PhilosophersAntonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci

Power rests on cultural hegemony, not just force.

Marxism1891 – 1937 ItalyMarxist philosopherPolitical theoristJournalistCo-founder of the Communist Party of Italy
Prison Notebooks, Q 1, Q 7, Q 13 (1929-1934)

Power rests on consent as much as on force

What it claims

There can and must be a hegemony before reaching government: one cannot count only on State power and the material force it gives to exercise political leadership.

Why

Power combines force and consent: in the West the state is only a front trench, with civil society standing behind it.

Valid with an implicit premise

Why do the dominated so often accept the established order, when they are the majority? Gramsci, writing in prison under Mussolini, answers that force is not enough. A class also holds because it "leads": its ideas and values pass for self-evident, through school, press, Church, associations. He calls this hegemony. Practical consequence: whoever wants to change society cannot count only on seizing the machinery of State. We file the argument under the question of the just society, on the side of equality, because Gramsci wants to overthrow the rule of a class; but the argument describes how power holds more than it says what is just, and this filing remains approximate.

P1A class is dominant in two ways: "leading" with regard to allied classes, "dominant" with regard to opposing classes.
P2The normal exercise of hegemony combines force and consent: force must not overwhelm consent and tries to appear backed by it, through the newspapers and associations that express public opinion.
P3In the West the State is only an outer trench: behind it stands a sturdy chain of fortresses and casemates, that is, civil society.
P4 · implicit premiseIf a class's power rests both on the machinery of State and on the leadership it exercises in civil society, it cannot be overthrown by seizing the machinery of State alone: a hegemony must be won first.
Therefore there can and must be a hegemony before reaching government: one cannot count only on State power and the material force it gives to exercise political leadership.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where a class leads by consent, with a solid civil society, yet where seizing the machinery of State is still enough to overthrow it.
Valid with P4. P1 to P3 describe how power holds; they do not yet say how it is undone. P4 supplies the link. It is mainly true for the West, where civil society is thick: for Russia in 1917, Gramsci thinks the State was "everything" and a quick seizure was enough. So the argument says nothing about the best strategy everywhere.
Analogy. A castle has a gate and, behind it, walls, courtyards, towers. Taking the gate does not give you the castle. In the West, says Gramsci, society is that long network of defences. The critic answers: the defences fall quickly if the castle's own soldiers no longer believe in the lord.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Karl Marx, Preface of 1859 (read in an "economist" sense) 1859 · attacks the conclusion

Marx writes that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. If so, dominant ideas follow the economic base: winning minds before changing the relations of production would be impossible or pointless. This is an internal Marxist debate: Marx is not aiming at Gramsci, but some readers have drawn this objection from him against Gramsci.

Gramsci replies
Gramsci Gramsci, later, on ideas and material forces
He recalls a statement of Marx's: a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force. From it he draws the notion of a "historical bloc": material forces are its content and ideologies its form, a merely didactic distinction, since without form material forces would not be historically conceivable and without material forces ideologies would be individual whims.
The debate goes on (our summary) Gramsci thus keeps a material base, but does not say which prevails when form and content diverge. More economist Marxists reply that this margin leaves hegemony depending, in the last analysis, on material conditions.
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak 1985 · attacks premise 2

Scott spent two years in a rice-farming village in Malaysia. The poor peasants there obey in public, but in private they mock the rich, drag their feet, pilfer, spread rumours. What makes them obey is not belief in the values of the dominant: it is the pressure of need and the fear of repression. For Scott, visible submission is not consent, and the theory of hegemony overrates the part played by ideas. He also contests the weak version of the thesis, according to which the dominated merely judge the order inevitable.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1985, after the author's death (1937).
The debate goes on (our summary) Gramsci died in 1937. He does not say the dominated adhere without reservation: in his view the man of the people has "two theoretical consciousnesses (or a contradictory consciousness)", one implicit in his activity, which unites him with those who work alongside him, the other verbal, inherited from the past and accepted without criticism (Q 11, §12). Scott would answer that his peasants, among themselves, do not repeat the discourse of the dominant at all. The debate is about the real share of consent, which the two authors measure differently.
The liberal objection (in the spirit of Karl Popper) 1963 · attacks premise 2

Popper does not discuss Gramsci; it is his criterion of falsifiability (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963) that is applied here. If every agreement can be read as manufactured consent and every disagreement as resistance, no observation can contradict the theory. It becomes immune to the facts. And calling citizens' free consent "hegemony" strips their choices of any value.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1963, after the author's death (1937).
The debate goes on (our summary) Gramsci died in 1937, before this book. His theory nonetheless picks out observable situations: he describes the "crisis of authority", in which the ruling class has lost consent and holds on only by force, because the masses no longer believe what they used to believe (Q 3, §34). The critic answers that recognising such a crisis after the fact is not enough: one would have to say in advance what distinguishes free consent from manufactured consent.