Abstract
The Gramsci Industry is still at work, even in post-Fordist times. Enthusiasm for Gramsci has never been so high; yet there are also issues of potential dilution, as the uses his work is set to proliferate, and the sheer volume of available materials makes it difficult to know where to start, or else how to keep up. My advice to students has long been to start with the Letters from Prison, then dive into the Notebooks. But good introductions are also useful, and the text under review may well be the best in English since Showstack Sassoon’s Gramsci’s Politics (1980).
The task that Hoare and Sperber set themselves is clear and comprehensive. First, that life of suffering which set Gramsci apart from many of his more privileged contemporaries. Here there is a clear emphasis on both the intellectual path and the commitment to practical activity, the combination which makes Gramsci so attractive to those who follow him. He was, after all, an intellectual as organizer, a journalist, the figure of the organic intellectual himself, except that the rising class was cut off at the pass by the postsocialist Mussolini. Second, a chart of thought from culture, politics and philosophy to the summit: the idea of hegemony. Third, some applications, which bring Gramsci into the present, but somehow perhaps also lack the sense of necessity to the matters discussed hitherto in the book. The case studies offered here discuss the idea of left/right, and neoliberalism in France and Britain. These studies are coherent, but – for example, in the case of the latter – sidestep the debate between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop, this even though Hall is central to later discussion, and the issue of Thatcherism is such a prime example of hegemony or authoritarian populism. Final excurses take us by Gramsci today, including postcolonialism, post-Marxism, cultural studies, and international political economy, the spread or dilution referred to already. For Gramsci has also been globalized, and not only set loose among the disciplines. These are important developments in Gramsci studies, but they also serve to destabilize the thinking that was so intimately tied to one place – Italy – and really also to one field, politics.
Hoare and Sperber want to argue against the notion of proliferation, or many Gramscis. Their orientation is towards looking to identify and follow his practice, his concrete engagement with the moment or conjuncture first in the south, then in Turin, then in prison, where for the first time Gramsci has the enforced luxury of sustained space for open-ended intellectual work, this even though he is constantly ill, hamstrung and miserable. Themes like coercion, consent, and common senses all loom large here. He was a Sard; he was a hunchback; he was immersed in his own cultures; and he left us no coherent body of work summarizing his theoretical thinking. The famous Notebooks offer hints, and precedents, rather than a developed, theoretically defined project. This is not Bourdieu, neither by place, time, nor intention. In the years of the bienno rosso, in Turin, he was a voluntarist, and was attracted – as were many others to the left – to the example of Red October, not so much because of intimate knowledge of its details but because of an attraction to its animating spirit, or at least what outsiders took that to be: the will to act, to slough off defeatism and indifference, to break out of the crystal palace left behind by the Second International.
Later, in prison after the period of defeat, Gramsci’s view was of course different. The Modern Prince missed its chance; other key concepts, such as Fordism and Americanism, came into play, and as Hoare and Sperber indicate, Gramsci was to remain ambivalent about these, as he was a modernizer; after all, he also came from the south. Historic bloc, passive revolution, all the key hints and ideas in Gramsci here are exercised with clarity and intelligence.
As indicated earlier, what finally follows are the authors’ attempts to apply and extend Gramsci. This gesture is important, and makes good sense; otherwise Gramsci can be made to look like a period museum piece. This is a problem, however, for clearly Gramsci’s thinking is interwar in its markings, ergo the appeal of the post-Marxist Gramsci, as in Laclau and Mouffe. At the same time, populism and authoritarian populism have not been such pressing issues since the 1930s; serious challenges lie before us.
Hoare and Sperber represent the newly rising wave of organic intellectuals. Their book will help educate newer readers and will also stimulate those well familiar with the Sard. This is a serious achievement. We can look forward to what they deliver for us next.