Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of ‘posthegemony’. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony – temporal, foundational and expansive – characterized by different understandings of (...) the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their ‘pre-Gramscianism’, their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a 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 political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better understood as (...) a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity. (shrink)

The subaltern has frequently been understood as a figure of exclusion ever since it was first highlighted by the early Subaltern Studies collective’s creative reading of Antonio Gramsci’s carceral writings. In this article, I argue that a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the notion of subaltern classes throughout Gramsci’s full Prison Notebooks reveals new resources for “refiguring” the subaltern. I propose three alternative figures to comprehend specific dimensions of Gramsci’s theorizations: the “irrepressible subaltern,” the “hegemonic subaltern,” and (...) the “citizen-subaltern.” Far from being exhausted by the eclipse of the conditions it was initially called upon to theorize in Subaltern Studies, such a refigured notion of the subaltern has the potential to cast light both on the contradictory development of political modernity and on contemporary political processes. (shrink)

According to conventional wisdom, Antonio Gramsci is a political philosopher lacking in, and who avoids, a serious interest in political economy. That is a serious misrepresentation of Gramsci’s works and thought. Equally wrong is the widespread view that anything Gramsci had to say about political economy is to be found in his scattered notes on ‘Americanism and Fordism’. On the contrary, a careful rereading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks shows that Marx’s great and unfinished project of the critique of political economy (...) plays a crucial rôle for Gramsci’s efforts to come to grips with the basics of a critical social science that could live up to the aspirations of a ‘scientific socialism’. As Gramsci was fully aware of the everyday battles of ideas in capitalist societies to be fought about the notions and tenets of popular or vulgar political economy, he did the best he could in order to understand and clarify the bases of a ‘critical’ and ‘scientific’ political economy. A political economy that was and still is urgently needed in order to fight the strongest of the strongholds of bourgeois hegemony - the ideas of vulgar economics in everybody’s heads. (shrink)

Reading 'Capital''s promotion of the Spinozist sources of Marxism has stimulated a series of important studies in several major zones of Marxist theoretical work. A more general reassessment of Spinoza's thought in the project of a 'radical Enlightenement' provides the opportunity to consider critically the contribution of these studies to the elaboration of Marxist political theory. Vittorio Morfino, well known Italian scholar of Spinoza and Althusser, proposes to study Engels's reading of Spinoza in the context of the inheritance of classical (...) German idealism in the Marxist theory of history. He argues that Spinoza provides resources for rethinking Marxist notions of temporality and structure. The result is a theory of conjunctural analysis, in distinction from 'normative' and 'prescriptive' perspectives. (shrink)

Can the Marxist tradition still provide new resources for thinking the specificity of historical time? This volume proposes to transform our understanding of Marxism by reconnecting with the 'subterranean currents' of plural temporalities that have traversed its development. From Rousseau and Sieyès to Marx, from Bloch to Althusser, from Gramsci to Pasolini and Postcolonialism, the chapters in this volume seek both to valorise neglected resources from Marxism's contradictory history, and also to read against the grain its orthodox and heterodox currents. (...) Privileging not the single time of historical development, but the plural temporalities that intertwine in and constitute any given historical conjuncture, and arguing against merely subjectivist theories of temporal multiplicity, this volume studies the articulation of the real, plural temporalities of mass political action. Comprehending their dynamics is a necessary precondition for a renewed politics of emancipation.Contributors include: Luca Basso, Stefano Bracaletti, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Fabio Frosini, Augusto Illuminati, Nicola Marcucci, Vittorio Morfino, Luca Pinzolo, Peter D. Thomas and Massimiliano Tomba. (shrink)

Historical Materialism has previously published a significant number of studies from the contemporary 'Marx Renaissance'. Roberto Finelli's intervention into the debate over Chris Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital' provides an opportunity to consider the international reverberations of this movement and its political presuppositions and consequences. Working in a very different tradition of Marxism, Finelli's interpretation of Marx has decisive similarities with Arthur's reading of the importance of Hegel's Logic for the conceptual structure of Capital. Yet whereas Arthur argues (...) for a 'direct homology', Finelli proposes a heuristic 'analogy'. The different conclusions reached by the two theorists reflect different orientations, both theoretical and political. Comparison to theses of the Italian workerist tradition and other contemporary readings of Marx suggest that these differences are best comprehended in a political rather than solely intellectual register. Despite their differences, these various research projects are in agreement regarding the necessity of deriving concrete strategies for the contemporary socialist movement from theoretical debate. (shrink)

Reading 'Capital''s promotion of the Spinozist sources of Marxism has stimulated a series of important studies in several major zones of Marxist theoretical work. A more general reassessment of Spinoza's thought in the project of a 'radical Enlightenement' provides the opportunity to consider critically the contribution of these studies to the elaboration of Marxist political theory. Vittorio Morfino, well known Italian scholar of Spinoza and Althusser, proposes to study Engels's reading of Spinoza in the context of the inheritance of classical (...) German idealism in the Marxist theory of history. He argues that Spinoza provides resources for rethinking Marxist notions of temporality and structure. The result is a theory of conjunctural analysis, in distinction from 'normative' and 'prescriptive' perspectives. (shrink)

This article explores the media representation of Muslims using critical discourse analysis. It emphasises the discursive construction of governmental paternalism that forms the dominant ideological disposition of China Daily’s coverage. The results reveal how Chinese official English newspapers facilitate the government’s dissemination of paternalistic discourse in the news of a large population of Chinese Muslims over the period. The investigation combines topic modelling with topos analysis to identify topics and topoi and to exhibit the ideology through the corpus compiled with (...) CD’s news about Chinese Muslims. Our findings both uncover the extent to which CD is used to promote paternalistic discourse by topic and reveal how paternalism is constructed by topoi. CD can be seen to strongly legitimise the paternalistic framework corresponding with the government’s promotion of social development and security in the region. Reciprocally, most Chinese Muslims are portrayed as obedient and dependent Chinese citizens who benefit from the government’s intervention. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which Gramsci’s engagement with Machiavelli and The Prince in particular result in three significant developments in the Prison Notebooks. First, I analyse how the ‘heroic fury’ of Gramsci’s lifelong interest in Machiavelli’s thought develops, during the composition of his carceral writings, into a novel approach to the reading of The Prince, giving rise to the famous notion of the ‘modern Prince’. Second, I argue that the modern Prince should not be regarded merely as a (...) distinctive figure, but rather should be understood as a dramatic development that unfolds throughout ‘the discourse itself’ of the Prison Notebooks, particularly in the crucial phase of reorganisation in the ‘special notebooks’ composed from 1932 onwards. Third and finally, I suggest that the combination of the two preceding themes is decisive for understanding the modern Prince as a distinctive form of political organisation. Rather than equated with a generic conception of the ‘ political party’, this notion was developed as a part of Gramsci’s larger argument regarding the necessity for anti-Fascist political forces in Italy in the early 1930s to grow into an antagonistic collective body guided by principles of ‘living philology’. (shrink)