The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. Perry Anderson
the most substantial study of the Prison Notebooks to appear in recent years has been Peter Thomas’s work The Gramscian Moment, which came out in 2009. Nearly half of this is devoted to refutation of ‘Antinomies’, along lines inspired by Francioni, and following him, the authority of Buci-Glucksmann.17 The centrepiece of the exercise is once more the argument, that Gramsci’s variant usages of ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ are perfectly consistent with each other, derived from an ‘integral’ conception of the state including both. Thomas traces such an understanding of the state back to Hegel, and argues that in his development of this notion—not in his concern with hegemony—lay Gramsci’s real originality. For Anglophone readers, The Gramscian Moment thus performs the service of introducing what Thomas describes as the philological acquisitions of ‘the most recent season of Gramscian scholarship’ on an expanded scale.18 There is, it is true, an element of oddity in the performance. Motivating the length of his critique of ‘Antinomies’, Thomas maintains that ‘it is the most well-known and influential of all studies of Gramsci in English’, which ‘won wide assent’ as ‘representative of a more general received image of Gramsci’, acting indeed as a veritable ‘touchstone’ in the field.19 The most cursory glance at the extant literature, overwhelmingly dominated by approaches close in spirit to that of Thomas himself, suffices to dispel any such idea.
More significant than this quirk is the apolitical cast of a work whose declared aim is to ‘repropose a distinctively Marxist philosophical research programme’.20 Across four hundred and fifty pages on Gramsci, there is scarcely one concrete reference to what is known of his politics, let alone to the politics of his reception, in Italy or elsewhere—not a single mention of Athos Lisa’s report on Gramsci’s political lectures in prison, inconvenient from so many points of view. Though in this too following in the footsteps of Francioni, the reasons for such silence are plainly not the same, since Thomas is above suspicion of any sympathy with the Historic Compromise, or what preceded and followed it. What might explain it? The answer, in all probability, lies in dependence on the milieu of post-communist scholars in Italy whose labours The Gramscian Moment extols, and whose sensibilities any more robust or explicit political standpoint would offend.21 It would be a mistake, however, to narrow this tacit connexion to a mere question of politesse. A shared premise is visibly at work, one that is widespread in intellectual history at large, beyond the study of Gramsci. This is the assumption—so common as to be virtually automatic—that the thought of any great mind must be as coherent as it is august, and that the highest task of commentary on it is to demonstrate its fundamental underlying unity. The reality is just the opposite: the thought of a genuinely original mind will typically exhibit—not randomly but intelligibly—significant structural contradictions, inseparable from its creativity, on which attempts to impose or extract an artificial homogeneity can only end in simplification and distortion. Conspicuous examples are the fate of three of the most powerful political thinkers of the early modern period, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau, all of whose oeuvres are riven by central contradictions, each regularly victim of misguided efforts to apply Davidson’s principle of charity to them. In the grip of this eminently conventional assumption, the aim of any well-meaning study of Gramsci becomes a demonstration of its higher unity, producing more or less ingenious exercises in what ancient and mediaeval wisdom termed ‘saving the appearances’.22 Thomas’s book is not to be especially blamed for an error that is so general, nor reduced to it, since the better part of the work is concerned with the more strictly philosophical side of the Prison Notebooks.
In the case of Gramsci, there is an obvious contrast between what Gramsci himself believed and what became standard usages of his texts. Setting aside the record of manipulations by officialdom, this was not purely a product of distortion by subsequent interpreters. It was possible because Gramsci’s intellectual explorations contain many divergent emphases, which he was under little pressure to reconcile or summarise. They do not aim at the construction of a system: there is an evident lack of anxiety about the chance of contradictions, as well as a series of circumlocutions and omissions due to censorship. Moreover, within the form of jotted enquiry that he chose, it is clear that what mainly interested Gramsci was terrain uncharted by historical materialism—questions that the Marxist tradition had said little about, taking much of what it did say for granted. The result of these two circumstances—the unbinding character of the mosaic, exploratory form, and the unspoken nature of certain background assumptions—was a composition that dispenses with criteria of expository coherence and protocols of reference to the Comintern canon. If Gramsci had ever been able to work the materials of the Quaderni up for publication, he would certainly have attended to these. We can say this with confidence from his pre-prison writings alone. The form, not unlike that of a commonplace book, that Gramsci’s reflections took in prison rendered it quite possible to develop ideas in not always consistent directions, sometimes leaving a logical route to conclusions at variance with what we know on other grounds he believed. To say, as I did, that on such occasions Gramsci ‘lost his way’, was overly dramatic, in keeping with a rhetorical strand in the text as a whole. But that Gramsci himself was well aware of the provisional and potentially fallible character of his reflections is clear. As he wrote: ‘The notes contained in this notebook, as in the others, were jotted down as quick prompts pro memoria. They are all to be punctiliously revised and checked, since they certainly contain imprecisions, false connexions, anachronisms. Written without access to books to which they refer, it is possible that after checking, they should be radically corrected, as the very opposite of what they say proves true.’23
That my essay was open to a different sort of criticism became clear to me on reading Eric Hobsbawm’s reflections on Gramsci, a few months after ‘Antinomies’ appeared in NLR. In March 1977 he gave a short paper to a conference on Gramsci in London, published in Marxism Today in July, which he expanded into an address to the large fortieth anniversary conference organised by the PCI in Florence in December, subsequently published in 1982.24 A quarter of a century later, the initial London version became a chapter in his collection of writings on Marxism, How to Change the World, which appeared in 2011.25 But the more developed version delivered in Florence remains essential reading. In either variant, within the space of scarcely more than a dozen pages, Hobsbawm produced the best general characterisation of Gramsci as a revolutionary thinker that has yet been written, at a succinct depth without equal in the literature.
Gramsci’s key originality, he argued, lay in the way in which he theorised problems both of revolutionary strategy for the conquest of power from capital, and of the construction of a society beyond capital, in a common conceptual framework based on his idea of hegemony. It was a mistake to stress only the first, without giving due weight to the second. Gramsci was fond of military metaphors, but never a prisoner of them, since ‘for a soldier war is not peace, even if it is the continuation of politics by other means and victory is, professionally speaking, an end in itself’, whereas for Gramsci ‘the struggle to overthrow capitalism and build socialism is essentially a continuum, in which the actual transfer of power is only one moment’.26 It followed that ‘the basic problem of hegemony is not how revolutionaries come to power, though this question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing and unavoidable rulers, but as guides and leaders’.27 Here it was important to remember that unlike either Marx or Lenin, Gramsci had in post-war Turin direct experience of work in a mass labour movement and what it meant to lead one, which gave him a much greater sense of the cultural transformations required, absent international war, to overturn the existing order and to build a new society that would last. Socialism meant not just socialisation of production, fundamental though that was, but socialisation in the sociological sense of the word, of people into new human relationships and structures of genuinely popular rule, dissolving the barriers between state and civil society. The hegemony that had to be won not just before and during, but after a revolution, could only be achieved by active mass participation and consensual education, ‘the school of a new consciousness, a fuller humanity for the socialist future’.28 In Russia, the dangers of a bureaucratism crushing any such prospect were plainly one of his preoccupations in prison.
This was a vision, Hobsbawm remarked, based on a general theory