Article

Thesis Eleven
117(1) 20–39
Hegemony, passive ª The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
revolution and the sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0725513613493991

modern Prince the.sagepub.com

Peter D Thomas
Brunel University, UK

Abstract
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including
a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition.
These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political
power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of
passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on
the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better under-
stood as a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as
social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the
social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of
hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state
power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is
encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as
both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alter-
native to the dominant forms of political modernity.

Keywords
Gramsci, hegemony, modern Prince, passive revolution, political modernity

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has become influential in a wide range of humanistic,

social-scientific and historical disciplines. It represents a singular ‘success’ of the voca-
bulary of the Marxist tradition, continuing to find a much wider audience than integrally
related concepts such as the dictatorship of the proletariat or the abolition of the capitalist

Corresponding author:
Peter D Thomas, Department of Politics and History, Brunel University, Marie Jahoda Room 229, Uxbridge,
London UB8 3PH, UK.
Email: PeterD.Thomas@Brunel.ac.uk

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 21

state. Frequently, however, the word seems to have very different when not directly con-
tradictory meanings ascribed to it, leaving new and old readers alike uncertain as to its
precise theoretical significance or contemporary relevance.
According to one influential interpretation, hegemony for Gramsci involves a leading
social group securing the (active or passive) ‘consent’ of other social strata, rather than
unilaterally imposing its decrees upon unwilling subjects. It relies more upon subtle
mechanisms of ideological integration, cultural influence or even psychological depen-
dency, than upon the threat of censure or violence. In this version, hegemony-consent is
conceived as the opposite of domination-coercion, according to presuppositions that effec-
tively reduce hegemonic politics to an unmediated ethical relationship. This reading has
accompanied the reception of the Prison Notebooks from the outset, beginning with the
PCI’s attempt to present Gramsci as the theorist of a ‘different’ communism after the rup-
ture of 1956.1 This interpretation now constitutes a sort of ‘beginner’s guide’ to the mean-
ing of hegemony, in its most widely diffused and generic forms. It is particularly prevalent,
albeit often contested, in the academic fields of cultural studies, sociology and
anthropology.2
A second interpretation regards Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as the forerunner of a
theory of the political constitution of the social via a ‘logic of equivalence’, or a unifying
process of the articulation of heterogeneity in the formation of a ‘political subject’.
Hegemony here figures fundamentally as a theory of the unification of the diverse in a
composite socio-political body, on whose unity alone ‘true’ politics can arise. This version
posits Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in the radical-liberal tradition of the collective
political agent, whether conceived as groups, class, caste or, most frequently, ‘the people’.
Historically, this reading emerged from the encounter between communist and liberal
thought in the Italian post-war constitutional process.3 Insofar as the concept of hegemony
is to be found in contemporary international discussions in political philosophy, it is often
represented in these terms.4
A third interpretation builds further upon the presuppositions of the first two readings,
arguing that hegemony-consent is a political technique proper to the terrain of civil soci-
ety, while the state is the locus of domination-coercion. Hegemony works away surrep-
titiously at the foundations of bourgeois rule in a molecular or even rhizomatic fashion in
civil society; direct confrontation on the terrain of the state is deferred to a future that
remains indeterminate, when not declared to be unnecessary. In effect, this version pre-
sents Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a form of ‘anti-politics’, which finds its strength
instead in the valorization of the ‘social’. Derived from readings of the New Left in the
1960s and 1970s, often inflected by the experience of Western Maoism and later left-
wing Eurocommunism, this interpretation is frequently operative in contemporary dis-
cussions in political science and political theory.5
Finally, a fourth interpretation situates the contemporary significance of the term of
hegemony on the terrain of geopolitics, in accordance with an established usage that stems
back at least as far as Thucydides.6 Hegemony is here configured at the level of a now
open, now hidden, struggle for influence and power between states, prior to but sometimes
including the outright declaration of military hostilities. This version effectively inscribes
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a critical perspective within a tradition of political
realism that regards the state as the key political actor of modernity. Precedents for this

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
22 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

usage can be found in the debates of the early Third International, though in more com-
plicated forms.7 Today, this interpretation is often encountered as an established ‘image of
Gramsci’ in mainstream discussions in International Relations, though increasingly con-
tested by ‘new’ neo-Gramscian perspectives.8

Hegemony and Herrschaft

Each of these readings reduces Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to an already known figure
in the history of modern political thought. The first interpretation represents Gramsci’s
theory of hegemony as a type of inverted Hobbesianism, with consent functioning as the
motor of an ethical foundation of the political. The second interpretation of hegemony as a
logic of equivalence depicts Gramsci as minor variant of the great modern tradition of
theories of political unity, as a thinly disguised Rousseauean vision of politics as the
transition from the ‘will of all’ to the ‘general will’. The third interpretation presents the
diversity and richness of existing civil society as the potential foundation for an alternative
mode of socialization, in a type of arrested Hegelianism that stops at §255 of the Philo-
sophy of Right, before civil society is revealed to find its foundation in the state. The fourth
interpretation represents Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a communist version of the
broadly Kantian presuppositions of modern international law, or even, in its later
Schmittian variant, as a clash between irreconcilable values, often more menacingly
telluric than cosmopolitan.
The combination of these perspectives yields a certain ‘traditional’ or at least
widespread interpretation of the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks. This
reading understands the politics of hegemony to involve, in the first instance, the
securing of consent of a significant proportion of political actors in a given social for-
mation; second, their unification into a ‘collective political subject’; third, the engage-
ment of this newly constituted ‘political subject’ in a battle against another such subject
formed by a similar process, each seeking to enlarge their occupation of the ‘peripheral
territory’ of civil society until they possess sufficient forces to launch an assault upon the
‘centre’ of the state apparatus; and, in a final moment, the clash of hegemonically
constructed states in competition on the international terrain, in a geopolitical repetition
of the originary domestic process. The concept of hegemony, that is, is thought to
provide primarily a description of the organic emergence of modern state power and
geopolitical competition.9
What these readings have in common, despite their very different theoretical ante-
cedents, histories and disciplinary locations, and what allows them to be articulated as a
‘total’ theory of hegemony in the manner indicated above, is the presupposition that the
concept of hegemony is fundamentally a general theory of political power. Such a
general theory can then be deployed either in order to contest existing power relations
and structures, or, in a mirror-image inversion, to delineate the preconditions of their
legitimation. In the first case, Gramsci then appears as a superannuated forerunner of
Foucault, as an ‘archaeologist’ of the forms of the modern state. In the second and by
far the most significant case, Gramsci is forced to step forward, to modify a famous Cro-
cean phrase, as the ‘Weber of the Proletariat’.10 In both cases, hegemony effectively
comes to denote stability, integration, and legitimation, even if in the form of the

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 23

negative legitimation that resists but simultaneously thereby also ‘acknowledges’ the
existing social order (rather than the delegitimation of a revolutionary rupture that negates
it). Hegemony is thus inscribed within a ‘typology of domination’ of Weberian dimen-
sions.11 As a form of ‘democratic domination’, it is represented as a novel addition to the
forms of legitimate Herrschaft alongside Weber’s classic trio of charismatic, traditional
and legal-bureaucratic domination.12 In some readings, hegemony is even called upon
to play the role of an Aufhebung of pre- and early-modern techniques of the political,
synthesizing their respective strengths in a new political practice adequate to the consoli-
dation and completion of the parliamentary democratic order as a system of political inte-
gration and equilibrium.

Lineages of passive revolution

Like most half-truths, such interpretations can claim at least some foundation in fact,
pointing to various citations cruelly ripped from their context that seem, at first glance,
to support the main lines of the respective argumentation. Similarly, like most half-
readings, they sprang not fully-grown from the transparent obviousness of a definitive
text, but were produced by a complex process of the always uncertain reading and crea-
tive misreading of Gramsci’s ‘radically incomplete’ Prison Notebooks in different his-
torical conjunctures, as Guido Liguori’s survey of the Italian reception amply attests
(2012).13 We can in fact trace back quite precisely the articulation of these different
interpretations into a general theory of hegemony to the emergence of a particular under-
standing of the role of the concept of ‘passive revolution’ in the conceptual architecture
of the Prison Notebooks.14 In its broadest sense, the notion of passive revolution for
Gramsci signified a distinctive process of (political) modernization that lacked the mean-
ingful participation of popular classes in undertaking and consolidating social transfor-
mation. This concept, now a central point of reference not only for Gramsci scholarship
but also in such diverse academic fields as international relations, historical sociology
and even ethnography (see e.g. Morton 2007, 2010; Tuğal 2009), surprisingly had not
been prominent at all in the immediate post-war reception of the Prison Notebooks.15
The belated valorization of this concept, in the debates of Italian Gramscianism in the
late 1970s, coincided with the short but intensely lived season of Eurocommunism and
the PCI’s still-born ‘historic compromise’. As Fabio Frosini has noted, the concept of
passive revolution played a central role in the Istituto Gramsci conference of 1977, ‘Pol-
itics and History in Gramsci’. Here, and increasingly in the following years, a particular
interpretation of passive revolution was deployed as an etherizing agent upon the entire
articulated chain of concepts of the Prison Notebooks. It fundamentally transformed the
understanding of hegemonic politics. Hegemony was effectively subordinated to passive
revolution, as a mere ‘mechanism’ of its realization or contestation. As Frosini argues, it
led to a reading of hegemony ‘in the light of the primacy of stability over instability’
(Frosini 2008: 667), rather than the relational – that is, dialectical – integration of those
polarities in a dynamic theory of political transformation. Thus, Gramsci’s thought could
be re-inscribed in the main currents of modern political thought, enacting a transition
from a supposedly irrationalist ‘conflictualist’ model to the claimed ‘consensualism’
characteristic of liberalism’s anthropological foundations and culmination as a theory

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
24 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

and practice of transcendental ordering.16 The concept of passive revolution was inter-
preted as a description of political modernity as the construction of an increasingly ratio-
nalized and bureaucratic Weberian ‘iron cage’ [stahlhartes Gehäuse]; hegemony became
‘a mere occasion for the transformation of the parties of the workers’ movement into par-
ties of government’ (Frosini 2008: 667). Although not often remembered today, these were
the theoretical foundations of the various post-Marxist readings of Gramsci that came to
prominence throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, on an international scale.17

A typology of hegemony
New scholarship over the last 20 years, however, benefitting from a full study of the
1975 critical edition of the Prison Notebooks and freed from at least some of the
instrumentalizations and polemics that marked earlier debates, has provided us with a
very different understanding of the development of Gramsci’s central concepts. There
have been important philological contributions from around the world, by scholars in
Germany (Haug 2006), Brazil (Coutinho 2012 [1999]; Bianchi 2008; Del Roio 2005),
France (Tosel 1991, 2009), Mexico (Kanoussi 2000), Canada (Ives 2004), the USA
(Buttigieg 1992, 1995; Fontana 1993; Green 2011) and the UK (Morton 2007). Above
all, the flourishing of a new Gramscian research culture in Italy over the last 20 years
has given rise both to innovative philological and theoretical work, particularly in the
initiatives of the International Gramsci Society, and also to new historical studies on
the political and intellectual context of Gramsci’s ideas, promoted by the Fondazione
Gramsci and the ongoing work on the new Edizione nazionale of Gramsci’s collected
writings.18 In many respects, this new season of studies takes up again, after the inter-
ruptions of the 1980s and 1990s, the ‘unfinished business’ bequeathed to Gramsci
scholarship by the path-breaking earlier works of figures such as Alastair Davidson in
Australia, John Cammett in the USA, Christine Buci-Glucksmann in France and Nicola
Badaloni, Paolo Spriano and Leonardo Paggi in Italy. These studies emphasized the
necessity of interpreting Gramsci’s thought in its integral historical context, as the
precondition for any creative extension to contemporary concerns (Davidson 1977;
Cammett 1967; Buci-Glucksmann 1980 [1975]; Badaloni 1975; Spriano 1979; Paggi
1970, 1984). Unfortunately, however, much of this new research remains the preserve
of specialists, particularly given the lack of regular translations into English of non-
Anglophone Marxist scholarship. We thus confront a stark discrepancy between the
widely diffused images of Gramsci in the Anglophone world and these new, more phi-
lologically and historically rigorous, understandings of his thought.
Basing myself upon the recent intense season of historical, philological and theore-
tical research on the historical and political context of the Prison Notebooks, I would like
to propose here an alternative ‘typology of hegemony’, or rather, more precisely, a
dialectical presentation of its constitutive elements. Synthesizing what I regard as the
most significant results of readings that have attended to the transformative dimensions
of the Prison Notebooks, I will attempt to thematize the central ‘component parts’ of
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, conceived as a developing research project rather than
fixed definition or closed system. Gramsci’s fully articulated concept of hegemony
involves four integrally and dialectically related ‘moments’: first, hegemony as social

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 25

and political leadership; second, hegemony as a political project; third, the realization of
this hegemonic project in the concrete institutions and organizational forms of a
‘hegemonic apparatus’; and fourth, ultimately and decisively, the social and political
hegemony of the workers’ movement. These four moments constitute a ‘dialectical
chain’ along which Gramsci deepens his researches throughout the Prison Notebooks;
beginning from the ‘primordial fact’ of hegemony as leadership, an immanent and
expansive dynamic leads him to uncover the determinations of hegemonic political
practice as the foundation for a new type of politics that could move beyond the forms of
domination of political modernity.19
Taken in its totality, this typology of hegemony provides us with both a sophisticated
analysis of the emergence of modern state power, and, and, even more importantly and
centrally, a theory of alternative political organization. In other words, Gramsci’s concept
of hegemony does indeed offer, as many interpretations have surmised, an analysis of the
forms of economic, social and political domination in the modern world. Building upon
debates in Russian social democracy, Gramsci develops the concept of passive revolution
in order to analyse a decisive stage in the production of the ‘hegemonic fabric of modern
sovereignty’ (Frosini 2012). The concept of passive revolution itself, however, was only an
intermediary stage in Gramsci’s research into the nature of hegemony as a political
practice, representing not its culmination but only a provisional moment in its elaboration.
As an analytical concept, passive revolution was a strategic intervention that aimed to
highlight an historical failure of hegemony. It represented the structural inability of the
bourgeois political project (particularly in the ‘West’, but also internationally) to realize
fully the potentials of this new political practice and theory (originally essayed in the
‘East’, but of international significance). Far from resulting in the immobilism of an
aestheticized image of modernity as an irrevocable passive revolution, the fully developed
concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks should be understood as a contribution to
the development of a prefigurative theory of a politics of another type of the subaltern
social groups, intent upon forging their own conception of the world and founding their
own new ‘integral civilisation’ (Q 11, § 27, p. 1434).20

Hegemony as social and political leadership

As has often been emphasized and just as frequently forgotten, Gramsci inherited the
concept of hegemony as social and political leadership directly from the debates of
Russian social democracy, and especially from Lenin (Anderson 1976; Shandro 2007;
Boothman 2008; Brandist 2012).21 In that context, hegemony meant the capacity of the
working class to provide political leadership to all the other popular classes in Russia in
the struggle against tsardom. Following the October revolution, this approach to mass
politics underwent a further development in the politics of the United Front and the NEP
(Buci-Glucksmann 1980; Paggi 1984). As head of the Italian Communist Party, after
having engaged with the debates on hegemony in Russia during his work at the Commu-
nist International in 1922–3,22 Gramsci worked to ‘translate’ this perspective into his
own political reality, in at least two senses.
First, he sought to develop the concept of hegemony in the sense of a political
leadership by the Italian Communist Party of the working classes, which aimed to

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
26 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

resolve the fundamental socio-economic and political problems confronting the Italian
people. Second, he began to use the concept of hegemony in order to analyse the histor-
ical formation of modern state power, comprehending it as a particular crystallization –
or ‘condensation’ in Poulantzas’s sense – of hegemonic relations of force. Both the Lyon
Theses, as well as ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, represent a significant sum-
mary of this phase of Gramsci’s work (Gramsci 1978). Upon imprisonment by the fascist
regime, Gramsci devoted particular attention to extending the second sense of his pre-
carceral research, seeking to understand the ways in which not only the Italian but also
the wider European ruling classes had historically consolidated their political power.
This is particularly evident in the early phases of the Prison Notebooks, especially in the
passages in his first notebook that analyse the hegemonic relations that had shaped the
Italian Risorgimento (Q 1, § 44: 40–54). Crucially, these historical reflections were
formulated against the background of Gramsci’s experience of workers’ hegemony in
Russia, and his perception that it represented a new mode of political activity and orga-
nization (the first ‘translation’ alluded to above). ‘Politics’ here provided the lens with
which to read ‘history’: Western political modernity was assessed in terms of its ‘lack’
of the political principle and practice of workers’ hegemony developed in the East,
which Gramsci believed had opened a new phase in the history of socio-political
organization.
Just as significantly, Gramsci immediately began to extend these historical reflections
to the present. Thus, at the same time as he analysed the relations of the Action Party and
the Moderates in the process of Italian state formation, for example, Gramsci com-
plemented these historical studies with reflections on contemporary politics, both in
terms of the causes for the rise of Italian fascism and, even more significantly, in terms of
possible alternative forms of proletarian hegemony. What was decisive for Gramsci
throughout the deepening of this line of research was to understand that hegemonic
politics could not be a practice of management or governance, but could only be
coherently developed as a practice of leadership in the widest sense. He distinguished
between at least two different types of leadership: in the case of bourgeois politics, the
type of leadership that structurally maintains a distance between the leaders and the
led, which ultimately constitutes the ‘logic’ of passive revolution; and in the case of
proletarian politics, the type of leadership that aims to help the masses to express, deepen
and strengthen their self-engagement for socio-political transformation.23 This type of
leadership for Gramsci included the leaders learning from the masses, in an ongoing
process in which the educators themselves are educated, to use the profound words of
Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (translated by Gramsci at an early stage in his incarcera-
tion; see Gramsci 2007).

Hegemony as a political project

It is against the background of this notion of the non-unitary nature of hegemony, divided
between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ practices of leadership that are substantively
incommensurable, that Gramsci developed the second decisive moment of his dialectical
theory: hegemony as a political project. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci is
insistent that a genuinely hegemonic project cannot be reduced to mere propaganda,

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 27

or generic influence. Rather, as a project, hegemony involves the articulation of different

modes of social, cultural and economic leadership into the form of an overall political
project. It involves active and continuous agitation and organization on the widest range
of fronts, from the explicitly political, to the social, to cultural and religious practices,
conceived in a broad sense as common ways of thinking and seeing in a given socio-
cultural formation. Again, the comparison to the historical emergence of the European
bourgeoisie as a hegemonic class in the ‘long 19th century’ was decisive. The bourgeoi-
sie’s hegemonic project had been prosecuted by ‘putting politics in command’ of a wider
project of social transformation, with an encompassing conception of the world and
organizational instances reinforcing each other. Gramsci found in the Jacobins a decisive
example of such a totalizing form of politics, while noting their limitations (Q 1, § 44:
40–54; Q 8, § 21: 951–3).
In terms of the striving of the subaltern social groups for hegemony, Gramsci posed
the question of how a hegemonic project could be constructed out of the immense
richness of all the different interest groups – sometimes even conflicting interest
groups – that constitute what he came to call the ‘subaltern social groups’, or popular
classes in the broadest sense; that is, all the groups or classes that are oppressed and
exploited by the current organization of society.24 As he developed this line of research,
he increasingly emphasized that hegemony as a project involves something similar to the
most rigorous forms of modern scientific experimental practice; hegemony, that is, is
represented as a research project for the creation of new proletarian knowledge (Q 11,
§34: 1448–9). Political actors aiming to build a hegemonic project must continually
make propositions, test them in practice, correct and revise them and test their modified
theses once again in concrete political struggles. This process results in an ongoing
dialectical exchange and interchange between the existing political conjuncture and
attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders of a political
movement and those who participate in them. A political project of hegemonic politics
thus comes to represent a type of ‘pedagogical laboratory’ for the development of new
forms of democratic and emancipatory political practice.25

Hegemonic apparatus
The third central moment of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is constituted by his
analysis of the institutions and organizational forms of leadership in political modernity.
This perspective involved the development of what can be regarded as Gramsci’s gen-
uinely ‘new’ addition to the concept of hegemony, with its extension and specification in
the notion of a ‘hegemonic apparatus’ (see Bollinger and Koivisto 2001 and 2009). With
this decisive concept, Gramsci attempted to think the dialectical relationality of a series
of structured institutions and organizational forms of political and seeming ‘non-polit-
ical’ practice. He analysed the hegemonic apparatuses built by the European bourgeoisie
leading up to and particularly in the wake of the French Revolution. As he frequently
noted, the expansion of the hegemonic apparatus of the bourgeoisie had involved not
merely explicitly political forms such as political parties, electoral programmes and
constitutional forms, but also the articulation of these instances with the full range of
modern social life (Q 6, § 137: 801). In a series of notes, Gramsci observed the complex

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
28 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

ways in which the bourgeoisie had emerged from its subaltern condition in feudalism in
order to become a social group able to offer leadership to the society as a whole, creating
the new forms by means of which and through which it was able to secure the (active or
passive) support for its cause of many other social groups excluded from previous dis-
tributions of power. This historical formation of a bourgeois hegemonic apparatus
occurred concretely in initiatives such as newspapers, publishing houses, educational
institutions, social associations, sporting clubs and cultural networks, in variable
articulations, depending upon the specific social formation;26 in short, the wide variety
of activities that structure and organize modern societies in their complexity as ‘orga-
nizations from above’ of ‘associations from below’, according to the paradigm of
modern transcendent sovereignty. The decisive transition in this element of Gramsci’s
research was the attempt to conceive of the formation of an alternative network of
proletarian hegemonic apparatuses, one that would not be dedicated to reinforcing the
current organization of society and its inequalities but which would rather open the way
towards the abolition of exploitative and oppressive social relations. This necessitated
reflection on the distinctive form of a proletarian hegemonic apparatus, corresponding to
and reinforcing its radically non-bourgeois content. To use the words of Marx’s reflec-
tions on the Paris Commune, Gramsci was attempting to theorize the formation of hege-
monic apparatuses that would be ‘expansive’ rather than ‘repressive’ (Marx and Engels
1975–2005, vol. 22: 334), which would begin a process of ‘permanent revolution’ in the
midst of capitalist domination, as an autonomous mode of organization of an antagonis-
tic political power.27

Hegemony of the workers’ movement

This analysis of the institutional forms of different types of hegemonic projects is
accompanied by the fourth moment of Gramsci’s integral concept of hegemony: the
notion of a hegemony of the workers’ movement. Central to his political activism before
the Prison Notebooks, as his carceral researches progressed Gramsci argued for the
hegemony of the working-class movement with increasing urgency. At first sight, this
argument may seem wilful or forced, or a reduction of the novelty of Gramsci’s concept
back to the ‘Russian’ model that he supposedly superannuated, with the analytic deploy-
ment of the concept of hegemony in order to analyse the more ‘complex’ political
formations of the West. After all, it has often been claimed that Gramsci was fundamen-
tally a theorist of the cultural superstructures, one who was not only a strong critic of
economic determinism but perhaps even ignorant of economic theory. Sometimes, it has
even been asserted that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony represents the beginning of a
‘post-Marxism’, which logically should reject the Marxist critique of political economy
and its emphasis upon class. Such readings, however, neglect the totality of the Prison
Notebooks, which contain extensive notes dedicated to discussions of Marx’s Capital
and economic history.28 They also neglect the context of Gramsci’s political activism,
which remained fundamentally directed against what he repeatedly characterized as the
‘dictatorship’ of the bourgeoisie, including and especially in its fascist variant. As
Alberto Burgio (2002) has emphasized, throughout Gramsci’s historical, political and
philosophical researches, he continually notes that the modern world, with its new forms

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 29

of freedom and unfreedom, is fundamentally distinguished from all other previous social
formations because it is an organization for the production, accumulation and expansion
of immense amounts of social wealth, and the creation of new forms of social wealth.
Gramsci, like Marx, regarded labour as no mere element or component part of this orga-
nization, or simply the activity of one class or class fraction (for instance, the supposedly
‘traditional’ industrial working class of then nascent Fordism). Rather, labour is depicted
in the Prison Notebooks as a social relation that determines, and is overdetermined by,
all other social relations in modern societies.29 It is one of the central nodal points in which
are condensed and expressed the structures and contradictions of modern society. Modern
capitalist society, from the everyday activities that constitute its ‘content’ to the social and
political relations of command that seek to function as their ‘form’, is dedicated to the
accumulation of capital by means of the private property of the means of production by
one class – that is, the bourgeoisie’s successful claim to the juridical right to appropriate
the surplus-value produced in the distinctively ‘unequal equality’ of the wage labour-
capital relation. Any movement to transform modern societies in which the capitalist mode
of production is dominant must therefore reckon accounts with this fundamental organiz-
ing principle, which continually produces, reproduces and overdetermines the relations of
subalternity that traverse capitalist society, both within and beyond strictly economic rela-
tions. In the first and not the last instance, such a revolutionary movement must challenge
the dominance of one minoritarian class, on the basis of the interests of all other classes in
the society, by addressing directly and forcefully what the Communist Manifesto refers to
as the ‘property question’, the material basis for subalternity in all its forms.
Leadership, or in other words, the instability of uneven tendencies towards trans-
formation rather than the equilibrium of order; politics as a tendentially unifying project
of knowledge formation, rather than relations of hierarchical command; institutions of
constituent power and their immanent expansion, rather than constitutional limitation;
labour as a dynamic social relation of the ceaseless transformation of modernity, which it
is the task of a militant communist movement to politicize. Far from a left-wing variant
of the state-centric dimensions of modern political thought, Gramsci’s dialectical chain
of hegemonic politics represents a radical alternative. It constitutes a movement from a
complex analysis of historically existing forms of domination towards the elaboration of
an even more complex theory of alternative political organization.

Hegemony and passive revolution

In light of this thematization of the dialectical unfolding of the concept of hegemony as a
research project, we can now resituate the concept of passive revolution. Rather than
‘deducing’ hegemony from passive revolution, as the ‘mechanism’ of its realization, it
becomes possible to understand the extent to which passive revolution represents a
deformation of hegemonic politics, or as a precise organizational obstacle to its extensive
practice. In particular, this thematization of the concept of hegemony enables us to
understand the limitation of the concept of passive revolution, as a stage in the devel-
opment of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and not as its terminus.
Far from representing an overall and informing theory that would allow us to com-
prehend its component parts, including that of hegemony, the concept of passive

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
30 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

revolution was in fact developed in progressive stages in the Prison Notebooks, as a

strategic and partial theory, or, as Gramsci called it, an ‘historical-political criterion’
(Q 1, §44: 41). It was an analysis of the specific organizational form of bourgeois hege-
mony, or rather of the organizational forms in which the bourgeois political project had
sought to prevent the full realization of hegemonic politics as a re-organization of exist-
ing political relations of force. In a first moment, from 1930 to early 1932, Gramsci used
the concept of passive revolution in order to describe the formation of the modern Italian
state in the Risorgimento. It was a process in which the dominant classes managed to
exclude the popular classes from autonomous and organized participation in the process
of modernization (Q 1, § 44: 40–54: February–March 1930; Q 8, § 25: 957: January
1932). In a second instance, beginning in late 1930, Gramsci began to extend the con-
cept, in a comparative manner, in order to analyse other social formations, such as
Germany, which seemed to have gone through a similar contradictory process of (eco-
nomic) modernization without (political) modernization, lacking a radical Jacobin
moment such as had accompanied the French Revolution (Q 4, § 57: 504: November
1930). Then, in a third moment, while engaged in intense debates with fellow communist
prison inmates in which he argued against the politics of the Stalinist Third Period, from
1932 onwards, it seems as if Gramsci thought that the notion of passive revolution could
have a international and even epochal meaning, as a type of logic of bourgeois hegemony
as such, with fascism in Italy as merely its ‘current’ form (Q 8, § 236: 1088–9: April
1932; Q 10I, § 9: 1226–9: April–May 1932). It is precisely such formulations that have
been seized upon to support a Weberian reading of passive revolution as a tale of polit-
ical modernity’s descent into a rationalized and bureaucratic iron cage.
Many interpretations have stopped at this point. They fail to note that Gramsci made at
least two further decisive steps in the development of the concept of passive revolution,
which fundamentally transform its significance. After he had considerably expanded the
originally ‘exceptionally Italian’ notion of the passive revolution of the Risorgimento to an
international terrain, Gramsci then began to ask himself whether such an unbridled theo-
retical development could not have negative political consequences. He returned to his
notebooks in order to develop the concept further in an explicitly theoretical register (as
opposed to his previous, largely historical studies), and ‘to cleanse it of every trace of
fatalism’ (Q 15, § 17: 1774–5: April–May 1933). Decisive in this process was his meditation
on central themes in Marx’s ‘Preface’ of 1859, which he had also translated at the beginning
of his incarceration, and which he read, in a novel fashion, as an argument against all forms
of determinism. In 1933 Gramsci argued that the concept of passive revolution could have a
concrete political sense, not by positing it as a political ‘programme’, but only if it ‘assumes,
or postulates as necessary, a vigorous antithesis’, which autonomously and intransigently
sets all its forces in motion (Q 15, § 62: 1827: June–July 1933). In other words, the concept of
passive revolution needed to be confronted by the potential for a process of de-pacification
and active revolution by and within the action of the popular classes.

The modern Prince

It is precisely in this period, from 1932 onwards, that Gramsci deepens his novel theory
of proletarian hegemony as an alternative form of political organization, encapsulated in

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 31

the Machiavellian metaphor of the ‘modern Prince’. Both the concept as well as the
historical reality of passive revolution can only be rationally comprehended and orga-
nizationally deciphered by considering the formulation of this notion of the modern
Prince as its Aufhebung in the fullest Hegelian sense. In other words, the concept of
passive revolution as a theorization of bourgeois organizational forms is incomplete,
unless we take into account Gramsci’s continuation of this line of research ‘by other
means’, with the delineation of passive revolution’s antithesis in the proletarian orga-
nizational forms synthesized in this dramatic and mythical Machiavellian figure. Having
overcome the risk of fatalism in the concept of passive revolution, Gramsci’s theoretical
energies turned to the depiction of the modern Prince, conceived as the simultaneous
representation and realization of a politics of a different type: an antidote against the
poison of the passive revolution.
Yet what kind of antidote is the modern Prince? From the early years of the reception
of the Prison Notebooks, it has often been argued that the modern Prince is a ‘codeword’,
either for the Communist Party, as founder of a new state and protagonist of ‘intellectual
and moral reform’ (Q 8, § 21: 953: January–February 1932), or for the modern political
party in general, as distinctive synthesis of the normative, motivational and executive
sources of the democratic ethos that underwrites modern mass societies (White and Ypi
2010: 814). Once again, a series of citations can easily be found to support this reading.
‘The modern Prince’, Gramsci famously argued, ‘the myth-Prince, cannot be a real per-
son, a concrete individual. It can be only an organism. [ . . . ] This organism is already
given by historical development; it is the political party’ (Q 8, § 21: 951–3: January–
February 1932). Notebook 13 (‘Notes on the Politics of Machiavelli’, from May 1932
to early 1934) in particular contains extensive notes on the political party as a necessary
protagonist of modern political life. Gramsci also famously develops a novel tripartite
theory of the ‘fundamental elements’ required for the existence of a political party: ‘a
mass element’; a ‘principal cohesive element’; and ‘an intermediate element, which
articulates the first [mass] element with the second [cohesive element] and maintains
contact between them, not only physically but also morally and intellectually’ (Q 14,
§ 70: 1733: February 1933; see Sassoon 1987: 150–79).
However, it is necessary to put these formulations in their philological and historical
context, in order to comprehend their full significance. Gramsci develops his reflections on
the modern Prince as a new organizational form in the same period when his disagreements
with the politics of the Stalinist ‘Third Period’, and its ‘bureaucratic centralist’ methods
(Q 13: § 36: 1632–5), are intensifying. It is also a period when he formulates his novel
addition to Marxist class analysis with the concept ‘subaltern social groups’. This concept
is not limited to the classes exploited in the capitalist labour process, but includes all social
groups oppressed and consigned to the ‘margins’ of history (Q 25: 2277). Finally, it is also
in these years that Gramsci continues to emphasize the need for a constituent assembly, as
the necessary terrain upon which a political leadership of the workers’ movement in the
anti-fascist struggle might become possible (Quercioli 1977; for the most recent research
on the proposal of the Constituente, see Vacca 2012). The modern Prince represents the
synthetic form into which all of these currents of Gramsci’s research flow. Each element
is decisive; only by considering all of them, and their integral relation, do we grasp the
distinctiveness of Gramsci’s ‘return’ to Machiavelli.30

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
32 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

For these reasons, Gramsci’s modern Prince should not be understood as a mere
codeword for a particular pre-existing political party, or even an already known form of
a communist political party, increasingly honoured more in the breach than observance
even when Gramsci was writing, with the consolidation of Stalinism in the USSR and
the international communist movement. Rather, exactly as in the case of Machiavelli’s
not-yet-existing Prince, Gramsci’s final mediations proposed a new practice and form
of politics, which includes and reaches its fullest extension in a novel understanding of
the political party as a ‘laboratory’ of a new society, but which is not reducible to it. The
modern Prince is not a ‘concrete individual’, or a single centralized entity, but a dynamic
collective process, which aims at nothing less than a totalizing expansion across the entire
social formation, as a new organization of social and political relations. For this reason,
Gramsci’s modern Prince is not constituted as the (subjective) form of a reductive articu-
lation of difference in terms of a chain of equivalence, or of unification, as would be
suggested by the formalism inherent to Laclau and Mouffe’s interpretation of hegemony.
Instead, the modern Prince represents the production of the ‘coherence’ of diverse
elements, which are engaged in relations of reciprocal translation that enriches, rather than
reduces, each of its constituent elements.31 In short, the modern Prince should be under-
stood in its fullest sense as this broader civilizational dynamic of re-activation and the
emergence of the ‘part of no part’ (Rancière 1999) from the experience of subalternity
that marks capitalist modernity as a passive revolution. It is precisely due to this broader
civilizational dynamic, which constitutes its condition of possibility, that the political party
that emerges from this process is of a distinctively new type.
Similarly, for the same reason, the proposal of the modern Prince cannot be reduced to
the type of political formalism that has dominated political modernity, from Hobbes to
Rousseau and beyond, in which a given political form comes to dominate its subaltern
(social) content. Rather, in so far as the modern Prince culminates in the constitution of a
‘laboratory-party’, it is a form that is merely the expression of a content that con-
stitutively exceeds it. ‘The modern Prince, as it develops, revolutionises the whole
system of intellectual and moral relations [ . . . ] the Prince takes the place of the divinity
or the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis for a modern laicism and for a
complete laicisation of all aspects of life and of all customary relationships’ (Q 13, § 1:
1561: May 1932). The institutional consolidation of this process in a party of a new type
should thus not be understood as the formation of a ‘political subject’, as a unified centre
of intention and initiative, or an ‘instrument’ or ‘machine’, in Weber’s famous phrase
from ‘Politics as Vocation’ (1994: 339). Rather, it is an always provisional condensation
of relations of force that continuously modify the composition of the modern Prince as a
collective organism, and as an expansive revolutionary process in movement.
Above all, the integral concept of the modern Prince, as both a broader civilizational
dynamic and as a novel institutional process of social transformation, represents – in an
active sense – a new type of political culture that would be capable of valorizing con-
stituent power as the basis for a new social organization, instead of deforming it in a pre-
given constitutional form – that is, a form of domination. In such a conception, Gramsci
argued, ‘one cannot construct a system of constitutional law of the traditional type’, but
rather, merely propose a series of fundamental principles that posit the end of the state as
its immanent goal (Q 5, § 127: 662). The modern Prince thus ultimately represents the

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 33

mythical form that aimed to call into being a coalition of the rebellious subalterns,
engaged in acts of self-liberation of hegemonic politics – a pedagogical laboratory for
unlearning the habits of subalternity and discovering new forms of conviviality, mutual-
ity and collective self-determination.

A prefigurative vocabulary of contemporary radical politics

The last years have witnessed a fundamental transformation in the international political
climate. After the long winter of neoliberalism, new but still fragile conceptions of the
world are beginning to circulate, from the continuing Arab revolutions, to Occupy, to
anti-austerity struggles around the world. For the first time since arguably the 1960s,
there are ongoing mass experiences of popular mobilization of an entire generation,
in the depths of what is becoming a political crisis of the ruling classes unable to restabilize
the inherent contradictions of its regime of accumulation. What these new movements
need are theories that will help them to increase their capacity to act, to make explicit the
new political perspectives that are implicit in them, in a ‘practical state’. Above all, these
movements need to develop the organizational forms that will enable them to grow and
flourish, in the transition from resistance against the existing order, towards the foundation
of a new type of society: from critique towards constitution.
I would suggest that the dialectical development of Gramsci’s research into the nature of
hegemonic politics, the historical reality of passive revolution, and the potential formation of
a modern Prince might be understood today as a prefigurative vocabulary with which to
comprehend and to strengthen the diversity of these contemporary mobilizations of resis-
tance and rebellion. Raymond Williams once famously argued that any possible future
socialist reorganization of society would necessarily be more and not less complex than the
relations of domination in capitalist societies (Williams 1979: 431). Gramsci’s concept of
the modern Prince as the dynamic of a new form of expansive institutionality suggests that
not only should socialism be understood as more complex, but so also must be the orga-
nizational forms that might constitute the initial stage of its elaboration and realization.

Notes
1. A detailed reconstruction of the different interpretations of the concept of hegemony in the
Italian debate can be found in Liguori (2012). See also D’Orsi (2008). For critical surveys of
interpretations on the concept of hegemony, see Gruppi 1977; Buci-Glucksmann 1985, and
Haug 2004.
2. For readings that have reinforced this interpretation, see Bates (1975); Williams (1977); Femia
(1981); Bocock (1986). For a critical reading of this line of reception in anthropology, see
Crehan (2002). Element of this reading of hegemony have also strongly marked the project of
subaltern studies, in its various articulations, see Guha 1997.
3. On ‘populist’ readings of hegemony on the ‘Italian road to socialism’, see Liguori (2012: 133–
68). For critical remarks on the later ‘exportation’ of this perspective in international debates,
particularly regarding the ‘family resemblances’ of Togliatti’s and Laclau and Mouffe’s
reading of Gramsci, see Casarino and Negri (2008: 162–4).
4. The most influential proposal of this reading was that of Laclau and Mouffe (1985). Laclau
(2005) has since extended this interpretation in his distinctive theory of populism as the ‘secret’
(in a Feuerbachian sense) of politics. Simon Critchley provides a succinct demonstration of the

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
34 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

entrance of this reading into the academic senso comune: ‘This act of the aggregation of the
political subject is the moment of hegemony’ (2007: 104).
5. This interpretation was most influentially formulated in Bobbio (1979 [1969]). For critical
readings of its presuppositions, see Texier (1979); Anderson (1976); Thomas (2009: 159–96);
Opratko (2012). For readings that attempt to argue for the superannuation of Gramsci’s
concept on the basis of this partial interpretation, see Day (2005) and Beasley-Murray (2011),
which is representative of an emerging post-hegemonic research programme in Latin Amer-
ican studies in particular.
6. For a reconstruction of usages of hegemony in ancient Greek political thought, see Fontana
(2000) and D’Orsi (2008).
7. On geopolitical uses of the concept of hegemony in the Communist International, see
Anderson (1976) and Buci-Glucksmann (1980 [1975]).
8. The ‘first generation’ of neo-Gramscian theory in International Relations is collected in Gill
(1993). Robinson 2005 provides an overview of recent debates. A representative example of
newer approaches in the field is Morton (2007).
9. For an influential example of this reading, see Cox (1987, 1993).
10. For a suggestive comparison of Weber’s and Gramsci’s concepts of modernity in their
respective political histories, see Portantiero (1981), Levy 1987, and Rehmann (1998). For
readings that tend to synthesize Weber and Gramsci, see Sen (1985) and Bocock (1986).
11. Such a reading of hegemony as a form of domination is particularly noticeable in Michael
Burawoy’s project of a ‘sociological Marxism’ (Burawoy 2003, 2012).
12. Bates’s suggestion that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony can be characterized as ‘political
leadership based on the consent of the led’ (Bates 1975: 352) effectively represents it as
similar to the mythical ‘fourth type’ of legitimate domination, based upon the will of the ruled,
that Weber reportedly briefly considered a possibility, albeit in a theoretically undeveloped
form that did not find its way into the manuscripts published as Economy and Society –
perhaps because it directly contradicts the self-foundational dimension of charismatic power,
which increasingly occupied Weber in his last years. See Weber (1917) and Breuer (1998).
13. For a now classic study of the constitutive and politically productive incompletion of the
Prison Notebooks, see Gerratana (1997).
14. For studies of the concept of ‘passive revolution’, see Thomas (2006), Voza (2004) and
Liguori and Voza (2009).
15. The Prison Notebooks were first published in Italy in an edited thematic edition in the late
1940s and 1950s. This edition was the basis for many early translations, including the
internationally influential Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1971). It was only
in 1975 that a critical edition was published under the editorship of Valentino Gerratana
(Gramsci 1975). A new edition of the Prison Notebooks is currently in preparation, under the
editorship of Gianni Francioni, as a section of the Edizione nazionale of Gramsci’s collected
writings. As a part of the preparatory work for this edition, an edition of photographic
reproductions of Gramsci’s original notebooks was published in 2009.
16. This transition back to a Hobbesian model of order was explicitly theorized by Paggi (1984: x).
17. Alongside Laclau and Mouffe (1985), which was influential largely in academic debates,
perhaps the most significant of these readings was that proposed by Stuart Hall and the ten-
dency affiliated with Marxism Today in the UK in the 1980s, which had an important impact
upon the formulation of the British Labour Party’s purported ‘Third Way’. See Hall (1988)
and, for an analysis of the misreadings of this tendency, Pearmain (2011).
18. The permanent seminar of the International Gramsci society has given rise to a significant con-
ceptual vocabulary (Frosini and Liguori 2004) and a monumental Dizionario gramsciano,
involving hundreds of scholars from around the world (Liguori and Voza 2009). The Fondazione

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 35

Gramsci has sponsored the production of a two-volume work containing the most advanced
research on the context of Gramsci’s thought (Giasi 2008). A survey of the ongoing work of the
Edizione nazionale can be found in Cospito (2010) and Vacca (2011).
19. The development of these ‘moments’ is thus dialectical in the sense of an open-ended experi-
ential discovery of necessary presuppositions, rather than in terms of formalistic closure or
synthesis; in Hegelian terms, the Bildungsroman-dialectic of The Phenomenology of Spirit
rather than the system-dialectic of the Science of Logic.
20. References to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks [Quaderni del carcere] follow the internationally
established standard of notebook number (Q), number of note (§), followed by page reference
to the Italian critical edition: Gramsci 1975.
21. Lo Piparo (1979) emphasizes Gramsci’s indebtedness to his previous university study of
historical linguistics, while Bellamy and Schechter (1993) emphasize the ‘Italian’ dimensions
of Gramsci’s thought. These pre-existing elements, however, were fundamentally transformed
by Gramsci’s encounter with the Bolshevik debates.
22. Archival research undertaken by myself and Craig Brandist in Moscow, thanks to a British
Academy research grant, has uncovered new materials related to Gramsci’s period in Russia,
including his encounter with the concept of hegemony. This material and critical commentary
is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series, published by Brill.
23. ‘The first element is that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led. The entire
science and art of politics are based on this primordial, and (given certain general conditions)
irreducible fact. [ . . . ] In the formation of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the
intention that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the con-
ditions in which this division is no longer necessary?’ (Q 15, §4: 1752).
24. For an exploration of the development of the complex meaning of the notion of ‘subaltern
social groups’ in the Prison Notebooks, stressing that it should not be understood as a mere
‘codeword’ for (economic) class, but should instead be understood as a novel addition to the
political vocabulary of marxism, see Green (2011).
25. On the notion of hegemonic politics as the production of new ‘intellectualities’, see Sotiris (2013).
26. For example, on the organizing function of newspapers in particular, see Q 17, §37: 1939 and
Notebook 24, dedicated to journalism. On the role played by bourgeois networks such as
Rotary, particularly in comparison to other ‘transnational’ organizations such as freemasonry,
see Q 5, §61: 593-4; Q 13, §36: 1633. On this theme, see Ives and Short 2013.
27. The concept of ‘permanent revolution’ plays a central role in the elaboration of Gramsci’s
theory of hegemony. See Q 10I, §12: 1234–5; Q 13, §7; 1565–7.
28. For an analysis of Gramsci’s deep engagement with the critique of political economy
throughout the Prison Notebooks, see Krätke (2011).
29. See in particular the analysis of relations of force and the relationship between structure and
superstructure in Q 13, §7: 1578–89.
30. Furthermore, I would suggest that Gramsci’s concept of the modern Prince is contained not
only in the notes that explicitly cite Machiavelli or discuss the political party. Rather, the
concept is also implicitly developed in the roughly 16 notebooks (that is, the majority of the
29 Prison Notebooks) that Gramsci compiles after 1932, including notebooks of both revised
texts and new departures. These later notebooks have often struck even the most attentive
readers as a mass of fragments, which often do not speak of political organization at all, but
rather cultural, socio-economic or historical themes (linguistics, Fordism, the development
of subaltern groups, historical linguistics and so forth). Taken together, however, I would
argue that these studies constitute an articulated ‘cognitive map’ of the many different ‘ter-
rains’ of the modern Prince. Out of the diversity and richness of the themes in these note-
books Gramsci slowly composed a sketch or many sketches of forms of popular practice

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
36 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

and organization that would be capable of defeating the passive revolution of bourgeois
modernity itself.
31. On the complexity of the notion of ‘coherence’ in Gramsci’s vocabulary, see Thomas (2009: 362–
79).

References
Anderson P (1976) The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review I 100: 5–78.
Badaloni N (1975) Il Marxismo di Gramsci. Turin: Einaudi.
Bates TR (1975) Gramsci and the theory of hegemony. Journal of the History of Ideas 36(2):
351–366.
Beasley-Murray J (2011) Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Bellamy R and Schechter D (1993) Gramsci and the Italian State. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Bianchi A (2008) O laborato´rio de Gramsci filosofia, histo´ria e polı´tica. São Paulo: Alameda.
Bobbio N (1979 [1969]) Gramsci and the conception of civil society. In: Mouffe C (ed.) Gramsci
and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bocock R (1986) Hegemony. London: Tavistock.
Bollinger S and Koivisto J (2001) Hegemonialapparat. In: Haug WF (ed.) Das historisch-kritische
Wörterbuch des Marxismus, Vo. 5. Hamburg-Berlin: Argument.
Bollinger S and Koivisto J (2009) Hegemonic apparatus. Historical Materialism 17(2).
Boothman D (2008) The sources for Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Rethinking Marxism 20(2).
Brandist C (2012) The cultural and linguistic dimensions of hegemony: Aspects of Gramsci’s debt
to early Soviet cultural policy. Journal of Romance Studies 12(3).
Breuer S (1998) The concept of democracy in Weber’s political sociology. In: Schroeder R (ed.)
Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization. London: Macmillan.
Buci-Glucksmann C (1980 [1975]) Gramsci and the State, trans. Fernbach D. London: Lawrence
& Wishart.
Buci-Glucksmann C (1985 [1982]) Hégémonie. In: Labica G and Bensussan G (eds) Dictionnaire
critique du marxisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Burawoy M (2003) For a sociological Marxism: The complementary convergence of Antonio
Gramsci and Karl Polanyi. Politics & Society 31(2): 193–261.
Burawoy M (2012) The roots of domination: Beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci. Sociology 46(2): 187–206.
Burgio A (2002) Gramsci storico. Una lettura dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’. Rome-Bari: Laterza.
Buttigieg JA (1992) Introduction. In: Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 1, ed. Buttigieg JA, trans.
Buttigieg JA and Callari A. New York: Columbia University Press.
Buttigieg JA (1995) Gramsci on civil society. Boundary 2 22(3): 1–32.
Cammett JM (1967) Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Casarino C and Negri A (2008) In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and
Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cospito G (ed.) (2010) Gramsci tra filologia e storiografia. Naples: Bibliopolis.
Coutinho CN (2012 [1999]) Gramsci’s Political Thought. Leiden: Brill.
Cox RW (1987) Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Cox RW (1993) Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: An essay in method. In: Gill S
(ed.) Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 37

Crehan K (2002) Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology. London: Pluto Press.

Critchley S (2007) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso.
D’Orsi A (ed.) (2008) Egemonie. Naples: Edizioni Dante & Descartes.
Davidson A (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press.
Day RJF (2005) Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto.
Del Roio M (2005) Os prismas de Gramsci: a fórmula polı´tica da frente u´nica (1919–1926). São
Paulo: Xamã.
Femia JV (1981) Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary
Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fontana B (1993) Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fontana B (2000) Gramsci and the ancients on hegemony. Journal of the History of Ideas 61(2):
305–326.
Frosini F (2008) Beyond the crisis of Marxism: Thirty years contesting Gramsci’s legacy. In: Bidet
J and Kouvelakis S (eds) Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism. Leiden: Brill.
Frosini F (2012) Reformation, Renaissance and the state: The hegemonic fabric of modern
sovereignty. Journal of Romance Studies 12(3).
Frosini F and Liguori G (eds) (2004) Le parole di Gramsci: per un lessico dei ‘Quaderni del
carcere’. Rome: Carocci.
Gerratana V (1997) Gramsci. Problemi di metodo. Rome: Editori Riunti.
Giasi F (ed.) (2008) Gramsci nel suo tempo. Rome: Carocci.
Gill S (ed.) (1993) Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare Q and Nowell-Smith
G. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Gramsci A (1975) Quaderni del carcere (Q), ed. Gerratana V. Turin: Einaudi.
Gramsci A (1978) Selections from the Political Writings (1921–1926), ed. and trans. Hoare Q.
London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Gramsci A (2007) Quaderni del carcere: Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), ed. Cospito G and
Francioni G. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana.
Gramsci A (2009) Quaderni del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, ed. Francioni G.
Cagliari: Biblioteca Treccani and L’Unione Sarda.
Green M (2011) Rethinking the subaltern and the question of censorship in Gramsci’s Prison
Notebooks. Postcolonial Studies 14(4): 385–402.
Gruppi L (1977) Il concetto di egemonia in Gramsci. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Guha R (1997) Dominance without Hegemony. History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Hall S (1988) Gramsci and us. In: The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the
Left. London: Verso.
Haug WF (2004) Hegemonie. In: Haug WF (ed.) Das historisch-kritische Wörterbuch des Marx-
ismus, Volume 6.1. Hamburg-Berlin: Argument.
Haug WF (2006) Philosophieren mit Brecht und Gramsci. Hamburg-Berlin: Argument.
Ives P (2004) Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt
School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Ives P and Short N (2013) On Gramsci and the international: a textual analysis. Review of
International Studies 39(3): 621–642.
Kanoussi D (2000) Una introducción a los Cudernos de la Cárcel de Antonio Gramsci.
México D.F.: Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla/International Gramsci Society/
Plaza y Valdez.

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
38 Thesis Eleven 117(1)

Krätke M (2011) Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to critical economics. Historical Materialism

19(3).
Laclau E (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Laclau E and Mouffe C (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic
Politics, trans. Moore W and Cammack P. London: Verso.
Liguori G (2012) Gramsci conteso. Interpretazioni, dibattiti e polemiche 1922–2012. Rome:
Editori Riuniti University Press.
Liguori G and Voza P (eds) (2009) Dizionario gramsciano 1926–1937. Rome: Carocci.
Lo Piparo F (1979) Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci. Rome-Bari: Laterza.
Marx K and Engels F (1975–2005) Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 22. London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
Morton AD (2007) Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global
Political Economy. London: Pluto Press.
Morton AD (2010) The continuum of passive revolution. Capital & Class 34(3): 315–42.
Opratko B (2012) Hegemonie. Münster: Verlag Westfälishces Dampfboot.
Paggi L (1970) Antonio Gramsci e il moderno principe. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Paggi L (1984) Le strategie del potere in Gramsci. Tra fascismo e socialismo in un solo paese
1923–26. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Paulesu (1977) Gramsci vivo nelle testimonianze dei suoi contemporanei. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Pearmain A (2011) The Politics of New Labour: A Gramscian Analysis. London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
Portantiero JC (1981) Los usos de Gramsci. Buenos Aires: Folios ediciones.
Quercioli MP (1977) Gramsci vivo nelle testimonianze dei suoi contemporanei. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Rancière J (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rehmann J (1998) Max Weber: Modernisierung als passive Revolution. Hamburg-Berlin: Argument.
Robinson WI (2005) Gramsci and globalisation: From nation-state to transnational hegemony.
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8(4): 559–574.
Sassoon AS (1987) Gramsci’s Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sen A (1985) Weber, Gramsci and capitalism. Social Scientist 13(1): 3–22.
Shandro A (2007) Lenin and hegemony: The Soviets, the working class, and the Party in the
Revolution of 1905. In: Budgen S, Kouvelakis S and Žižek S (eds) (2007) Lenin Reloaded:
Toward a Politics of Truth. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sotiris P (2013) Hegemony and mass critical intellectuality. International Socialism Journal 137.
Spriano P (1979) Antonio Gramsci and the Party: The Prison Years. London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
Texier J (1979) Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures. In: Mouffe C (ed.) Gramsci and
Marxist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Thomas PD (2006) Modernity as ‘passive revolution’: Gramsci and the fundamental concepts of
historical materialism. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Socie´te´
historique du Canada 17(2): 61–78.
Thomas PD (2009) The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leiden: Brill.
Tosel A (1991) L’esprit de scission: Etudes sur Marx, Gramsci, Lukács. Paris: Belles Lettres.
Tosel A (2009) Le marxisme du 20e siècle. Paris: Editions Syllepse.
Tuğal C (2009) Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Vacca G (ed.) (2011) Studi storici 52(4).
Vacca G (2012) Vita e pensieri di Antonio Gramsci. Turin: Einaudi.
Voza P (2004) Rivoluzione passive. In: Frosini F and Liguori G (eds) Le parole di Gramsci: per un
lessico dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’. Rome: Carocci.

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015
Thomas 39

Weber M (1917) Ein Vortrag Max Webers über die Probleme der Staatssoziologie. 25 October,
Wien. Neue Freie Presse no. 19102.
Weber M (1994) Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
White J and Ypi L (2010) Rethinking the modern Prince: Partisanship and the democratic ethos.
Political Studies 58: 809–828.
Williams R (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams R (1979) Politics and Letters. London: NLB.

Author biography
Peter D Thomas lectures in the history of political thought at Brunel University, London.
He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, and
co-editor of Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical
Thought. He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism.

Downloaded from the.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on January 21, 2015