Abstract
Peter D. Thomas’s reassessment of Gramsci’s key philosophical concepts is of the utmost significance for the revaluation of Marxism as an “identity of theory and praxis” (Thomas 2009: 380). Furthermore, this novel reading of the Prison Notebooks emphasizes Gramsci’s contribution as crucial in ensuring the validity of Marxism in the age of cynical neoliberalism. The general aim of this book is to overcome the contemporary post-Marxist misapprehensions concerning the possibility of creating a socialist hegemony (Wood 1986). Whereas these post-Marxist thinkers such as Laclau and Mouffe subdivide Gramsci’s corpus into several autonomous research topics, Thomas succeeds in realigning the Prison Notebooks as a coherent project. Thomas shows in a convincing manner that Gramsci expanded the basic tenets of Theses on Feuerbach whereby theory itself “is to be understood as a determinate activity alongside other activities with its own specific tasks to fulfil, a theoretical ‘moment’ that can be immanent to the social practices it seeks to comprehend because those practices are already immanent to it” (Thomas 2009: 363).
The first two chapters introduce a synthesis of the erroneous interpretations of Althusser and Anderson. These chapters are necessary to counter their prevalent ideas on Gramsci which still tend to dominate current debates. In addition, Thomas states that Althusser and Gramsci represent the last two great debates on the theoretical conjuncture of Marxism and are necessary as a point of departure. Althusser’s critique was permeated with his theoretical anti-humanism and opposition to the supposed Hegelian expressive totality. The author therefore continuously engages in the Althusserian tradition to discover the “contradictions that plagued the former’s reading of Gramsci” (Thomas 2009: 35). In “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” Anderson sets out the classic case for the reintegration of Gramsci into Western Marxism. The result is a reconstruction by “detours via detours” (Thomas 2009: 52) presenting Gramsci without the innovativeness of the research program in the Prison Notebooks. Anderson’s influence initiated a definite reading of Gramsci in regard to concepts like hegemony, civil society, and political society. Anderson’s version of the research project presupposes the impossibility that Gramsci sublated Croce or former Marxian thinkers, which resulted in the novelty of his concepts. This erroneous perspective has been reproduced by numerous authors in the 1980s, although it cannot be denied that early forms of criticism already existed (Buci Glucksmann 1980: 174-175). Thomas agrees with the Italian expert Francioni that Anderson alienated Gramsci from his research program in order to create his own rebuttal of the Eurocommunist interpretation. “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” is principally flawed because it lacks methodological and philological accuracy (Thomas 2009: 80). Nonetheless, Thomas and Anderson have a mutual goal: to refute the myth of inconsistency in the Prison Notebooks. Anderson’s misinterpretation has brought forth key philological assertions about the very nature of Gramsci’s concepts. This sharp scepticism is already widely shared by recent Italian research, and Thomas’s expertise on this matter allows us to rethink the old paradigms of the 1970s and 1980s.
Chapter three discusses the literary form of the Prison Notebooks, which have caused tremendous confusion understanding Gramsci’s itinerary. This chapter comprises the spine of Thomas’s venture, showing that the philosophy of praxis opened a completely new road to comprehend the dialectical unity between Marxism as a concrete Weltanschauung on the one hand, and the potential to grasp its own formation within a historical context on the other hand (Thomas 2009: 253). It is commonly presupposed that the specific nature of the conceptual language—“the codewords”— of the notebooks existed because Gramsci had to apply self-censorship in order to elude the prison guards (Thomas 2009: 53). At the same time he “rarely invents new terms or concepts instead works with previous existing terminology that his readers will be familiar with from other authors or contexts . . . and transforms them” (Ives 2004: 65). Thomas convincingly shows that Gramsci’s language has very specific purposes and he warns that it would be imprudent to suggest self-censorship is the reason why he wrote his Prison Notebooks in this peculiar way. Furthermore, Gramsci’s critique of classical philosophical concepts—for example Croce’s historicism—only serves as a tool to create a complete new way of hegemonic thinking. Researchers such as Finocchiaro only partially reconstruct the critique but never integrate its content into the overall hegemonic project (Finocchiaro 1988: 8-27). Through this method, Gramsci imbued existing concepts with a completely new meaning. Thomas warns the reader that nothing should be taken for granted in Gramsci’s labyrinth of meaning and that the seeming familiarity of the concepts possess unknown dimensions (Thomas 2009: 93). Thomas gives two concrete examples of shifting meaning and content: (1) the state, integral state, and political society; (2) base, superstructure, and ideology (Thomas 2009: 95-102). These shifts have to be placed in the overarching composition of the notebooks containing three chronological phases. The fragmentary character can therefore be regarded as a deliberate, incomplete, and open articulated totality. “These notes . . . thus internalise the ‘historically’ incomplete situations they attempt to document and to analyse” (Thomas 2009: 123).
Chapter four discusses the categories of passive revolution and integral state within the analysis of the historical transformations of bourgeois hegemony. Gramsci’s research on the integral state presents the reader with the historical dialectical process between civil society and political society within the unified framework of the state-form. Thomas sketches the crisis of early liberal modernity and reconstructs Gramsci’s inquiry into which methods were employed by the bourgeoisie in defence of the capitalist society. The interpenetration of civil and political society created a completely new form of institutionalization of class struggle, which sublated the contradictions of organic crisis into a new unity called the integral state (Thomas 2009: 133-52). Chapter five integrates these categories into the machinery of hegemony which differentiates and expands the concepts of state and society. Thomas denies any opposition between coercion and consent because they belong to the same unitary political power similar to the unitary distinction between civil and political society. “Hegemony . . . in civil society is necessarily comprehended in political society and overdetermined by it” (Thomas 2009: 194). Surprisingly, Thomas does not explicitly mention the operational “methodological meta-level,” although Gramsci clearly masters a very specific way of dialectical thinking throughout his differentiation of the concept of hegemony. At the same time the author refers to the Marx-Hegel connection on other topics (Thomas 2009: 170-90). Chapter six elaborates the unique character of Gramsci’s concepts within the history of Marxist political philosophical thought including a specific reference to Lenin’s legacy.
Chapters seven to nine are without any doubt the most innovative sections. Thomas tackles the three most disputed concepts: “absolute historicism,” “absolute humanism,” and “absolute immanence.” “These concepts should be regarded as three ‘attributes’ of the constitutively incomplete project of the development of Marxism as the philosophy of praxis . . . can be considered as brief resumés for the elaboration of an autonomous research programme in Marxist philosophy today, as an intervention on the Kampfplatz of contemporary philosophy that attempts to inherit and to renew Marx’s original critical and constructive gesture” (Thomas 2009: 448). Gramsci’s immanent critique of metaphysical traditions paralleled the Althusserian research project on the epistemological break between classical forms of philosophy and Marx. Thomas contrasts Althusser’s triad “ideology-philosophy-science” with Gramsci’s “politics-history-philosophy” as well. Althusser’s critique on humanist Marxism and Stalinism resembles the same strategy employed by Gramsci concerning the critique of Croce and Bukharin. The fundamental difference is that the Althusserian project created its own pitfall stemming from the inability to integrate the tension between synchronic and diachronic time. Gramsci’s “non-contemporaneity of the present” allows the reader to become aware of the very complex nature of class struggle as a “symptomatic index.” “The present, as the time of class struggle, is necessary and essentially ‘out of joint,’ fractured by the differential times of different class projects” (Thomas 2009: 285). “Absolute humanism” redefines the historical evolution of men as subjects of class struggle. Humans as subjects make their history according to the configuration of social relations within a social formation. The result is a complex series of mediations between subjects and their social structures. Each and every mediation is therefore a continuous becoming and a convergence of ideology and relations of production (Thomas 2009: 393-96). Furthermore, “absolute historicism” negated the old status questionis—as Marx did—on the hypostatized opposition between subjectivism and objectivism. The philosophy of praxis as “absolute immanence” emphasizes the dialectical process between people and their historical context, and truth is “located in the world rather than transcending it” (Thomas 2009: 306). Science and theory were and will be “a particular mode of historical being” (Thomas 2009: 358). The scientific research helps to constitute a socialist hegemony and to transform everyday common sense into a critical self-awareness (Thomas 2009: 373-74). The philosophy of praxis is founded on the unitary identity of difference between theory and practice. This knowledge should enable the organic Marxist intellectual to engage with the daily class struggle.
Thomas single-handedly redefined and redesigned the research program on the very nature of the Prison Notebooks. Thomas’s Gramsci could well be the solution to another seeming aporia, the Althusser-Thompson-Anderson debate. In time, researchers will take advantage of Thomas’s groundbreaking work. It should be read by everyone who is concerned about revitalizing Marxian thought. Intended for both graduate students and Gramsci scholars, this book has to be read in combination with cited works on Gramsci’s thought.