Review

Reviewed Work(s): Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli
by Benedetto Fontana
Review by: Evan Watkins
Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 973-974
Published by: American Political Science Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2082723
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 American Political Science Review Vol. 88, No. 4
received pieties at its beginning to production of a new-
model, progressive nation-state in its middle to intima-
tions of a new-model progressive civilization at its end.
The rest of Faulkner's book sets out Bacon's plan for
the conquest of human nature through the making of
the self-made man able to contend in an alien world
(Part 2) and then for a man-made state of the world
appropriate to such a self (Part 3).
Faulkner says, early in the book, that this last part, on
"the state of progress," contains "the obviously impor-
tant and political innovations" and that "the reader who
wishes to reach quickly much of the meat should turn
there first." In this part, Faulkner contends that Bacon's
doctrine of the state is far from the Elizabethan monar-
chism with which it is often identified: rather, Bacon
plans a nation-state of the type that we call modern-
one bent on economic and industrial growth and pre-
sided over by a republican but effectual government.
Such growth-oriented nations will constitute a world of
great powers but will harbor Bacon's science with a
human face. Each of Bacon's major political writings
does its own work to produce the new orders, by
showing how enlightened despots can establish a state,
how rising men can transform an established state into a
civil state (a civil society and a civil government), and
how progressive intellectuals and their allies among the
mercantile class can introduce into the civil state a
visionary scientific project for ameliorating human suf-
fering. Bacon follows Machiavelli in criticizing classical
political philosophy as useless and in promising effectu-
ality through reliance on the most powerful of passions;
but while Bacon continues the building of hopes on fear,
his own specialty is the nourishing of hopes.
Part 2 treats Bacon's transformation of ethics into a
radically individualistic doctrine of the self-made man.
Individualism is the central doctrine of modern politics,
Faulkner says, and the life of the self is central for Bacon;
his humane science, radically rethinking human ends
and needs, discovers a needy self that must make its
own provision to the point of making its own world.
Bacon produces first a critique of divinity and morality
as well as philosophy and then a construction of arts that untarist Gramsci, and so on ad nauseam" (p. 2). The ad
enable the self to manage itself and others into the
power that will preserve itself and them. Nature, even
human nature, is stingy: the good that men get-even
their purposes-they make for themselves. Morality is
realistic humanitarianism, mixing a show of provision
for humanity's needs with primary provision for satis-
faction of one's own passion to survive. To serve one-
self, there is need for public policy and also for a public after this early and distancing gesture Fontana himself
persona as an image to win followers. Indeed, public
persona is the delivery of self: while fear makes us wish
to save ourselves, the art of doing so originates in
vengeful anger at our natural state of misery, and real
revenge is a far-sighted domination that gives the self a
life after death through the devising of a public image;
this culminates in the image of a new-model Caesar who
will blend civil supports with promises of humane
benefactions to achieve a general and durable conquest
of the minds of future generations-with Bacon himself
revered, in the end, as humanity's true savior.
The very last chapter of the entire book evaluates the
premises of Bacon's project, subjecting his teachings,
both on nature and on human nature, to the same
twofold critique: his reductionist reasoning begins by
excluding various naturally given notions that human
living cannot do without; and his construction work
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makes use of an impoverished version of what his
demolition work excluded at the outset. Faulkner criti-
cizes the doctrine of productive experimentalism that is
the scientific foundation of Bacon's work and the doc-
trine of the self-made man that is the moral core of it.
Faulkner does not, however, criticize the Baconian mod-
em civil order; Faulkner is a politic man, and that order
is the regime under which we live. It is also the regime
in which we prosper, and Faulkner is a humane man;
the truly progressive achievements of the regime should
be defended, Faulkner says. But, he argues, the Baco-
nian foundation and its core will not provide the means
to defend or even properly to estimate the achievements
of the regime.
Where to look for help? In the middle chapter of part
2, Faulkner centers attention on Bacon's rejection of "the
philosophical alternative"-the classical teachings on
wisdom and friendship that Bacon sought to correct.
Those who would rush into postmodernity, seeking an
alternative to the doctrine that informs the Baconian
project, can find, in Faulkner's book, reason to pause for
a good long look back.
St. John's College, Annapolis HARvEY FLAUMENHAFT
Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gram-
sci and Machiavelli. By Benedetto Fontana. Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 226p. $44.95
cloth, $16.95 paper.
Gramsci is almost the only communist leader to sur-
vive with honor in the "post" fields of so many recent
currents of leftist thought. He has, in fact, not only
survived but flourished, through the widespread dis-
semination of key concepts like hegemony and organic
intellectual. Fontana notes early in his introductory chap-
ter the multiple appearances Gramsci continues to
make, depending on the interpreter: "the Crocean or
Hegelian Gramsci, the Leninist Gramsci, the Jacobin
Gramsci, the democratic-spontaneist Gramsci, the vol-
nauseam is rather too much like an expression of Crocean
intellectual distacco for a book that otherwise takes very
seriously Gramsci's insistence that philosophy must
become a popular political force. After all, multiple
Gramscis around is not automatically reason for con-
tempt. It can mean that his ideas are caught up in, and
inform, significant political conflicts of direction; and
gets quickly to the business of interpretively pursuing
the complications in Gramsci's analysis of Machiavelli.
Fontana's angle of entry is a crucial one, for while
Gramsci has indeed survived with honor even in self-
designated "post-Marxist" thinking, the sticking point
remains Gramsci's modernist (no post) insistence on the
revolutionary necessity of an organized, mass-based
political party. And nowhere is that insistence more
evident than in the notebooks concerned with Machia-
velli. Laclau and Mouffe's summary comment in Hege-
mony and Socialist Strategy (1985) can serve as a typical
"post" dissociation from at least this aspect of Gramsci's
politics: "We will thus retain from the Gramscian view
the logic of articulation and the political centrality of the
frontier effects, but we will eliminate the assumption of
a single political space as the necessary framework for
those phenomena to arise" (p. 137, emphasis original).
973
 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 1994
I think it a fruitless debate whether one can thus pick
and choose parts of a political philosophy or whether
one has to swallow a system whole. Gramsci is not a
system in any case; he is not medicine (good or bad) that
one has to swallow; people will use what they find
useful and discard the rest. The serious issue Fontana's
analysis raises (if indirectly) concerns the "strategic"
sense in such a summary dismissal of the relevance of
party politics to a "post" world. Fontana's approach is
indirect because focused, first of all, on a matter of
interpretation: How exactly did Gramsci understand
"political party" in relation to Machiavelli's thought?
For Fontana, Gramsci was interested in Machiavelli
"as the thinker who first understood and first theorized
the need for a politics that would recognize the presence
of the 'mass' as a new factor in the power equation"
(p. 8). Croce's response to Machiavelli's recognition was
that if they cannot be kept out of the "power equation,"
they can at least be kept out of knowledge; hence one
had better be sure that knowledge and power are clearly
understood as two very different things. Machiavelli
was about power, not knowledge. Fontana's claim,
however, is that Gramsci's counterreading of Machiav-
elli is not only a challenge to Croce's attempt to keep
philosophical knowledge and ethical direction distinct
from politics as a purely "technical" field of power
relations. More fundamentally, Gramsci's reading in-
sists that Croce's very focus on that distinction is alreadyoverarching claim is asserted rather than argued, for
a political displacement. What seems from Croce's lib-
eral perspective both a threat and a mystery (What
happens when the "mass" becomes "a new factor in the
power equation"? is transformed into an intellectual
dilemma that might then admit to philosophical resolu-
tion: What is the relation between knowledge and
power? Croce's feat of prestidigitation is the assurance
that if you can get the right answer to the second
question, the first will solve itself and the power threat
posed by "the mass" disappear. Gramsci's "anti-Croce"
begins with Machiavelli, as a reminder that Croce was
asking the wrong question.
Fontana's second and connected claim is more com-
plicated and takes up much of the book in its elabora-
tion. Briefly, the thesis is that if, unlike Croce, one begins and Nicola Lacey. Toronto: University of Toronto
with "the presence of the 'mass"' as a political factor,
then one must find a way to understand politics other-
wise than as domination. Thus, for Fontana, the figure
of "the prince" in Machiavelli (as, correlatively, "the
party" in Gramsci) does not mark the emergence of new
types of political leaders and new forms of instrumental
political power interests. It is, instead, a figure embed-
ded in a process of social transformation that constructs
the political order as a realm of freedom. The party as
"modem prince" is then out "to teach the people a new
political knowledge" (p. 151), Fontana allows. But he
adds immediately that "this knowledge .. . must now
be understood as one always internal to the people,
because the democratic philosopher (the teacher) is
himself a product of the people he intends to educate"
(p. 151). The party, in other words, is neither a cadre of pronouns to take account of "the gendered reality be-
revolutionary leaders nor the intellectual representative
of an already existent (if mute) "class subject." The party
is the democratic philosopher produced by the people as
they themselves becoming democratic philosophers in
action. It is finally a figure of politics-as-freedom built or frame or are woven into the social worlds we inhabit,
out of the destruction of politics-as-domination.
Thus, like Laclau and Mouffe and other "post" theo-
rists, Fontana stresses that popular identities are not a
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given of the social field; they must be constructed. His
reading of Gramsci, however, specifies that process of
construction as an educative logic of social relations
implicated in the politics of party. The issue of whether
the political order is a "single" space or, as in Laclau and
Mouffe, a matter of intersecting, multiple contingencies
is less important than whether the reciprocity of educa-
tional relationships can inform the activity of every
citizen-participant. Fontana finds the basis for Gramsci's
conception of educational reciprocity in the formula
Machiavelli introduces in both the Discourses and The Art
of War: "The new knowledge that Machiavelli intends to
introduce is here established by the relation 'io . . . da
voi ... come voi da me' ('I ... through you ... as you
through me'), a relation that establishes the active dy-
namism of a knowledge that itself teaches the necessity
for action" (p. 104). For Fontana, education in this
Gramscian sense is a precondition for general political
freedom, rather than a political strategy articulated by a
representative party leadership.
The largest claim of the book is that no matter how
"post," the reduction of politics to strategies, organiza-
tion, and interests in fact continues a liberal, Crocean
tradition of avoiding "the presence of the 'mass' as a
new factor in the power equation." It remains within the
field of politics as domination. To some great extent, this
Fontana gives scarcely enough attention to recent polit-
ical discourses to ground it. Nevertheless, the insight
and the awareness of both historical circumstances and
philosophical positioning that Fontana brings to bear on
Gramsci's reading of Machiavelli seems to me an indis-
pensable corrective to an all-too-familiar "post" assump-
tion that a party politics engaged in fundamental, global
conflicts is merely a thing of the past.
University of Washington EvAN WATKINS
The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the
Liberal-Communitarian Debate. By Elizabeth Frazer
Press, 1993. 268p. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Like many other feminists, Elizabeth Frazer and
Nicola Lacey, both of Oxford University, are dismayed
at the nearly complete domination of the "contested
terrain" of political theory by theorists who pay no
serious attention to what feminists see as thoroughly
persuasive arguments. Clearly, the structures of gender
fundamentally affect political and personal life and the
societies in which such life occurs. When this is ac-
knowledged, it profoundly alters the estimates that can
be made of the adequacy of liberal political theory and
communitarian social theory. Yet both the liberalism
dominant in North America and its communitarian
critics have done almost nothing beyond changing a few
hind the concepts of political theory" (p. 37).
Can anyone doubt that gender is a component of our
identities, and that we are at least partly shaped by the
structures of gender expectations and roles that underlie
whatever the metaphors we use to express this? But
then the abstract, isolated individuals of liberal theory,
and the view that political activity consists of the indi-
974