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Gramsci’s Unfinished Critique of Civil Society

Marco Fonseca Glendon College York University

Second Draft Please Contact Before Citing1

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Gramsci's ideas about civil society, like other key ideas found in his notebooks including hegemony, common sense, war of movement and war position, organic intellectuals and historical bloc, must be treated exactly as he wanted them to be treated and not as many of his later followers, readers and interpreters would like to treat them. Throughout his notebooks Gramsci tells us how he wants his ideas to be treated. Here is a clear passage on this:

It is necessary, first of all, to trace the process of the thinker’s intellectual development in order to reconstruct it in accordance with those elements that become stable and permanent - that is, those elements really adopted by the author as his own thought, distinct and superior to the "material" that he had studied earlier and that, at a certain time, he may have found attractive, even to the point of having accepted it provisionally and used it in his critical work or in his work of historical or scientific reconstruction. This precaution is essential, particularly when dealing with a nonsystematic thinker, with a personality in whom theoretical and practical activity are indissolubly intertwined, and with an intellect that is therefore in continuous creation and perpetual movement (II 137).2

It is as if Gramsci had written these words about himself, the nature of his own intellectual endeavour, and the nature of his own intellectual work in prison so as to pre-empt future readers from ascribing to his ideas any kind of either “systematic” (historical materialist) or intrinsically “fragmentary” (postmodernist) character that he did not, could not or refused to give to them because of their essentially tentative and unfinished character. It is as if Gramsci was cautioning us against taking the “fragmentary” nature of his notebooks as a definitive methodological approach for thinking critically – as Buttigieg, the latest editor of his prison notebooks, wants us to do [ref to Buttigieg]. And so, as to emphasize his point, Gramsci writes:

Moreover, among the works of the same author, one must distinguish those that he himself completed and published from those that were not published because unfinished. The content of the latter must be treated with great discretion and caution: it must be regarded as not definitive, at least in that given form; it must be regarded as material still in the process of elaboration, still provisional (II 137).

It is on the basis of these cautionary words, therefore, that I propose to read Gramsci’s critical notes on civil society as formulated in his prison notebooks (and as given to us in excellent translation by Buttigieg) and regard them, well, as an unfinished and thus only provisional critique of civil society. This, indeed, is the central argument of this essay. What Gramsci says of the relationship between Marx and Engels, at the outset of his Prison Notebooks, we can equally say about the relationship between Gramsci himself and his own editors – including Buttigieg:

... if one wants to know Marx, one must look for him above all in his authentic works, published under his own personal direction (II 138-139).

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Since Gramsci does not have “books” per se published under his own personal direction, we must be content either with his pre-prison journalistic work or with his work from prison. Buttigieg’s argument that the notebooks should be read as – effectively – expressions of a philosophical and methodological commitment to the “fragment”, the “detail”, the “parts” is an argument that negates how Gramsci himself regarded his own work and how Gramsci remained explicitly committed to – although was never able to fully develop – a kind of Hegelian Marxist historical materialism, a methodological and philosophical approach rather concerned with totality, centrality, historicity and structurality than with mere fragmentarity or particularity. Although interesting, arguments that retroactively render Gramsci into a precursor of postmodern thought should, thus, be taken with great caution and more as expressions of the literary (actually postmodern and linguistic) training of many of these postmodern scholars than as the underlying logic of Gramsci’s own work. Gramsci’s first clearly articulated view on civil society is found in paragraph thirty eight of the fourth notebook, where Gramsci offers an initial but already detailed discussion of “relations between structure and superstructures” (II 177-188), relations that Gramsci came to regard, in light of his understanding of Marx, as of primary explanatory importance for the life of society. More specifically, the context is a discussion of “relations of forces” and the various “moments or levels” – and combinations – of these forces and, particularly, their articulation through various forms of ever widening and higher forms of political consciousness. Gramsci’s discussion of civil society can thus not be separated from his discussion of the dialectic of structure and superstructure that informs most of his prison notebooks. The first level in the social relation of forces is that of “objective relations”, a “naturalistic” fact that Gramsci argues can be “measured within the systems of the exact or mathematical sciences”, a level that also corresponds to Hegel’s notion of simple determinate being (II 179). At this level, of course, there are no specific cultural, political or economic forms of consciousness on the part of social groups. Here Gramsci deals with pure objectivity, pure facticity, unmediated by any kind of consciousness or discourse, where the formation of social groups – and, presumably, within them individuals – occurs “on the basis of the level of development of the material forces of production” and where “each one of these groups represents a function and a position within production itself” (II 179). Using the language of structuralism, this could be said to be the level of pure structures without subjects or, at least, without clearly articulated subjectivities or forms of consciousness. It is here, Gramsci says, that we encounter a “fundamental alignment of social forces” that ultimately determines whether or not a given society enjoys “sufficient and necessary conditions” for its transformation. The second level is the “political” relation of forces that Gramsci in turn says can be divided into “various moments corresponding to the different levels of political consciousness as they have manifested themselves in history up to now” (II 179). This is Gramsci’s version of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic’s development of being-for-self and self-consciousness. A first moment here is when “consciousness” is born at the “most rudimentary” and “primitive economic level”, that is, at the individual level within what Gramsci calls “fundamental social groups” – particularity in Hegel’s civil society, social classes in Marx. Gramsci thus speaks of an individual merchant or an individual manufacturer “feeling himself in solidarity” with another merchant or another manufacturer. Note that Gramsci emphasizes the

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idea of “feeling of solidarity” with another member of a similar group rather than just self-interest, passions or the inclinations that often move these individuals into action. One-to-one identification, Hegelian recognition appears to Gramsci to be the primary – if “primitive” – experience of political consciousness and he places it as a “first moment” in the development of political relation of forces. A second moment within the second level of “political” relations of forces comes when each individual member of a primary or fundamental social group attains consciousness of the “solidarity of interests among all the members of the social group” although still within the “purely economic sphere” (II 179). Class solidarity as well as class competition develop here. Although this is still a purely “politico-economic phase” of political consciousness, the “question of the state” already appears here in terms of a “rudimentary political equality” posed by those who claim the “right to participate in, modify, and reform administration and legislation within the existing general framework” (II 179). Horizontal equality within particular social groups thus seems to be the primary drive towards the development of the idea and the institution of the state. A third and final moment at the second level of political relations comes when “one becomes conscious of the fact that one’s own ‘corporate’ interests, in their present and future development, go beyond the ‘corporate’ confines – that is, they go beyond the confines of the economic group – and they can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups” (II 179). Here Gramsci performs a kind of reversal of Hegel’s argument about belong to corporations insofar as, in Hegel, the goal of such membership is to address problems in civil society that cannot be addressed by the automatic mechanisms of civil society itself and, at the same time, by linking up with the institutions of the state and thus transcend the limitations and alienation of civil society altogether. But for Gramsci it is at this moment that we reach the “most patently ‘political’ phase” by linking downwards with “subordinate groups” and this “marks the clear-cut transition from the structure [without any consciousness] to complex superstructures” with multiple forms and levels of consciousness. This is also the moment in which “previously germinated ideologies [generated from the structure and from previous generations] come into contact and confrontation with one another” and from where “only one of them – or, at least, a single combination of them – tends to prevail, to dominate, to spread across the entire field, bringing about, in addition to economic and political unity, intellectual and moral unity, not on a corporate but on a universal level” (II 180). It is here also, Gramsci argues, that “the hegemony of a fundamental social group over the subordinate groups” is established or imposed. This is the phase where the very universal, the seemingly contradictory universalism of fundamental rule, the universalism of class hegemony, is born. When a group’s “maximum expansion” is attained through the “organism” of the “state-government” – this being only one possible form of domination – this expansion itself is viewed as the expansion of universality itself. Although what emerges here are simply “unstable equilibriums between the interests of fundamental social groups and the interests of subordinate groups in which the interests of the fundamental group prevail”, these “equilibriums” are nevertheless made possible to the extent that the fundamental group can exercise economic self-restraint rather than “economic selfishness” or to the extent to which the fundamental group attains the goal of universality (II 180). This is thus the phase where “hegemony” – a concept that Gramsci unambiguously attributes to Lenin (II 187) – becomes “universality”. A specific “fundamental social group” brings about

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“intellectual and moral unity” by transforming the “state-government” ensemble into more than a means to expand the interests of the group itself or more than just the executive government of the bourgeoisie – as Marx once famously argued that the state was (ref to Marx). In what is perhaps a truly Gramscian moment in the history of Western Marxism, then, Gramsci argues that it is here where the “state-government” ensemble comes to be seen as “tied to the interests of the subordinate groups” and where the interests of the “fundamental group” prevail only to some extent. This is thus not an argument for the “autonomy” of the state vis a vis class rule as is the case in the later work of Althusser’s follower Poulantzas, but an argument that identifies the self-limitation of predatory class domination in favor of hegemony or “moral universalism.” Gramsci thus ties relations of hegemony (“what is”) with moral universalism (“what ought to be”). In “real history”, Gramsci observes, these phases and these dynamics do not occur in pure form but always become “entangled with one another, horizontally and vertically’. Finally, the third level in the political relation of forces is the “relation of military forces” which, from time to time, can be “immediately decisive” (II 180). This is the level of class struggle itself where “movements” and “positions” can decide the course and fate of history and, thus, human lives. Note that this section is particularly central for an understanding of Gramsci's views on national oppression, self-determination, state formation and world history. When reading the work of Gramsci, understanding how these various phases and levels interact with one another is no simple matter and adopting reductionist methodologies contributes to, rather than help overcome, distortions in our theoretical understanding of this Marxist theorist’s work. Take for example what Gramsci calls the “category of economism” as it relates to the “theoretical movement for free trade” and “theoretical syndicalism” that Gramsci introduces in this context (II 182). Whereas the “theoretical movement for free trade” belongs to a dominant group, “theoretical syndicalism” belongs to a subaltern group. The dominant group and its theoreticians or respective intellectuals “speculate ignorantly” on “the distinction between political society and civil society” maintaining that “economic activity belongs to civil society and that political society must not intervene in its regulation” (II 182). In fact, Gramsci argues, “the distinction is purely methodological and not organic; in concrete historical life, political society and civil society are a single entity” (II 182). The “practical” or “organic” unity of civil and political society is, thus, what is hidden by reductionist methodologies like economism either as this is adopted by the intellectuals of the ruling groups or those of the subaltern ones. Something similar can be said about what has recently and quite mistakenly emerged as “Gramsci’s theory of civil society”. From the outset Gramsci introduces the notion of civil society as being a single organic entity with political society. Throughout the notebooks Gramsci develops this particular idea of civil society usually in opposition to an alternative conception that, quite often, Gramsci identifies with “mechanical”, intellectualist, economist, idealist or bourgeois theoretical positions. Gramsci’s acute concern with the theoretical “errors” and practical “deviations” of “economism” was widely shared by Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, and other revolutionaries of Gramsci’s time [including Bukharin?], involved as many of them were in the rather dogmatic [doctrinaire] and often deeply embittered, divisive and disqualifying debates of the Second International. It is thus not surprising that Gramsci himself, even from inside his prison cell, also wanted to deal with the problem of “economism” as well. Gramsci’s notion of civil society was thus born out of

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the arguments about practice, strategy and revolution that took place within the Comintern and, also to a certain extent, within Italian intellectual and revolutionary circles engaged in a frontal ideological battle with Fascism. The critique of civil society that Gramsci begins to sketch out in prison is, thus, a militant critique of both its theoretical and ideological formation as well as its practical “embankments”. It is a critique against the “economism” implicit in rudimentary notions of social life that draw simplistic divisions between what is economic and what is political. The case of arguments around free trade, for example, illustrates the ideological function of “economism”. Gramsci argues that political society intervenes in civil society (understood in the early stages of his notebooks simply as the world of economic activity) when it legislates laissez-faire liberalism or free trade. This is, Gramsci argues, “an act of [the] will” or a political act and not the “spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts” operating within economic life (II 182-183). The same can be said, Gramsci argues, in the case of syndicalism. Here the political regulation comes from within the economically subaltern group itself in that “this group is prevented by this theory from ever becoming dominant: prevented, that is, from leaving behind the economic-corporate phase in order to advance to the phase of politico-intellectual hegemony in civil society and become dominant in political society” (II 183). Syndicalism is, as Gramsci understands it, an early stage in the practical and theoretical self-understanding of the economically subaltern group in bourgeois or capitalist society, it is a key impediment to the “organic” (in Hegelian terms, from the ground up, from inside out, from within or from itself) self-organization of this group and its development or advancement into the phase of “politico-intellectual hegemony in civil society.” Whether or not the subaltern group or groups in bourgeois or capitalist society can actually accomplish this – given the historic bloc (the unity of structure and superstructure) or hegemonic system of embankments and trenches of civil society – is a question that Gramsci never answers in clear terms. What he does claim explicitly is that the road to a new hegemony takes places through the organization of a political party, a “new prince”, clearly oriented towards the formation of a new state rather than a new civil society. And the historical study on the development of political parties, Gramsci argues, “must [...] be conducted within the ambit of the concept of hegemony” rather than that of civil society (II 187). The study of how “fundamental social groups” or social classes develop, the various “necessary stages” that they undergo as they progress from one level of consciousness to another, higher, and more complex one, is central to Gramsci’s analysis of civil society. In this context, and closely following the three levels that Hegel himself distinguishes in “ethical life”, he distinguishes three phases that he attributes to all “fundamental social groups”: “The corporate phase, the phase of hegemony (or struggle for hegemony) in civil society, and the phase of state power” with their corresponding (like superstructures that correspond to specific structures) “specific intellectual activities” (II 197). Political science proper is born, Gramsci argues in close harmony with Hegel’s own “outline of political science”, in the phase of struggle for hegemony within civil society and at the historical stage when this civil society grows from these struggles.3 Gramsci relies on the usual qualification to avoid the charges of “mechanical thought” that he lobes at thinkers like Bukharin. He writes: “the relationship between intellectuals and production is not direct [except in the case of industrialists and other capitalists that Gramsci sometimes also calls “intellectuals”], as in the case of the fundamental social groups, but mediated, and it is

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mediated by two types of social organization: a) by civil society, that is, by the ensemble of private organizations in society; b) by the state” (II 200). These intellectuals, Gramsci argues, have “a function in the ‘hegemony’ that is exercised throughout society” (II 200). In other words, there is no direct or one-to-one relationship between hegemony and production; relationships of hegemony are exercised “throughout” society and not just in the sphere of production although it is also exercised in the sphere of direct production itself; how hegemony is exercised throughout society is something that Gramsci attempts to explain by appealing to a concept of “intellectual” activity that is both broad and, sometimes, vague; Gramsci insists that historical “phase of hegemony” – the phase of indirect rule or ideological leadership typical of “advanced” capitalist societies – is characterized by the presence of a “civil society” understood not merely as the sphere of “ethical life”, but more broadly as the “ensemble of private organizations” that serve as the “trenches” of the modern bourgeois state. Note that Gramsci is consistent throughout the notebooks with the definition of civil society as an “ensemble of private organizations”, but he does not leave this definition undeveloped. He progressively expands the concept of civil society to encompass a more complex and dynamic phenomenon, namely, the whole “system of trenches and embankments” that undergirds the modern liberal-capitalist state. Understood this way, and this is Gramsci’s notion of civil society at its most comprehensive and critical, civil society thus appears as a system that underpins, fortifies and secures not only the politically confined system of the state, but also the more culturally and socially diffused bourgeois hegemony. Understanding civil society this way also changes the nature of the relationship between civil society and political society, the mediating mechanisms and dynamics between the two, and particularly the role that intellectuals play in “bonding” these two seemingly separate systems into what could be called, extending Gramsci’s meaning of the term, a historical “bloc.” Indeed, the intellectuals that help construct, disseminate and ideologize bourgeois hegemony exercise their function not merely within civil society, but from within political parties and their key function is to secure “the bonding of the organic intellectuals of a social group with traditional intellectuals, a function it can carry out as part of its basic function, which is to lift the ‘economic’ members of a social group to the level of ‘political intellectuals’, that is, organizers of all the functions intrinsic to the organic development of an integral civil and political society” (II 202). But what if intellectuals fail to connect with traditional intellectuals or, more seriously, with the “masses”? How does hegemony arise in this potentially critical situation? Gramsci assigns great importance to this question throughout his notebooks as this disconnect would certainly signal, in Gramsci’s historical materialist analysis, a possible cause of cultural and political underdevelopment and, thus, lack of conditions for a possible revolution. Contrary to appearance, profoundly elitist societies [as many of those in the pre-modern/bourgeois and pre-liberal era were] are societies not ripe for the kind of hegemonic rule Gramsci charts in his notebooks. Another way of saying this is that overtly despotic rule is, in fact, a negation of the kind of hegemony Gramsci argues has developed in the modern bourgeois and liberal era. As Gramsci writes: “In Italy there has never been an intellectual and moral reform involving the popular masses. The Renaissance, eighteen-century French philosophy, nineteenth-century German philosophy: these are reforms that touch only the upper classes and often only the intellectuals” (II 243-244). For Gramsci, however, the Reformation is an exception to the rule of elitist domination in that it does touch, and indeed becomes part, of the “popular masses”. By

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contrast, Gramsci sees Italian Renaissance intellectuals like Croce as in fact having failed to touch “significant masses of people” (II 244). The slow progress of revolutionary thought and activity in Europe and, more particularly in Italy, starting in 1848 signals, for Gramsci, how historical materialism (or Marxism) is poised to follow in the footsteps of the Reformation and eventually “permeate all of society down to its deepest roots”. Like the Reformation, then, a critical theory and philosophy like Marxism will have to become “totalitarian as a conception of the world” if it has any hope of becoming more than a mere intellectual, elitist or avant-garde movement. But in becoming “totalitarian”, understood in the Hegelian sense of totality or in the Sartrean sense of totalizing, this conception of the world thus becomes hegemonic. Behind all the work that openly bourgeois and upper class private associations like Rotary Clubs may do, Gramsci argues that they have an ultimately common way of connecting with the people. They help disseminate “a new capitalist spirit: in other words, the idea that industry and trade are a social service even prior to being a business and that, indeed, they are or could be a business insofar as they are a ‘service’” (II 269). Like many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the private associations that Gramsci examined also want to see “the capitalism of plunder” superseded and replaced by a more humane form of society, one that is more favorable to development and freedom or, in Gramsci's terms, one that is more favorable to the expansion of “economic forces.”4 Gramsci’s understanding of the Protestant Reformation illustrates his views on how hegemony is actually and historically constructed. According to him the Reformation “penetrated” to the heart of the popular masses and, thus, became both organic (rooted or grounded in local and national life) and intellectual in a new sense – not in the “cosmopolitan” sense of medieval times and traditional intellectuals. Take the example of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), the fifteenth-century Catholic cardinal from Germany (Holy Roman Empire), whom Gramsci also recognizes as a “reformer of medieval thought and one of the initiators of modern thought” (II 311).5 What is particularly significant for Gramsci about Cusa is his role in the power struggle between the [federalist] German states of the Holy Roman Empire and [centralist] Catholic Rome. In the late 1420s Cusa worked as secretary to Otto of Ziegenhain, the Archbishop of Trier and, after the death of the bishop, acted as representative to the Council of Basel (1431-49) on behalf of Ulrich von Manderscheid, one of the claimants to the archbishopric of Trier. During the council Cusa wrote De concordantia catholica, a synthesis of ideas on church and empire balancing church hierarchy with the idea of Christian consent. In writing this Cusa joined other cardinals who attempted to combine hierarchical continuity and church reform and supported Pope Eugenius IV’s conciliar or unity efforts both with the Eastern Church as well as with German princes. For his efforts he was named Bishop of Brixen in 1450 by Pope Nicholas V although many of his local conciliar reforms were nevertheless cancelled by the same pope. He was imprisoned in 1460 by Duke Sigismund of Austria for implementing reforms and attempting to recapture lost revenues in his bishopric. Cusa died in 1464 without seeing any of his reforms actually implemented. According to Gramsci, Cusa stood for the rights of collective (council) governance within the late medieval Catholic Church as against the autocratic governance model centered on the Pope. Here Gramsci makes an audacious historical claim: it is “fair to say that the Lutheran Reformation broke out from the ground up because Cusa’s reform activity from the top-down failed: that is because the church was unable to reform itself from within” or organically (II 311).6

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Gramsci argues that Luigi Salvatorelli developed “all or almost all the basic elements, negative and positive, for explaining feudalism historically” (II 332). Gramsci uses the following passage from Salvatorelli’s work as evidence for this point - quote in II 331-332. During the Middle Ages or the age of European feudalism, the Christian monastery and the work of church intellectuals like Saint Benedict (480-547 CE) became a “new social nucleus” organically born out of the “new principle of Christianity” – what Hegel calls the principle of subjective freedom – as this was implemented through “truly creative work of social reform” at the communal, village or parish level in protection of the peasants [one of the “fundamental social groups” of this historical period] and as bulwark against the “rapaciousness of the tax collectors and from the incursions of legal and illegal armed bands” (II 332). Gramsci uses the work of Filoppo Ermini to further develop this point on the importance and impact of Christian monasteries: “The Benedictine houses truly became a haven of learning, and the monastery, more than the castle, was to become the center of all learning... Benedict’s plan was fulfilled; the orbis latinus [an imperfect version of Augustin’s City of God] shattered by the savagery of the invaders, was made whole again, and, thanks primarily to the intellectual and manual labor of Benedict’s followers, the marvelous civilization of the Middle Ages was launched” (II 332).7 Ultimately, however, the failure of this bottom-up approach to Christian civilization and the eventual triumph of the castle and the church, exemplified also by the ultimate failure of intellectuals like Cusa, led to the Protestant Reformation in places like Germany and England and the Counter-Reformation in places like Spain and Italy.8 Note here the link Gramsci makes between “Monasticism and feudalism”, not in terms of superstructures corresponding to specific structures, but in terms of a contradiction between “Practical development of the rule of St. Benedict and of the principle of “ora et labora” where “labora” was “already subordinated to ‘ora’; in other words, the primary purpose was, obviously, divine service” giving rise to a privileged caste of monks that can be “in the convent every hour to perform their religious rites” (II 333). Instead of responding positively to the challenge of Catholic reformers like Cusa or, more radically Luther and Calvin, in places like Spain and Italy the Counter-Reformation actually “stifled intellectual development” (II 338). Gramsci identifies two lines of intellectual development, particularly in Italy, that grew out of the Counter-Reformation with profound implications for modernity and the question of hegemony. One current, typified by thinkers like Leon Batista Alberti (1404-1472), “directs its attention toward the ‘particular’, toward the bourgeois as an individual who develops within civil society and who has no conception of political society outside his ‘particular’ sphere” (II 338). This is a kind of “medieval theoretical syndicalism”. The other current “reached its high point with Machiavelli and with the formulation of the problem of the church as a deleterious national problem” (II 338). Machiavelli “represents and tries to reconcile the political inclinations of the bourgeoisie (republics) and of princes, insofar as both want to establish states or increase their territorial and military power” (II 349). The superiority of Machiavelli’s thought resides, for Gramsci, in that it points towards the universality and totality of the state. In a long critical note on M. Azzalini, Gramsci explores in more detail Machiavelli’s theory of the state. In Gramsci’s views, Machiavelli articulates “a conception of the world that could also

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be called ‘philosophy of praxis’ or ‘neohumanism’, in that it does not recognize transcendental or immanent (in the metaphysical sense) elements but is based entirely on the concrete action of man, who out of historical necessity works and transforms reality” (II 378). Instead of raising his discussion to the level of an abstract doctrine, Machiavelli “brings everything back to politics” understood as the “art of governing men, of securing their permanent consent, and hence of founding ‘great states’” (II 378). This Machiavelli, as Gramsci himself, is a critic of the Italian medieval bourgeoisie for one crucial reason: this class could not “move beyond the corporate phase and into the political phase”, it remained trapped within “the medieval-cosmopolitan conception represented by the pope, the clergy, and also by the secular intellectuals (humanists)”, it was “unable to create an autonomous state but remained within the feudal and cosmopolitan medieval framework” (II 379). Machiavelli’s critique of “medieval cosmopolitanism” is thus grounded on his understanding of and call for the founding of modern national states (if not modern nationalism/patriotism/republicanism itself). The key role of the Prince is thus to setup and strengthen the modern state. Gramsci’s appropriation of a Hegelianized Marchiavellian theory of the state furnishes him with a model for his own formulation of the theory of the modern political party, particularly the revolutionary party that Gramsci calls the “new prince”. Like its traditional or classical Machiavellian counterpart, the new prince’s role is to establish “a new type of state” (II 382). Even if the political party “neither rules nor governs”, it nevertheless has “de facto power” and “exercises the hegemonic function, and hence the function of balancing various interests in ‘civil society’; however, ‘civil society’ is in fact so thoroughly intertwined with political society that all the citizens feel instead that the party rules and governs” (II 382). Because of this new reality of the political party, Gramsci argues that traditional constitutional law, particularly in Italy, where parties themselves directly “neither rule nor govern”, there is a need for a new form of constitutional law, “a system of principles asserting that the end of the state is its own end, its own disappearance: it other words, the reabsorption of political society into civil society” (II 382).9 Throughout the notebooks Gramsci carries out an extensive analysis of Italy’s foremost Hegelian thinker Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and his ideas on civil society. According to Gramsci, Croce “wants to maintain a distinction between civil society and political society, between hegemony and dictatorship” (III 9) and, to some extent, Gramsci himself retains this distinction. Thus “Ethical history is the aspect of history that is related to ‘civil society’, to hegemony. Political history is the aspect of history related to state-governmental activity” (III 161). Gramsci further defines the link between civil society and hegemony when he calls hegemony, in typical Hegelian/Crocean terms, “a determinate system of moral life” (III 373). But Gramsci does not find in Croce sufficient conceptual elements for the further development of the concept of hegemony. It is Lenin, by contrast, who supplies him with the missing conceptual ingredients. As Gramsci writes: “I have referred [...] to the philosophical importance of the concept and fact of hegemony, attributable to [Lenin]” (III 183). In a passage that echoes Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, Gramsci even makes a distinction between the age of hegemony and the age of liberty:

The realization of hegemony means the real critique of a philosophy, its real dialectic. Marx initiates intellectually a historical era that will probably last for centuries, that is, until the demise of political society and the advent of

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regulated society. Only then will his conception of the world be superseded (the conception of necessity <superseded> by the conception of liberty) (III 183).

Gramsci thus outlines a connection between the critique of civil society as a central site of hegemony, as a “system of moral life”, and the need for a dialectical morality. He writes: “Underlying the most recent philosophies with a utopian basis, like Croce’s, is the view that Hegel’s dialectic was the [last] reflection of these great historical nodes and that the dialectic, an expression of social contradictions, should become, with the disappearance of these contradictions, a pure conceptual dialectic. In history, true equality – that is, the degree of ‘spirituality’ attained by the historical process of ‘human nature’ – is to be identified in the system of explicit and implicit ‘private and public’ associations that are woven together in the ‘state’ and in the world political system. Thus one arrives also at the equality of, or the equation between, ‘philosophy and politics’, thought and action, that is, at a philosophy of praxis” (III 187). According to Gramsci’s stagist view of historical progression, in the present age of hegemony, as opposed to the future age of liberty, “the German proletariat was the heir of classical German philosophy” and Lenin’s theorization and realization of hegemony constitutes “a great ‘metaphysical’ event” (III 183). In the current historical context “the great intellectuals exercise hegemony, which presupposes a certain collaboration, that is, an active and voluntary (free) consent; in other words, a liberal-democratic regime” (III 9). Clearly and despite the influence that Croce exerted on Gramsci, the latter is nonetheless developing a critique of Crocean democratic liberalism.10 Gramsci’s critique of liberalism, including Croce’s version of aristocratic liberalism, leads him to develop a basic, but clearly unfinished, critique of the ideas of freedom and free will roughly following Hegel’s critique in the Philosophy of Right: “The concept of freedom should be linked with that of responsibility: the responsibility that generates discipline. Responsibility as opposed to individual free will. The only freedom is ‘responsible’ – that is, ‘universal’ - freedom insofar as it posits itself as the individual aspect of a collective or group ‘freedom,’ as the individual expression of a law” (III 10). This critique of freedom is aimed at individual freedom and the “free will” it is supposed to be based on, but not at the idea of “universal freedom” in general. It is a critique that can lead to a reexamination of the ideas of free will/free choice, of the individual as free will, as self-possession or self-property, and of these ideas as the content of freedom and the sphere where this freedom is more or less spontaneously exercised, i.e. civil society. But in Gramsci these ideas do not get developed. What Gramsci does, instead, is reassign the concept of freedom to the collective and offer the freedom of the collective as universal freedom and thus as expression of a “law” generated by collective or general will. This is thus an understanding of collective freedom that still relies on a will-centered conception of collective subjectivity understood as a large individual, a supra-human humanity, a super historical ego unfolding its powers through specific and identifiable stages of growth and development as a “social grouping” that only at specific states is “able to present itself” in this way or that way (III 9). This is, thus, Gramsci’s version of Hegel’s Spirit or the Idea of self-conscious and self-organized freedom.11

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Sometimes Gramsci distinguishes Croce’s and, more broadly, the Catholic notion of civil society and what he calls the “encyclopedic notion” of civil society (III 20-21). In his own words: “One must distinguish civil society as Hegel understands it [in his Philosophy of Mind or part three of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences] and in the sense it is often used in these notes (that is, in the sense of the political and cultural hegemony of a social group over the whole of society; as the ethical content of the state) from the sense given to it by Catholics, for whom civil society is, instead, political society or the state, as opposed to the society of the family and of the church. For Catholicism, what is called ‘civil society’ in Hegelian language is not ‘necessary’, that is, it is “purely historical or contingent” (III 21). This polemic with the Catholic understanding of civil society reflects a constant preoccupation of Gramsci with Catholic thought throughout the notebooks. This concern with Catholic thought is partiality attributable to the enormous influence of this form of thinking on Italian intellectual life and to some of the readings Gramsci was doing and commenting on in prison. More important than this polemic, however, is the specific way in which Gramsci develops his idea of civil society on this note and, particularly, his claim to be using the notion of civil society “as Hegel understands it.” Yet, Gramsci never really offers an explicit engagement with Hegel’s key texts or passages on civil society either in the Encyclopaedia’s Phenomenology of Mind or in the Philosophy of Right. The reader is either left to figure this out on his/her own or to simply accept that Gramsci is indeed employing a Hegelian understanding of civil society. Beyond this, although Gramsci engages with Catholic thinkers, he does not make the link between the Augustinian tradition of “free will” and the Kantian and liberal idea of autonomous freedom that underpin the theory and practice of bourgeois civil society all the way to the twentieth century. Gramsci elaborates his ideas on the Catholic notion of civil society in his discussion on whether or not “state newspapers” – the so-called Fifth Estate – are a progressive and independent expression of journalism. Gramsci suggests the following: illiberal structures of government are those in which civil society merges with political society (III 48-49). It is true, Gramsci argues, that “What is called ‘public opinion’ is tightly connected to political hegemony; in other words, it is the point of contact between ‘civil society’ and ‘political society,’ between ‘consent’ and ‘force.’ When the state wants to embark on an action that is not popular, it starts to create in advance the public opinion that is required; in other words, it organizes and centralizes certain elements of civil society” (III 213). Those elements include, of course, newspapers but also political parties, parliament, etc. However, in Communist society, at least as this was understood and witnessed in Gramsci’s days, the state can also justifiably and progressively undertake the education of adult citizens through state-sponsored journalism only “in those societies wherein the historical unity of civil society and political society is understood dialectically (in a real and not just conceptual dialectic) and the state is conceived as surmountable by ‘regulated society.’ In the latter kind of society, the dominant party is not organically confused with the government; it is, rather, an autonomous instrument for the transition from civil-political society to “regulated society,” in that “it absorbs both of them in order to surpass them (not to perpetuate their contradiction)” (III 49). What Gramsci means by “regulated society” is Communist society as this was being constructed in the Soviet Union. Throughout his notebooks, Gramsci adheres to a stagist view of social groups, class, state, and national formation. This view informs Gramsci's views on revolutionary associations and bourgeois civil society as well. So Gramsci says: “One should examine the formation - this

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occurred within the political class in Piedmont during the Napoleonic empire but especially during its collapse - of the group that detached itself from the parochial conservatives in order to draw the attention of the dynasty to the task of national unification. This group would attain the height of its visibility in the neo-Guelph movement of 1848. The dynastic, non-national character of this new group (of which De Maistre was a most noteworthy member): its politics, more cunning than Machiavellian, became the accepted politics of the governing class up to 1870 and even later; its organic [lack of national program or grounding] weakness manifested itself, above all, in the crux of 1848-49 and was related to this politics of mean and niggardly cunning” (III 51). This is a clear example of a stagist argument on "normal" class formation - as in the French example, an example Gramsci extolls as illustrating a case where the bourgeoisie was able to organize "a complete and perfect society" (III 9) - leading to "national unity" (organic unity), a unity that the "social grouping [class] that had become the economic driving force in Europe after the year 1000" was able to articulate, only when this class was ready to do so: "with all the intellectual and moral forces that were necessary and adequate to the task of organizing a complete and perfect society" as the bourgeoisie did in France but not in Italy (III 9). In relation to how nations (organic formations) develop, to understand how classes form and develop and become hegemonic, to understand how civil societies become the trenches of hegemony and the central mechanism of consent and common sense “understanding” is always wrong. Gramsci formulates the problem with “common sense” as follows: “The historical question is muddied by the intrusion of emotions and politics and by prejudices of every sort. It is really difficult to make common sense understand that an Italy of the kind that was formed in 1870 had never existed before and could never have existed: common sense is led to believe that what exists today has always existed and that Italy has always existed as a unified nation but was suffocated by foreign powers” (III 58). This critical - actually contemptuous - view of “common sense”, echoing Hegel’s harsh criticisms of the “understanding” as opposed to reason, and similar to Croce’s dismissive views on the masses and their ultimate incapacity to understand the work of intellectuals or philosophers, informs Gramsci’s notebooks throughout. Gramsci is thus not a theorist of common sense as this is commonly understood, but a harsh and unrelenting critic of how his Italian con-nationals basked in what he saw as the profoundly distorted and distorting logic of everyday knowledge. Common sense is thus not the starting point for an analysis of the “entire historical movement” that would eventually coalesce in the formation of “national unity”. This starting point should be sought elsewhere. Gramsci also adheres to a stagist view of development in his notion of “association” (III 62). Although some of these observations are partially applicable to the idea of “private associations” that Gramsci says constitute civil society, in this case he is referring to non-private, including revolutionary, associations aiming to become “parties” and even the state. Gramsci writes: “A permanent association capable of growth cannot exist unless it is buttressed by definite ethical principles that the association itself sets down for its individual constituents in order to maintain the internal unity and homogeneity needed to reach its goal” (III 62). A “normal association”, Gramsci explains, “conceives of itself as an aristocracy, an elite, a vanguard; in other words, it sees itself linked by a million threads to a given social grouping and through that to the whole of humanity” (III 63). For Gramsci, then, “normal associations” do not behave in a merely “corporate” or exclusively self-interested form but rather aim to extend themselves to “a whole social grouping that is itself conceived as aiming to unify all humanity” and all these

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relationships “give a [tendentially] universal character to the group ethic that must be considered capable of becoming a norm of conduct for humanity as a whole” (III 63). According to this argument, then, politics from the level of these associations and up is conceived as “a process that will culminate in a morality” for all and toward a “form of society in which politics and hence morality as well are both superseded” by what Gramsci calls in prison-code “regulated society” or, in this instance, Communist society (III 63). These associations are thus not a civil society, an end in themselves, and are not a means to hold liberal, despotic, authoritarian or - even less – future “regulated” states accountable. Neither are they an expression of individual free will or autonomy or a mere expression of the right to organization, nor are they about defending either bourgeois individualism or subaltern syndicalism vis-a-vis the state or the elites that control the state and/or the economy. Instead, closely adhering to the strictures of Hegel’s Logic and Hegel’s stagist view of civil society in his Philosophy of Right, Gramsci too sees them as stages on the way to becoming organic parties (“a whole social grouping”) and, eventually, states and nations (“the whole of humanity”) founded on a universal morality as expression of a “national collective will” or a “real democracy” (III 63). If these associations have an “organic” character, it is so insofar as they grow from within national states and aim, indeed, to become the state themselves. But they are “organic” also insofar as they are not implants or mere transplantations from outside the national land. In other words, they must grow natively or they will be unable to grow the universal moral canopy - the “norm of conduct for humanity as a whole” - that Gramsci claims they already “tendentionally” – or, in Hegel’s Aristotelian and metaphysical terms, teleologically – possess. In short, Gramsci sees these associations, and not civil society, as the organic soil from where the new prince and future state is to emerge. Gramsci sharpens the stagist view of group, class, state, and national development to which he adheres as follows: “History has arrived at a certain stage, hence every movement that appears to be at odds with that given stage seems antihistorical insofar as it ‘reproduces’ an earlier stage. In such cases, there is talk of reaction, etc. The problem arises out of the failure to think of history as the history of classes. A class reaches a certain stage, it sets up a certain form of state life; the dominated class rebels, breaking up the achieved reality” (III 102-103). In other words, “The unitary state has been a historical advance, it has been necessary, but that does not mean that every movement that aims to break up a unitary state is antihistorical and reactionary. If the dominant class cannot attain its historicity other than by smashing these facades, then we are not dealing with a modern ‘unity’ but with an administrative-military-fiscal ‘unity’. It may be the case that the creation of a modern unity requires the destruction of the previous ‘formal’ unity” (III 103). Although formulated in relatively simple, almost crude, terms, and very much in a way that resembles Bukharin's “popular manual” – the target of so much critical comments by Gramsci himself, this stagist view of historical development nevertheless informs Gramsci’s view of “politics as history in the making” (III 81), of law as an “expression of the ruling class” (III 83), and of civil society as a bulwark against any breaches of hegemony, part of the “unity” of the dominant class, a key component of the current stage in the history of classes and unitary state.

A class that posits itself as apt to assimilate the whole of society – and, at the same time, is truly capable of embodying this process – would take this notion of the sate and of the law to such a level of perfection as to conceive of the end

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of the state and the law, for the state and the law would serve no purpose once they had accomplished their task and been absorbed by civil society (III 234).

Gramsci touches on, but does not fully develop, the link between the ideas of God, property or propriety, morality and law. He cites approvingly a passage from Alessandro Chiappelli that reads as follows: “The concept of property that is the center of gravity and the root of our entire juridical system is likewise the very fiber of our entire civil and moral structure. Even our theological view is shaped in many cases by this model, and God is sometimes represented as the great proprietor of the world. The rebellion against God in Milton’s Paradise Lost, as in Dante’s earlier poem, is depicted as Satan’s or Lucifer's reckless attempt to dispossess the Almighty and oust him from his supreme throne” (III 125). Gramsci adds: “Chiappelli forgets that in the [Catholic] Creed, too, God is said to be ‘creator and lord (dominus: master, owner) of heaven and earth’” (III 125). But Gramsci does not develop these ideas into a full critique of bourgoies individualism, the modern bourgeois self and its foundational aporias, as a fundamental and contradictory socializing experience at the heart of bourgeois civil society or the idea of the individual self as an expression of property, as indeed existing/appearing in the form of property and, to that extent, as “free will”. John Milton, after all, wanted to frame his Paradise Lost (1667) as an exploration, a depiction, of the battle between “God’s eternal foresight and free will” (Quote from Book I) as this was understood, debated, and lived during the English Civil War, a key moment in the historical development of bourgeois consciousness. This experience informs and, indeed, culturally precedes the broader systemic structures of possessive individualism at the heart of capitalism, structures very convincingly revealed by MacPherson. Gramsci’s critical contributions to our understanding of modern civil society, thus, remains tantalizingly unfinished insofar as it does not reach deep enough to the level and conception of the self-as-property and the self-as-free-will, freedom as surrender and subjection to the Law, that underpins either the progressive or less so progressive forms of individualism that he identifies in his notebooks (see III 120-121). Gramsci’s contemporary readers, on the other hand, tend to see in the absence of this deeper analysis evidence for what they perceive as his ostensibly more political and economic arguments ranging from the ideas of political war to ideas about hegemony. In the context of the edifice of structures and superstructures that Gramsci, following other Marxists, uses the represent social dynamics, “organic associations” appear to be above civil society, which Gramsci understands as the sphere of hegemony, morality and “custom in general” (III 64, 69). Civil society is thus the sphere where people acquire the consciousness of “common sense”, the kind of sense without which the state cannot cease to behave in authoritarian and coercive ways. This is the context in which Gramsci offers his most famous and often-quoted formulation of civil society as “the state = political society + civil society” (III 75). In this formulation, “hegemony” (the sphere of common sense and civil society) is understood as being “protected by the armor of coercion” (the sphere of political society and the state) (III 75). This formulation thus represents a concept of civil society and the state that Gramsci thinks sufficient to account for the social and historical situation of Italy in his days when Gramsci sees the state as having already moved beyond the “economic-corporatist” stage that characterized the “communal states” or the city states of Renaissance Italy that according to Gramsci lasted until 1848. In the post-corporatist stage of development, however, the state can no longer be simply identified with government just as during the economic-corporate stage of

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class/state development civil society (then reduced to the sphere of economic activity) was identified with political society (then reduced and understood as the sphere of governmental activity). The new context of state and national development, like the new context of civil society development, require that “certain elements that fall under the general notion of the state must be restored to the notion of civil society”. The ultimate point of hegemony is thus to supersede the state as a “night watchman”, as a primarily repressive apparatus, and generate the conditions that can “dissolve” the state into [self] “regulated society”. Only in this form is it possible to imagine the “state-coercion element withering away” as the “increasingly conspicuous elements of regulated society (or ethical state or civil society) assert themselves” and, indeed, take over the regulation of social, cultural and economic life. Until this situation is achieved, the notion and indeed the institution of the state as “night watchman remains a necessary transitional stage, that is, a form of coercive organization that will protect the development of those elements of regulated society that are continually on the rise and, precisely because they are on the rise, will gradually reduce the state's authoritarian and coercive interventions” (III 75-76). A key element of this “regulated society” is, precisely, civil society and its continual growth is thus seen by Gramsci as certainly contributing to the dissolution of repressive states, but with the goal of strengthening hegemony, not superseding it. Associations are not our private or non-private, profit or non-profit, religious or civic-minded, grassroots or public NGOs nor are they identified with the family or the church, the paramount institutions of civil society that Gramsci identifies. Instead, as mentioned above, they should be understood primarily as “parties” in formation, as proto-parties, and these parties can in turn be understood as embryonic states and, further, as steps towards the “unification of the whole humanity”. Gramsci's distinction between associations and private associations is in fact based on a broader argument about the nature of social organization. Gramsci’s broader argument is that “in any given society nobody is unorganized and without a party, provided that organization and party are understood broadly, in a nonformal sense” (III 107). Not all associations are of the same kind. According to Gramsci, “private associations” exist in two general forms: “natural or contractual or voluntary” (III 107). Among the latter, as equal expressions of embryonic hegemonic classes and states, “one or more prevails, relatively or absolutely, constituting the hegemonic apparatus of one social group over the rest of the population (civil society), which is the basis for the state in the narrow sense of governmental-coercive apparatus” (III 107). In the conceptual edifice of the social world that Gramsci constructs, he locates private associations as lying somewhere between the “general population” (civil society) and the sphere of organized political parties (an expression of political society) aiming to become states. Individuals can and do indeed belong to one or more of these private associations even when they are in conflict with one another. But as soon as one of these private associations becomes a hegemonic party and, indeed, becomes the state and adopts a “totalitarian policy” forcing “all members of a particular party to find in that one party the satisfaction that they had previously found in a multiplicity of organizations” and seeks to prevent other parties from themselves becoming “totalitarian”, then the dominant party becomes regressive and “objectively reactionary” (III 108). In this particular type of hegemonic situation the excluded and dominated parties have no choice but to engage the dominant party in resistance and engage them in a battle, a “war”, for position and domination. The struggle between associations, parties and, indeed, the “fundamental social groups” or classes that they are an expression of eventually

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reaches a decisive point that, following Trotsky’s use of military language and Luxembourg’s “little book”, Gramsci calls the point of “transition from the war of maneuver (and frontal assault) to the war of position” (III 109). Gramsci is quite clear in saying that “so-called private initiatives and activities have the same goal, and they constitute the apparatus of the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes. Hegel’s conception [of “ethical life” and the state?] belonged to a period when the widespread growth of the bourgeoisie might have seemed limitless, and therefore one could affirm its ethical and universal character: the entire human race will be bourgeois” (III 338). There is little in this critique of civil society that can lead us to conclude that Gramsci is outlining the general contours of a “progressive” version of civil society as, quite clearly, he sees no such possibility at all. Opposed to the trenches of civil society formed by these private associations, Gramsci also identifies “the 1848 concept of the war of movement” or “permanent revolution” and hegemony as a war of position “that can only come into existence after certain things are already in place, namely, the large popular organizations of the modern type that represent, as it were, the 'trenches' and the permanent fortifications of the war of position” (III 267). These “large popular organizations” that constitute the “trenches” in the revolutionary war of position are, however, not the same “private associations” that represent the trenches of bourgeois civil society. These are opposite trenches on enemy sides of the war of position and Gramsci is not suggesting that civil society be fought with civil society or hegemony with hegemony or the state with the state. In this regards, Gramsci remains a Leninist and, indeed, a Machiavellian Leninist. How does Gramsci understand the war of position, then?

The war of position calls on enormous masses of people to make huge sacrifices; that is why an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is required and hence a more ‘interventionist’ kind of government that will engage more openly in the offensive against the opponents and ensure once and for all, the ‘impossibility’ of internal disintegration by putting in place controls of all kinds – political, administrative, etc., reinforcement of the hegemonic positions of the dominant group, etc. All of this indicates that the culminating phase of the politico-historical situation has begun, for, in politics, once the ‘war of position’ is won, it is definitely decisive (III 109).

Although Gramsci does not introduce the idea into this passage, the role of civil society in the “war of position” is suggested here in terms of “reinforcements”, “controls of all kinds”, etc. But the war of position is fought both by the state or against the state by mobilizing “enormous masses of people” and, in either case, demanding of them, and expecting from them, “huge sacrifices” in the “offensive against the opponents”. If by the state, a successful war of position guarantees the impossibility of “internal disintegration” and this guaranteed is reinforced by “controls of all kinds” and “reinforcement of the hegemonic positions” that transform simple victory into a decisive one. If by the opponents, a successful war of position can lead the next phase in politico-historical development. This is, thus, not a war in which civil society is mobilized against the state but, quite to the contrary, it is a war in which “the superstructures of

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civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare” (III 162) and in which those structures are mobilized against the enemies of the state. And what is the war of maneuver or war of movement?

In politics [...] the war of maneuver drags on as long as the positions being won are not decisive and the resources of hegemony and the state are not fully mobilized. But when, for some reason or another, these positions have lost their value and only the decisive positions matter, then one shifts to siege warfare – compact, difficult, requiring exceptional abilities of patience and inventiveness. In politics, the siege is reciprocal, whatever the appearances; the mere fact that the ruling power has to parade all its resources reveals its estimate of the adversary (III 109).

Again, Gramsci does not clearly introduce the idea of civil society into this idea of “war of movement”, but he does suggest where it is and what role it plays in the conflict of classes that has degenerated into a war that “drags on”. Civil society is found in “siege warfare” where the siege is “reciprocal”.12 Gramsci’s notes on the “war of position” and the “war of maneuver” or “war of movement” are sometimes placed within his discussions on “structure and superstructure”. But he also uses theory of war to sharpen his thoughts on historical and political dynamics. For example, Gramsci compares “the economic factor” or economism - e.g. workers’ strikes - to “field artillery in a war of maneuver”. Just like field artillery, Gramsci maintains, the “immediate economic factor [is] expected to have a double effect: 1) to open a breach in the enemy’s defenses, after throwing him into disarray and making him lose faith in himself, his forces, and his future; 2) to organize in a flash one's own troops, to create cadres, or at least to place the existing cadres (formed, up to that point, by the general historical process) at lightening speed in positions from which they could direct the dispersed troops; to produce, in a flash, a concentration of ideology and of the ends to be achieved" (III 161-162). Just as any battle won or lost because of the use of field artillery on either part of the conflict, Gramsci argues that “economic determinism” or economism leads to “historical mysticism” or the “anticipation of some sort of dazzling miracle” (III 162). This argument does not amount to a rejections of popular or revolutionary “tactics of assault and incursion” that define the overall economic war of maneuver. But it does mean that these tactics must be appropriately framed and understood. In Gramsci’s words: “in wars among the most industrially and socially advanced states, these methods of war must be seen to have a reduced tactical function rather than a strategic function; their place in military history is analogous to that of siege warfare in the previous period” (III 162). A similar reduction in the importance and effectiveness of the war of maneuver “must take place in the art and science of politics, at least in those cases pertaining to the most advanced states, where 'civil society' has become a very complex structure that is very resistant to the catastrophic ‘irruptions’ of the immediate economic factor (crises, depressions, etc.).” For in these “advanced states”, Gramsci underlines, “the superstructures of civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare” (III 162). Why then focus on civil society? Is it to build an alternative, organic, or progressive civil society from and for the grassroots to put checks on the state and the economy and to hold governments

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accountable as has become fashionably understood today even among so-called anti/alter-globalization activists and among some Gramsci scholars? Recalling the reasons behind Marx’s own in-depth critique of political economy, here is what Gramsci proposes about civil society:

[O]ne must conduct an in-depth study of those components of civil society that correspond to the defensive system [of the ruling groups] in a war of position (III 163).

Gramsci’s concern with the possibilities of revolution in “advanced states” such as those of Western Europe, including Italy, and the failures of successive revolutionary episodes from 1848 to his own day, led him to turn his attention beyond the structures of political economy and towards the geography of political hegemony. In this new geography, attacks on particular factories, individual churches or temples, or state offices or ministries cannot be confused with attacks on capitalism, religious ideologies or bourgeois hegemony. As Gramsci writes:

Sometimes, it would appear that a ferocious artillery attack [in a war of maneuver] against enemy trenches [the complex structure of civil society] had levelled everything, whereas in fact it had caused only superficial damage to the defenses of the adversary, so that when the assailants advanced they encountered a defensive front that was still effective. The same thing occurs in politics during great economic crisis (III 163).

Gramsci’s critical analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is thus deeply informed by his considerations on the war of position and the war of maneuver. So are his critical reflections on Trotsky’s notion of “permanent revolution” and his repeated warnings against confusing the war of maneuver with a decisive revolutionary strategy. “One should determine”, Gramsci writes, “whether [Trotsky’s] famous theory about the permanence of movement is not a political reflection of the theory of the war of maneuver [...]; whether it is not, in the final analysis, a reflection of the general-economic-cultural-social conditions of a country in which the structures of national life are embryonic and unsettled and cannot become ‘trench or fortress’” (III 168). In other words, Gramsci links the development of the theory of “permanent revolution” to a social situation characterized by the absence of civil society and, thus, a situation where “frontal assaults” seem to make more sense than tactical battles for hegemony or “trench warfare”. Defenders of Trotsky like Buttigieg, Hoare, and Smith, all also editors of Gramsci’s notebooks at one point or another, argue that Gramsci’s comparison of Trotsky’s notion of “permanent revolution” with the war or maneuver or the “tactic of the revolutionary offensive” is “mistaken” (Buttigieg’s point, III 505). According to Buttigieg, in fact, Trotsky himself argued that his theory of permanent revolution “pertained specifically to the stages of revolution in the ‘backward bourgeois countries’” (III 505). But if Buttigieg is right on this point, then the theory of permanent revolution would actually be even more questionable and problematic. As quoted by Buttigieg, Trotsky emphatically – or dogmatically – argues that in the so-called “backward countries” the “road to democracy pass[es] through the dictatorship of the proletariat” where “democracy is not a regime that remains self-sufficient for decades, but is only a direct prelude to the socialist revolution” (III 505). To bolster this position Buttigieg quotes Frank Rosengarten to the effect that “the divergence between Trotsky and Gramsci lies in their understanding of

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how the national and international dimensions of the socialist revolution are to be interrelated with each other” (III 506). In light of Gramsci’s discussion of the need to pay serious attention to the structures of civil society within national states as a central defense of “advanced states” or, in its relative absence, the key variable that may explain not only a victory like that of the Russian Revolution, but also its weakness, it is Rosengarten, and by extension Buttigieg, who appear to be mistaken. For Gramsci the interplay between national and international elements is important, but he is emphatic and explicit in seeing “social relations” as preceding international relations (III 259). An even more important relationship than the national/international interplay, for Gramsci, is the relationship between “structures” and “superstructures” within specific socio-historical formations. As Gramsci writes, “In a philosophy of praxis, wherein everything is practice, the distinction will not be between the moments of the absolute spirit but between structure and superstructure” (III 271). In short, “[t]he structure and the superstructures form a ‘historical bloc’” (III 340). Contrary to Trotsky, then, Gramsci argues that Lenin “understood the need for a shift from the war of maneuver that had been applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position, which was the only viable possibility in the West [...] where the structures of society were still capable of themselves becoming heavily fortified trenches” (III 168). Although Lenin understood the need for this shift both practically and theoretically, he never had time to develop this theory [“his formula”]. Gramsci wants to develop this theory and, indeed, his notebooks can be understood as a long and complex effort to develop this theory in the form of a critique of civil society. For Gramsci, “the fundamental task was a national one; in other words, it required a reconnaissance of the terrain and an identification of the elements of trench and fortress represented by the components of civil society, etc.” (III 169). Gramsci’s critique of civil society reaches its height with one of his most celebrated ideas on civil society:

In the East, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements. Needless to say, the configuration varied from state to state, which is precisely why an accurate reconnaissance on a national scale was needed (III 169).

So, for Gramsci, Lenin supplies the starting formula for the critique of bourgeois civil society, but left it unfinished. Contrary to Trotsky’s ideas of the ultimate impossibility of long-lasting revolution in one country without an international movement to support it and nurture it, the decisive plane of action for Gramsci remains ultimately the national – the organic plane of action – and the key dialectical relationship remains that of structures and superstructures now understood as a relationship between the trenches of civil society and the adequate tool or instrument needed to articulate an effective “war of position” capable of breaching and, eventually, toppling the “sturdy structure of civil society.” This tool or instrument is, precisely, the new prince. For Gramsci, therefore, the reason for thinking about civil society is so as to find a way to destroy it not merely by engaging in some permanent and potentially unending war of maneuver against merely tactical and “economistic” targets, but by developing the resources and capabilities of a new prince to effectively engage in a decisive and strategic war of position that

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can reach deep into the “sturdy fortresses and emplacements” of the advanced or modern bourgeois state. Gramsci is thus not a theorist of civil society in the sense of being a thinker that is reformulating the concept of civil society for our present time as much as he is a dialectical critic of it even when his own critique, as suggested above, does not go far enough and remains itself ultimately unfinished and trapped in the moral politics of a bourgeois self writ large – the collective self, the collective will – that underpins the civil society he wants to foreground and map out as the key target of revolutionary praxis. Gramsci’s reflections on the new prince are closely tied to his ideas on hegemony as leadership, parties as future states, and relations within parties as anticipation, as seedlings, of the future age of “freedom”. Gramsci writes:

By looking at the internal development of the parties, one can evaluate their hegemonic role or political leadership. If the state represents the coercive and punitive force of a country's juridical order, the parties - representing the spontaneous adherence of an elite to such regulation, considered as a type of collective society that the entire mass must be educated to adhere to - must show in their specific interior life that they have assimilated as principles of moral conduct those rules that in the state are legal obligations. Within the parties, necessity has already become freedom (that is, the value of political leadership) of the internal discipline of a party and hence the value of such discipline as a yardstick for assessing the potential for growth of the various parties. From this point on, the parties can be seen as schools of state life (III 217).

More than just a critic of civil society, Gramsci is thus a serious theorist of the “modern prince”. Machiavelli’s The Prince already offers to Gramsci a description of “the process of formation of a ‘collective will’” (III 246), but it does so as “a concrete ‘fantasy’ that works on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will.” The Prince remained utopian because “the ‘prince’ did not really exist historically and did not appear before the Italian people in a historically immediate form; he was, rather, a ‘theoretical abstraction’, the symbol of the generic leader, of the ideal ‘condottiere’.”13 By contrast, “The modern Prince, the myth-Prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a social component in which a collective will – one that is recognized and, to some extent, has asserted itself in action – has already begun to take shape. Historical development has already produced this organism, and it is the political party – the modern formation that contains the partial collective will with a propensity to become universal and total” (III 247). Understanding Gramsci’s views on the individual subject, the power of individual “agency” and the role of individuality in world history is crucial in order to grasp the limitations of his critique of modern bourgeois civil society. Equally important, of course, is an understanding of Gramsci’s views on the “collective subject” that gets to make history. According to Gramsci, the “actions” of a party, as opposed to those of an individual, are not “immediate” and they are not generated merely by a “great and imminent danger” requiring “lightning speed” reactions. Individual actions, Gramsci maintains, “cannot be long lasting” and they cannot have “an organic character”. In fact, in almost every case individual actions typify “a restoration or

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reorganization” rather than a progression or a revolution. These actions are thus “not typical of the founding of new states or new national and social structures” (III 247). An individual action is “a ‘defensive’ rather than creative type of action. It is based on the assumption that an already existing “collective will” has dispersed, lost its nerve, and needs to be regrouped and reinforced, as opposed to the assumption that a ‘collective will’ has to be created ex novo and directed toward goals that are concrete, to be sure, but whose concreteness has not yet been tested by experience” (III 247). Contrary to Sorel’s objections, Gramsci argues that the Modern Prince “must have a section devoted to Jacobinism (in the complete sense of this notion […]), as an example of how a concrete and operative collective will is formed. It is also necessary to define ‘collective will’ and political will in general in the modern sense: will as operative awareness of historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and immediate historical drama” (III 248, emphasis added). It is thus in terms of the formation of a “collective will” that Gramsci proposes to understand the Modern Prince. Gramsci opposes to this “collective will” the “common sense” that prevails in the world of civil society. The key question is thus not whether a new and alternative civil society can arise from the “molecular” and bio-political life of bourgeois civil society, but rather whether or not – in language that anticipates Ernesto Laclau – “the basic conditions exist for the awakening of a national-popular collective will” (III 248, emphasis added). Gramsci can be regarded, thus, as a typical advocate of - as he says of Oriani – “Italy’s national-popular greatness” or “a great national popular democratic movement” (III 328). Whether or not this “national-popular collective will” can be awaken requires “a historical (economic) analysis of the social structure of the given country and a ‘dramatic’ representation of the attempts made over the centuries to awaken this will and the reasons for the successive failures” (III 248). And why had this great awakening of a progressive, national-popular, collective will cum national front failed to emerge in Italy?

The reason for the successive failures of the attempts to create a national-popular creative will is to be found in the existence of certain classes and in the particular character of other classes conditioned by the international position of Italy (seat of the universal church). This position determined an internal situation that can be called ‘economic-corporative’ that, politically, is a particular form of anarchic feudalism. There never was an effective ‘Jacobin’ force – precisely the force that creates the national-popular collective will, the foundation of all modern states. An important component of the Modern Prince is [thus] the question of moral and intellectual reform, that is, the question of religion or worldview. In this field, too, we find an absence of ‘Jacobinism’ and a fear of ‘Jacobinism’ expressed in philosophical terms (latest example: Benedetto Croce). The modern Prince must be the promoter of moral and intellectual reform, which constitutes the terrain for a subsequent development of the national popular collective rooted in a complete and accomplished form of modern civilization (III 248).

Political and religious education – what Hegel calls Bildung – is at the heart of the construction of an alternative national-popular collective will. Hegel himself had already assigned a critical role to education in the progression of Spirit from family to civil society and then to the state.

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Now, Gramsci redeploys the same argument in the context of his reconsideration of the modern prince as the key collective instrument of revolutionary transformation. Thus, rather than aiming at the construction of a new “grassroots civil society” or the development of new “capabilities” for further human development and freedom within the structures and superstructures of capitalism, in the end the modern Prince “should focus entirely on these two basic points: the formation of a national popular collective will, of which the modern Prince is the active and operative expression, and intellectual and moral reform” (III 249).

As it grows, the modern Prince upsets the entire system of intellectual and moral relations, for its development means precisely that every act is deemed useful or harmful, virtuous or wicked, depending on whether its point of reference is the modern Prince and whether it increases the Prince's power or opposes it. The Prince takes the place, in people's consciousness, of the divinity and of the categorical imperative; it becomes the basis of a modern secularism and of a complete secularization of life and of all customary relations (III 249).

There is, thus, no Gramscian idea of civil society, democracy or human development per se, but there clearly is a Gramscian idea of well-organized political activity, centered around the development of the modern prince, and aimed at upsetting the “entire system of intellectual and moral relations” or, indeed, the entire discourse and structures of modern civil society. The moral and intellectual reform that the modern Prince brings about also touches the level of education of “the great majority of the world’s population” (III 329). As we saw above, Gramsci regards the knowledge of popular masses with great contempt and argues that they are "still Ptolemaic", they continue to live in a pre-Copernican world, an essentially traditional and parochial world. Therefore acquiring the right “consciousness” means reaching the level of knowledge of the intellectuals without “conventionality and artifice” insofar as they sometimes exhibit a “national-popular” identity. The consciousness of intellectuals of course reflects the complexities of the social structure. In Gramsci’s terms:

A new historical situation creates a new ideological superstructure whose representatives (the intellectuals) must be regarded as ‘new intellectuals’ brought forth by the new situation and not as a continuation of the preceding intelligentsia. If the ‘new’ intellectuals position themselves as the direct continuation of the previous intelligentsia, they are not ‘new’ at all; they are not tied to the new social group that represents the new historical situation but to the residues of the old social group of which the old intelligentsia was the expression (III 332).

The new social group of intellectuals is thus divided into different strata with their own “typical cultures”. Ideologically, also, “many of these strata are still steeped in the culture of past historical situations” with “many of its strata still have a Ptolemaic worldview” (III 332). “The fundamental characteristic of common sense consists in its being a disjointed, incoherent, and inconsequential conception of the world that matches the character of the multitudes whose philosophy it is” (III 333). Further, “common sense is a disorderly aggregate of philosophical

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conceptions in which one can find whatever one likes” (III 334). Thus, the point of intellectuals, particularly the new intellectuals, is to approach the people and “guide it ideologically and keep it linked with the leading group” (III 334). The point of these intellectuals is to unify theory and practice until it becomes a “concrete universal, historically concrete” (III 337). Gramsci links the transformation of common sense into an organized consciousness and revolutionary “collective will”, not with civil society, but with the new Prince linked to the progressive social group. This is the case particularly after the formation of the party system “when permanent collective wills” come about and “set themselves goals that are both immediate and intermediate” (III 346), Gramsci lays great emphasis on the politics of the will, particularly collective will, as a transformative instrument of radical change. When discussing the notion of Machiavelli as a realist thinker more concerned with “what is” rather than “what ought to be”, for example, Gramsci writes: “The question is more complex: one must determine whether the ‘ought to be’ is an arbitrary act or a necessary fact, whether it is concrete will or passing fancy, desire, daydream. The active politician is a creator, but he does not create out of nothing, and neither does he draw his creations out of his brain. He bases himself on effectual reality; but what is this effectual reality? Could it be something static and immobile? Is it not, rather, a reality in motion, a relation of forces in continuous shifts of equilibrium? When applying one's will to the creation of a new equilibrium among really existing and active forces - basing oneself on the force with a progressive thrust in order to make it prevail - one is always moving on the stream of effectual reality, but for the purpose of mastering it and superseding it. The ‘ought to be’ comes into play not as an abstract and formal idea but as a realistic interpretation and as the only historicist interpretation of reality - as that which alone is active history or politics” (III 283). Gramsci’s ought to be turns out to be Hegel’s ought to be [ref]. Gramsci’s Leninist notion of consciousness comes through quite clearly in the following terms:

The average worker has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his activity in and understanding of the world; indeed, his theoretical consciousness can be ‘historically’ in conflict with his activity. In other words, he will have two theoretical consciousnesses: one that is implicit in his activity and that really unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the world and a superficial, ‘explicit’ one that he has inherited from the past. The practical-theoretical position, in this case, cannot help becoming ‘political’ – that is, a question of ‘hegemony’. Consciousness of being part of a hegemonic force (that is, political consciousness) is the first stage on the way to greater self-awareness, namely, on the way to unifying practice and theory (III 330).

In Gramsci, however, the aim of consciousness or self-consciousness is not to merely increase personal autonomy or individual self-assertion in the liberal bourgeois sense of these terms. On the contrary, for Gramsci “Self-consciousness in the historical sense means the creation of a vanguard of intellectuals: a ‘mass’ does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become ‘independent’ without organizing itself, and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is, without

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organizers and leaders. But this process of creating intellectuals is long and difficult” (III 330). And this process cannot take place within the “system of intellectual and moral” life of existing civil society. Rather “It is the parties that elaborate the new integral and all-embracing intelligentsia; the traditional intellectuals of the earlier phase (clergy, professional philosophers, etc.) will necessarily disappear, unless – following a long and difficult process – they are assimilated” (III 331). In other words, the earlier experience of socialization and learning in civil society, largely organized by traditional intellectuals and private associations, has to be overcome by people, led by the intellectuals organically emerging from them but linked to the new Prince, and eventually “assimilated” into the task of social transformation. In a real sense, then, new intellectuals and the modern Prince are engaged not only in a battle for social transformation, but also and more largely in a battle for knowledge or “objectivity” itself. As Gramsci sees it, the “struggle for objectivity is thus the struggle for the cultural unification of the human race. This unification process is the process of the objectivization of the subject, who becomes increasingly a concrete universal, historically concrete” (III 337, emphasis added). Gramsci'’ considerations on intellectual and moral reform, in transforming what he calls the moral life of civil society or the trenches of hegemony, and the role that intellectuals play in transforming them leads him to a discussion of some of the greatest intellectual and moral movements in Europe starting with the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. Gramsci is concerned with how, to what extent and in what form, these cultural and intellectual movements took root in Italy or not. In the German case, Gramsci writes, “the intellectual coarseness of the men of the Reformation foreshadowed classical German philosophy [Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel] and the vast movement of modern German culture” [Weimar?] (III 154). But in the case of Italy, Gramsci claims, the best that the Italian Rissorgimento had been able to produce philosophically was the figure and philosophy of Benedetto Croce. Indeed, Gramsci engages with the figure and thought of Croce throughout his notebooks. But no comment on Croce stands out more glaringly than Gramsci’s comparison of Croce with Erasmus, the quintessential Renaissance Catholic theologian and philosopher. Despite his greatness and influence as well as the depth and breadth of his knowledge, Erasmus is nevertheless said to have made the following narrow-minded comment on Luther: “Wherever Luther goes, culture dies.” In like manner, Gramsci argues, Croce charged historical materialism for its “scientism” and its “materialistic superstition”. Despite Croce’s profound engagement with the philosophy of Hegel, he “no longer understands how the historical process that started with the ‘medieval’ Luther could extend all the way to Hegel” (III 154, emphasis added). And beyond misunderstanding the nature of the historical process that sustains his own thought, Croce also failed to “go to the people” and thus become a “‘national’ [organic] element (just like the men of the Renaissance, as opposed to the Lutherans and Calvinists), because he has not been able to create a group of disciples who would have made his philosophy ‘popular’, [...] so that it could become an educational factor [...] for the common man” (III 154). Given his stature and significance in Italian intellectual and, indeed, moral life, Croce’s failure to reach the people represents, for Gramci, the failure of traditional, cosmopolitan, intellectuals to create an entirely post-Catholic and post-corporatist culture. But this is not just the failure of traditional intellectuals, but the great failure of the entire Italian bourgeoisie.

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Gramsci’s critique of Italian intellectuals like Croce brings forth his admiration for the “national” philosophers of France and Germany and for what, in Gramsci’s stagist view of historical progress and fulfillment, they accomplished. In his reading of Hegel, in fact, Gramsci links the concepts of will, consciousness, action and universality into a single conceptual ensemble that constitutes the subjectivity of his own progressive collective will. In reference to Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, Gramsci writes:

Hegel says that ‘in the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the revolution to which in Germany mind has in these latter days advanced, was formally thought out and expressed’. That is to say, in a great epoch of universal history, ‘two nations only have played a part, the German and the French, and this in spite of their absolute opposition, or rather because they are so opposite’” (III 355).14

Gramsci also quotes the following key passage from Hegel himself:

The metaphysical process by which [the] abstract Will develops itself so as to attain a definite form of Freedom, and how Rights and Duties are evolved therefrom, this is not the place to discuss. It may however be remarked that the same principle obtained speculative recognition in Germany, in the Kantian Philosophy. According to it the simple unity of Self-consciousness, the Ego, constitutes the absolutely independent Freedom, and is the Fountain of all general conceptions – i.e. all conceptions elaborated by Thought – Theoretical Reason; and likewise of the highest of all practical determinations [or conceptions] – Practical Reason, as free and pure Will; and Rationality of Will is none other than the maintaining one’s self in pure Freedom – willing this and this alone – Right purely for the sake of Right, Duty purely for the sake of Duty. Among the Germans this view assumed no other form than that of tranquil theory; but the French wished to give it practical effect. Two questions, therefore suggest themselves: Why did this principle of Freedom remain merely formal? And why did the French alone, and not the Germans, set about realizing it? (III 628, emphasis added).

As these passages show, Gramsci is aware of the link between the “Ego” as “absolutely independent Freedom” and “Fountain of all conception” and the role of the “Will” in “maintaining one’s self in pure Freedom”. Gramsci knows that these fundamental ideas of Western European thought and culture underpin the moral life, the common sense, of the moral self of bourgeois civil society. But insofar as Gramsci does not take his critique of the “trench system” of the “most advanced states” to the level or depth of the self itself, the bourgeois Ego, the idea of “one’s self” as “pure Freedom”, and instead translates these ideas to collective terms and sets out to defend a morality of the collective self, the collective will and of “man as mass” aiming to a totalitarian universalism through a new prince, he remains hopelessly trapped precisely in the very categories of bourgeois philosophical thought and political practice that he is desperately trying to demolish even if only theoretically.

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Gramsci is certainly right is making a link between civil society and the modern state, the historical process that started with the ‘medieval’ Luther and that extends all the way to Hegel, with the profound transformations in culture, morality and politics that brought about the very self of civil society that Gramsci left largely intact and hidden behind its trenches and embankments. The Reformation, as Gramsci argues, became connected to the “common man” in a deeply subjective and metaphysical sense and thus became an organic, immanent factor or, in Gramsci's words, “vitally embedded among the masses” (III 159). Gramsci sees the Reformation process as one led by nationally-linked intellectuals and thus leading to a profound moral reform of societies. By contrast, he sees the Renaissance as a process that remained an international and cosmopolitan movement, led by cosmopolitan intellectuals like Erasmus or Croce, but without a true connection to the vital social forces, particularly in Italy. As he writes: “It is clear that one cannot understand the molecular process by which a new culture asserts itself in the contemporary world unless one has understood the Reformation-Renaissance historical nexus” (III 192). Attempting to dig a little deeper into the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the Reformation leads Gramsci to propose an interesting link between “grace” and capitalism.15 As he writes:

The historico-cultural node that needs to be sorted out in the study of the Reformation is the transformation of the concept of grace from something that should ‘logically’ result in the greatest fatalism and passivity into a real practice of enterprise and initiative on a world scale that was [instead] its dialectical consequence and that shaped the ideology of nascent capitalism (III 193).

Although Gramsci’s link between grace and capitalism is not wholly original as these points and links had already and quite systematically been explored by Weber, one cannot forget that Gramsci is working within the Marxist and Leninist tradition of revolutionary thought and practice and, like Lukács, he too wants to foreground the importance of these seemingly superstructural elements in the making of contemporary forms of political consciousness and argue that their meaning and influence exceeds any form of mechanical or economistic understanding of social dynamics. Yet, Gramsci does not go deep enough, again, in his exploration of the concept of grace and does not trace this idea and its dialectical consequences all the way back to Augustine, the master thinker of the subjected will as true freedom through grace.16 In fact, Gramsci’s understanding of the theological foundations of these ideas and their continuing influence on his own collectivistic translation of them remains perpetually tenuous, rudimentary, and unselfcritical. The philosophy of the will, the ego, self-consciousness and freedom as largely articulated by “classical German philosophy” remains lodged deeply at the heart of Gramsci’s own understanding of the politics of the will even when he transfers it to the level of collective subjects and tries to give it a historical materialist shape. Marx, by contrast, offers a critique not only of English political economy and notions of civil society, but also of the very Kantian and Hegelian conceptions that Gramsci attempts to resurrect as the philosophical heart of this modern Prince. For Marx, in fact, the task of critique involved “a critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the resolute negation of the German political and legal

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consciousness as practiced hereto, the most distinguished, most universal expression of which, raised to the level of a science, is the speculative philosophy of law itself" [and the philosophy of the bourgeois subject that underpins it] (III 628). For all its foundation on the modern idea of “rights”, according to Marx this whole idea of the modern state and civil society actually “disregards real man” (III 628). Gramsci’s critique of civil society remains unfinished precisely because he does not dig deep enough beyond the trenches and fortifications of civil society towards an examination of the bourgeois self, the idea of the self as property and the idea of the self expressing itself as “free will” that underpin the category of modern civil society and even - if not more so - knowledge at the level of “common sense” – the “Ptolemaic worldview” – Gramsci says prevails as form of knowledge among the “masses” of people. In fact, Gramsci takes the ideas of “free will” and the self as property for granted and conceptually extends them to collective life, the life of subaltern classes that have become conscious of themselves, “autonomous”, “sovereign” – thanks to the work of their organic intellectuals – and have become organized into revolutionary political parties – thanks to the work of the New Prince – seeking to constitute themselves into a new society and a new state. The passage to a new society and a new state, however, also requires “moral action”. But the kind of moral action that is required, Gramsci maintains, cannot be inspired by moralistic formulae like Kant’s categorical imperative. According to Gramsci, “Kant’s categorical formula” can be summarized in the following terms: "behave as you would want everybody else to behave in the same circumstances” (III 323). This inaccurate rendition of Kant’s moral philosophy in general and the Kantian categorical imperative in particular nonetheless leads Gramsci into fa critique of Kant and Kantian-based forms of liberalism that has deep echoes of Hegel: “Analyzed realistically, Kant’s formula is only applicable to a specific milieu, with that milieu’s moral superstitions and barbaric mores; it is a static, empty formula into which one can pour any actual historical content (with its contradictions, naturally, so that what is a truth on the other side of the Pyrenees is a falsehood on this side of the Pyrenees)” (III 323). As a remedy to Kant’s abstract moral language Gramsci offers, unfortunately, a reductionist version of the vocabulary of Marxism that is, in fact, no better than the language of Bukharin despite Gramsci’s own many condemnations of Bukhari’s supposed vulgarizations of what Gramsci at one point calls “the authentic testimony of Marx” (III 173). In resorting to this critical reading of Kant’s moral philoosphy Gramsci left us a rather simple morality of collective praxis as an alternative for the current age of hegemony that is, in fact, no better than Kant’s.17 Repeating a formula developed by Marx in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Gramsci maintains that a new society and a new state cannot be developed until all the necessary social conditions are ready for it and when these conditions are ready, Gramsci turns to a relatively simple moral philosophy to articulate his thoughts on the imperative of action as both fulfillment and revolution:

If the conditions do exist, the completion of the tasks becomes ‘duty, ‘will’ becomes free. Morality thus becomes, in a certain sense, a search for the necessary conditions for the freedom of the will, a will aimed at a certain end and at proving that the necessary conditions exist (III 158).

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Gramsci calls this version of the moral imperative the “scientific foundations for a morality of historical materialism”. Although this idea of a “moral science” has never been widely adopted outside reduced numbers of communist/socialist intellectuals, it nonetheless plays a large role in Gramsci's theorizations.

If history is the history of liberty – according to Hegel’s proposition – the formula applies to the entire history of the human race, and all currents, all parties are expressions of liberty (III 298).

Gramsci’s unfinished critique of civil society is on the right track even if Gramsci’s moral philosophy of praxis falls quite short of what is needed to overcome the “self” at the heart of modern forms of civil society that Gramsci left unexamined. It is precisely in the direction of developing a critique of that self that we can also develop Gramsci’s formidable critique of civil society and render it more adequate for our present time. 1 All comments are welcome, but please contact before citing: marco at marcofonseca.net 2 All citations refer to Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 3 Volumes, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. In-text citations refer to volume number and page number. 3 Despite his critique of Bukharin's “popular manual”, Gramsci's understanding here and elsewhere is remarkably similar, if not essentially the same, as Bukharin’s understanding of the evolution of knowledge or "science" as a "reflection" of developments in the fundamental "structures" of society. 4 Other organizations that may well be characterized by "petty bourgeois democracy, secularism, anticlericalism", like Freemasonry, are also not divorced from the project of diffusing bourgeois hegemony (II 271). If organizations of the upper classes like Rotary Clubs do not address themselves directly to the people, freemasonry does (?). 5 This view is supported by… 6 Perhaps Gramsci makes this claim because he is Italian and is fond of claiming for Italy the prior role in the development of key European events or historical episodes or because Cusa was an Italian "intellectual" and, in addition to the above reason, he represents the ultimate failure of the traditional role of intellectuals. 7 There is a connection with Autustine here. 8 These points have been elaborated by Küng and MacCulloch. 9 One problem with this argument is that Gramsci also argues that civil society is a system of trenches that protect and secure political society and, more broadly, the hegemony of the ruling class and of its state; civil society is thus a construction that safeguards political society and the liberal capitalist state and not its goal unless Gramsci means that in a thoroughly bourgeois capitalist society the end of the state qua representative of the elites is to dissolve itself and be replaced by an anarcho-capitalist order and thus be reabsorbed by these elites themselves. 10 In this passage it is also possible to see Hegel’s influential view of civil society as the sphere of “ethical life”.

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11 What this notion of freedom is not is a notion of freedom that stems from the Hegelian dynamic of mutual recognition or the Levinasian freedom in the other, the neighbor; it is not freedom in recognition and in community, the kind that Enrique Dussel explores in his Ethics of Liberation, and thus it is not freedom in the act of encountering others and engaging with them, but rather freedom in hegemony, freedom as an expression of the “dialectic” of “coercion and consent”. Neither is Gramsci’s notion of freedom here an earlier version of Habermas’ idea of “communicative freedom” because communication, passé Habermas himself, is a kind of secondary form of action whereas recognition, as even Habermas’ disciple Axel Honneth appears to recognize, is even more primary, more fundamental, and retains priority over communication. That, at any rate, is one lesson we learn from both Hegel and Levinas. 12 Gramsci calls Luxemburg’s 1906 The Mass Strike “the most significant theory of the war of maneuver applied to the study of history and to the art of politics” (III 161). 13 According to Gramsci theorists like Sorel never advanced “from the concept of ‘myth’, via the concept of trade unions, to the concept of political party.” 14 See the quote in Buttigieg III 627. 15 In proposing this link Gramsci anticipates the work of Latin American philosophy of liberation thinkers like León Rozitchner, Enrique Dussel, Horacio Cherutti and Raul Fornet-Betancourt. 16 Ref to my manuscript. 17 Buttigieg points out at least one of Kant’s actual definitions of the categorial imperative (III 608).