For citation here, I refer where possible to Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and trans. by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers , 1971), hereafter cited as Selections. The full critical edition, Quaderni del carcere (Torino: Einaudi editore, 1975) is cited as Quaderni.
2.
This seems to be the problem underlying Perry Anderson's 'The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci', New Left Review (No. 100, November 1976 — January 1977) which purports to find inconsistencies in Gramsci's use of concepts.
3.
On this point see E.P. Thompson, 'The Poverty of Theory' in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978) which represents an historicist position analogous to that of Gramsci in opposition to the abstract philosophical marxism of Louis Althusser. For Althusser's position see, 'Marxism is not Historicism', in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital trans. by Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books , 1979).
4.
It is said that this was to avoid confiscation of his notes by the prison censor, who, if this is true, must have been particularly slow-witted.
5.
Christine Buci-Gluckmann , Gramsci et l'Etat: Pour une theorie materialiste de la philosophie (Paris: Fayard , 1975) places Gramsci squarely in the Leninist tradition. Hughes Portelli, Gramsci et le bloc historique (Paris: Fayard, 1972) and Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Pour Gramsci (Paris: Fayard, 1973) both contrast Gramsci with Lenin. Buci-Gluckmann's work seems to me to be more fully thought through. See also Chantal Mouffe and Anne Showstack Sassoon, ' Gramsci in France and Italy—A review of the literature, Economy and Society (Vol. 6, No. 1, February 1977), pp. 31-68.
6.
This notion fitted well with Gramsci's assessment of the situation in Italy in the early 1920s; the working class was by itself too weak to carry the full burden of revolution and could only bring about the founding of a new state by an alliance with the peasantry and some petty bourgeois elements. In fact, Gramsci considered the workers' council movement as a school for leadership of such a coalition and his efforts prior to his imprisonment were directed towards building this coalition.
7.
See, Christine Buci-Gluckmann , op. cit, p. 63.
8.
N. Machiavelli, The Prince, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 49-50; and Gramsci, Selections, pp. 169-170.
9.
The term 'Western Europe' refers here to the Britain, France, Germany and Italy of the 1920s and 1930s.
10.
Gramsci, Selections, p. 238.
11.
Gramsci borrowed the term 'passive revolution' from the Neopolitan historian Vincenzo Cuocco (1770-1823), who was active in the early stages of the Risiorgimento. In Cuocco's interpretation, Napoleon's armies had brought a passive revolution to Italy.
12.
Christine Buci-Gluckmann, op. cit, p. 121.
13.
Gramsci, Quaderni, Vol. IV, p. 2632.
14.
See Sorel's discussion of myth and the 'Napoleonic battle' in the letter to Daniel Halevy which introduces his Reflections on Violence trans. by T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (New York: Collier, 1961).
15.
Gramsci, Selections, p. 366.
16.
Ibid, pp. 180-195.
17.
Ibid, p. 176.
18.
Ibid, p. 264.
19.
Ibid, p. 182.
20.
Ibid, p. 116.
21.
Ibid, p. 117.
22.
The dating is tentative and would have to be refined by enquiry into the structural features proper to each period as well as into factors deemed to constitute the breaking points between one period and another. These are offered here as mere notations for a revision of historical scholarship to raise some questions about hegemony and its attendant structures and mechanisms.
23.
Imperialism, which has taken different forms in these periods, is a closely related question. In the first, pax britannica, although some territories were directly administered, control of colonies seems to have been incidental rather than necessary to economic expansion. Argentina, a formally independent country, had essentially the same relationship to the British economy as Canada, a former colony. This, as George Lichtheim noted, may be called the phase of 'liberal imperialism'. In the second period, the so-called 'new imperialism' brought more emphasis on direct political controls. It also saw the growth of capital exports and of the finance capital identified by Lenin as the very essence of imperialism. In the third period, which might be called that of the neo-liberal or monopoly-liberal imperialism, the internationalising of production emerged as the pre-eminent form, supported also by new forms of finance capital (multinational banks and consortia). There seems little point in trying to define some unchanging essence of imperialism but it would be more useful to describe the structural characteristics of the imperialisms which correspond to successive hegemonic and non-hegemonic world orders. For a further discussion of this as regards pax britannica and pax americana, see Robert W. Cox, 'Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory', Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Vol. 10, No. 2, Summer 1981), pp. 126-155.
