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Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince

Peter D Thomas Thesis Eleven 2013 117: 20 DOI: 10.1177/0725513613493991 The online version of this article can be found at: http://the.sagepub.com/content/117/1/20

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Article

Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince

Peter D Thomas
Brunel University, UK

Thesis Eleven 117(1) 2039 The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0725513613493991 the.sagepub.com

Abstract Gramscis 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 Gramscis 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. Keywords Gramsci, 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 integrally related 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: PeterD.Thomas@Brunel.ac.uk

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state. Frequently, however, the word seems to have very different when not directly contradictory 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 leading social group securing the (active or passive) consent of other social strata, rather than unilaterally imposing its decrees upon unwilling subjects. It relies more upon subtle mechanisms of ideological integration, cultural influence or even psychological dependency, than upon the threat of censure or violence. In this version, hegemony-consent is conceived as the opposite of domination-coercion, according to presuppositions that effectively reduce hegemonic politics to an unmediated ethical relationship. This reading has accompanied the reception of the Prison Notebooks from the outset, beginning with the PCIs attempt to present Gramsci as the theorist of a different communism after the rupture of 1956.1 This interpretation now constitutes a sort of beginners guide to the meaning 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 a theory 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 a composite 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 liberal thought in the Italian post-war constitutional process.3 Insofar as the concept of hegemony is to be found in contemporary international discussions in political philosophy, it is often represented 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 society, while the state is the locus of domination-coercion. Hegemony works away surreptitiously 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 that remains indeterminate, when not declared to be unnecessary. In effect, this version presents Gramscis concept of hegemony as a form of anti-politics, which finds its strength instead in the valorization of the social. Derived from readings of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, often inflected by the experience of Western Maoism and later leftwing Eurocommunism, this interpretation is frequently operative in contemporary discussions 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 now open, now hidden, struggle for influence and power between states, prior to but sometimes including the outright declaration of military hostilities. This version effectively inscribes Gramscis concept of hegemony as a critical perspective within a tradition of political realism 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 complicated forms.7 Today, this interpretation is often encountered as an established image of Gramsci in mainstream discussions in International Relations, though increasingly contested by new neo-Gramscian perspectives.8

Hegemony and Herrschaft

Each of these readings reduces Gramscis theory of hegemony to an already known figure in the history of modern political thought. The first interpretation represents Gramscis theory of hegemony as a type of inverted Hobbesianism, with consent functioning as the motor of an ethical foundation of the political. The second interpretation of hegemony as a logic 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 the transition from the will of all to the general will. The third interpretation presents the diversity and richness of existing civil society as the potential foundation for an alternative mode of socialization, in a type of arrested Hegelianism that stops at 255 of the Philosophy of Right, before civil society is revealed to find its foundation in the state. The fourth interpretation 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 menacingly telluric than cosmopolitan. The combination of these perspectives yields a certain traditional or at least widespread interpretation of the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks. This reading understands the politics of hegemony to involve, in the first instance, the securing of consent of a significant proportion of political actors in a given social formation; second, their unification into a collective political subject; third, the engagement of this newly constituted political subject in a battle against another such subject formed by a similar process, each seeking to enlarge their occupation of the peripheral territory of civil society until they possess sufficient forces to launch an assault upon the centre of the state apparatus; and, in a final moment, the clash of hegemonically constructed 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 antecedents, histories and disciplinary locations, and what allows them to be articulated as a total theory of hegemony in the manner indicated above, is the presupposition that the concept of hegemony is fundamentally a general theory of political power. Such a general theory can then be deployed either in order to contest existing power relations and 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 by far the most significant case, Gramsci is forced to step forward, to modify a famous Crocean phrase, as the Weber of the Proletariat.10 In both cases, hegemony effectively comes to denote stability, integration, and legitimation, even if in the form of the

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negative legitimation that resists but simultaneously thereby also acknowledges the existing social order (rather than the delegitimation of a revolutionary rupture that negates it). Hegemony is thus inscribed within a typology of domination of Weberian dimensions.11 As a form of democratic domination, it is represented as a novel addition to the forms of legitimate Herrschaft alongside Webers classic trio of charismatic, traditional and legal-bureaucratic domination.12 In some readings, hegemony is even called upon to 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 consolidation and completion of the parliamentary democratic order as a system of political integration and equilibrium.

Lineages of passive revolution

Like 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 halfreadings, they sprang not fully-grown from the transparent obviousness of a definitive text, but were produced by a complex process of the always uncertain reading and creative misreading of Gramscis radically incomplete Prison Notebooks in different historical 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 different interpretations into a general theory of hegemony to the emergence of a particular understanding of the role of the concept of passive revolution in the conceptual architecture of 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 meaningful participation of popular classes in undertaking and consolidating social transformation. This concept, now a central point of reference not only for Gramsci scholarship but also in such diverse academic fields as international relations, historical sociology al 2009), surprisingly had not and even ethnography (see e.g. Morton 2007, 2010; Tug 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, Politics 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 entire articulated chain of concepts of the Prison Notebooks. It fundamentally transformed the understanding of hegemonic politics. Hegemony was effectively subordinated to passive revolution, as a mere mechanism of its realization or contestation. As Frosini argues, it led 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 transition from a supposedly irrationalist conflictualist model to the claimed consensualism characteristic 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 rationalized and bureaucratic Weberian iron cage [stahlhartes Gehause ]; hegemony became a mere occasion for the transformation of the parties of the workers movement into parties of government (Frosini 2008: 667). Although not often remembered today, these were the 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 the 1975 critical edition of the Prison Notebooks and freed from at least some of the instrumentalizations and polemics that marked earlier debates, has provided us with a very different understanding of the development of Gramscis central concepts. There have been important philological contributions from around the world, by scholars in Germany (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). Above all, the flourishing of a new Gramscian research culture in Italy over the last 20 years has given rise both to innovative philological and theoretical work, particularly in the initiatives of the International Gramsci Society, and also to new historical studies on the political and intellectual context of Gramscis ideas, promoted by the Fondazione Gramsci 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 interruptions of the 1980s and 1990s, the unfinished business bequeathed to Gramsci scholarship by the path-breaking earlier works of figures such as Alastair Davidson in Australia, John Cammett in the USA, Christine Buci-Glucksmann in France and Nicola Badaloni, Paolo Spriano and Leonardo Paggi in Italy. These studies emphasized the necessity 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 preserve of specialists, particularly given the lack of regular translations into English of nonAnglophone Marxist scholarship. We thus confront a stark discrepancy between the widely diffused images of Gramsci in the Anglophone world and these new, more philologically and historically rigorous, understandings of his thought. Basing myself upon the recent intense season of historical, philological and theoretical research on the historical and political context of the Prison Notebooks, I would like to propose here an alternative typology of hegemony, or rather, more precisely, a dialectical presentation of its constitutive elements. Synthesizing what I regard as the most significant results of readings that have attended to the transformative dimensions of the Prison Notebooks, I will attempt to thematize the central component parts of Gramscis theory of hegemony, conceived as a developing research project rather than fixed definition or closed system. Gramscis fully articulated concept of hegemony involves 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 a hegemonic apparatus; and fourth, ultimately and decisively, the social and political hegemony of the workers movement. These four moments constitute a dialectical chain 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 concept of hegemony does indeed offer, as many interpretations have surmised, an analysis of the forms of economic, social and political domination in the modern world. Building upon debates in Russian social democracy, Gramsci develops the concept of passive revolution in order to analyse a decisive stage in the production of the hegemonic fabric of modern sovereignty (Frosini 2012). The concept of passive revolution itself, however, was only an intermediary 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 to highlight an historical failure of hegemony. It represented the structural inability of the bourgeois political project (particularly in the West, but also internationally) to realize fully the potentials of this new political practice and theory (originally essayed in the East, but of international significance). Far from resulting in the immobilism of an aestheticized image of modernity as an irrevocable passive revolution, the fully developed concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks should be understood as a contribution to the development of a prefigurative theory of a politics of another type of the subaltern social 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 leadership

As has often been emphasized and just as frequently forgotten, Gramsci inherited the concept 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 the working class to provide political leadership to all the other popular classes in Russia in the 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 Communist International in 19223,22 Gramsci worked to translate this perspective into his own political reality, in at least two senses. First, he sought to develop the concept of hegemony in the sense of a political leadership 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 historical formation of modern state power, comprehending it as a particular crystallization or condensation in Poulantzass sense of hegemonic relations of force. Both the Lyon Theses, as well as Some Aspects of the Southern Question, represent a significant summary of this phase of Gramscis work (Gramsci 1978). Upon imprisonment by the fascist regime, Gramsci devoted particular attention to extending the second sense of his precarceral research, seeking to understand the ways in which not only the Italian but also the 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 the Italian Risorgimento (Q 1, 44: 4054). Crucially, these historical reflections were formulated against the background of Gramscis experience of workers hegemony in Russia, and his perception that it represented a new mode of political activity and organization (the first translation alluded to above). Politics here provided the lens with which to read history: Western political modernity was assessed in terms of its lack of 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-political organization. Just as significantly, Gramsci immediately began to extend these historical reflections to 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 complemented these historical studies with reflections on contemporary politics, both in terms 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 Gramsci throughout 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 be coherently 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, the type of leadership that structurally maintains a distance between the leaders and the led, 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, deepen and 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 incarceration; 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 substantively incommensurable, that Gramsci developed the second decisive moment of his dialectical theory: hegemony as a political project. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci is insistent 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 different modes 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 sociocultural formation. Again, the comparison to the historical emergence of the European bourgeoisie as a hegemonic class in the long 19th century was decisive. The bourgeoisies 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 decisive example 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 immense richness of all the different interest groups sometimes even conflicting interest groups 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 the most rigorous forms of modern scientific experimental practice; hegemony, that is, is represented as a research project for the creation of new proletarian knowledge (Q 11, 34: 14489). Political actors aiming to build a hegemonic project must continually make 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 ongoing dialectical exchange and interchange between the existing political conjuncture and attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders of a political movement and those who participate in them. A political project of hegemonic politics thus comes to represent a type of pedagogical laboratory for the development of new forms of democratic and emancipatory political practice.25

Hegemonic apparatus
The third central moment of Gramscis concept of hegemony is constituted by his analysis of the institutions and organizational forms of leadership in political modernity. This perspective involved the development of what can be regarded as Gramscis genuinely new addition to the concept of hegemony, with its extension and specification in the notion of a hegemonic apparatus (see Bollinger and Koivisto 2001 and 2009). With this decisive concept, Gramsci attempted to think the dialectical relationality of a series of structured institutions and organizational forms of political and seeming non-political 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 frequently noted, the expansion of the hegemonic apparatus of the bourgeoisie had involved not merely 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 in order to become a social group able to offer leadership to the society as a whole, creating the 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 distributions of power. This historical formation of a bourgeois hegemonic apparatus occurred concretely in initiatives such as newspapers, publishing houses, educational institutions, social associations, sporting clubs and cultural networks, in variable articulations, depending upon the specific social formation;26 in short, the wide variety of activities that structure and organize modern societies in their complexity as organizations from above of associations from below, according to the paradigm of modern transcendent sovereignty. The decisive transition in this element of Gramscis research was the attempt to conceive of the formation of an alternative network of proletarian hegemonic apparatuses, one that would not be dedicated to reinforcing the current organization of society and its inequalities but which would rather open the way towards the abolition of exploitative and oppressive social relations. This necessitated reflection on the distinctive form of a proletarian hegemonic apparatus, corresponding to and reinforcing its radically non-bourgeois content. To use the words of Marxs reflections on the Paris Commune, Gramsci was attempting to theorize the formation of hegemonic apparatuses that would be expansive rather than repressive (Marx and Engels 19752005, vol. 22: 334), which would begin a process of permanent revolution in the midst of capitalist domination, as an autonomous mode of organization of an antagonistic political power.27

Hegemony of the workers movement

This analysis of the institutional forms of different types of hegemonic projects is accompanied by the fourth moment of Gramscis integral concept of hegemony: the notion of a hegemony of the workers movement. Central to his political activism before the Prison Notebooks, as his carceral researches progressed Gramsci argued for the hegemony of the working-class movement with increasing urgency. At first sight, this argument 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 deployment of the concept of hegemony in order to analyse the more complex political formations of the West. After all, it has often been claimed that Gramsci was fundamentally 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 has even been asserted that Gramscis concept of hegemony represents the beginning of a post-Marxism, which logically should reject the Marxist critique of political economy and 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 the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, including and especially in its fascist variant. As Alberto 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 social formations because it is an organization for the production, accumulation and expansion of 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 organization, or simply the activity of one class or class fraction (for instance, the supposedly traditional 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 which are condensed and expressed the structures and contradictions of modern society. Modern capitalist 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 the accumulation of capital by means of the private property of the means of production by one class that is, the bourgeoisies successful claim to the juridical right to appropriate the surplus-value produced in the distinctively unequal equality of the wage labourcapital relation. Any movement to transform modern societies in which the capitalist mode of production is dominant must therefore reckon accounts with this fundamental organizing principle, which continually produces, reproduces and overdetermines the relations of subalternity that traverse capitalist society, both within and beyond strictly economic relations. In the first and not the last instance, such a revolutionary movement must challenge the dominance of one minoritarian class, on the basis of the interests of all other classes in the society, by addressing directly and forcefully what the Communist Manifesto refers to as the property question, the material basis for subalternity in all its forms. Leadership, or in other words, the instability of uneven tendencies towards transformation rather than the equilibrium of order; politics as a tendentially unifying project of 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 it is the task of a militant communist movement to politicize. Far from a left-wing variant of the state-centric dimensions of modern political thought, Gramscis dialectical chain of hegemonic politics represents a radical alternative. It constitutes a movement from a complex analysis of historically existing forms of domination towards the elaboration of an even more complex theory of alternative political organization.

Hegemony and passive revolution

In light of this thematization of the dialectical unfolding of the concept of hegemony as a research project, we can now resituate the concept of passive revolution. Rather than deducing hegemony from passive revolution, as the mechanism of its realization, it becomes possible to understand the extent to which passive revolution represents a deformation of hegemonic politics, or as a precise organizational obstacle to its extensive practice. In particular, this thematization of the concept of hegemony enables us to understand the limitation of the concept of passive revolution, as a stage in the development 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 a strategic 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 hegemony, 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 existing 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 Italian state in the Risorgimento. It was a process in which the dominant classes managed to exclude the popular classes from autonomous and organized participation in the process of modernization (Q 1, 44: 4054: FebruaryMarch 1930; Q 8, 25: 957: January 1932). In a second instance, beginning in late 1930, Gramsci began to extend the concept, in a comparative manner, in order to analyse other social formations, such as Germany, which seemed to have gone through a similar contradictory process of (economic) modernization without (political) modernization, lacking a radical Jacobin moment 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, from 1932 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 hegemony as such, with fascism in Italy as merely its current form (Q 8, 236: 10889: April 1932; 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 political modernitys descent into a rationalized and bureaucratic iron cage. Many interpretations have stopped at this point. They fail to note that Gramsci made at least two further decisive steps in the development of the concept of passive revolution, which fundamentally transform its significance. After he had considerably expanded the originally exceptionally Italian notion of the passive revolution of the Risorgimento to an international terrain, Gramsci then began to ask himself whether such an unbridled theoretical development could not have negative political consequences. He returned to his notebooks in order to develop the concept further in an explicitly theoretical register (as opposed 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 meditation on central themes in Marxs Preface of 1859, which he had also translated at the beginning of his incarceration, and which he read, in a novel fashion, as an argument against all forms of determinism. In 1933 Gramsci argued that the concept of passive revolution could have a concrete 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 intransigently sets all its forces in motion (Q 15, 62: 1827: JuneJuly 1933). In other words, the concept of passive revolution needed to be confronted by the potential for a process of de-pacification and active revolution by and within the action of the popular classes.

The modern Prince

It is precisely in this period, from 1932 onwards, that Gramsci deepens his novel theory of 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 the historical reality of passive revolution can only be rationally comprehended and organizationally 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 organizational forms synthesized in this dramatic and mythical Machiavellian figure. Having overcome the risk of fatalism in the concept of passive revolution, Gramscis theoretical energies turned to the depiction of the modern Prince, conceived as the simultaneous representation 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 reception of 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 intellectual and moral reform (Q 8, 21: 953: JanuaryFebruary 1932), or for the modern political party in general, as distinctive synthesis of the normative, motivational and executive sources of the democratic ethos that underwrites modern mass societies (White and Ypi 2010: 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 person, a concrete individual. It can be only an organism. [ . . . ] This organism is already given 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 1932 to 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 tripartite theory of the fundamental elements required for the existence of a political party: a mass element; a principal cohesive element; and an intermediate element, which articulates the first [mass] element with the second [cohesive element] and maintains contact 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 on the modern Prince as a new organizational form in the same period when his disagreements with 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 novel addition to Marxist class analysis with the concept subaltern social groups. This concept is not limited to the classes exploited in the capitalist labour process, but includes all social groups oppressed and consigned to the margins of history (Q 25: 2277). Finally, it is also in these years that Gramsci continues to emphasize the need for a constituent assembly, as the 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 research on the proposal of the Constituente, see Vacca 2012). The modern Prince represents the synthetic form into which all of these currents of Gramscis research flow. Each element is decisive; only by considering all of them, and their integral relation, do we grasp the distinctiveness of Gramscis return to Machiavelli.30

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For these reasons, Gramscis modern Prince should not be understood as a mere codeword 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 Machiavellis not-yet-existing Prince, Gramscis final mediations proposed a new practice and form of 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. The modern Prince is not a concrete individual, or a single centralized entity, but a dynamic collective process, which aims at nothing less than a totalizing expansion across the entire social 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 articulation of difference in terms of a chain of equivalence, or of unification, as would be suggested by the formalism inherent to Laclau and Mouffes interpretation of hegemony. Instead, the modern Prince represents the production of the coherence of diverse elements, which are engaged in relations of reciprocal translation that enriches, rather than reduces, each of its constituent elements.31 In short, the modern Prince should be understood in its fullest sense as this broader civilizational dynamic of re-activation and the emergence of the part of no part (Ranci` ere 1999) from the experience of subalternity that 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 party that emerges from this process is of a distinctively new type. Similarly, for the same reason, the proposal of the modern Prince cannot be reduced to the type of political formalism that has dominated political modernity, from Hobbes to Rousseau 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 a laboratory-party, it is a form that is merely the expression of a content that constitutively exceeds it. The modern Prince, as it develops, revolutionises the whole system of intellectual and moral relations [ . . . ] the Prince takes the place of the divinity or the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis for a modern laicism and for a complete 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 type should thus not be understood as the formation of a political subject, as a unified centre of intention and initiative, or an instrument or machine, in Webers famous phrase from Politics as Vocation (1994: 339). Rather, it is an always provisional condensation of relations of force that continuously modify the composition of the modern Prince as a collective organism, and as an expansive revolutionary process in movement. Above all, the integral concept of the modern Prince, as both a broader civilizational dynamic and as a novel institutional process of social transformation, represents in an active sense a new type of political culture that would be capable of valorizing constituent power as the basis for a new social organization, instead of deforming it in a pregiven constitutional form that is, a form of domination. In such a conception, Gramsci argued, one cannot construct a system of constitutional law of the traditional type, but rather, merely propose a series of fundamental principles that posit the end of the state as its 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, mutuality and collective self-determination.

A prefigurative vocabulary of contemporary radical politics

The last years have witnessed a fundamental transformation in the international political climate. After the long winter of neoliberalism, new but still fragile conceptions of the world are beginning to circulate, from the continuing Arab revolutions, to Occupy, to anti-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 restabilize the inherent contradictions of its regime of accumulation. What these new movements need are theories that will help them to increase their capacity to act, to make explicit the new political perspectives that are implicit in them, in a practical state. Above all, these movements 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 foundation of a new type of society: from critique towards constitution. I would suggest that the dialectical development of Gramscis research into the nature of hegemonic politics, the historical reality of passive revolution, and the potential formation of a modern Prince might be understood today as a prefigurative vocabulary with which to comprehend and to strengthen the diversity of these contemporary mobilizations of resistance and rebellion. Raymond Williams once famously argued that any possible future socialist reorganization of society would necessarily be more and not less complex than the relations 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 that not only should socialism be understood as more complex, but so also must be the organizational 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 the Italian 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, see Crehan (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 Mouffes reading 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). This interpretation was most influentially formulated in Bobbio (1979 [1969]). For critical readings of its presuppositions, see Texier (1979); Anderson (1976); Thomas (2009: 15996); Opratko (2012). For readings that attempt to argue for the superannuation of Gramscis concept 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 American studies in particular. For a reconstruction of usages of hegemony in ancient Greek political thought, see Fontana (2000) and DOrsi (2008). On geopolitical uses of the concept of hegemony in the Communist International, see Anderson (1976) and Buci-Glucksmann (1980 [1975]). 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). For an influential example of this reading, see Cox (1987, 1993). 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). Such a reading of hegemony as a form of domination is particularly noticeable in Michael Burawoys project of a sociological Marxism (Burawoy 2003, 2012). Batess suggestion that Gramscis concept of hegemony can be characterized as political leadership based on the consent of the led (Bates 1975: 352) effectively represents it as similar 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). For a now classic study of the constitutive and politically productive incompletion of the Prison Notebooks, see Gerratana (1997). For studies of the concept of passive revolution, see Thomas (2006), Voza (2004) and Liguori and Voza (2009). The Prison Notebooks were first published in Italy in an edited thematic edition in the late 1940s and 1950s. This edition was the basis for many early translations, including the internationally influential Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1971). It was only in 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 the editorship 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 photographic reproductions of Gramscis original notebooks was published in 2009. This transition back to a Hobbesian model of order was explicitly theorized by Paggi (1984: x). 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 tendency affiliated with Marxism Today in the UK in the 1980s, which had an important impact upon 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). The permanent seminar of the International Gramsci society has given rise to a significant conceptual vocabulary (Frosini and Liguori 2004) and a monumental Dizionario gramsciano, involving hundreds of scholars from around the world (Liguori and Voza 2009). The Fondazione

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

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). The development of these moments is thus dialectical in the sense of an open-ended experiential 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. References to Gramscis Prison Notebooks [Quaderni del carcere] follow the internationally established standard of notebook number (Q), number of note (), followed by page reference to the Italian critical edition: Gramsci 1975. Lo Piparo (1979) emphasizes Gramscis indebtedness to his previous university study of historical linguistics, while Bellamy and Schechter (1993) emphasize the Italian dimensions of Gramscis thought. These pre-existing elements, however, were fundamentally transformed by Gramscis encounter with the Bolshevik debates. Archival research undertaken by myself and Craig Brandist in Moscow, thanks to a British Academy research grant, has uncovered new materials related to Gramscis period in Russia, including his encounter with the concept of hegemony. This material and critical commentary is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series, published by Brill. The first element is that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led. The entire science 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 the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer necessary? (Q 15, 4: 1752). For an exploration of the development of the complex meaning of the notion of subaltern social groups in the Prison Notebooks, stressing that it should not be understood as a mere codeword for (economic) class, but should instead be understood as a novel addition to the political vocabulary of marxism, see Green (2011). On the notion of hegemonic politics as the production of new intellectualities, see Sotiris (2013). 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 as Rotary, 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. The concept of permanent revolution plays a central role in the elaboration of Gramscis theory of hegemony. See Q 10I, 12: 12345; Q 13, 7; 15657. For an analysis of Gramscis deep engagement with the critique of political economy throughout the Prison Notebooks, see Kr atke (2011). See in particular the analysis of relations of force and the relationship between structure and superstructure in Q 13, 7: 157889. Furthermore, I would suggest that Gramscis concept of the modern Prince is contained not only in the notes that explicitly cite Machiavelli or discuss the political party. Rather, the concept is also implicitly developed in the roughly 16 notebooks (that is, the majority of the 29 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 attentive readers as a mass of fragments, which often do not speak of political organization at all, but rather cultural, socio-economic or historical themes (linguistics, Fordism, the development of 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 terrains 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 bourgeois modernity 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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