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Historical Materialism #24
The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism
Winner of the Premio internazionale Giuseppe Sormani 2011, awarded by the Fondazione Istituto Piemontese Antonio Gramsci in Turin for the best book/article on Gramsci in the period between 2007-2011 internationally.
Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are today acknowledged as a classic of the human and social sciences in the twentieth century. The influence of his thought in numerous fields of scholarship is only exceeded by the diverse interpretations and readings to which it has been subjected, resulting in often contradictory images of Gramsci. This book draws on the rich recent season of Gramscian philological studies in order to argue that the true significance of Gramsci’s thought exists in its distinctive position in the development of the Marxist tradition. Providing a detailed reconsideration of Gramsci’s theory of the state and concept of philosophy, The Gramscian Moment argues for the urgent necessity of taking up the challenge of developing a “philosophy of praxis” as a vital element in the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.
Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are today acknowledged as a classic of the human and social sciences in the twentieth century. The influence of his thought in numerous fields of scholarship is only exceeded by the diverse interpretations and readings to which it has been subjected, resulting in often contradictory images of Gramsci. This book draws on the rich recent season of Gramscian philological studies in order to argue that the true significance of Gramsci’s thought exists in its distinctive position in the development of the Marxist tradition. Providing a detailed reconsideration of Gramsci’s theory of the state and concept of philosophy, The Gramscian Moment argues for the urgent necessity of taking up the challenge of developing a “philosophy of praxis” as a vital element in the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.
508 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 18, 2015
Şu ana kadar okuduğum en sağlam Gramsci yorumu oldu bu. Hiç eğmeden bükmeden kavramları köklerinden koparmadan, kültüralist veya liberal anlamlar çıkarmaya zorlmadan çok bütünlüklü bir analiz olmuş.
The best Gramsci review I've read so far. It doesn't bend or stretch the concepts more than their capabilities or uproot them to force them on culturalist or liberal theses. It's a whole and meaningful analysis.
The best Gramsci review I've read so far. It doesn't bend or stretch the concepts more than their capabilities or uproot them to force them on culturalist or liberal theses. It's a whole and meaningful analysis.
September 14, 2011
Comprehensive treatment of Gramsci and his times. I skipped over several sections that were aimed mainly at academics, to get to the things I'm most interested in, how to apply Gramsci to strategy and tactics today. It's that kind of book, you can skip around in it.
January 26, 2026
A very interesting book with a lot of flaws that nonetheless contributes a great deal not only to defending Gramsci from Althusser's criticism, but demonstrating the misguided nature of Althusser's criticism in a sympathetic way which does not totally invalidate structural Marxism as a whole and separates Gramsci definitively from Marxist humanism as generally understood. Gramsci's "humanism" is closer to a socially-historically determined "personism" than the epistemological humanism criticized by Althusser. Perry Anderson's interpretation of Gramsci is mercilessly criticized, and I think Thomas backs his criticisms up very well. I was going back and forth from Anderson and Althusser to Thomas and Gramsci very frequently. Thomas does well to reject Bobbio and critique Althusser on that point. Thomas makes an interesting point in citing Lenin's views on the NEP as "cultural revolution" to incorporate the peasantry into socialism, an angle which has interesting implications for the Chinese and Vietnamese models.
Thomas has some ideological drawbacks, particularly when dealing with any form of Marxism he doesn't like, i.e. post-Lenin Soviet Union and Mao's China, with a false equivalence made between Bukharin's sociology of historical materialism and Soviet-Chinese dialectical materialism. It borders on pure polemic and really demonstrates the poverty of scholarship on the part of Anglophone Marxists in reading anything beyond the most basic works of Stalin rather than actual Soviet philosophical discourses, etc. (i.e. Deborin's anti-mechanism read as simply Stalinist assault against Bukharin, when even the imprisoned Gramsci recognized its greater potential), and there is no attempt to bring Chinese Marxism into dialogue with any trends aside from dismissing it as a "deformation" of Marxism alongside the Soviet Union. Thomas also dismisses the Althusserian state and the ISA as "Weberian," which is again simply either a polemical device or severe misreading or misinterpretation of Althusser (which seems to be the former, considering Thomas otherwise has an excellent grasp of Althusserian work). Thomas also follows the missteps of Althusser in positing an epistemological break in Althusser's work, when even he recognizes the seeds of the philosophy of the encounter are presenting in the early scientific structuralism.
Thomas has some ideological drawbacks, particularly when dealing with any form of Marxism he doesn't like, i.e. post-Lenin Soviet Union and Mao's China, with a false equivalence made between Bukharin's sociology of historical materialism and Soviet-Chinese dialectical materialism. It borders on pure polemic and really demonstrates the poverty of scholarship on the part of Anglophone Marxists in reading anything beyond the most basic works of Stalin rather than actual Soviet philosophical discourses, etc. (i.e. Deborin's anti-mechanism read as simply Stalinist assault against Bukharin, when even the imprisoned Gramsci recognized its greater potential), and there is no attempt to bring Chinese Marxism into dialogue with any trends aside from dismissing it as a "deformation" of Marxism alongside the Soviet Union. Thomas also dismisses the Althusserian state and the ISA as "Weberian," which is again simply either a polemical device or severe misreading or misinterpretation of Althusser (which seems to be the former, considering Thomas otherwise has an excellent grasp of Althusserian work). Thomas also follows the missteps of Althusser in positing an epistemological break in Althusser's work, when even he recognizes the seeds of the philosophy of the encounter are presenting in the early scientific structuralism.
Want to read
March 4, 2011I plan to read this along with the three Volume Prison Notebooks.
July 29, 2019
An extraordinary and comprehensive account of Gramsci's "theory of praxis." In many ways a kind of manual of Gramscianism -- the place to go first when you want to find out what Gramsci meant by historicism, humanism, immanence, war of position, integral state, and so on. A very fine achievement.
October 7, 2025
This book is an excessively philosophical work. There are good points made, but there is a lack of political clarification in favour of abstraction. The philosophising is part of a political problem. If one wants to read a densely political Gramsci-influenced study of revolutionary Marxism, read Alan Shandro's book on Lenin's political thought.
Thomas argues that the Prison Notebooks are less cryptic than often thought. Gramsci's jailers would not have been tricked by wordplay into thinking that he was just writing harmless niceties. The representative words used by Gramsci are more often just notes for abbreviation, as he would have done in any context. Also, it may have been that when Gramsci used a certain term, he meant it over the 'translation', for instance that when Gramsci speaks of the 'philosophy of praxis' he doesn't just mean 'Marxism' but uses this term to refer to something more specific than Marxism.
What the Notebooks are is fragmentary. Though this is not unusual for the Marxist canon. Understanding Marxism materialistically means we have to see its texts not as timeless treatises establishing eternal doctrine. To do so would be a liberal conception of intellectual history. Instead, we have to see them as part of historical development, as concrete interventions. Getting something from them for our own time requires an understanding of context to know the intention of the work, and is determined by the political questions that we face in our own time. It's not illegitimate to read 'into' historical texts meaning which is determined by our own time, so long as we are conscious of the historical determinations involved in such a reading.
Thomas correctly argues that hegemony is not counterposed to dictatorship. It is rather the form of leadership and dominance over those who are in an alliance. From that, force against the enemy of the alliance finds legitimacy. There is a dialectic of coercion and consent: consent is developed through force (power provides reason to support), but force also requires legitimacy to not be seen as an outrage. Often, the relationship is not sequential, but both arise as aspects of a contested situation.
For a hypothetical example: In a mass strike, the state seeks to enact repression, but it also fights to win legitimacy for that repression. 'The people participating in the strike are a minority of society (true!), parliament represents the whole of society and therefore takes precedent.' This is an argument for the legitimacy of the bureaucratic state apparatus over the proletariat. For the proletariat there would be two struggles, first the struggle of the strike itself and the fight against repression, but then also the struggle for legitimacy, that it is not the government but the strike that represents the interests of the people and which the people should get behind. Coercion and consent are in dialectical union. It is never an either/or issue of determining what moment is that of consent or that of coercion.
Gramsci draws on Machiavelli's image of the Centaur, of half man half beast, to make the point: "levels of force and consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilisation, of the individual moment and of the universal moment ('Church' and 'State'), of agitation and of propaganda, of tactics and of strategy, etc... it often happens that the more the first 'perspective' is 'immediate' and elementary, the more the second has to be 'distant' (not in time, but as a dialectical relation), complex and elevated. In other words, it may happen as in human life, that the more an individual is compelled to defend his own immediate physical existence, the more will be uphold and identify with the complex and most noble values of civilisation and of humanity."
The relationship of civil society and state to base and superstructure is complex. Gramsci certainly does not identify civil society with base and state with superstructure. Civil society has a superstructural aspect, moreover Gramsci emphasises this in arguing that economy must be theorised politically. Conversely the state cannot be understood as an entity without a basic aspect, as Engels argued political power is also an economic power. The structure of civil society is the terrain of political action.
Passive revolution is a concept of particular controversy. More than just a description of bourgeois 'revolutions from above', it is the term which describes the process of rearticulation and reorganisation of the bourgeoisie's hegemonic position, in the face of a crisis of hegemony. It is prompted by class struggle raising itself such that the oppressed classes are threatening a breaking apart of bourgeois political dominance. That the class struggle prompts the bourgeoisie to creatively rearticulate its hegemonic position, that the class struggle in this sense can contribute to the prolonging of capitalism as much as its overthrow, is very important for understanding history up to the present and the crisis of hegemony the bourgeoisie faces today.
Gramsci was neither a Trotskyist nor a Stalinist. He saw himself as forwarding Lenin's political thought. I've commented on the critique of Trotsky elsewhere. Gramsci against Stalin is significant to emphasise when Stalin and Bukharin claimed the concept of hegemony against Trotsky. For Stalin, Lenin's contribution was in the proletarian dictatorship supposedly negating the pre-revolutionary struggle for hegemony. For Gramsci, Lenin's greatest innovation in realising hegemony came after 1917. Hegemony was not counterposed to but complimented dictatorship. Stalin and the Eurocommunists both misunderstood this. Lenin understood totally differently to Stalin the tasks of the government after the civil war, seen in his last arguments against bureaucratisation, which Gramsci draws on in opposition to Stalin. Gramsci's discussion of culture here is significant: one of Lenin's last arguments about the struggle against bureaucratisation was to raise the cultural level of the masses so that they could act as a check on the government.
The weaker parts of the book are the more philosophical sections. Thomas leans on the philosophical category of immanence to establish Gramsci's philosophy of praxis as an Hegelian identity of theory and practice. That Thomas sees in the struggle for hegemony only these concepts is a problem on his part. The scientific aspect of Marxism must be defending to uphold a materialistic approach to politics. Marxism is a science and a philosophy; a science with respect to theory, and a philosophy with respect to practice. This is not to separate theory from practice, but to assert their non-identity. Science is necessary for making an objective assessment of the balance of forces. This is not Marxism as sociology as in Bukharin (which Gramsci in his critique does not totally discard insofar as it makes a scientific contribution), it is a recognition that science does not immediately spring out of practice as Marxist knowledge.
Thomas sees in the conception of Marxism as science a dogmatic religion imposed on workers from outside. This is the inverse of the Althusserian conception of theoretical practice. Both ultimately rest on an identity rather than unity of theory and practice. Lenin's conception of Marxism as being engaged in a struggle with spontaneity is the only coherent way of situating oneself within the historical process without reducing marxism to its object. It is the only way of understanding Marxism as developing through history, that it creatively innovates and doesn't defend a timeless truth. The non-Leninist conception gives rise to a contradiction, of on the one hand Marxism as a god complex viewing history from outside, and on the other hand conceiving of Marxist theory as immanent to its object; Marxism is merely the expression of the logic of the proletariat, and comprehending Marxism is a matter of divination of absolute knowledge. This is a religious conception. Both humanism and anti-humanism are dogmatic, and both have origins on Christian thought. The god complex is philosophically totalitarian for ascribing to everything its own knowledge or the process it interprets. Situating oneself within the logic of the historical process and a conception of consciousness from without are two sides of the same theoretical grounding. Lenin's alternative grounded the conception of agency found in the Marxist concept of leadership i.e. hegemony. By conceiving the role of the intellectual and of the party as pedagogical through struggle, Thomas develops a conception of hegemony more in like with Menshevism. This is the result of believing hegemony to be a primarily philosophical rather than political question. For Menshevism, proletarian hegemony was secured through the proletariat relating to its own activity; such a focus on identity went the way metaphysics, sending the Mensheviks down the path of opportunism and subservience to the bourgeoisie. For Bolshevism, proletarian hegemony is secured through a particular relationship of the proletariat to other classes and social strata.
Thomas sees too much in the united front. While it was greatly significant a question in Gramsci's time, it should be elevated to a strategy. The united front was at an important but nevertheless tactical difference with the Stalinist third period. The political problems ran deeper than that. It is an economism which sees the united front as a strategy, focusing on the self-contained working class in relationship with itself. United Front as strategy gives way to tailism. The point of the united front tactic, a move specific to workers' parties, was to put the workers' movement from the defencive onto the offensive so that it may then go on to win leadership of other classes. There are two levels of hegemony: that of the Marxist party over the proletariat, and that of the proletariat over other classes and the people as a mass. These are secured simultaneously, and missing one means you get neither. The active role that the party plays in articulating a strategic alliance of class forces is missed, and therefore the party is downplayed. Thomas' political suggestions at the time were ultimately socialist-movementist, such as calling for militancy in the trade unions. That's well and good, but it's not enough of an orientation in itself; it doesn't clarify the specific role of Marxism in a strategic orientation to working-class power. The contradiction of anti-party and anti-revolutionary party attitudes of the left today will only be overcome by dedicated effort informed by more than the arguments of this text.
Thomas argues that the Prison Notebooks are less cryptic than often thought. Gramsci's jailers would not have been tricked by wordplay into thinking that he was just writing harmless niceties. The representative words used by Gramsci are more often just notes for abbreviation, as he would have done in any context. Also, it may have been that when Gramsci used a certain term, he meant it over the 'translation', for instance that when Gramsci speaks of the 'philosophy of praxis' he doesn't just mean 'Marxism' but uses this term to refer to something more specific than Marxism.
What the Notebooks are is fragmentary. Though this is not unusual for the Marxist canon. Understanding Marxism materialistically means we have to see its texts not as timeless treatises establishing eternal doctrine. To do so would be a liberal conception of intellectual history. Instead, we have to see them as part of historical development, as concrete interventions. Getting something from them for our own time requires an understanding of context to know the intention of the work, and is determined by the political questions that we face in our own time. It's not illegitimate to read 'into' historical texts meaning which is determined by our own time, so long as we are conscious of the historical determinations involved in such a reading.
Thomas correctly argues that hegemony is not counterposed to dictatorship. It is rather the form of leadership and dominance over those who are in an alliance. From that, force against the enemy of the alliance finds legitimacy. There is a dialectic of coercion and consent: consent is developed through force (power provides reason to support), but force also requires legitimacy to not be seen as an outrage. Often, the relationship is not sequential, but both arise as aspects of a contested situation.
For a hypothetical example: In a mass strike, the state seeks to enact repression, but it also fights to win legitimacy for that repression. 'The people participating in the strike are a minority of society (true!), parliament represents the whole of society and therefore takes precedent.' This is an argument for the legitimacy of the bureaucratic state apparatus over the proletariat. For the proletariat there would be two struggles, first the struggle of the strike itself and the fight against repression, but then also the struggle for legitimacy, that it is not the government but the strike that represents the interests of the people and which the people should get behind. Coercion and consent are in dialectical union. It is never an either/or issue of determining what moment is that of consent or that of coercion.
Gramsci draws on Machiavelli's image of the Centaur, of half man half beast, to make the point: "levels of force and consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilisation, of the individual moment and of the universal moment ('Church' and 'State'), of agitation and of propaganda, of tactics and of strategy, etc... it often happens that the more the first 'perspective' is 'immediate' and elementary, the more the second has to be 'distant' (not in time, but as a dialectical relation), complex and elevated. In other words, it may happen as in human life, that the more an individual is compelled to defend his own immediate physical existence, the more will be uphold and identify with the complex and most noble values of civilisation and of humanity."
The relationship of civil society and state to base and superstructure is complex. Gramsci certainly does not identify civil society with base and state with superstructure. Civil society has a superstructural aspect, moreover Gramsci emphasises this in arguing that economy must be theorised politically. Conversely the state cannot be understood as an entity without a basic aspect, as Engels argued political power is also an economic power. The structure of civil society is the terrain of political action.
Passive revolution is a concept of particular controversy. More than just a description of bourgeois 'revolutions from above', it is the term which describes the process of rearticulation and reorganisation of the bourgeoisie's hegemonic position, in the face of a crisis of hegemony. It is prompted by class struggle raising itself such that the oppressed classes are threatening a breaking apart of bourgeois political dominance. That the class struggle prompts the bourgeoisie to creatively rearticulate its hegemonic position, that the class struggle in this sense can contribute to the prolonging of capitalism as much as its overthrow, is very important for understanding history up to the present and the crisis of hegemony the bourgeoisie faces today.
Gramsci was neither a Trotskyist nor a Stalinist. He saw himself as forwarding Lenin's political thought. I've commented on the critique of Trotsky elsewhere. Gramsci against Stalin is significant to emphasise when Stalin and Bukharin claimed the concept of hegemony against Trotsky. For Stalin, Lenin's contribution was in the proletarian dictatorship supposedly negating the pre-revolutionary struggle for hegemony. For Gramsci, Lenin's greatest innovation in realising hegemony came after 1917. Hegemony was not counterposed to but complimented dictatorship. Stalin and the Eurocommunists both misunderstood this. Lenin understood totally differently to Stalin the tasks of the government after the civil war, seen in his last arguments against bureaucratisation, which Gramsci draws on in opposition to Stalin. Gramsci's discussion of culture here is significant: one of Lenin's last arguments about the struggle against bureaucratisation was to raise the cultural level of the masses so that they could act as a check on the government.
The weaker parts of the book are the more philosophical sections. Thomas leans on the philosophical category of immanence to establish Gramsci's philosophy of praxis as an Hegelian identity of theory and practice. That Thomas sees in the struggle for hegemony only these concepts is a problem on his part. The scientific aspect of Marxism must be defending to uphold a materialistic approach to politics. Marxism is a science and a philosophy; a science with respect to theory, and a philosophy with respect to practice. This is not to separate theory from practice, but to assert their non-identity. Science is necessary for making an objective assessment of the balance of forces. This is not Marxism as sociology as in Bukharin (which Gramsci in his critique does not totally discard insofar as it makes a scientific contribution), it is a recognition that science does not immediately spring out of practice as Marxist knowledge.
Thomas sees in the conception of Marxism as science a dogmatic religion imposed on workers from outside. This is the inverse of the Althusserian conception of theoretical practice. Both ultimately rest on an identity rather than unity of theory and practice. Lenin's conception of Marxism as being engaged in a struggle with spontaneity is the only coherent way of situating oneself within the historical process without reducing marxism to its object. It is the only way of understanding Marxism as developing through history, that it creatively innovates and doesn't defend a timeless truth. The non-Leninist conception gives rise to a contradiction, of on the one hand Marxism as a god complex viewing history from outside, and on the other hand conceiving of Marxist theory as immanent to its object; Marxism is merely the expression of the logic of the proletariat, and comprehending Marxism is a matter of divination of absolute knowledge. This is a religious conception. Both humanism and anti-humanism are dogmatic, and both have origins on Christian thought. The god complex is philosophically totalitarian for ascribing to everything its own knowledge or the process it interprets. Situating oneself within the logic of the historical process and a conception of consciousness from without are two sides of the same theoretical grounding. Lenin's alternative grounded the conception of agency found in the Marxist concept of leadership i.e. hegemony. By conceiving the role of the intellectual and of the party as pedagogical through struggle, Thomas develops a conception of hegemony more in like with Menshevism. This is the result of believing hegemony to be a primarily philosophical rather than political question. For Menshevism, proletarian hegemony was secured through the proletariat relating to its own activity; such a focus on identity went the way metaphysics, sending the Mensheviks down the path of opportunism and subservience to the bourgeoisie. For Bolshevism, proletarian hegemony is secured through a particular relationship of the proletariat to other classes and social strata.
Thomas sees too much in the united front. While it was greatly significant a question in Gramsci's time, it should be elevated to a strategy. The united front was at an important but nevertheless tactical difference with the Stalinist third period. The political problems ran deeper than that. It is an economism which sees the united front as a strategy, focusing on the self-contained working class in relationship with itself. United Front as strategy gives way to tailism. The point of the united front tactic, a move specific to workers' parties, was to put the workers' movement from the defencive onto the offensive so that it may then go on to win leadership of other classes. There are two levels of hegemony: that of the Marxist party over the proletariat, and that of the proletariat over other classes and the people as a mass. These are secured simultaneously, and missing one means you get neither. The active role that the party plays in articulating a strategic alliance of class forces is missed, and therefore the party is downplayed. Thomas' political suggestions at the time were ultimately socialist-movementist, such as calling for militancy in the trade unions. That's well and good, but it's not enough of an orientation in itself; it doesn't clarify the specific role of Marxism in a strategic orientation to working-class power. The contradiction of anti-party and anti-revolutionary party attitudes of the left today will only be overcome by dedicated effort informed by more than the arguments of this text.
March 8, 2015
Peter Thomas definitely knows Gramsci's work inside out and confidently demonstrates some of the more intricate angles. I wasn't a big fan of his method of readings Gramsci through Althusser and Anderson. Regardless, a must read for anyone interested in Gramsci.
July 13, 2024
It should be illegal to write a book this good.
Brutal in developing beyond Anderson and Althusser, in a way that makes clear so many of the central preoccupations of Gramsci whilst we still lack a complete English edition.
Brutal in developing beyond Anderson and Althusser, in a way that makes clear so many of the central preoccupations of Gramsci whilst we still lack a complete English edition.
August 14, 2025
Truly an 'epistemological break' of a book. There's a persona of you before you read it and a persona of you after it.
May 28, 2024
One for the Gramsci aficionados, which, I'm finally forced to conclude, I am sadly not. It's an impressive work of scholarship but I really struggled with this abstruse book over the past few months. It left me feeling both underwhelmed and overwhelmed - a similar reaction to when I tried reading Selections from the Prison Notebooks near a decade ago. A significant part of the book is a polemic with Perry Anderson's influential The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, which emphasises that seeming contradictions in Gramsci's arguments were due to his imprisonment by fascist jailors, worsening health and the need to avoid censorship. Thomas tends to argue instead that Gramsci's ideas were mostly consistent throughout. Thomas knows Gramsci inside out and makes a great effort to put his writings in context. Despite this, I still struggle to get why Gramsci is considered such a significant figure. His arguments are often so abstract they permit contradictory interpretations. His most perceptive insights are immersed in pages of impenetrable verbosity. And I hate that I know this much about Benedetto Croce so I'd better get busy forgetting.
September 21, 2020
Yazar, Gramsci'nin Hapishane Defterleri'nin detaylı bir analizini yapıyor. Gramsci'nin düşüncesini derinleştiren, başta Althusser olmak üzere birçok düşünürün Gramsci eleştirilerini yerli yerine oturtarak cevaplayan bir eser. Devlet-toplum ilişkisini anlamak ve bugünün siyasetine ışık tutacak bir perspektif geliştirmek için çok değerli bir çalışma olmuş. Yazım dili yer yer felsefi kavramların sıkça kullanımından dolayı ağırlaşabiliyor ancak bu kadar kapsamlı bir çalışma için anlaşılabilir bir durum. Gramsci üzerine akademik ya da siyasi olarak düşünmek isteyen herkesin başvurması gereken bir kaynak
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