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Gramsci: Hegemony and Revolution

Hegemony is widely associated with the genius of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian revolutionary incarcerated by Mussolini's Fascist regime in the 1920s and 1930s. Of course, he did not invent the term but, more accurately, reinvented it in the notes and essays he wrote during a lengthy spell in prison that, eventually, killed him. In those writings, Gramsci employed 'hegemony' to reimagine revolution as a process of building popular consent to a new form of state.

But why would Gramsci pursue a theory about consent while under conditions of physical coercion? Surely, his incarceration is evidence that force is the ultimate tool of social control? Gramsci's point was that even authoritarian regimes such as Fascism, which ruled Italy for twenty years, needed willing support across some sectors of society. Modern states, he argued, increasingly aspire to 'intellectual and moral leadership' of their populations, however much physical force is also required. The capacity to lead by consent was what he called 'hegemony' (egemonia) and, in class-divided societies like Italy's, it was usually combined with degrees of coercion. As we shall see, Gramsci was a communist so, for him, hegemony helped in exploring the conditions for leading a revolution to overthrow capitalism. It put into perspective how a whole socio-political order could be established, sustained, or transformed. His prison writings offer a comprehensive account of how domination is entwined with elements of political and cultural leadership. For that reason, Gramsci's insights are a major benchmark in the fortunes of hegemony.

Gramsci's Fusion

Gramsci drew upon two prominent intellectual traditions in developing his ideas. As a Marxist, he shared in a tradition of revolutionary thought that conceived social classes as the primary agents of historical change. In particular, he was influenced by the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Ilyich 'Lenin', who in October 1917 successfully overthrew the Tsarist regime in Russia. The Russian Revolution was of enormous significance for Gramsci and his generation. It was demonstrable proof that an entire political order could be replaced through organized mass action. Lenin provided a model of revolution that centred on the 'vanguard' party - a disciplined, centralized organization of professional revolutionaries that led, on behalf of the working class, the effort to overthrow the state and instil a new order (Lenin 1992). In debating the conditions for revolution, particularly in countries with partial capitalist development, Lenin and other Russian Marxists had used 'hegemony' to describe the leading role of the working class over its allies in preparing for the seizure of power (see Anderson 1976-7; Lester 2000: 29-51).

Gramsci also inherited ideas rooted in a distinctively Italian political tradition that stretched back to Niccolò Machiavelli (see Fontana 1993). In that tradition, politics was conceived as an ongoing process of building and maintaining a state, securing and extending its rule over potential rivals. Italian thinkers frequently employed the dichotomy of force and consent to understand authority (Femia 1998). Rather than imagine a 'social contract' as the founding principle of legitimate rule - which established domination once and for all - they understood authority to be intrinsically unstable. Politics was a constant practice of maintaining power by pragmatically balancing brute force and willing consent. It did not matter, strictly speaking, what motivated consent: fear, love, or self-interest were all much the same. When nineteenth-century Italian thinkers later employed hegemony to imagine the nation state, they did so in this sense of stealthily expanding consent, rather than force alone, over an otherwise fractious and culturally divided society (Jacobitti 1981).

So 'hegemony' was already a term in use before Gramsci appropriated it. It underscored the strategic priorities in founding and maintaining political order where authority could not be taken for granted - either through the primacy of one class in leading a coalition (Russia) or cumulatively extending a national base of support (Italy). Gramsci fused these traditions in a unique way. Revolution in developed capitalism, he argued, should not be aimed, narrowly, at the violent seizure of power (as Russian revolutionaries argued). Rather, it entailed preparing a new order by displacing an existing hegemony and cultivating a new one. But that did not mean espousing some benign, but empty, ideal of 'national unity'. At the root of any hegemony was an effort to generate a collective subject from the material conditions and experiences of a distinct social class.

In his prison writings, Gramsci combined these ideas to assemble a distinctive vocabulary for exploring politics as a struggle for hegemony: 'integral state', 'war of position' and 'war of manoeuvre', 'historic bloc', 'passive revolution', and so on. These terms form an essential part of his legacy and are vital to its later applications. But, as I shall note, his framework also contains unresolved tensions and challenges for those who want to take them further.

Revolution and the Italian State

What prompted Gramsci to develop the concept of hegemony? Of all the places to begin thinking about hegemony, Italy in the early twentieth century may seem the most unlikely. The 'liberal' state - formally unified by 1871 - was notoriously weak and unpopular. The Catholic Church refused to recognize its authority, political elites were aloof from the wider public, and governments were inclined to impose order on society by force. Italy's new citizens were, in turn, resentful of its power over them and frequently resisted it. This was a country of regions, diverse local cultures, multiple dialects, and profound material inequality. That was especially so in its underdeveloped, rural South where the new state was often experienced as a colonial force (Clark 1984). Italy had been legally unified, yet - contra the national communion envisioned by advocates of unification, such as Giuseppe Mazzini - in reality the liberal order remained precarious.

It was because the liberal state was built without widespread popular consent - no 'civil religion' or national sentiment unified it - that Gramsci eventually elaborated his own approach to hegemony (Bellamy and Schecter 1993). His aspiration, like that of so many radical intellectuals angry at a glaringly incomplete unification, was to replace this liberal order on 'the periphery of modernity' (Urbinati 1998) with one that properly incorporated its popular classes - mostly peasants who worked on the land, as well as a small industrial working class concentrated in the North. Like others, too, he saw this as a process of generating a modern ruling class responsive to the lives and needs of ordinary people (see Bellamy 1987).

Gramsci had been born to a family of Albanian descent on the island of Sardinia, in Italy's South. He witnessed, first-hand, the liberal state's social and administrative inadequacies - its chronic poverty, the contempt of its rulers for people's lives, and the corrupt, inefficient ways the regime functioned (Davidson 1977). After moving, in 1911, to the northern city of Turin, he became a socialist, committed to overthrowing capitalism and modernizing the state. Gramsci was soon a radical journalist and commentator. A speaker of Sardinian and a student of linguistics at university, he was - unlike most socialists - uniquely attuned to the country's fragmented national culture (see Ives 2004). For him, revolution was the only way properly to integrate the mass of the population into a political order with a shared ethos, like more developed states such as Britain and France. Socialism therefore meant educating the working classes into a morally disciplined community to lead the nation as a whole. He therefore rejected the dominant Marxist tradition, whose crude 'scientific' doctrine assumed the so-called 'iron laws' of history would bring about capitalism's inevitable collapse. The young Gramsci was influenced, instead, by 'idealists' who emphasized the importance of cultural education, moral rigour, and the power of the will in shaping history (see Bellamy 1990).

The First World War unleashed a profound, levelling violence that shattered Europe's systems of class hierarchies and closed, elite politics. As imperial powers and constitutional monarchies across Europe tottered under the pressure of popular resentments, Gramsci judged the Italian liberal order to be effectively obsolete (Vacca 2020). In Italy in 1919-20, sustained strikes and factory occupations brought industry to a standstill. Similar uprisings took place in Germany and Hungary. Gramsci saw a chance for workers to begin generating their own form of state within the organization of industrial production (Gramsci 1977). Inspired by the Russian Revolution and its 'soviet' system of workers' councils, he argued that Italy's factories might prefigure a new form of democratic authority based on workers' self-management (see Clark 1979; Schecter 1991). A shared mentality as...