BENEDETTO FONTANA HEGEMONY AND POWER - ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GRAMSCI AND MACHIAVELLI Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.

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1 Frank Rosengarten 267 BENEDETTO FONTANA HEGEMONY AND POWER - ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GRAMSCI AND MACHIAVELLI Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. The main purpose of this excellent study is to situate the thought of Antonio Gramsci in the context of Italian political and cultural history. Too few of Gramsci's readers are sufficiently aware of how important Italian sources are to the genesis and development of Gramsci's world view, especially with regard to his theory of hegemony for which, Fontana argues, he drew heavily from The Prince, The Discourses, and The Art of War. Machiavelli was "central to Gramsci's thought," as were other Italian thinkers Vico, De Sanctis, Croce who contributed essential insights indispensable to a proper understanding of Gramsci's position in European intellectual history. But there is one key Italian thinker, the Neapolitan Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola, who is missing (except for a single footnote) from Fontana's analysis of Gramsci's theory of hegemony, a lacuna which results, I think, from a somewhat skewed, anti-or perhaps better, non-leninist, reading of Gramsci as a "Hegelian" Marxist. I shall return later to this question. Fontana's study is amply documented, and includes an extensive selective bibliography. If not the very first serious investigation of Gramsci's indebtedness to Machiavelli, it is certainly by far the most thorough and critically acute. It is not the first to present Machiavelli as a "revolutionary" thinker, 1 but it is the first to bring all of the tools of a critical-historical armamentarium to bear on the relevance of Machiavelli's political project to modern and contemporary theories of revolutionary change. In addition to elucidating the various ways in which Machiavelli can be seen as a source for some of Gramsci's basic concepts, such as hegemony, Fontana's book provides a new and wide-ranging

2 Frank Rosengarten 268 examination of key terms in Machiavelli's lexicon, such as the dyads virtù/fortuna and forza/consenso. Moreover, it offers sound arguments in support of the belief that in their emphasis on the "unity" of knowledge and action, ethics and politics, Machiavelli and Gramsci are part of an unbroken continuity of political thought, despite their chronological remoteness to each other. Fontana makes valuable contributions to our understanding of both Machiavelli and Gramsci in all of the book's eight densely packed chapters, and he does so in a particularly useful manner by contrasting (in Chapters One to Four) Benedetto Croce's historical-idealist reading of Machiavelli with Gramsci's historical-materialist reading of the Florentine secretary. What emerges from these four chapters is a picture of Croce as the theorist of "distinctions" and Gramsci as the theorist of "connections" between thought and action, philosophy and politics, "spirit" and "matter." The point of view undergirding these chapters is stated in Chapter One, where Fontana maintains that Gramsci's interpretation and use of Machiavelli constitutes a "counterreading" of Croce's Machiavelli: The Gramscian Machiavelli is a figure that stands in radical opposition to the Crocean Machiavelli. What this means is that to understand the Gramsci-Machiavelli relation it is also necessary to understand the Croce-Gramsci relation; and, further, any discussion of Gramsci's interpretation of Machiavelli necessarily presupposes a discussion of Croce's reading of Machiavelli. Thus the relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli can only be located within the Gramscian critique of Crocean thought and Italian culture. And the interpretation of Machiavelli is a reading that issues from, and which (at the same time) attempts to negate, the Crocean and liberal interpretation of Machiavellian thought (pp. 7-8). One might quibble with the word "negate" in the last sentence of the passage just quoted and replace it with "transcend," inasmuch as Gramsci dealt with Croce in the Prison Notebooks as an adversary, not an enemy, and insisted on the need for historical materialism to integrate the achievements of idealist thought into a new and enriched philosophy of praxis that retains its idealist heritage. But this observation takes nothing away from the value of Fontana's main line of argument concerning Croce and Gramsci, which is that while Croce conceived of philosophy as a "universal realm of 'truth' whose 'purity' and integrity would be violated and compromised were such a realm of

3 Frank Rosengarten 269 pure thought to come into a close and intimate contact with the world of action and sociopolitical struggle" (p. 14), Gramsci, as a disciple of the Machiavellian synthesis of thought and action, asserted and defended analytically an integrated conception of the philosophy of praxis, wherein the world of material reality and material practices interpenetrates dialectically with the world of ideas and values. In Chapter Four, entitled "Power and the State Croce and Gramsci on the Nature of Machiavelli's Politics," after offering insights into the Christian, and specifically Augustinian, view of the earthly and the heavenly city as "forever separate and distinct," Fontana cites Crocean skepticism about the capacities for leadership of the popular masses, to point out that Machiavelli and Gramsci both looked precisely to these masses, the volgo, as the standard bearer of a new revolutionary order based on true democracy. One of the most original aspects of Fontana's study is its creative use of classical Greco-Roman concepts, and of medieval and Renaissance notions of what is possible and desirable in the political realm, to facilitate understanding of Gramsci's political thought. Students of the Renaissance will find his analysis in Chapter Five of Guicciardini's views on virtù, fortuna, and the particulare, compared with Machiavelli's to be very helpful elucidations. Chapters Six and Seven provide an illuminating exposition of the meanings of the terms "private" and "public" in antiquity, during the Renaissance, and in the modern era. Unlike the dominant trend today in the United States, where the private realm is held up to be the realm of true freedom undeterred by a meddlesome and incompetent public sector, for thinkers such as Cicero and Machiavelli, as exponents of republican virtue in ancient Rome and in Renaissance Italy, it is the public realm that defines and makes possible a meaningful freedom, while the private realm is felt as restricted, the domain of necessity, where fortune reigns supreme and subjection to forces that appear alien to human ends and values is felt as invincible. An implicit point here is that if, as seems likely, Gramsci internalized this sense of public and private, it becomes clearer than ever why he would have found prison life to be such a politically as well as emotionally painful ordeal. On the other hand, had it not been for this ordeal, we would not have the Prison Notebooks, a circumstance that has interesting parallels with the life of Machiavelli, who did his most significant writing only after being ousted from his post in the Florentine government, briefly imprisoned, and then kept

4 Frank Rosengarten 270 safely at bay in a sort of political limbo outside the halls of power. As indicated above in a reference to the absence of any discussion of Italy's first important Marxist thinker, Antonio Labriola, my only serious reservation about this otherwise profound and lucid study is its almost total effacement of Gramsci's indebtedness to "Bolshevik" political theorists principally Lenin and Trotsky. Granted, the subject of the book is the relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli, but its main focus is the influential theory of hegemony which constitutes one of the pillars on which Gramsci's claim to originality rests. It is somewhat disconcerting to notice that, in arguing for the centrality of Machiavelli's ideas to the development of Gramsci's theory of hegemony, Fontana neglects to acknowledge Gramsci's explicit intellectual debt to Lenin (and grudgingly to Trotsky also) for his own conception of hegemony. Moreover, Gramsci's theory of hegemony, although linked in some respects to Machiavelli's call for a new order founded not so much on force as on a consensual and interactive relationship between rulers and the ruled, is rooted primarily in his assimilation of what Perry Anderson calls "the fateful setbacks" to the workers' movement for socialist revolution suffered in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy in the early 1920s. 2 The theory of hegemony as "political and moral leadership" flowed from a set of "relations of force" that led Gramsci to rethink the whole process by which socialists would have to carry on their struggle after 1923, the year in which revolution was crushed and in which he assumed leadership of the Italian Communist Party. In other words, one can agree with Fontana that Gramsci's notion of hegemony, which is defined by Fontana (following Gramsci) as "intellectual and moral leadership [direzione] whose principal constituting elements are consent and persuasion" (p. 140), is prefigured by the classical Roman notion of societas and by Machiavelli's concept of popular republican democracy, yet insist at the same time on the primary importance of Gramsci himself attributed to the "founding fathers" of a Marxist science of politics, Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. Is it necessary, in order to bring a new perspective to bear on a question of this sort, to correct a previously one-sided view by paying no attention to it at all, or by suggesting, as Fontana does in his concluding chapter, that Gramsci derived his theory of hegemony from a principled commitment to methods diametrically opposed to those of Lenin? Fontana makes Gramsci's adoption of the tactics of a hegemonic "war of position," based on the attempt to erode

5 Frank Rosengarten 271 the sources of capitalist power in the West by an astute practice of socialist cultural politics, seem to be a normative value rather than a choice made in a specifically contingent "situation" (in the Sartrean sense). Gramsci did, as Fontana says, "reverse" the Leninist revolutionary pattern, by insisting that "a legitimating hegemony must first be established" in order to achieve a secure state power (p. 150), but he did so in reaction to circumstances and not because he was committed in theory to anti-bolshevik methods. Perry Anderson had it right, I think, when he pointed out, in pages devoted to the originality of Western Marxism, that, for Gramsci hegemony was a term "designed precisely to theorize the political structures of capitalist power that did not exist in Tsarist Russia," and that a hegemonic system of power was "defined by the degree of consent it obtained from the popular masses which it dominated, and a consequent reduction in the scale of coercion needed to repress them." 3 In any event, in a section of the Prison Notebooks devoted to "state and civil society," after observing that the events of 1917 were the last occurrence of revolution conducted according to the theory of a "war of maneuver" aimed at overturning the existing order in Russia, Gramsci went on to attribute the first theoretical formulation of a hegemonic "war of position" to Trotsky, concluding, however, that it was Lenin who first "understood that a change was necessary from the war of manoeuvre applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position which was the only form possible in the West [...]." 4 This is what Lenin was aiming at, Gramsci wrote, in the strategy of the "United Front" articulated in 1921 and Two other passages in the Notebooks are even more explicit and revealing in terms of Gramsci's debt to Lenin; not, to be sure, for his much more refined and nuanced understanding of hegemony, but rather for the fundamental notion on which that understanding is based. The first appears in a section of the Notebooks entitled "The Study of Philosophy," the second in a section entitled "Problems of Marxism." From "The Study of Philosophy": The proposition contained in [Marx's] "Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" to the effect that men acquire consciousness of structural conflicts on the level of ideologies should be considered as an affirmation of epistemological and not simply psychological and moral value. From this, it follows that the theoretical-practical principle of hegemony also has epistemological

6 Frank Rosengarten 272 significance, and it is here that Ilich [Lenin]'s greatest theoretical contribution to the philosophy of praxis should be sought. In these terms one could say that Ilich advanced philosophy as philosophy in so far as he advanced political doctrine and practice. The realisation of a hegemonic apparatus, in so far as it creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of knowledge: it is a fact of knowledge, a philosophical fact. In Crocean terms: when one succeeds in introducing a new morality in conformity with a new conception of the world, one finishes by introducing the conception as well; in other words, one determines a reform of the whole of philosophy. 5 And in "Problems of Marxism": "I have referred elsewhere to the philosophical importance of the concept of hegemony, for which Ilich [Lenin] is responsible. Hegemony realised means the real critique of a philosophy, its real dialectic." 6 Fontana wants to liberate Gramsci from the Bolshevik embrace, but in doing so he moves too far in the direction of his Italian predecessors, with Machiavelli at the forefront. There are many other things one could say about this immensely valuable book. Let it suffice here to say that from now on, all Gramsci scholars will have to take Fontana's contribution into account in ways that are not merely incidental to this or that aspect of Gramsci's political thought and conception of Marxism, but that are absolutely indispensable to an integrated understanding of his world view. The City University of New York, New York, New York FRANK ROSENGARTEN NOTES 1 Fontana refers to Giuliano Procacci's Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli, but he neglects to mention Procacci's ground-breaking introductory essay, "Machiavelli rivoluzionario," in Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere scelte, ed. Gian Franco Berardi (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969), pp. xiii-xxxvi. 2 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979), p Ibid., p. 79.

7 Frank Rosengarten Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p Ibid., pp Ibid., p. 381.