegemony of the working-class movement with increasing urgency. At first sight, thisargument may seem wilful or forced, or a reduction of the novelty of Gramscis concept

back to the Russian model that he supposedly superannuated, with the analytic deploy-ment of the concept of hegemony in order to analyse the more complex politicalformations of the West. After all, it has often been claimed that Gramsci was fundamen-tally a theorist of the cultural superstructures, one who was not only a strong critic of economic determinism but perhaps even ignorant of economic theory. Sometimes, it haseven been asserted that Gramscis concept of hegemony represents the beginning of apost-Marxism, which logically should reject the Marxist critique of political economyand its emphasis upon class. Such readings, however, neglect the totality of the Prison Notebooks , which contain extensive notes dedicated to discussions of Marxs Capital

and economic history.28

They also neglect the context of Gramscis political activism,which remained fundamentally directed against what he repeatedly characterized as thedictatorship of the bourgeoisie, including and especially in its fascist variant. AsAlberto Burgio (2002) has emphasized, throughout Gramscis historical, political and philosophical researches, he continually notes that the modern world, with its new forms




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of freedom and unfreedom, is fundamentally distinguished from all other previous socialformations because it is an organization for the production, accumulation and expansionof immense amounts of social wealth, and the creation of new forms of social wealth.

Gramsci, like Marx, regarded labour as no mere element or component part of this orga-nization, or simply the activity of one class or class fraction (for instance, the supposedlytraditional industrial working class of then nascent Fordism). Rather, labour is depicted in the Prison Notebooks as a social relation that determines, and is overdetermined by,all other social relations in modern societies. 29 It is one of the central nodal points in whichare condensed and expressed the structures and contradictions of modern society. Moderncapitalist society, from the everyday activities that constitute its content to the social and political relations of command that seek to function as their form, is dedicated to theaccumulation of capital by means of the private property of the means of production byone class that is, the bourgeoisies successful claim to the juridical right to appropriatethe surplus-value produced in the distinctively unequal equality of the wage labour-capital relation. Any movement to transform modern societies in which the capitalist modeof production is dominant must therefore reckon accounts with this fundamental organiz-ing principle, which continually produces, reproduces and overdetermines the relations of subalternity that traverse capitalist society, both within and beyond strictly economic rela-tions. In the first and not the last instance, such a revolutionary movement must challengethe dominance of one minoritarian class, on the basis of the interests of all other classes inthe society, by addressing directly and forcefully what the Communist Manifesto refers toas the property question, the material basis for subalternity in all its forms.

Leadership, or in other words, the instability of uneven tendencies towards trans-formation rather than the equilibrium of order; politics as a tendentially unifying projectof knowledge formation, rather than relations of hierarchical command; institutions of constituent power and their immanent expansion, rather than constitutional limitation;labour as a dynamic social relation of the ceaseless transformation of modernity, which itis the task of a militant communist movement to politicize. Far from a left-wing variantof the state-centric dimensions of modern political thought, Gramscis dialectical chainof hegemonic politics represents a radical alternative. It constitutes a movement from acomplex analysis of historically existing forms of domination towards the elaboration of

an even more complex theory of alternative political organization.

Hegemony and passive revolutionIn light of this thematization of the dialectical unfolding of the concept of hegemony as aresearch project, we can now resituate the concept of passive revolution. Rather thandeducing hegemony from passive revolution, as the mechanism of its realization, it becomes possible to understand the extent to which passive revolution represents adeformation of hegemonic politics, or as a precise organizational obstacle to its extensive

practice. In particular, this thematization of the concept of hegemony enables us tounderstand the limitation of the concept of passive revolution, as a stage in the devel-opment of Gramscis theory of hegemony, and not as its terminus.

Far from representing an overall and informing theory that would allow us to comprehend its component parts, including that of hegemony, the concept of passive

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revolution was in fact developed in progressive stages in the Prison Notebooks , as astrategic and partial theory, or, as Gramsci called it, an historical-political criterion(Q 1, 44: 41). It was an analysis of the specific organizational form of bourgeois hege-

mony, or rather of the organizational forms in which the bourgeois political project had sought to prevent the full realization of hegemonic politics as a re-organization of exist-ing political relations of force. In a first moment, from 1930 to early 1932, Gramsci used the concept of passive revolution in order to describe the formation of the modern Italianstate in the Risorgimento . It was a process in which the dominant classes managed toexclude the popular classes from autonomous and organized participation in the processof modernization ( Q 1, 44: 4054: FebruaryMarch 1930; Q 8, 25: 957: January1932). In a second instance, beginning in late 1930, Gramsci began to extend the con-cept, in a comparative manner, in order to analyse other social formations, such asGermany, which seemed to have gone through a similar contradictory process of (eco-nomic) modernization without (political) modernization, lacking a radical Jacobinmoment such as had accompanied the French Revolution ( Q 4, 57: 504: November 1930). Then, in a third moment, while engaged in intense debates with fellow communist prison inmates in which he argued against the politics of the Stalinist Third Period, from1932 onwards, it seems as if Gramsci thought that the notion of passive revolution could have a international and even epochal meaning, as a type of logic of bourgeois hegemonyas such, with fascism in Italy as merely its current form ( Q 8, 236: 10889: April1932; Q 10I, 9: 12269: AprilMay 1932). It is precisely such formulations that have been seized upon to support a Weberian reading of passive revolution as a tale of polit-ical modernitys descent into a rationalized and bureaucratic iron cage.

Many interpretations have stopped at this point. They fail to note that Gramsci made atleast two further decisive steps in the development of the concept of passive revolution,which fundamentally transform its significance. After he had considerably expanded theoriginally exceptionally Italian notion of the passive revolution of the Risorgimento to aninternational terrain, Gramsci then began to ask himself whether such an unbridled theo-retical development could not have negative political consequences. He returned to hisnotebooks in order to develop the concept further in an explicitly theoretical register (asopposed to his previous, largely historical studies), and to cleanse it of every trace of

fatalism ( Q 15, 17: 17745: AprilMay 1933). Decisive in this process was his meditationon central themes in Marxs Preface of 1859, which he had also translated at the beginningof his incarceration, and which he read, in a novel fashion, as an argument against all formsof determinism. In 1933 Gramsci argued that the concept of passive revolution could have aconcrete political sense, not by positing it as a political programme, but only if it assumes,or postulates as necessary, a vigorous antithesis, which autonomously and intransigentlysetsallitsforcesinmotion( Q 15, 62: 1827: JuneJuly1933). In other words, the concept of passive revolution needed to be confronted by the potential for a process of de-pacificationand active revolution by and within the action of the popular classes.

The modern PrinceIt is precisely in this period, from 1932 onwards, that Gramsci deepens his novel theoryof proletarian hegemony as an alternative form of political organization, encapsulated in




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the Machiavellian metaphor of the modern Prince. Both the concept as well as thehistorical reality of passive revolution can only be rationally comprehended and orga-nizationally deciphered by considering the formulation of this notion of the modern

Prince as its Aufhebung in the fullest Hegelian sense. In other words, the concept of passive revolution as a theorization of bourgeois organizational forms is incomplete,unless we take into account Gramscis continuation of this line of research by other means, with the delineation of passive revolutions antithesis in the proletarian orga-nizational forms synthesized in this dramatic and mythical Machiavellian figure. Havingovercome the risk of fatalism in the concept of passive revolution, Gramscis theoreticalenergies turned to the depiction of the modern Prince, conceived as the simultaneousrepresentation and realization of a politics of a different type: an antidote against the poison of the passive revolution.

Yet what kind of antidote is the modern Prince? From the early years of the receptionof the Prison Notebooks , it has often been argued that the modern Prince is a codeword,either for the Communist Party, as founder of a new state and protagonist of intellectualand moral reform ( Q 8, 21: 953: JanuaryFebruary 1932), or for the modern political party in general, as distinctive synthesis of the normative, motivational and executivesources of the democratic ethos that underwrites modern mass societies (White and Ypi2010: 814). Once again, a series of citations can easily be found to support this reading.The modern Prince, Gramsci famously argued, the myth-Prince, cannot be a real per-son, a concrete individual. It can be only an organism. [ . . .] This organism is alreadygiven by historical development; it is the political party ( Q 8, 21: 9513: January February 1932). Notebook 13 (Notes on the Politics of Machiavelli, from May 1932to early 1934) in particular contains extensive notes on the political party as a necessary protagonist of modern political life. Gramsci also famously develops a novel tripartitetheory of the fundamental elements required for the existence of a political party: amass element; a principal cohesive element; and an intermediate element, whicharticulates the first [mass] element with the second [cohesive element] and maintainscontact between them, not only physically but also morally and intellectually ( Q 14, 70: 1733: February 1933; see Sassoon 1987: 15079).

However, it is necessary to put these formulations in their philological and historical

context, in order to comprehend their full significance. Gramsci develops his reflections onthe modern Prince as a new organizational form in the same period when his disagreementswith the politics of the Stalinist Third Period, and its bureaucratic centralist methods(Q 13: 36: 16325), are intensifying. It is also a period when he formulates his noveladdition to Marxist class analysis with the concept subaltern social groups. This conceptis not limited to the classes exploited in the capitalist labour process, but includes all socialgroups oppressed and consigned to the margins of history ( Q 25: 2277). Finally, it is alsoin these years that Gramsci continues to emphasize the need for a constituent assembly, asthe necessary terrain upon which a political leadership of the workers movement in the

anti-fascist struggle might become possible (Quercioli 1977; for the most recent researchon the proposal of the Constituente , see Vacca 2012). The modern Prince represents thesynthetic form into which all of these currents of Gramscis research flow. Each elementis decisive; only by considering all of them, and their integral relation, do we grasp thedistinctiveness of Gramscis return to Machiavelli. 30

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For these reasons, Gramscis modern Prince should not be understood as a merecodeword for a particular pre-existing political party, or even an already known form of a communist political party, increasingly honoured more in the breach than observance

even when Gramsci was writing, with the consolidation of Stalinism in the USSR and the international communist movement. Rather, exactly as in the case of Machiavellisnot-yet-existing Prince, Gramscis final mediations proposed a new practice and formof politics, which includes and reaches its fullest extension in a novel understanding of the political party as a laboratory of a new society, but which is not reducible to it. Themodern Prince is not a concrete individual, or a single centralized entity, but a dynamiccollective process, which aims at nothing less than a totalizing expansion across the entiresocial formation, as a new organization of social and political relations. For this reason,Gramscis modern Prince is not constituted as the (subjective) form of a reductive articu-lation of difference in terms of a chain of equivalence, or of unification, as would besuggested by the formalism inherent to Laclau and Mouffes interpretation of hegemony.Instead, the modern Prince represents the production of the coherence of diverseelements, which are engaged in relations of reciprocal translation that enriches, rather thanreduces, each of its constituent elements. 31 In short, the modern Prince should be under-stood in its fullest sense as this broader civilizational dynamic of re-activation and theemergence of the part of no part (Ranci` ere 1999) from the experience of subalternitythat marks capitalist modernity as a passive revolution. It is precisely due to this broader civilizational dynamic, which constitutes its condition of possibility, that the political partythat emerges from this process is of a distinctively new type.

Similarly, for the same reason, the proposal of the modern Prince cannot be reduced tothe type of political formalism that has dominated political modernity, from Hobbes toRousseau and beyond, in which a given political form comes to dominate its subaltern(social) content. Rather, in so far as the modern Prince culminates in the constitution of alaboratory-party, it is a form that is merely the expression of a content that con-stitutively exceeds it. The modern Prince, as it develops, revolutionises the wholesystem of intellectual and moral relations [ . . .] the Prince takes the place of the divinityor the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis for a modern laicism and for acomplete laicisation of all aspects of life and of all customary relationships ( Q 13, 1:

1561: May 1932). The institutional consolidation of this process in a party of a new typeshould thus not be understood as the formation of a political subject, as a unified centreof intention and initiative, or an instrument or machine, in Webers famous phrasefrom Politics as Vocation (1994: 339). Rather, it is an always provisional condensationof relations of force that continuously modify the composition of the modern Prince as acollective organism, and as an expansive revolutionary process in movement.

Above all, the integral concept of the modern Prince, as both a broader civilizationaldynamic and as a novel institutional process of social transformation, represents in anactive sense a new type of political culture that would be capable of valorizing con-

stituent power as the basis for a new social organization, instead of deforming it in a pre-given constitutional form that is, a form of domination. In such a conception, Gramsciargued, one cannot construct a system of constitutional law of the traditional type, butrather, merely propose a series of fundamental principles that posit the end of the state asits immanent goal ( Q 5, 127: 662). The modern Prince thus ultimately represents the




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mythical form that aimed to call into being a coalition of the rebellious subalterns,engaged in acts of self-liberation of hegemonic politics a pedagogical laboratory for unlearning the habits of subalternity and discovering new forms of conviviality, mutual-

ity and collective self-determination.

A prefigurative vocabulary of contemporary radical politicsThe last years have witnessed a fundamental transformation in the international politicalclimate. After the long winter of neoliberalism, new but still fragile conceptions of theworld are beginning to circulate, from the continuing Arab revolutions, to Occupy, toanti-austerity struggles around the world. For the first time since arguably the 1960s,there are ongoing mass experiences of popular mobilization of an entire generation,in the depths of what is becoming a political crisis of the ruling classes unable to restabilizethe inherent contradictions of its regime of accumulation. What these new movementsneed are theories that will help them to increase their capacity to act, to make explicit thenew political perspectives that are implicit in them, in a practical state. Above all, thesemovements need to develop the organizational forms that will enable them to grow and flourish, in the transition from resistance against the existing order, towards the foundationof a new type of society: from critique towards constitution.

I would suggest that the dialectical development of Gramscis research into the nature of hegemonicpolitics, thehistorical reality of passiverevolution,andthepotentialformationof a modern Prince might be understood today as a prefigurative vocabulary with which tocomprehend and to strengthen the diversity of these contemporary mobilizations of resis-tance and rebellion. Raymond Williams once famously argued that any possible futuresocialist reorganization of society would necessarily be more and not less complex than therelations of domination in capitalist societies (Williams 1979: 431). Gramscis concept of the modern Prince as the dynamic of a new form of expansive institutionality suggests thatnot only should socialism be understood as more complex, but so also must be the orga-nizational forms that might constitute the initial stage of its elaboration and realization.

Notes

1. A detailed reconstruction of the different interpretations of the concept of hegemony in theItalian debate can be found in Liguori (2012). See also DOrsi (2008). For critical surveys of interpretations on the concept of hegemony, see Gruppi 1977; Buci-Glucksmann 1985, and Haug 2004.

2. For readings that have reinforced this interpretation, see Bates (1975); Williams (1977); Femia(1981); Bocock (1986). For a critical reading of this line of reception in anthropology, seeCrehan (2002). Element of this reading of hegemony have also strongly marked the project of subaltern studies, in its various articulations, see Guha 1997.

3. On populist readings of hegemony on the Italian road to socialism, see Liguori (2012: 133 68). For critical remarks on the later exportation of this perspective in international debates, particularly regarding the family resemblances of Togliattis and Laclau and Mouffesreading of Gramsci, see Casarino and Negri (2008: 1624).

4. The most influential proposal of this reading was that of Laclau and Mouffe (1985). Laclau(2005) has since extended this interpretation in his distinctive theory of populism as the secret(in a Feuerbachian sense) of politics. Simon Critchley provides a succinct demonstration of the

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entrance of this reading into the academic senso comune : This act of the aggregation of the political subject is the moment of hegemony (2007: 104).

5. This interpretation was most influentially formulated in Bobbio (1979 [1969]). For criticalreadings of its presuppositions, see Texier (1979); Anderson (1976); Thomas (2009: 15996);Opratko (2012). For readings that attempt to argue for the superannuation of Gramscisconcept on the basis of this partial interpretation, see Day (2005) and Beasley-Murray (2011),which is representative of an emerging post-hegemonic research programme in Latin Amer-ican studies in particular.

6. For a reconstruction of usages of hegemony in ancient Greek political thought, see Fontana(2000) and DOrsi (2008).

7. On geopolitical uses of the concept of hegemony in the Communist International, seeAnderson (1976) and Buci-Glucksmann (1980 [1975]).

8. The first generation of neo-Gramscian theory in International Relations is collected in Gill(1993). Robinson 2005 provides an overview of recent debates. A representative example of newer approaches in the field is Morton (2007).

9. For an influential example of this reading, see Cox (1987, 1993).10. For a suggestive comparison of Webers and Gramscis concepts of modernity in their

respective political histories, see Portantiero (1981), Levy 1987, and Rehmann (1998). For readings that tend to synthesize Weber and Gramsci, see Sen (1985) and Bocock (1986).

11. Such a reading of hegemony as a form of domination is particularly noticeable in MichaelBurawoys project of a sociological Marxism (Burawoy 2003, 2012).

12. Batess suggestion that Gramscis concept of hegemony can be characterized as politicalleadership based on the consent of the led (Bates 1975: 352) effectively represents it assimilar to the mythical fourth type of legitimate domination, based upon the will of the ruled,that Weber reportedly briefly considered a possibility, albeit in a theoretically undeveloped form that did not find its way into the manuscripts published as Economy and Society perhaps because it directly contradicts the self-foundational dimension of charismatic power,which increasingly occupied Weber in his last years. See Weber (1917) and Breuer (1998).

13. For a now classic study of the constitutive and politically productive incompletion of the Prison Notebooks , see Gerratana (1997).

14. For studies of the concept of passive revolution, see Thomas (2006), Voza (2004) and Liguori and Voza (2009).

15. The Prison Notebooks were first published in Italy in an edited thematic edition in the late1940s and 1950s. This edition was the basis for many early translations, including theinternationally influential Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1971). It was onlyin 1975 that a critical edition was published under the editorship of Valentino Gerratana(Gramsci 1975). A new edition of the Prison Notebooks is currently in preparation, under theeditorship of Gianni Francioni, as a section of the Edizione nazionale of Gramscis collected writings. As a part of the preparatory work for this edition, an edition of photographicreproductions of Gramscis original notebooks was published in 2009.

16. This transition back to a Hobbesian model of order was explicitly theorized by Paggi (1984: x).17. Alongside Laclau and Mouffe (1985), which was influential largely in academic debates,

perhaps the most significant of these readings was that proposed by Stuart Hall and the ten-dency affiliated with Marxism Today in the UK in the 1980s, which had an important impactupon the formulation of the British Labour Partys purported Third Way. See Hall (1988)and, for an analysis of the misreadings of this tendency, Pearmain (2011).

18. The permanent seminar of the International Gramsci society has given rise to a significant con-ceptual vocabulary (Frosini and Liguori 2004) and a monumental Dizionario gramsciano ,involving hundreds of scholars from around the world (Liguori and Voza 2009). The Fondazione




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Gramsci has sponsored the production of a two-volume work containing the most advanced research on the context of Gramscis thought (Giasi 2008). A survey of the ongoing work of the Edizione nazionale can be found in Cospito (2010) and Vacca (2011).

19. The development of these moments is thus dialectical in the sense of an open-ended experi-ential discovery of necessary presuppositions, rather than in terms of formalistic closure or synthesis; in Hegelian terms, the Bildungsroman -dialectic of The Phenomenology of Spirit rather than the system-dialectic of the Science of Logic .

20. References to Gramscis Prison Notebooks [Quaderni del carcere ] follow the internationallyestablished standard of notebook number ( Q), number of note (), followed by page referenceto the Italian critical edition: Gramsci 1975.

21. Lo Piparo (1979) emphasizes Gramscis indebtedness to his previous university study of historical linguistics, while Bellamy and Schechter (1993) emphasize the Italian dimensionsof Gramscis thought. These pre-existing elements, however, were fundamentally transformed by Gramscis encounter with the Bolshevik debates.

22. Archival research undertaken by myself and Craig Brandist in Moscow, thanks to a BritishAcademy research grant, has uncovered new materials related to Gramscis period in Russia,including his encounter with the concept of hegemony. This material and critical commentaryis forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series, published by Brill.

23. The first element is that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led. The entirescience and art of politics are based on this primordial, and (given certain general conditions)irreducible fact. [ . . . ] In the formation of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it theintention that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the con-ditions in which this division is no longer necessary? ( Q 15, 4: 1752).

24. For an exploration of the development of the complex meaning of the notion of subalternsocial groups in the Prison Notebooks , stressing that it should not be understood as a merecodeword for (economic) class, but should instead be understood as a novel addition to the political vocabulary of marxism, see Green (2011).

25. On thenotion of hegemonic politics as theproduction of newintellectualities, seeSotiris (2013).26. For example, on the organizing function of newspapers in particular, see Q 17, 37: 1939 and

Notebook 24, dedicated to journalism. On the role played by bourgeois networks such asRotary, particularly in comparison to other transnational organizations such as freemasonry,see Q 5, 61: 593-4; Q 13, 36: 1633. On this theme, see Ives and Short 2013.

27. The concept of permanent revolution plays a central role in the elaboration of Gramscistheory of hegemony. See Q 10I, 12: 12345; Q 13, 7; 15657.

28. For an analysis of Gramscis deep engagement with the critique of political economythroughout the Prison Notebooks , see Kratke (2011).

29. See in particular the analysis of relations of force and the relationship between structure and superstructure in Q 13, 7: 157889.

30. Furthermore, I would suggest that Gramscis concept of the modern Prince is contained notonly in the notes that explicitly cite Machiavelli or discuss the political party. Rather, theconcept is also implicitly developed in the roughly 16 notebooks (that is, the majority of the29 Prison Notebooks ) that Gramsci compiles after 1932, including notebooks of both revised texts and new departures. These later notebooks have often struck even the most attentivereaders as a mass of fragments, which often do not speak of political organization at all, butrather cultural, socio-economic or historical themes (linguistics, Fordism, the developmentof subaltern groups, historical linguistics and so forth). Taken together, however, I would argue that these studies constitute an articulated cognitive map of the many different ter-rains of the modern Prince. Out of the diversity and richness of the themes in these notebooks Gramsci slowly composed a sketch or many sketches of forms of popular practice

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and organization that would be capable of defeating the passive revolution of bourgeoismodernity itself.

31. On the complexity of the notion of coherence in Gramscis vocabulary, see Thomas (2009: 362 79).

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Author biography

Peter D Thomas lectures in the history of political thought at Brunel University, London.He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism , and co-editor of Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought . He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism .

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