Freedom on the Edge of Structure:

Gramsci and the Political

Niklas Plaetzer, Sciences Po Paris

Written for the Graduate seminar “Freedom, Rationality and Commitment” (Pr. Sharkey)
Spring 2016 – Please do not cite without permission (work in progress!)

“If being a Communist involves responsibility, I accept it.”1

Antonio Gramsci in court, June 4, 1928.

Introduction: Towards a Philosophy of Praxis

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) represents a remarkable case in the history of Marxism: both
theorist and revolutionary, his ideas, in large parts developed in his Prison Notebooks, seem to
escape the strict classi fications of Marxist systematics. Gramsci's sense of creative engagement with
Marx's theoretical edi fice has earned him the reputation of one of the most original minds of radical
thought. He is, in the words of Michael Walzer, “a rare bird in the twentieth century – an innocent
communist”2 – and might as such also come as a possible redeemer for Marxism beyond a kind of
proto-totalitarian grand récit.3 Even for his critics, Gramsci has to be read as part of “a
countertradition to set against the long line of Leninist precedents.” 4 This essay is going to discuss
Gramsci's idea of freedom in order to investigate the extent of his double rupture with Marxist
orthodoxy.5 It will be argued that Gramsci does not only invert the economistic outlook of base and
superstructure by appraising the latter and thereby providing a much needed political corrective to
the determinism to which Marxism has too often been reduced. He also develops a sophisticated
“philosophy of praxis”6 that goes beyond the relations of force within a structured totality by

1 Cited in Antonio A. Sentucci, Antonio Gramci, New York: Monthly Review Press 2010, 119.
2 Michael Walzer, “Antonio Gramsci's Commitment,” in: The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political
Commitment in the Twentieth Century, 80-101, here 81.
3 Cf. Tama Weisman, Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx: On Totalitarianism and the Tradition of Western Political
Thought, Lexington, MA: Lexinton Books 2013.
4 Walzer, 81.
5 The thesis of a Gramscian “double inversion” of orthodox Marxism was first developed by Norberto Bobbio in his
influential presentation at the Cagliari Conference 1967, reprinted as Norberto Bobbio, “Gramsci and the conception
of civil society,” Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge &
Kena Paul 1979, 21-48. Mouffe summarizes Bobbio's thesis on Gramsci as that of a “double inversion in relation to
the marxist tradition: 1. the primacy of the ideological superstructures over the economic structure; the primacy of
civil society (consensus) over political society (force).” Mouffe, “Gramsci today,” Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 3.
6 Simon Critchley notes that “philosophy of praxis” is both Gramsci's “code in the Prison Notebooks for Marxism and
a critique of the latter insofar as Marxism should not present itself as an abstract theory.” Simon Critchley,
Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London and New York: Verso 2012, 102.

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af firming the passionate commitment of revolutionaries, driven by the “discipline of one's own
inner self,”7 the latter conceived of as socially constructed and by no means to be confused with a
fixed and self-enclosed individual. This essay aims to bring to light the extent to which Gramsci
opens up a space for a political notion of freedom, while also demonstrating in how far his ideas
ultimately fall back into a last grounding in the predetermined outlook of a class-based analysis.
The theoretical tension which brilliantly plays out in Gramscian thought is thus the one
between “Marxist science and working-class politics:” 8 “scienti fic analysis of social formations” on
one hand, and “ideas in active struggle”9 on the other, that is to say, between 'two Marxs,'10 the
economist of base/superstructure against the thinker of praxis. The essay will hence be divided into
two parts: one investigating the structural conditions of freedom in Gramsci's thought, another
discussing the element of contingency in action. Is freedom thinkable in Gramscian politics? In the
first part, this rather large question will be understood in the more classically Marxist sense, as
suggesting an investigation of the limits of freedom related to necessary relations of force, namely
“relations of production” which structure the life of men and women under capitalism “independent
of their will.”11 To what extent does Gramsci follow the Marxian dictum of economic conditioning?
It will be argued that his concept of civil society, as opposed to “political society” (the state,
characterized by force) as well as to the economy (in distinction to the notion in Hegel and Marx 12),
crucially extends the Marxist framework towards an analysis of class domination on the
superstructural level. A Gramscian civil society framework places the emphasis on consent as a
mechanism of class struggle, thereby paving the way for an analysis of intricate, 'capillary' forms of
power which can (but do not always) include internalized forms of oppression within a subject who
(ideologically) perceives herself to be free.13 In this sense, one might say that Gramsci develops on
Marx's views on freedom's socio-economic limitations rather than surpassing his perspective.
However, as a second subsection is going to demonstrate, his reconceptualization of the notion of
ideology signi ficantly departs from the economistic weight which much of the Marxist tradition
places on epistemology. This aspect, it will be argued against Walzer's critique, must be appreciated
as both one of his most important theoretical innovations and as an extension of the possibilities of
freedom.
But if one is to employ Heidegerrian terms for our purposes here, Gramsci's welcome
theoretical revaluation of civil society would still only operate on the ontic level, which “has to do
7 Antonio Gramsci, Cronache torinesi 1913-1917 [Turin Chronicles 1913-1917], ed. S. Caprioglio, Turin 1980, 100-
101, cited in Sentucci, 35.
8 Walzer, 81.
9 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, New York and London: 93,
10 Cf. François Dosse, “Structuralism,” in: Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), Columbia Companion to Twentieth Century
Philosophies, New York: Columbia University Press 2009, 469-478, here 474, referring to Althusser's idea of an
“epistemological break” (coupure épistémologique) between two Marxs. Cf. Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Lire
le Capital, Vol. 2, Paris: Maspero 1969, 16, 19-20.
11 Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in: Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-
Engels Reader, second edition, London and New York: W.W. Norton and Company 1978, 4.
12 Jean L. Cohen, Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1994, 142-144.
13 In this respect, the similarities between Gramsci and Foucault have frequently been noted. See most notably the
work of Antonio Negri. Cf. Marcia Landy, “'Gramsci beyond Gramsci:' The Writings of Toni Negri,” boundary 2,
Vol. 21, No. 2, summer 1994, 63-97.

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with the manifold practices of conventional politics, while the ontological concerns the very way in
which society is instituted.”14 Therefore, while his views constitute a veritable rupture with
economistic forms of Marxism, the concepts of civil society and ideology will not be suf ficient for a
convincing account of freedom's conditions of possibility. They only touch upon the ontic
functioning of politics (la politique) but do not grasp the ontological questioning of the very
possibility of society's contingent “auto-institution.” 15 This ontological level, however, is
indispensable if one is to determine the extent to which the moment of the political (le politique) is
acknowledged in Gramsci's work and freedom as contingency thus thinkable. If society in Gramsci
remains ontologically determined 'in the last instance' by a fundamentally economic class division,
i.e. ontologically pre-determined in this instance16, how far can Gramsci's notion of freedom really
take us? In other words, the very moment we are told that politics is an autonomous arena of action,
we are immediately reminded of its necessarily heteronomous conditioning by class struggle. In
response to this ontological conundrum, a second part of the essay is going to develop on the
aporias of Gramsci's idea of hegemony, which denotes an “ethico-political” “balance of
compromise”17 between disparate agents of society for the purpose of common action. While the
logic of hegemonic articulation, understood as the linking of different actors via cultural and
political practices, points towards a break with Marxist dialectics, a recourse to the work of Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe will allow us to demonstrate the ultimate incapacity of Gramsci to think
hegemony as fully contingent and, thus, political. To put it bluntly, for Gramsci, freedom is not
actually free. Whereas it might be true that “His Majesty the Economy” is no longer “striding along
the royal road of the Dialectic,”18 “here still […] his ministers Politics and Ideology might be
duplicitous in the performance of their assigned tasks.” 19 Freedom and commitment must therefore
remain structurally 'hollow' notions, as they are still anchored in the ontology of a class-based
determinism.
A last part is then going to turn towards Gramsci's idea of the “democratic philosopher” 20 as
the name he gives to the subject of hegemonic articulation who, despite it all, manages to escape

14 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London and New York: Routledge 2005, 8-9. On the relevance of the
ontic/ontological distinction for political thought, see Oliver Marchart, “Politics and the ontological difference: on
the 'strictly philosophical' in Laclau's work,” in Oliver Marchart, Simon Critchley (eds.), Laclau: A Critical Reader,
London: Routledge 2012, 54-73.
15 Cf. Cornelius Castoriadis, L'institution imaginaire de la société, Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1975.
16 As Mouffe and Laclau put it, “if the economy is an object which can determine any type of society in the last
instance, this means that, at least with reference to that instance, we are faced with simple determination and not
overdetermination. If society has a last instance which determines its laws of motion, then the relations between the
overdetermined instances and the last instance must be conceived in terms of simple, one-directional determination
by the latter.” Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics, London and New York: Verso 1985, 99. Original emphasis.
17 Gramsci as cited in Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review, Vol. 1, No. 100,
November-December 1976, 19.
18 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Random 1969, 113.
19 John Rosenthal, “Who Practices Hegemony?: Class Division and the Subject of Politics,” Cultural Critique, No. 9,
Spring 1988, 25-52, here 39.
20 Antonio Gramsci, “'Language,' Languages and Common Sense,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. by
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart 1971, 667. The notion is powerfully
commented on in Benedetto Fontana, Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiaveli,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1993, 21-22, 71-72, 106-107.

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necessity through will. For Gramsci, a democratic philosopher must “throw himself, too, into
practical life, and become an organizer of the practical aspects of culture […] he must democratize
himself.”21 This act of commitment is directed against against any “mechanical form [of thought]
that gives the impression of having all of history in one's pocket.” 22 Such reductionism would
correspond to the attitude of a traditional intellectual, lost in abstractions and detached from the
thickness of cultural life. “Organic intellectuals,” by contrast, are characterized by affection and
understanding for the local ways of culture and the habits of commonality among the
marginalized.23 Their will can be a revolutionary impulse and possibly free itself from structural
conditioning.24 Such freedom, however, is not the attribute of an individual or a class. Instead,
every 'revolutionary' act of commitment entails itself a “molecular” 25 transformation of the subject,
producing what Gramsci calls “collective man.”26 The praxis of the intellectual/activist is then
precisely the work of linkage between heterogeneous wills, articulating the political subjects of
“historical blocs” in the first place. While it can thus be argued that Gramsci provides us with the
outlines of an innovative theory of political subjectivity, it must also be acknowledged immediately
that he often points in contradictory directions. Every interpretation of his work must remain a
selective one, as the “hieroglyphs” of his fragmentary notes by no means contain just one “hidden
order.”27

I) Libertas ex Machina: Freedom and Structural Limitation in Gramscian Politics

“From my own street sense, I knew they was doin' shit. But you couldn't tell them anything.
They say they have the science.'”28
local interviewee on the island of Grenada about the 1970s Marxist-Leninist
vanguard party New Jewel Movement

a) Mapping the Superstructure: Civil Society as Trench Warfare

At the most fundamental level, Gramsci shares Marx's vision of capitalist society as
comprising structural limitations for the realization of human freedom. As a Sardinian immigrant in
the factory town of Turin, he had come into direct contact with class-based forms of domination and
resistance from early on in his life. What must have struck the rural Southerner in the urban North is

21 Gramsci as cited in Sentucci, 142.

22 Ibid, 149.
23 Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 131. See on this point Peter
McLaren, Gustavo Fischman, Silvia Serra and Estanislao Antelo, “The Specters of Gramsci: Revolutionary Praxis
and the Committed Intellectual,” Journal of Thought, Vol. 33, No. 3, Fall 1998, 9-41.
24 Sentucci, 61.
25 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 540.
26 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 665.
27 Anderson, 6.
28 Charles Mills, “Getting out of the Cave: Tensions between Democracy and Elitism in Marx's Theory of Cognitive
Liberation,” Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, March 1990, 1-50, here 45.

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the complexity of a situation which in Trotsky's terms can be referred to as “combined and uneven
development:”29 the simultaneousness existence of diverging economic 'steps of development.' The
central importance of economic conditions for any political proposition did therefore by no means
escape Gramsci. “In the urban sections of the party […] there exist vigorous groups of communists
conscious of their historical mandate,” he wrote in the Turin-based Communist journal Ordine
Nuovo.30 Such phrasings are evidence that Gramsci was in fact deeply informed by Marx's account
of the “economic structure of society” as “the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond de finite forms of social consciousness. ”31 Gramsci's view
does hence not consist in an outright rejection of classical Marxist positions. Instead, he suggests
the “necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure.”32
Against possible over-interpretations of Marx's phrasing of an economic 'conditioning' to
mean a complete determination in all cases, which would turn the superstructure into something
like a shadow of underlying base dynamics, Gramsci af firms that Marx is essentially a
“'historicist',”33 well-aware of both economic and politico-cultural speci ficities of different contexts.
With Etienne Balibar, we might then impute to Gramsci's reading of Marx “the revolutionary thesis
that praxis constantly passes over into poiêsis and vice versa. There is never any effective freedom
which is not also a material transformation.”34 The economic base for Gramsci cannot be conceived
as a “hidden god”35 who secretly animates the machinery of capitalism. Rather, it is quite simply the
central factor determining structures of domination – one factor among others, such as state and
civil society, towards which he turns his own perspective. The orthodox Marxist belief in a pure and
simple determination on the part of an economic base appeared to Gramsci as nothing short of
“historical mysticism, the awaiting of a sort of miraculous illumination,” 36 also inherently linked to
the political failures of communism in the West due to a lack of initiative and commitment.
In capitalism, however, freedom remains blocked by the interlinked dynamics of class
domination, which ceaselessly pass over the line between base and superstructure. Gramsci speaks
of “civil society” having become “relatively resistant to the catastrophic 'incursions' of the
immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.),”37 implying at once their distinctness, while
also clearly making a conceptual rupture with orthodox Marxism by insisting on a much wider
space for political action, at least temporarily sheltered from the “incursions” of the base. In order to
elaborate on the political rather than economic element, he analyzes the differences between states
with respect to what one might call their 'stage of superstructural development,' which to him
29 Cf. Leon Trotsky, “Pecularities of Russia's development,” Chapter 1 of History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1,
originally published 1932 with University of Minnesota Press, reprint Chicago: Haymarket Books 2008.
30 Gramsci as cited in Sentucci, 81. My emphasis.
31 Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in: Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels
Reader, 4.
32 Gramsci, cited in Sentucci, 151. My emphasis.
33 Gramsci, cited in Sentucci, 149.
34 Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, London and New York: Verso 2014, 41.
35 Gramsci, cited in Sentucci, 149.
36 This critique in his Prison Notebooks is directed against Rosa Luxemburg. Cited and commented in John
Schwarzmantel, The Routledge Guidebook to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, London: Routledge 2014, 206.
37 Gramsci, “State and Civil Society,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 489.

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determines their speci fic opportunities for liberation (i.e. revolution). 38 As Althusser points out,
while Marx's Capital focussed on an analysis of the economy, a more thorough elaboration of
superstructural elements had been left wanting for long: “Like the map of Africa before the great
explorations, this theory [of class politics] remains a realm sketched in outline, with its great
mountain chains and rivers, but often unknown in detail beyond a few well-known regions. Who
has really attempted to follow up the explorations of Marx and Engels? I can only think of
Gramsci.”39 His theoretical adventures into the more remote and yet uncharted regions of the
superstructure depart at a conceptually forked road, leading to different destinations for the societies
of Western and Eastern Europe. While in the East, the Czar could be toppled in order to make a
workers' revolution, the dispersed nature of power in the West presents a completely different
picture and must also necessitate a different roadmap. As he writes in the Prison Notebooks:
“We can now fix two major superstructural levels – one that may be called 'civil society,'
that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called 'private', and the other that of 'political
society' or the state. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of
'hegemony' which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to
that of 'direct domination' or command exercised through the State and 'juridical'
government.”40
Gramsci illustrates the distinction between these two superstructural levels with their respective
prevalence in West and East. When the Czarist regime fell in the course of the October Revolution,
workers' power was immediately won; the direct take-over of state power could hence be modeled
as a “war of maneuver.”41 But in the West, where civil society is so far developed that power is
primarily exercised via mechanisms of apparent consent rather than force – namely through the
ideological articulation of hegemony – the situation turns out to be thoroughly different. “In the
East, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a
proper relationship between state and civil society, and when the state trembled, a sturdy structure
of civil society was at once revealed.” 42 The state in Western societies is nothing but “an outer
ditch,” behind which one finds a “powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,” which must be
recognized in its distinctness from country to country.43 In civil society, class warfare comes down
to a long and intricate “war of position,” winning over support rather than storming into palaces. 44

38 At this juncture, the overlap between Foucault's and Gramsci's analyses becomes again particularly visible.
Gramsci's narrative of a shift from state power (in less advanced Russia) to civil society (in the West) mirrors the
Foucauldian shift from sovereign to disciplinary power (notwithstanding their diverging assessments vis-à-vis the
importance of class). Cf. Michel Foucault, “Lecture at the Collège de France from 1 February 1978,” in: Security,
Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978. New York: Picador 2007.
39 Louis Althusser, For Marx, 114.
40 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London:
Lawrence and Wishart 1971, 12.
41 War metaphors permeate Gramsci's entire political thought. William J. Hartley therefore opens an influential article
on his work with the words “Antonio Gramsci is the Clausewitz of cultural politics,” see “Hegemony and Cultural
Politics: The Praxis of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks,” Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1987, 35-53.
42 Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, 236-238.
43 Ibid. for an in-depth analysis of this passage, see Anderson, 26-29.
44 Cf. Anderson, 77.

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We might say then that Gramscian thought distinguishes between two forms of politics: the politics
of force, and the politics of consent – state and hegemony.45 Both of them, he claims against Marxist
orthodoxy46, operate at a distance to purely economic conditioning. If it was not due to political
limitations, why would socialism not be realized yet? 47 His revaluation of class politics thus implies
at once an analysis of culturally speci fic power con figurations and a call to wake up from dogmatic
slumber to make room for praxis.

b) Is the proletariat 'brain-damaged?' Gramsci on Ideology

Simon Critchley aptly describes the work of hegemonic coalition-building in civil society as
“the cultivation of forms of commonality, of habits, customs and a whole ethos of [...] 'common
sense.'”48 What is crucial here is the possible linkage between freedom and domination, the
seemingly paradoxical equivalence of consensual and yet somehow illegitimate rule. What appears
to a subject as her own free commitment prima facie might in fact be the unconscious ideological
taking of sides for the (class) enemy in a war of position. The “common sense” of hegemony could,
indeed, turn out to be “common non-sense,” to quote Thoreau. 49 At first glance, the notion of
ideology sits uneasily with a reading of Gramscianism as a reappraisal of freedom beyond structural
determination, as it seems to heavily undermine the individual realm of autonomous choice and
send us back to an economistically conditioned epistemology of class consciousness. Gramsci's
rupture with economism could appear problematically incoherent on this point, as much as his
writings insist again and again that the superstructure can function independently from economic
conditioning. The notion of ideology – or put otherwise, the idea of false freedom – has to come to
the center of our analysis, as orthodox Marxism conceptualizes it as a more or less mechanical
mediator between base and superstructure, a view from which the Gramscian outlook must be
rigorously distinguished.50 As our analysis in the previous section has demonstrated, Gramsci brings
state and civil society into the spotlight as important battlegrounds of an entrenched, slow, and often
disguised war of position between classes. But if the unidirectional link between base and
superstructure is supposed to be broken, what is behind the disguise – and can we look behind?
The proximity between freedom and domination, i.e. the idea of an ideological distortion of
what only appears to be consent, is very much foreign to liberal minds who are attached to the
image of autonomously acting Cartesian selfs. It therefore easily lends itself to misreadings. In his
critique of Gramsci, Michael Walzer approximates the concept of hegemony, which denotes a
45 It has to be emphasized, as stated earlier, that these distinctions are not coherent throughout Gramsci's written work.
In fact, any reading of his fragmentary notes necessarily contains a strongly selective aspect. For Gramsci's
“conceptual slippages,” see Anderson, 23.
46 Throughout this essay, “orthodox Marxism” is meant to loosely refer to a current of thought overall approximating
the views of the Second International, including authors such as Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, and Luxemburg.
47 Cf. Sentucci, 35, and Mouffe and Laclau, 49.
48 Critchley, 101.
49 Henry David Thoreau, “Reform Papers,” in The Essays of Henry David Thoreau, Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield 1992, 12.
50 Cf. Eagleton, “From Lukács to Gramsci,” in Ideology: An Introduction, 93-125.

7
government through an ethico-political “common sense,” to Marx's notion of “false
consciousness.”51 It is due to ideological incomprehension, to a false “common sense” as opposed to
“good sense,” Walzer's reading goes, that the working class has not made revolution. “The standard
account blames the victims: if only the workers knew their own interests! Gramsci falls easily
enough into this style of reasoning, and Frank Parkin is not entirely unfair when he describes 'a
succession of Marxist theorists, from Lukacs and Gramsci to the Althusserian and Frankfurt
schools,' whose diagnosis of revolutionary failure implies 'in the most oblique and scholarly manner
that the proletariat [is] suffering from a kind of collective brain damage.'” 52 Such a reading,
however, remains inattentive to the speci ficities of Gramsci's thought. His “common sense,”
contrary to what Walzer and Parkin suggest, is in no way reducible to the traditional concept of
ideology.53 While it might imply the 'ideological' consent of subjects, the very category of 'objective
interests' is foreign to the primacy which Gramsci accords to politics, as is the idea of stable and
self-enclosed atomic selfs.54
“Common sense” refers to the moral and cultural linkage of hegemony: it is an “organic
cement”55 of shared ideas which produces political effects; as such, it shares very little with the
notion of 'interests,' which would tie back to a fixed structural location for each subject in the
material base that could be 'represented' by a more or less 'true' or 'false' consciousness. Rather,
Gramsci's 'purely superstructural' understanding of ideology comes remarkably close to what
Habermas describes as “structural violence,” which does not “manifest itself as force” but rather in
the form of “inconspicuously working communication blocks,” which produce subjects who
“deceive themselves about themselves and their situation.”56 We might say, with young Marx, that
Parkin's own phrase of the proletarian brain damage “forgets that the nature of the 'particular
person' is not his beard and blood and abstract physis, but his social quality”57 – and that this 'nature'
is therefore up for political recon figurations aiming at new a subjectivation of free agents. For this
properly political assertion, no recourse to a grounding economism is needed or even desirable and
the category of 'false consciousness' must be abandoned. What happens in the Gramscian
transformation of 'common sense' into 'good sense' is then not the lifting of a veil: “it is not a

51 Walzer, 84
52 Ibid. The reference to Frank Parkin is to Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique, New York: Columbia
University Press 1979, 81.
53 Eagleton, 112-114.
54 “For Gramsci, the meaning of consensus is not to be found in the apparent willingness of an individual to accept
certain views and to engage in certain activities, but rather in the conditions for that willingness to be present.”
Esteve Morera, “Gramsci and Democracy,” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science
politique, Vol. 23, No. 1, March 1990, 24.
55 Cf. Maurizio Viano, “The Left according to the Ashes of Gramsci,” Social Text, No. 18, Special Issue on
Postmodernism, Winter 1987-1988, 51-60.
56 Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1984, 184. He continues, very much
in a Gramscian sense: “In systematically restricted communications, those involved form convictions subjectively
free from constraint [one might add: following the consensual logic of hegemony], convictions which are, however,
illusionary. They thereby communicatively generate a power which, as soon as it is institutionalized can also be
used against them.”
57 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, ed. Joseph O'Malley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1977, 22.

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question of introducing from scratch a scienti fic form of thought into everyone's life, but of
renovating and making 'critical' an already existing activity” of the oppressed.58
Gramscian class politics is democratic pedagogy as praxis, not the revelation of a Platonic
Truth. The matter of Gramsci's materialism is located in the thickness of intersubjectivity, not in the
soil, brains, bones, and machinery imagined by orthodox Marxist thinking: consent and cultural
practices, not laws of motion, govern its development. His proposed uses of ideology are thus very
different from classical Ideologiekritik, itself undertaken with a belief in rationality that can
justi fiably be called another reductionism at work among orthodox Marxists. 59 For Gramsci,
ideology is not primarily a 'mysti fication' to be rejected, but it might as well be an affectively
charged linkage among the poor, such as folklore and popular culture, which to him can be valuable
tools for the extension of freedom, not ideological masquerade. 60 In Gramscian thought, therefore,
“the relational speci ficity of the hegemonic link is no longer concealed, but on the contrary becomes
entirely visible and theorized.”61 “Ideology” is the name for the weapon that can help accomplish
transformations, “civil society” the name of the battleground; but both of these elements are also
part of the front at which political and cultural trenches can sustain existing domination and thus
limit the ontic possibilities of freedom.

II) Gramsci beyond Gramsci: Hegemony and Postfoundational Freedom

a) “Revolution against Capital:” Thinking Politics as Groundless Articulation

In Gramsci's view, as expressed in his 1917 article “Revolution against Capital”62

(provocatively referring to Marx's book), “the Bolsheviks disown Karl Marx,” insofar as they break
with the logic of economic necessity in the name of free political action. The very existence of the
Russian case demonstrates that “the laws of historical materialism are not as set in stone, as one
may think, or one may have thought.” 63 Instead of waiting for the productive forces to mechanically
burst apart the relations of production, it is up to committed revolutionaries to “create the conditions
needed for a full and complete ful fillment of their ideal” – “and they will do so in less time than
capitalism would have.”64 In Gramsci's eyes, it was Lenin's concept of the “class alliance,” notably
theorizing the coalition between proletarians, peasants, and soldiers, which opened the door to the

58 Morera, 23-37, here 26, citing Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 637.
59 Cf. José Nun, “Elementos para una Teoriá de la Democracia: Gramsci y el Sentido Común,” Revista Mexicana de
Sociología 49, 1987, 21-54.
60 Stephen Olbry Gencarella, “Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical Folklore Studies,” Journal of Folklore Research,
Vol. 47, No. 3, September-December 2010, 221-252. Alberto Maria Cirese, “Gramsci's Observations on Folklore,”
in Ann Showstack Sassoon (ed.), Approaches to Gramsci, London: Writers and Readers 1982, 212-247.. For a
fruitful continuation of this view, see Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London and New York: Verso 2005.
61 Mouffe and Laclau, 67.
62 Antonio Gramsci, “La Rivoluzione contro il Capitale, [The Revolution against Capital]” Avanti!, 24 December
1917, available in English translation at https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1917/12/revolution-against-
capital.htm.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.

9
primacy of hegemonic politics as a free articulation of linkage between different identity
categories.65 The politics of the working class could now no longer be reduced to a mere acting out
of a predetermined plot of History: it would have to be thought of as acting in an emphatic sense of
an unpredictable openness. In the Gramscian perspective, then, “there are no solid homes to return
to, no places reserved in advance for the righteous.”66
Nevertheless, the door to the political, opened by Lenin's notion of “class alliance,” still
remains half closed, as the latter does not go far enough in its break with teleological laws of
History and a metaphysics of class struggle. Leninist alliance politics remains tied to a narrative of
which the final chapters and their protagonists are supposedly known from the get-go. Gramsci's
hegemony, by contrast, goes a key step further, as it points towards the “construction of the very
identity” of all social actors (such as the working class) beyond a mere “rationalist coincidence of
'interests' among pre-constituted agents.” 67 Returning to the Heideggerian categories of an
ontic/ontological divide, one can argue that with Gramsci, the political enters the scene of Marxist
theory. What is at stake is not just the shifting of pre-given entities through politics, but the 'auto-
institution' of political subjects themselves.68 In one of his most lucid passages, Gramsci writes:
“The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is
‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in
you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such
an inventory.”69
The question of whether Gramsci is fully able to think freedom and commitment beyond structural
conditioning hinges on the importance of this missing inventory. While Lenin's class alliance still
claims the superior knowledge of scienti fic materialism, firmly placing the proletariat at its center,
Gramsci's hegemony seems to be entering the groundless arena of political articulations. His
inventory would then be the “organic cement” of cultural and moral practices, which inform and
hold together a new project of common sense, the “modern Prince” of a revolutionary party that is
at once a “myth-prince” and a “collective will,” asserting itself through practice, without reference
to a foundationalist science.70 Some interpreters have therefore highlighted the openness of

65 Biagio de Giovanni, “Lenin and Gramsci: state, politics, and party,” in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist
Theory, 259-288.
66 Dick Hebdige, “Postmodernism and the 'other side,'” in: David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall:
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge: 1996, 174-200, here 198.
67 Mouffe and Laclau, 58
68 The phrase is Castoriadis'.
69 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 628. My emphasis.
70 Cf. Gramsci, “The Modern Prince,” in: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 313-445, here 323. For an inspiring
discussion of post-foundationalism in political thought, developing Gramscian themes, see Oliver Marchart, Post-
Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press 2007, German edition: Die politische Differenz, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2010. “Post-foundationalim”
is meant to refer to “a constant interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundation – such as totality, universality,
essence, and ground. Post-foundationalism […] must not be confused with anti-foundationalism or a vulgar and
today somewhat out-dated 'anything goes' postmodernism, since a post-foundational approach does not attempt to
erase completely such figures of the ground, but to weaken their ontological status. The ontological weakening of
grounds does not lead to the assumption of the total absence of all grounds, but rather to the assumption of the
impossibility of a final ground which is something completely different as it implies an increased awareness of, on

10
Gramscian hegemony and praised it as a model which would give full ontological appreciation to
contingency. Morera cites Gramsci's writings on the role of women as evidence that his thought
does not reduce all political issues to an 'ontologized' inventory of class-based dialectics. “Gramsci
considers the issue of the 'formation of a new feminine personality' to be 'the most important ethico-
civil question tied to the sexual question.' This question, however, cannot be solved by the party or
by any group of legislators. It can only be solved, he writes, 'when women have attained
independence vis-à-vis men' and have developed 'a new conception of themselves and of their role
in sexual relations.'”71 Gramsci similarly asserts that “any innovative movement is mature to the
extent that the elderly, the young and women can participate in it.”72
The overwhelming textual evidence, however, seems to stand against this interpretation.
While Gramsci's construction of hegemony is an “ethico-political” affair, it “must necessarily be
based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic
activity.”73 Ernesto Laclau is thus correct in his interpretation, which holds that for Gramsci, only
“fundamental classes,” proletariat and bourgeoisie, are quali fied to serve as nodal points of a
hegemony. This, however, is not only presented as a historically contingent fact, but is put forward
as the ontological condition of society as such. Freedom and commitment are therefore not aspects
of a contingent choice on the part of politically 'articulated' collective subjects; they are, “in the last
instance,” grounded in a structurally predetermined reality that cannot be overcome (except,
perhaps, through the full dissolution of class society). Consequently, even though the advent of
communism is no longer ensured by teleology, the failure of the working class to construct
hegemony would by necessity lead to a strengthening of bourgeois hegemony: politics, rather than
being linked to freedom of action, ultimately remains an ontologically limited “zero-sum game
among classes.”74 Gramsci's thought oscillates between groundlessness and class metaphysics, in
the end failing to develop a politics beyond the Marxist inventory.

b) Gramsci's “Collective Man:” Political Action and the Production of Subjectivity

Despite the deplorable ontological limitations of Gramsci's approach, the importance he

gives to the commitment of political actors is nevertheless remarkable, especially if held against the
backdrop of the Marxist tradition. But who, precisely, is the subject of Gramscian politics? A
possible answer can be developed on the basis of his theory of the 'organic intellectual,' who is a
subject on the 'edge' of structure, as it were: largely conditioned by capitalist society, without a
doubt, but nevertheless capable of shaping a “collective will, which at least in some aspects was an

the one hand, contingency, and, on the other, the political as the moment of partial and always, in the last instance,
unsuccessful grounding.” Marchart, 2.
71 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 587-588.
72 Gramsci, cited in Morera, 31.
73 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 161. My emphasis.
74 Mouffe and Laclau, 69.

11
original, ex novo creation.”75 Certainly very much inspired by the Italian reception of German
idealism76 and the ideal of Bildung as self-development, Gramsci saw the transformation of the
world as inherently linked to a change of the self, which he regards as constitutively intersubjective:
“To transform the external world, the general system of relations, is to potentiate oneself and
to develop oneself. That ethical 'improvement' is purely individual is an illusion and an
error: the synthesis of the elements constituting individuality is 'individual', but it cannot be
realized and developed without an activity directed outward, modifying external relations
[…] with other men, in the various social circles in which one lives, up to the greatest
relationship of all, which embraces the whole human species.”77
The invention of new hegemonic constructions therefore “denotes a transformation from within,
both the subject and its environment.” 78 What is important to stress is that Gramsci's debt to an
idealist notion of subjectivity certainly comprises a stress on intersubjective processes of self-
transformation, yet he clearly breaks with this tradition as he neither believes in a pre-given
'transcendental' content to be 'realized' for the self, nor in a law of history that would fuel its
progressive development. Gramsci's subject of politics is hence still conditioned by 'objective
conditions,' but also endowed with a “political passion” which allows it to partially “transcend”
them through 'ex novo' commitment.79
This existential leap 'over the edge of structure,' i.e. the experience of the moment of the
political in its ontological sense, Gramsci calls “catharsis.” 80 Political involvement is thus neither
reducible to the playing-out of a teleology, nor is it a lonely act. Action in the emphatic sense can
“only be performed by 'collective man,' and this presupposes the attainment of a 'cultural-social
unity' through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills with heterogeneous aims, are welded together
with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world.” 81 For Gramsci,
the 'organic intellectual' is the agent of this cathartic linkage, bringing into the world not only a new
political order, but at each step also a new subject. Such an intellectual – we can imagine her as a
teacher, folklorist, union activist, and revolutionary at once 82 – does not commit the “enlightenment

75 Gramsci, “The Modern Prince,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 325.
76 Notably the work of Benedetto Croce, whom Gramsci both admired and critiqued heavily; see Jacques Texier, who
calls Gramsci the 'unconscious critic of Marx and brilliant disciple of Croce,” Jacques Texier “Gramsci, theoretician
of the superstructures,” in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 48-80, here 55-56.
77 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 682.
78 Nadia Urbinati, “From the Periphery of Modernity: Antonio Gramsci's Theory of Subordination and Hegemony,”
Political Theory, Vol. 26, No 3, June 1998, 370-391, here 370.
79 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 340.
80 Gramsci writes: “The term 'catharsis' can be employed to indicate the passage from the purely economic (or
egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment, that is the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure
in the minds of men. This also means the passage from 'objective to subjective' and from 'necessity to freedom.'”
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 691.
81 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 665.
82 Cf. Ernesto Laclau, “Power and Representation,” in Mark Poster (ed.), Politica, Theory, and Contemporary Culture,
New York: Columbia University Press 1993, 283.

12
error” of a “forced imposition of new principles;” 83 The subject of hegemony cannot be purely
rational, but has to be articulated as a 'historical bloc,' built with the help of ideology, religion, and
at times superstitious prejudice; its 'cement' is affective, not reason-based. Looking back at Soviet
totalitarianism today, we cannot help but share Mills assessment that it is “an inexpressible tragedy
that this basic lesson” has never been understood by the self-declared representatives of 'scienti fic
materialism' throughout history.84 Hegemonic articulation must bring together an intellectual
“knowing” with a passionately popular element, privileging neither one from the outset. 85 But if
Walzer asserts that “there was always something schoolmasterish about Gramsci,” 86 he is unfair
with regards to the political-epistemological intricacies his notion of hegemony entails. For
Gramsci, political action is always a form of democratic pedagogy – but the latter is imagined in a
radically democratic sense of “an active, reciprocal relation in which every teacher is always a pupil
and every pupil is always a teacher.”87 Thus, though not everyone occupies the social function of
intellectual in capitalism, every subject is always already working at the cultural construction site of
hegemony: the challenge is to cathartically make this work 'explicit' and 'critical' and thereby
transform its very agent. Whereas contingency in Gramsci does remain blocked by the metaphysical
grounding within a 'class ontology,' the invention of a new collective will out of a plurality of
identities largely politicizes the production of subjectivity. Despite the last ontological vestiges of
determinist Marxism, his theoretical contribution proposes a kind of freedom which powerfully
problematizes the liberal idea of the autonomous self; for Gramsci, freedom, if it exists, must be
located within a process of “molecular” transformation of world and subjectivity – on the edge of
structure, where the political is at home.

Conclusion

Ultimately, our argument has to conclude on a two-fold assessment: On one hand, Gramsci's
thought on freedom appears as a powerful and nuanced corrective to two prevalent extremes in 20 th
century thought: to a naive and perhaps still all too common liberal belief in unfettered autonomy as
much as to a determinist Marxist economism. Gramscian hegemony is a precious tool in this light,
as it links up multiple agents around a commitment to a shared world view and common will,
neither based on their identitarian sameness, nor on a preconceived Truth. In this notion of
hegemonic linkage, we can detect Gramsci's radical democratic perspective, still resonating today,
in an age of globalizing social movements and ever-growing socio-cultural diversity. His
conceptualization of civil society and ideology in particular departs from Marxist economism in
ways which considerably expand the possibilities of freedom. Instead of either celebrating

83 Gramsci, cited in Urbinati, 380.

84 Mills, 46
85 Gramsci, “Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding
and to Knowing,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 767.
86 Walzer, 89.
87 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 666.

13
individual autonomy or flatly denying it within a totalizing social machinery, Gramsci's subject of
freedom is located 'at the edge of structure,' reminding us that the “proportions in which the subject
transcends the limitations imposed” on her cannot simply “be stated a priori.”88 Freedom, instead, is
related to a molecular transformation at a speci fic structural juncture, creating a new 'assemblage' of
disparate identity elements: not the mere attribute of a given individual, but part and parcel of the
subjectivation of a new “collective man.” In this sense, Gramsci's “philosophy of praxis” is also a
philosophy of freedom beyond both structure and the individual. On the other hand, however, we
also need to insist that his theoretical endeavor remains unable to fully account for a form of politics
that escapes the economistic prejudices of the orthodox Marxism he wishes to overcome. 'In the last
instance,' Gramsci's framework of hegemony remains inevitably connected to what he calls the
“nucleus of economic activity,” struggling in vain to theoretically emancipate itself from its
Marxist predecessors. Such economic grounding is inconsistent with Gramsci's own project to think
political action beyond a pre-given 'inventory.'
Reading Gramsci against Gramsci, a theory which fully appreciates the moment of the
political must include a notion of freedom that would no longer be ontologically predetermined
along class-lines, but groundless – and thus worthy of its name. But in the end, his thought does
speak forcefully to our own time: for him, like for us, “in putting the question 'what is man?' what
we mean is: 'what can man become?'”89 The possibility of freedom amounts to nothing but the
political experiment of answering this question in ever new ways.

88 A. B. Davidson, “Gramsci and Reading Machiavelli,” Science & Society, Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 1973, 56-80, 62.
89 The full quote reads: “We can see that in putting the question 'what is man?' what we mean is: what can man
become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he 'make himself,' can he create his own life? We maintain
therefore that man is a process and, more exactly, the process of his actions. If you think about it, the question itself
'what is man?' is not an abstract or 'objective' question. It is born of our reflection about ourselves and about others,
and we want to know, in relation to what we have thought and seen, what we are and what we can become; whether
we really are, and if so to what extent, 'makers of our own selves,' of our life and of our destiny. And we want to
know this 'today,' in the given conditions of today, the conditions of our daily life, not of any life or any man.”
Gramsci, “What is Man?,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 664. My emphasis.

14