Review of International Studies (1998), 24, 321 Copyright British International Studies Association

Engaging Gramsci: international relations

theory and the new Gramscians*
R A N DA L L D. G E R M A I N A N D M I C H A E L K E N N Y

Abstract. The work of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has had a significant
impact upon the study of International Relations (IR) over the past fifteen years. Despite the
emergence of a distinct Italian School in IR, however, there have been few assessments of the
utility of Gramscis concepts in this area. Our purpose here is to engage with the work of the
new Gramscians. We begin by specifying the theoretical attractions of using Gramsci in IR,
and then subject the key foundational claims of the new Gramscians to critical analysis. Our
principal conclusions are that the Italian schools appropriation of Gramsci is far more
conceptually problematic than they acknowledge, and that their use of his framework is
difficult to sustain with respect to the scholarship devoted to his ideas. If Gramsci is to be
used effectively within IR, closer attention must be paid both to the historical meaning of his
work and to the problems raised by it. In short, Gramsci and his ideas must be more
thoroughly historicized if his work is to be used to comprehend the multiple dynamics of
world order today.

In 1983 an article appeared in the journal Millennium which introduced a generation

of International Relations (IR) scholars to the work of the Italian Marxist theorist
Antonio Gramsci.1 In this seminal publication, Robert W. Cox argued that
Gramscis general conceptual framework provided the discipline with an alternative
theoretical approach to the mainstream. Most importantly, it offered IR theorists a
number of innovative concepts that promised to illuminate the mechanisms of
hegemony at the international level. Within the space of little more than a decade, at
least ten volumes appeared which employed a recognizably Gramscian approach to
consider change and transformation in world order, spawning what some now call
the Italian School of IR.2 Although this phrase represents a slightly artificial way

* We would like to thank the following for their encouragement and comments on early drafts:
Mark Bevir, Simon Caney, Bob Cox, Mick Cox, David Dessler, Paul Langley, Adam Morton,
Susan Strange and Oran Young.
1
Robert Cox, Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method, Millennium, 12
(1983), pp. 16275.
2
Stephen Gill employs the term Italian School, which he points out was coined by an anonymous
reviewer. See S. Gill, Epistemology, Ontology and the Italian School, in Stephen Gill (ed.),
Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge, 1993), p. 21. Other volumes
broadly inspired by the Gramscian turn in IR would include Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy,
Americas Quest for Supremacy and the Third World (London, 1988); Robert Cox , Production, Power
and World Order (New York, 1987); Andrew Gamble and Anthony Payne (eds.), Regionalism and
World Order (London, 1996); Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission
(Cambridge, 1990); Craig Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change (Cambridge,
1994); David Rapkin (ed.), World Leadership and Hegemony (Boulder, CO, 1990); William Robinson,

3
4 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

of connecting scholars who use Gramsci for different reasons and in different ways,
we believe it is useful to the extent that it highlights how a particular set of ideas has
come to exert an important influence within the discipline.3 For it is by the
pioneering efforts of these scholars that Gramscis ideas have been introduced to an
entirely new academic audience, and through them to todays IR students.
But amidst their enthusiastic adoption of a Gramscian mantle, those working
within this emerging discourse have failed to engage critically with some of the key
premises underlying their appropriation of Gramsci.4 We consider this failure in
terms of three questions: (i) whether the reading of Gramsci on which this appro-
priation rests actually constitutes a viable interpretation of his work; (ii) whether his
key concepts (from an IR point of view) can be internationalized in quite the way
that the new Gramscians propose; and (iii) whether his concepts are fully adequate
to comprehend the nature of social order in the contemporary period. In this article
we engage critically with the fundamental and unexamined premises upon which the
case for the Italian school rests.
Our consideration of these premises leads us to raise substantial doubts about the
way in which Gramsci has been deployed within IR. In terms of (i), the question of
how we can know Gramscis meaning on key philosophical and analytical ques-
tions is a more complex and problematic issue than the Italian school allows. Unlike
their counterparts in social and political theory who have exhaustively debated the
meanings and uses of Gramscis work, IR scholars have been content simply to
apply Gramsci, without asking how and under what conditions his method and
concepts shed light on developments in their field of study.5 With regard to (ii), it is
not at all clear that his conceptual categories can be meaningfully internationalized
as the new Gramscians propose. In particular, we stress the paradox that Gramsci,
above all a theorist who grappled with the discourses and realities of statism in the
early twentieth century, is now being used to theorize not only the existence of a
global civil society disembedded from the nation-state, but also a form of hegemony
reliant on transnational social forces. And with respect to (iii), we ask whether
Gramscian-influenced analyses are themselves capable of comprehending the
complex nature of social order in todays world. Ultimately, we must question

Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony (Cambridge, 1996); and Mark
Rupert, Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production and American Global Power
(Cambridge, 1995). See also John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony,
Territory and the International Political Economy (London, 1995).
3
We do of course acknowledge the case that not all of the scholars we identify as belonging to the
Italian school would consider themselves as such. Robert Cox, for instance, has come to his mature
views on world order as much through a prolonged engagement with the thought of Vico, Sorel,
Carr, Braudel and Collingwood as with that of Gramsci. He has also indicated, in personal
correspondence, that he does not consider himself to be a member of any school, Gramscian-
inspired or otherwise.
4
See, however, Peter Burnham, Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order, Capital and
Class, 45 (1991), pp. 7393; Peter Burnham, Open Marxism and Vulgar International Political
Economy, Review of International Political Economy, 1 (1994), pp. 22131; Andr Drainville,
International Political Economy in the Age of Open Marxism, Review of International Political
Economy, 1 (1994), pp. 10532; and L. H. M. Ling, Hegemony and the Internationalizing State: A
Post-colonial analysis of Chinas Integration into Asian Corporatism, Review of International
Political Economy, 3 (1996), pp. 126.
5
Indeed, one sympathetic reviewer of the earliest of these texts styled his review Applying Gramsci:
Roger Tooze, Understanding the Global Political Economy: Applying Gramsci, Millennium, 19
(1990), pp. 27380.
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 5

whether the use made of Gramsci does not stretch a conceptual apparatus beyond
the point at which its explanatory power can be maintained.
We propose to engage Gramsci and the new Gramscians in three steps. First, we
highlight the principal intellectual attractions of using Gramsci. Second, we explore
how the use of key Gramscian concepts in IR relates to some of the wider currents
of debate within what is now a rather large literature devoted to Gramsci. And
finally, we suggest the key issues which further critical engagement with Gramscis
work must consider.

IR theory and the Italian school

In theoretical terms, the chief attractions of using Gramsci lie along two dimensions.
First, for some his work provides an ontological and epistemological foundation
upon which to construct a non-deterministic yet structurally grounded explanation
of change. On this reading, Gramscis theoretical insights provide a critical counter-
point to approaches which hypostatize the structural characteristics of world order,
in terms of either the international system of states or the world economy/system.6
By insisting on the transformative capacity of human beings, Gramscis radical
embrace of human subjectivity provides IR scholars with one way of avoiding a
deterministic and ahistorical structuralism.7 For one proponent of a Gramscian IR,
this radical social ontology entails a more empowering self-understanding in which
humans are actively self-constitutive in the process of consciously reconstructing
their internal relations with society and nature.8
Some have even gone so far as to perceive in Gramscis work the promise of
circumnavigating the positivist-inspired dichotomies that frame most conceptual
work in IR. Stephen Gill, for example, boldly claims that a Gramscian-inspired
International Political Economy (IPE) overcomes the subjectobject dualism at the
heart of positivist social science.9 Here the key to Gramscis popularity lies in the
path his work charts between the pre-given units of neorealist analysis (states) and
the unexplored domestic foundations of world-systems theory. Others have claimed
that Gramscis ideas allow us to reconnect the individual to the state via the
fundamental processes of alienation, which serve to ground both of these forms of
human existence under capitalism.10 It is not just states and the state system that
must be understood in terms of one another; so too must individuals and social
forces. For these theorists Gramscis work provides IR with a systematic historical
materialist conception of world order capable of avoiding the pitfalls of rival modes
of structural analysis.
6
See Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA, 1979), and Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Modern World-system I (New York, 1974).
7
See Richard Ashley, The Poverty of Neorealism, International Organization, 38 (1984), pp. 22586;
Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie, International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of
the State, International Organization, 40 (1986), pp. 75375; Alexander Wendt, The AgentStructure
Problem in International Relations Theory, International Organization, 41 (1987), pp. 33570; and
David Dessler, Whats at Stake in the AgentStructure Debate, International Organization, 43 (1989),
pp. 44173.
8
Rupert, Producing Hegemony, p. 26; Gill, Epistemology, p. 24.
9
Gill, Epistemology, p. 22.
10
Rupert, Producing Hegemony, p. 33.
6 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

The enthusiasm with which such ontological and epistemological claims have been
advocated derives predominantly from the critique of mainstream IR which these
theorists offer. Gills formulation may be taken as the exemplar.
Social scientific explanation cannot develop either if it rests upon a Cartesian dualism
concerning subject and object or if it theorises in terms of cause and effect . . . [B]oth neo-
realism and mechanical forms of Marxism . . . share the problem of being constructed upon
subjectobject and agentstructure dichotomies . . . [They are subject to] a widespread
tendency to use transhistorical theorisations based upon sets of a priori categories which
appear to take on an ontological autonomy.11
By strictly delimiting the spatial and temporal contexts within which explanation is
framed, Gill maintains that a Gramscian approach makes social scientific explana-
tion possible. For many of the new Gramscians, getting beyond the limitations of
positivism constitutes one of the most compelling reasons to deploy a Gramscian
approach within IR today.
The second dimension of Gramscis attractiveness lies in the employment of his
methodology, which the Italian school has broadly interpreted as an innovative
reading of historical materialism in conjunction with a flexible and ultimately
historicist understanding of social class, institutions and the power of ideas.12 This
methodology underpins a novel reading of the social relations of world order, most
clearly seen in the way that the Gramscian concepts of hegemony, historical bloc
and civil society have been applied to the post-1973 period. For example, in contrast
to the somewhat arid use made of the concept of hegemony by neorealist scholars,
or its increasingly functional tone in world-systems analyses,13 the richly textured
and suggestive deployment of this concept in the Gramscian IPE literature provides
insights into the social basis of hegemony, its construction as a social artefact and its
inherent points or moments of contradiction. Moreover, by considering how
hegemony itself is a product of leadership, i.e., a consequence of individual and
collective human acts, the Gramscian reading of this concept draws our attention to
both its contestability and the impossibility of reducing it to a preponderance of
material resources.14
The concept of an historical bloc evokes a similarly richly textured analysis by
many Gramscian-inspired scholars. For Cox, an historic bloc is a dialectical concept
in the sense that its interacting elements create a larger unity, while for Murphy it is
perhaps akin to a Rubiks Cube, a social order that must be looked at in different
ways in order to be understood completely.15 Either use of the term helps these
scholars to look beyond the state, to peer through its narrow juridical form in order
to apprehend the broader social order of which it forms a constituent element. In
this sense it provides them with an alternative set of analytical tools capable of

11
Gill, Epistemology, p. 22.
12
A useful and Gramscian-inspired definition of historicism can be found in Joseph Femia, An
Historicist Critique of Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas, History and Theory,
20 (1981), pp. 11516. See also Robert Cox, Approaches to World Order, with Timothy Sinclair
(Cambridge, 1996), pp. 2930, 513, 656 and 917.
13
For an example of the former, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge,
1981), p. 116, while an example of the latter can be found in Peter Taylor, The Way the Modern World
Works: World Hegemony to World Impasse (Chichester, 1996), p. 37.
14
David Rapkin, The Contested Concept of Hegemonic Leadership, in Rapkin (ed.), World
Leadership.
15
Cox, Gramsci, p. 167; Murphy, International Organization, p. 28.
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 7

assessing the extent to which any social order can be defined as hegemonic. Such a
consideration has encouraged several new Gramscians to contest the depiction of
the contemporary era as one of after hegemony.16
Finally, the explanatory power of much new Gramscian analysis is predicated
upon an innovative reading of civil society that extends it to the global level. Most
new Gramscians would accept Craig Murphys argument that for Gramsci civil
society is the political space and collective institutions in which and through which
individuals form political identities . . . It is the realm of voluntary associations, of
the norms and practices which make them possible, and of the collective identities
they form, the realm where I becomes we.17 The innovative contribution of the
Italian school lies in considering civil society at the international or global level,
where they see it as corresponding most closely to the practices and values fostered
by public and private transnational institutions, which are in turn based upon the
progressive transnationalization of dominant social forces.18 Here civil society as
both a social space and a set of voluntary associations begins to leave behind its
prior association with a particular nation-state. Global civil society, in this sense,
exists outside the political space bounded by the parameters of the nation-state
system. The spatial boundaries of global civil society are different, because its
autonomy from the constructed boundaries of the state system allows for the
construction of new political spaces.19
The Gramscian turn in IR thus provides a way to conceptualize world order free
of the constraints of state-centric approaches and the interstate relations they focus
upon, without abandoning altogether an explicit acknowledgement of their import-
ance. It is especially critical of the claims by both neorealist and world systems
theorists that the deep structural logic of world order remains unchanged over
time.20 Instead, the new Gramscians adopt a broad historicist or historical material-
ist framework to examine the structural organization of world order, and focus upon
the emerging terrain of global civil society as the principal battleground over which
the struggle for hegemony is now occurring.

Engaging Gramsci: claims and debates

Engaging Gramsci requires an explicit acknowledgement of the many obstacles

which stand in the way of any definitive interpretation of his legacy. His life and
work are marked by multiple and often conflicting influences, which make it difficult
to express with clarity the analytical core of his thought.21 Gramscis principal
intellectual achievement, the Prison Notebooks (or Quaderni), were written under
appalling physical and mental conditions; they take the form of working notes and
16
The term comes from Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World
Political Economy (Princeton, NJ, 1984).
17
Murphy, International Organization, p. 31.
18
Gill, American Hegemony, pp. 4656; Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, pp. 3840.
19
Ronnie Lipschutz, Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society,
Millennium, 21 (1992), p. 393.
20
Gilpin, War and Change, pp. 22830; Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formation: Structures of the
World-economy (Oxford, 1989), pp. 867.
21
See Paul Ransome, Antonio Gramsci: A New Introduction (London, 1992), pp. 54112.
8 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

are deliberately coded in places. Moreover, they contain many inconsistencies which
make the text as a whole open to multiple and radically different interpretations.
While some have therefore dismissed his theoretical relevance to understanding
contemporary circumstances, others have pointed out that he had neither the
opportunity to make final revisions to the text nor the luxury of working with a
conceptual language adequate to his theoretical labours.22 Instead, he relied on a
language culled from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxies, on the one hand, and the Italian
philosophers he read as a student, notably Labriola and Croce, on the other. Despite
these obstacles, Gramscis defenders maintain that he managed to effect one of the
most far-reaching revisions of Marxism in the twentieth century. In short, anyone
wishing to negotiate Gramscis work, or the literature devoted to it, cannot ignore
the many different Gramscis on offer.23 To apply Gramsci, therefore, is at the same
time to be critically engaged with his work.24
From this point of view, perhaps the biggest problem arising from the Italian
schools appropriation of Gramsci stems from the way in which the significance of
some of his ideas and the debates into which he entered have been lost or mis-
understood through the decontextualization of his thought. In effect, Gramsci
comes to IR at a third remove: abstracted from the debates which sparked his
thinking, from the interpretive difficulties surrounding his ideas, and from the
contending interpretations which his thinking has ignited. Our task here is to
reconnect Gramscian IR with the bountiful scholarship devoted to his ideas. As we
do so, it will become clear that some of the claims that have been advanced by the
Italian school look rather tenuous when considered against the backdrop of the
principal interpretive debates which Gramscis work has generated.

Ontology and epistemology

Stephen Gill suggests that Gramsci offers a way of transcending the dualism
between subject and object that has plagued social scientific analysis in general and
IR practitioners in particular. He argues that in international studies the Gramscian
approach is an epistemological and ontological critique of the empiricism and
positivism which underpin the prevailing theorisations.25 One of the principal
foundations of this critique is Gramscis historicism, which most new Gramscians
see as a potent analytical alternative to prevailing interpretive paradigms. In parti-
cular, they argue that this commitment to historicism overcomes the problem of
determinism inherent to so much structuralist thinking. As Gill insists, Gramscis
approach stands in contrast to abstract structuralism in so far as it has a

22
See Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, New Left Review, 100 (1977), pp. 578;
Richard Bellamy, Gramsci, Croce and the Italian Tradition, History of Political Thought, 11 (1990),
pp. 31339; Geoff Eley, Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio
Gramsci in the English-speaking World, 195782, European History Quarterly, 14 (1984), pp. 44178.
23
Chantal Mouffe, Introduction: Gramsci Today, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist
Theory (London, 1979), p. 1. Joseph Femia, Hegemony and Consciousness in the Thought of
Antonio Gramsci, Political Studies, 23 (1975), p. 30.
24
While some new Gramscians do acknowledge these interpretive difficulties, few go so far as to
indicate just how far it might temper their claims. One exception is Augelli and Murphy, Americas
Quest, p. 5.
25
Gill, Epistemology, p. 22.
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 9

human(ist) aspect: historical change is understood as, to a substantial degree, the

consequence of collective human activity.26
Those familiar with the literature devoted to Gramscis life and thought will find
such claims surprising, for three reasons. First, the status of Gramscis historicism is
by no means secure or unambiguous. Second, the relationship between his ideas and
structuralism has been conceptualized by many commentators quite differently
from that identified by the new Gramscians. And third, while historical change is
undoubtedly understood in Gramscis work as being mediated through collective
and individual action, these actions are themselves often represented as occurring
within parameters established, in the last instance, by political economy, that is, by
the relations of class forces at particular moments of time. In all three cases, the
principal difficulty with the Italian schools reading of Gramsci stems from the
assumptions of theoretical coherence and interpretive clarity which they attribute to
his work.

Historicism, structuralism and subjectivity: As numerous scholars have elaborated,

Gramscis thinking involved a complex negotiation and reworking of different
intellectual traditions, most obviouslythough by no means exclusivelyMarxist-
Leninism and idealist philosophy, particularly its Italian variants. He was of course
well versed in the canonical texts of Second International Marxism, and generally
operated within a Marxist-Leninist framework. Amongst many other legacies, these
lineages gave his work a profound commitment to historical materialism as a
method of interpreting social structures and change, and a belief that ideas, cultures
and values had to be historicized if their meanings were to be properly understood.
Yet, alongside these sources he also absorbed some of the principal traditions from
the Italian intellectual context in which he wrote.27 He came to the mature ideas
expounded in the Prison Notebooks through a lengthy engagement with Crocean
idealism as much as with Marxist-Leninism. Croces teleological account of the
unfolding of the principle of liberty and its culmination in the modern Italian state
shaped the elite parts of Italian culture profoundly, a process Gramsci himself was
to go on to interpret critically.28 Read against the background of Italian philosophy,
therefore, Gramsci has been presented as breaking with Marxism by shifting the
meaning of some its central categories and returning to Hegel via thinkers like
Labriola and Croce. Such an interpretation was put forward at the famous 1967
conference in Cagliari, where Norberto Bobbio argued that Gramsci completed the
inversion of the Marxist understanding of the basesuperstructure metaphor,
prioritizing civil society as the realm in which identities were shaped and the
dominance of social elites secured under capitalism.29 This argument has recurred in
different forms amongst those who argue that Gramsci provided a clearly defined
rejection of classical Marxism.30

26
Ibid.
27
Bellamy, Gramsci, Croce and the Italian Tradition.
28
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and tr. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Smith (New York, 1971), pp. 11420.
29
Norberto Bobbio, Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society, in Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and
Marxist Theory.
30
For a useful summary of the major interpretive fashions in this area, see A. B. Davidson, The
Varying Seasons of Gramscian Studies, Political Studies, 20 (1972), pp. 44861.
10 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

Certainly Gramsci was contemptuous of attempts by his contemporaries to

establish Marxisms philosophical foundations on the same lines as the laws of
natural science.31 Equally, his sense of the significance of phenomena like folklore,
myths and national identity in the construction of hegemonies possibly allowed him
to break with Marxist orthodoxies in certain respects. Perhaps most significant of all
his legacies from the Italian tradition was his conception of the distinction between
force and consent, which he took principally from Machiavellis writings.32 But in
addition to absorbing these traditions, Gramsci also broke from Crocean theory in
his rejection of strongly teleological forms of thinking. History was better conceived
as comprising a contingent and unpredictable sequence of developments which he
labelled historical blocs: temporary unifications of the major social relations within
a given national context under the hegemony of a ruling coalition. For Gramsci the
movement from one historical conjuncture to another was neither predetermined
nor linear. History was a far more open-ended series of developments which could
be articulated in different directions and end in different kinds of resolutions.33
This view of history represents for the Italian school a cast-iron alternative to
mainstream paradigms such as positivism, empiricism or structuralism. But
forcing this kind of reading on Gramsci is not without problems. When Stephen Gill
discusses the Gramscian notion of historical necessity, for example, he is adamant
that by this Gramsci means that social interaction and political change takes place
within what can be called the limits of the possible, limits which, however, are not
fixed and immutable but exist within the dialectics of a given social structure. And
while it is true that this social structure both constrains and constitutes social action,
it is equally true that social action has a transformative impact upon its constraining
structure: structures are transformed by agency.34
But beyond this important theoretical point, Gill and the new Gramscians do not
venture. In much of the literature surrounding Gramscis meaning, this is the
beginning not the end of enquiry into his thought. What remains open for question,
in particular, is in what sense we are to understand social interaction and political
change as challenging and redefining the limits of the possible. How is the
possible constituted in real historical situations? By prior economic relations which
set unbreakable limits? by actors thoughts, which are the products of the prevailing,
hegemonic common sense? or by actors who, through lived experiences and shared
cultural codes, learn what constitutes the possible? It seems fair to argue that all
three were possible for Gramsci, rendering this a more complex area in terms of his
work than the new Gramscians allow. Similar ambiguities and complexities surround
related issues, such as the balance of structure- and agent-centred analysis in
Gramscis writing. We believe it is time to move beyond the simple assertion that
necessity and autonomy are dialectical, to consider more fully both how Gramsci
understood this dialectic to work and his sense of the relative autonomy of the
different levels of the superstructure in relation to the actions and identities of
individuals and groups. For it is precisely these integral relationships which stand at
the heart of Gramscis complex notion of structuralism.

31
Femia, Hegemony and Consciousness, pp. 368.
32
Gramsci followed Machiavellis depiction of this relationship in The Prince as a centaur, half-animal
and half-human. Prison Notebooks, p. 170.
33
Esteve Morera, Gramscis Historicism: A Realist Interpretation (London, 1990).
34
Gill, Epistemology, p. 23.
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 11

Such complexity is evident in his consideration of the relationship of base to

superstructure. At one level, Gramscis conception of this relationship challenges
the meta-theoretical formulations advanced by Louis Althusser in the 1970s, and
which have been criticized for their objectivist and totalizing character.35 Here there
is little doubt regarding the radically interactive dimension of Gramscis conception
of the basesuperstructure relationship. At the same time, the extent to which
Gramsci moves beyond classical Marxist conceptions of the centrality of economic
relations within the social processes of modern capitalism is not at all clear. While
some latter-day interpreters have argued for the apparently autonomous role of
culture and politics in Gramscis ideas, others have contested this move in both
political and intellectual terms. Esteve Morera, for example, maintains that there is a
danger in allotting Gramscis studies of culture and politics a theoretical
significance that they do not have . . . [T]he fact that Gramsci was interested in
culture . . . is not to be construed as a statement about the primacy of culture.36
Morera argues that Gramsci saw the necessary conditions for a successful hegemonic
strategy as both structural and superstructural at the same time.
The hegemony of a group depends not only on its ability to organize consensus on . . .
problems related to the economic structure, but also on those problems of an . . . extra-
economic nature . . . In Gramscis analysis of Americanism, the economy poses . . . problems
whose solutions are structural and superstructural at once. The problems . . . themselves often
depend on the relations of forces, that is, on the relative strength and . . . organization of the
fundamental classes.37
In this reading of Gramsci, classes appear to be structured predominantly in the
world of production, which in turn constitutes the necessary precondition for the
development of political forces. Certainly Gramscis consideration of the concept of
passive revolution begins from this point: a society does not set for itself tasks for
whose solution the necessary conditions have not already been incubated.38 As
Morera points out, we find repeated throughout the Prison Notebooks the suggestion
that the material forces are the content, and ideology the form, of a particular
historical bloc.39
Yet this part of Gramscis work is not without its own set of interpretive ambi-
guities. Gramsci himself undercuts such a neat division between (ideological) form
and (economic) content, by suggesting that this distinction between form and
content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable
historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the
material forces.40 As Chantal Mouffe demonstrates, Gramsci allots a key role to
ideology in shaping and expressing these forces, while simultaneously retaining a
sense of the primacy of the relations of production.41 This theoretical ambiguity is
manifest too when Gramsci talks of crises facing a particular hegemonic formation:
[A]t certain moments the automatic thrust due to the economic factor is slowed

35
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London, 1977). E. P. Thompson has provided
a historicist rejoinder in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978).
36
Morera, Gramscis Historicism, p. 60.
37
Ibid., pp. 1467.
38
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 106.
39
Morera, Gramscis Historicism, p. 140.
40
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 377.
41
Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci, in Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory.
12 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

down, obstructed, or even momentarily broken down by traditional ideological

elements.42
The point to emphasize here is that these are complex areas of debate which have
been the object of very different scholarly interpretations. One axis around which
debate revolves is the question whether we should consider Gramsci an idealist or a
(broadly) historical materialist thinker.43 For our purpose, it is significant that few
contemporary interpreters adopt either of these rather stark interpretive alternatives.
While Gramsci did indeed reconceive and in some ways surpass classical Marxist
understandings of base and superstructure, he did not provide a tight alternative
model in their stead. Rather, he moved towards a reading of the superstructure
which took far more seriously the different levels and domains of social power, and
which recognized culture and ideology as partly constitutive of identity and
hegemony. In certain key respects, therefore, Gramscis contribution to subsequent
analysis is his subversive stance towards some of the standard binary oppositions
which sustained both materialist and idealist discourse. Distinctions between
economic content and ideological form, subjectivity and economic structure, and
structural constraints and collective agency, were to a large extent challenged by his
thinking, even if he continued to use some of these dichotomies in his own analyses.
Despite the widespread influence of his thinking, therefore, it is perhaps more
accurate to consider his epistemological and ontological ideas as innovative and
eclectic but ultimately problematic. For this reason, they cannot uphold Gills bold
claim of transcending the positivist-inspired dualism between subject and object.
This reading of Gramscis legacy is strengthened if we consider his writings on the
theme of how subjectivities are formed under capitalist social relations, which
constitute some of his most original and powerful theoretical ideas. Of particular
importance here is his understanding of the role and nature of human consciousness
in historical development. Clearly he assigns this an enlarged role in the construction
of identities and the maintenance of consensus, as compared to classical Marxists.
His subtle understanding of the interrelations between hegemony and individual
consciousness, as well as his radically different account of how individual subjects
are formed, stand out as major additions to the Marxist repertoire.44
But once again, it is not clear that he broke entirely from the rigidities of classical
Marxism in this area. In many respects, his ideas remain in dialectical tension with
these traditions. Consciousness, for Gramsci, could not be understood independently
of the exigencies of the economic substructure. In Femias words, it is this
substructure which provides Gramsci with the active propulsive force of history.45
This explains how Gramsci treats some of the burning questions of the day for the
left: for instance, why workers were not in general disposed to revolt against
capitalist social relations, and why so many Italians were turning to Fascism. In both
these cases, the explanations he produced were couched in terms of the balance of
class forces and the position of these groups with regard to the relations of
production, as well as subtle analyses of how subjects were positioned by and

42
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 168.
43
See Chantal Mouffe and Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci in France and Italy: A Review of the
Literature, Economy and Society, 6 (1977), pp. 3168.
44
Mouffe, Hegemony and Ideology; Robert Bocock, Hegemony (London, 1986).
45
Femia, Hegemony and Consciousness, p. 36.
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 13

recruited to different value systems and ideological paradigms. In this as in other

writings, the coherence and consistency of Gramscis work often falls short of
supporting the claims of the new Gramscians.

Meaning, appropriation and the history of ideas: In our view, the new Gramscians
would benefit from paying greater attention to the debates which have developed in
the course of different attempts to export Gramscis analytical framework to
temporal or geographical contexts different to his own. This argument came alive,
for instance, within the Italian Communist Party in the postwar period, when
leading intellectual figures deployed Gramscis authority to justify the adoption of a
more reformist strategy for the party.46 Equally, in British politics in the 1980s,
Gramscis mantle proved extraordinarily controversial, allowing critics such as
Stuart Hall to theorize the phenomenon of Thatcherism in ways that carried long-
lasting intellectual and political effects.47 Significantly, in both cases contested
interpretations of Gramsci were hotly disputed, illustrating very clearly the
intellectual malleability of his ideas.
We suggest that the Italian school would benefit not only from paying closer
attention to the interpretive problems evident in these disputes, but also by display-
ing greater sensitivity to the general problems of meaning and understanding in the
history of ideas. Such a sensitivity has much to teach the new Gramscians about the
dangers of removing thinkers from their contexts and applying their frameworks in
ways that bear only partial resemblance to their original meanings.48 Here we prefer
the strategy of commentators like Chantal Mouffe, who has long argued that main-
taining the integrity of his thought (when used in other contexts) is best achieved
through a symptomatic reading of his work.49 Without committing ourselves to
any particular interpretation, we suggest that the symptomatic stress upon develop-
ing a thorough sensitivity to the problematics against and through which thinkers
ideas are forged is entirely appropriate in Gramscis case.50
Applying Gramsci to todays problems therefore means paying far greater
attention to the problems of meaning and interpretation embedded in his ideas. It
also necessitates a closer understanding of how he reconceptualized key Marxist
motifs, such as base and superstructure, in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxies
of the day; the economism of Second International Marxism, for instance, or the
ethical statism of many northern Italian liberals. Such a methodology produces a
rather different Gramsci to the slayer of positivism and realism as propounded by
the Italian school. What emerges is a more hesitant, diverse and, in some respects,

46
Davidson, Varying Seasons; Mouffe and Sassoon, Gramsci in France and Italy; J. M. Cammett,
Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford, CA, 1967).
47
Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London, 1988). For a contrasting Gramscian-inspired
departure, see Bob Jessop et al., Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations and Thatcherism, New Left
Review, 147 (1986), pp. 3260.
48
See Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory, 8
(1968), pp. 353; Quentin Skinner, Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,
Political Theory, 2 (1974), pp. 277303; and J. Tully, The Pen is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinners
Analysis of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, 13 (1983), pp. 489509.
49
Mouffe, Introduction; Christine Buci-Glucksman, Gramsci and the State, tr. D. Fernbach (London,
1980).
50
Our point here is not to advocate the case for linguistic contextualism (hard or soft) with respect to
engaging Gramsci, but to raise awareness of the issues associated with using the ideas of a particular
theorist outside of their original context.
14 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

more inconsistent thinker; yet also a conceptually powerful and creative one whose
work offers abundant insights and ideas that, understood rigorously albeit flexibly,
can be applied in very different contexts to his own.

Methodology

The case for using Gramsci rests upon the utility of his core concepts for
apprehending salient features of world order. This claim in turn depends upon the
proposition that these concepts can be internationalized or globalized. We will
explore this claim with respect to two concepts: civil society and hegemony.

Global civil society: The idea that a global civil society is coming into being has
become a commonplace of much recent IR literature.51 For the new Gramscians, the
value of internationalizing Gramsci lies precisely in the connections that can be
drawn between the mechanisms and the ideologies of consent that operate on a
global basis. A Gramscian approach, in this reading, illuminates not only the
constitutive role of neo-liberal ideology in the construction of global hegemony, it
also specifies the terrain over which this ideological contest is now being fought.
Identifying the terrain of global civil society is conceptually important for the new
Gramscians precisely because they consider it to be the key social formation through
which power is exercised today.
Gramsci understood civil society to consist of the formal and informal networks,
institutions and cultural practices which mediate between the individual and the
state: the ensemble of organisms commonly called private .52 In the modern
period, this terrain of mediation has become distinguished by its national character
and history. Such a national character, for example, is reflected in Gramscis
consideration of the origin of what he terms common sense, and especially its links
to religion.53 Thus he was critical of some of the more a priori forms of inter-
nationalist argument current amongst his fellow Marxists, because these were in
some sense to be imposed upon national cultural formations. Throughout the Prison
Notebooks he is clear that socialists have to embed their arguments within the soil of
national political and popular cultures; hence the power of his understanding of the
concept of the national-popular.54 For Gramsci, in other words, the link between
hegemony and consent runs directly through the terrain of civil society.55 Yet it is
not at all clear what meaning if any Gramsci would attribute to the domain of civil
society if it could be neither represented through the imagery of the nation nor
considered in relation to the state.

51
See Roger Coate, Chadwick Alger and Ronnie Lipschutz, The United Nations and Civil Society:
Creative Partnerships for Sustainable Development, Alternatives, 21 (1996), pp. 93122; Jessica
Matthews, Power Shift, Foreign Affairs, 76 (Jan./Feb. 1997), pp. 5066.
52
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 12.
53
Ibid., pp. 41925.
54
Ibid., p. 421.
55
Cox argues that the hegemonic concept of world order is founded not only upon the regulation of
inter-state conflict but also upon a globally-conceived civil society, i.e. a mode of production of
global extent which brings about links among social classes of the countries encompassed by it. Cox,
Gramsci, p. 171.
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 15

Many Gramsci scholars approach his concept of civil society by highlighting this
consideration. In a recent article, Anne Showstack Sassoon offers a critical
assessment of the complexity and historical specificity of statesociety relations in
Gramscis work.56 For her, Gramscis notion of civil society gains meaning only
within the specific context of the expansion of the twentieth-century state. Several
factors were key in this regard: the massively expanded role of the potentialities and
actuality of state power in the 1920s and 1930s (most importantly the massive
bureaucratic structures emerging in the USSR which Gramsci observed at first hand
shortly before his imprisonment); the impact of the First World War in terms of the
capacity of European states to organize their societies, especially the way in which
they secured their economic structure and political consent in an historically
unprecedented way in order to wage war;57 and the realization that positing a clear
distinction between civil and political society hindered comprehension of modern
state power and the complex network of ties that bound individuals to states. These
considerations led Gramsci to a conception of civil society as a sphere organically
tied to the state in a wide range of functions and processes, particularly in shoring it
up against ideological attack. As Sassoon puts it,
effective political power in the modern world . . . was not a one way process of political
management. Nor could it be understood without an adequate comprehension of the nature
of civil society in the concrete because civil society in its nationally and historically
differentiated institutional forms and contents conditioned state power and was inevitably
conditioned in turn.58
To speak of a specifically Gramscian reading of civil society divorced from its neces-
sary relationship to the state is therefore to obscure the way in which the relationship
of the two analytical categories comprises for Gramsci a single social entity. This is
clearly evident in his famous equation state = political society + civil society.59 Put
another way, while Gramsci could possibly conceive of a state shorn of civil society
(which would be by definition a totalitarian one, as for example in tsarist Russia),60
he could not entertain the reverse. Recognizing such an integral relationship helps to
account for the explanatory power of Gramscis notion of hegemony. It leads us to
look beyond the state- and economy-centred myopias of many analyses to bind
together state and society organically.
Such an organic reading of Gramscis conception of civil society, however, sits
uneasily with the Italian schools internationalized version. How, to follow Murphy,
are we to render civil society as the domain where the national I becomes the global
or international we? Most critically, how are we to think of global civil society in
the absence of what Gramsci would have clearly understood to be its necessary
counterpart, the international state, i.e., some kind of concrete transnational
structure of authority broadly comparable to what Gramsci understood a state

56
Anne Showstack Sassoon, Family, Civil Society, and the State: The Actuality of Gramscis Notion of
Societa Civile , Dialektik, 3 (1995), pp. 6782.
57
Ibid., p. 70.
58
Ibid., p. 72.
59
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 263.
60
This is the context of his oft-quoted remark that In Russia the State was everything, civil society was
primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society,
and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. Gramsci, Prison
Notebooks, p. 238.
16 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

structure to be? Among new Gramscians, the work of Robert Cox addresses this
issue most directly.61 He sees an emerging international structure of political
authority, the internationalizing of the state, to be the counterpart to the inter-
nationalizing of production, a development we may, following his usage highlighted
earlier, associate with a globally conceived civil society. This incipient international
state structure has at its heart the central governmental agencies of the most
important industrialized (and industrializing) economies, together with key
multilateral agencies (such as the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for
International Settlements, the Trilateral Commission and the G-7 secretariat).62 The
power of the international state in this reading derives primarily from the ideo-
logical consensus within which these institutions operate: it provides a coherent
institutional form that, despite many internal conflicts and disagreements, speaks
with one voice on the critical questions facing the contemporary world. We can
speak of the international state, in other words, not because there is some kind of
supranational entity in the making, but because national state structures are
increasingly adopting the same broad ideological discourse, deepening the extent of
their regulatory and policy coordination, and investing significant amounts of
resources and authority in multilateral institutions.63 It is a nebuleuse, to use another
of Coxs terms, whose lack of formal institutionalization should not deflect us from
the task of deciphering it.64
Yet, if we step back and ask which part of this new institutional form acts to
ensure conformity to the precepts of world order, the answer given by the new
Gramscians cannot but undermine the notion of an international state, however
defined. One way to answer this question is to acknowledge that national states
remain the only political authorities capable of taking public decisions and acting
with governmental authority in world politics today. Such an acknowledgement does
not ignore the fact that all states now take decisions within a context of increasingly
integrated global markets. Still less does it maintain that states are somehow
autonomous in their decision-making capacity, free from the influence of a myriad
of private, market-based decisions. Rather, it reflects the legal reality of sovereignty
as practised by existing forms of political authority. It remains the national state
which takes and executes decisions, whether between states or within multilateral
institutions such as the IMF, the BIS or the G-7. While it is certainly accurate and
indeed important to draw attention to the international (or multilateral, or trans-
national, or global) context within which political authority is exercised today, we
question whether this should be understood as the internationalizing of the state.
A second answer to the question of who ensures conformity to the precepts of
world order considers global civil society itself the domain in which such agency
occurs. Or more accurately, many new Gramscians look to elements of global civil
society as the chief agents of conformity to world hegemony: for Cox it is inter-

61
Power, Production and World Order, pp. 24553; and Global Perestroika, in Cox, Approaches to
World Order, pp. 3003.
62
The notion of the internationalizing of the state resonates beyond the Italian school. For example,
some constructivists have used it. See Alexander Wendt, Collective Identity Formation and the
International State, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), p. 392.
63
See Stephen Gill, Gramsci and Global Politics: Towards a Post-hegemonic Research Agenda, in
Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, pp. 58; Agnew and
Corbridge, Mastering Space, ch. 7; Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, ch. 1.
64
Cox, Global Perestroika, p. 301.
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 17

national finance; for Gill it is internationally mobile capital; for Agnew and
Corbridge it is the transnational networks representative of international production
and finance; and for van der Pijl it is internationally mobile class fractions.65 Framed
in this way, however, these forms of agency all arise in relation to either the
operation of the world market or the social relations of the nation-state. In other
words, the concept of global civil society here gains meaning precisely through its
relationship to the national state or the world market rather than the international
or internationalizing state. However suggestive and provocative this analysis may
be, its link with a specifically Gramscian reading of civil society must be questioned.
For in the end, the concept of a global civil society cannot claim a Gramscian
lineage except in relation to some kind of international state. Some new
Gramscians might object at this point that their use of the term international state
is consistent with Gramscis notion of the extended state: they view the
internationalizing of the state not as a clearly demarcated institutionalized structure
but rather as a fluid process of consensus formation. We believe such a response
would sidestep the issue: any specifically Gramscian reading of civil society requires
a corresponding structure of concrete political authority in order to become
genuinely hegemonic in the sense used by Gramsci. It thus requires an account of a
global political society along the lines questioned here. Put another way, we
challenge the new Gramscians to show just how far Gramscis justly famous
equation can be refashioned to read: international state = global political society +
global civil society.

Hegemony and counter-hegemony: Following our earlier argument regarding the

merits of a symptomatic reading of Gramsci, we have argued that his conception of
civil society needs to be rendered in terms of the nation-state to retain its historically
specific meaning. This historical specificity is particularly apposite to his under-
standing of the tasks facing those forces opposed to the consolidation of an
incipient historical bloc. Cox was among the first new Gramscians to suggest ways in
which the historical bloc of the leading state functions in a double sense as the
principal elite domestically and internationally. This has encouraged Cox and others
to consider whether or not a transnational class capable of fashioning a new
historical bloc has emerged. Yet, can Gramscis notion of hegemony, especially
where it rests on developments within the sphere of civil society, sustain its explana-
tory power outside of the national social context within which it was developed?
How, for example, should the strength of hegemony be measured? Within a national
social context, this question can be answered from a Gramscian perspective, albeit
not without complications. Broadly speaking, hegemony is achieved within the
sphere of civil society by consensual means, when a leading class sheds its immediate
economic-corporate consciousness and universalizes (within the constraints of the
national-popular character) its norms and values, thereby establishing a political and
ethical harmony between dominant and subordinate groups. A dominant class rules,
but effectively with and over, rather than against, subaltern classes. Here we can
measure the extent of hegemony by the existence or absence of social strife, and by
the degree of legitimation which the social order and body politic enjoy.
65
Cox, Production, Power and World Order, p. 267; Gill, American Hegemony, pp. 11221; Agnew and
Corbridge, Mastering Space, p. 205; Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class
(London, 1984).
18 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

At the level of world order, however, engaging in such measurement is more

conceptually problematic. The most concerted attempt by the new Gramscians to
outline the contours of world order focuses on the social, political and economic
power of an emergent transnational managerial class, arguing that this class has
effected its own agenda within the context of a new and increasingly globalized
world market. This line of argument, however, has been criticized generally for
totalizing hegemony and inadequately comprehending the nature of counter-
hegemonic resistance.66 For example, nearly all new Gramscians accept the
paramount dominance of what has been termed variously as the discourse of neo-
liberalism or hyper-liberalism. They see this discourse as the product of a
transnational managerial elite who are at the forefront of globalization trends
worldwide, and who have marshalled a convincing set of intellectual arguments to
underpin their material position within a globalizing economy. To follow Agnew and
Corbridges phrasing, the contours of this new hegemonic regime of transnational
liberalism rest on the conditions of glocalization and the attendant ideologies of
neo-liberalism and market-access economics.67 Most critically for our purposes,
however, they see this hegemony largely as a one-directional power relationship:
hegemony is fashioned by this elite transnational class on its own terms and then
forced or imposed on subaltern classes.68 These subaltern classes in turn either resist
such frontal assaults as best they can or capitulate. Hence the rather pessimistic tone
of many new Gramscian analyses.69
It is ironic that through their focus on the coherence and expansiveness of these
so-called transnational classes, the new Gramscians have downplayed one of the
central insights provided by Gramsci with regard to hegemony, namely, that
dominant and subaltern classes engage in a series of material and ideological
struggles which change the very nature of the terrain under contestation. Thus, for
example, during the negotiations at Bretton Woods in 1944, neither the Americans
nor the British emerged with their contending visions of the postwar monetary
system intact. Between the arguments and interests in favour of a more purely
liberal monetary order and those which envisioned a far more embedded (even
socialized) one, what Ruggie has evocatively termed embedded liberalism was
fashioned.70 Conversely, where national cultures are protected, and local and/or
national norms and values defended, it is difficult to ascribe to transnational classes
the totalizing character so often portrayed by the new Gramscians. Anyone living
outside the heartlands of the supposedly new transnational historical bloc cannot
but be struck by the resilience of local culture, and by the extent to which local

66
Drainville, International Political Economy; Ling, Hegemony and the Internationalizing State; and
Matt Davies, The Cultural Project of Neoliberalism in Chile: Hegemony or Cultural Imperialism?,
paper presented to the International Studies Association, Washington, DC, 1994.
67
Agnew and Corbridge define glocalization as the simultaneous fragmentation of places and identities.
Mastering Space, p. 185.
68
See, e.g. Stephen Gill, Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism,
Millennium, 24 (1995), pp. 399423; Cox, Global Perestroika, pp. 30811; Rupert, Producing
Hegemony, pp. 174207. A welcome corrective has come recently in the form of an edited volume in
honour of Robert and Jesse Cox: Stephen Gill and James Mittelman (eds.), Innovation and
Transformation in International Studies (Cambridge, 1997).
69
Christine Chin and James Mittelman, Conceptualising Resistance to Globalisation, New Political
Economy, 2 (1997), pp. 2537.
70
John Ruggie, International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar
Economic Order, International Organization, 36 (1982), pp. 379415.
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 19

culture changes the emphasis of neo-liberalism wherever and whenever it comes into
contact with it.71 The flow and power of ideas, Gramsci should have taught us, is
nowhere clear and unambiguous; and outside of where these ideas are firmly
grounded within national social formations, their global power must be seen as
contingent, open to contestation, and malleable.

Silences: Part of the difficulty of internationalizing the key Gramscian concepts we

have explored lies in the important analytical silences which they contain. We shall
highlight two. First, as one sympathetic Gramsci scholar has argued, his seemingly
expansive definition of civil society in fact excludes some of the central locations
and relations of social power within modern societies, including the arena of gender
relations, the institution of the family, and the realm of voluntary, non-commercial
activities that increasingly characterizes how people experience and participate in
social life.72 Practices in these different spheres have become far more significant and
overtly contested since Gramscis death; thus, any conception of civil society which
fails to address how gender relations and the family infuse the power structure of
modern society (and its corollary, the state) turns an analytical blind eye to some of
the key pillars of social order. In this sense, the new Gramscians cannot simply
apply their chosen theoretical framework for understanding politics and identity in
the contemporary context, without at the same time going beyond it if they are to
overcome its limitations.
Second, Gramscis understanding of the nature and possibility of counter-
hegemonic struggles may not be wholly adequate for societies with very different
cultural formations and media technologies to those of his time. Certainly his sensi-
tivity to the complex contestation of the prevailing hegemony at all social scales is
marked. But his limitations are also evident from even a cursory assessment of
important debates surrounding the field of subaltern studies in recent years. On the
one hand, critics of this tradition, who draw much of their inspiration from
Gramsci, point to the shallow and under-theorized conception of resistance which
re-emerges in some writing within this paradigm.73 On the other hand, as Richard
Bellamy suggests, for all his emphasis on the nature of consent, Gramsci under-
estimates the many ways in which liberal democracies have been able to secure their
own legitimacy, especially via constitutional means.74 For Bellamy, Gramscis
account of the relationship between state and civil society ultimately must be
rejected because it lacks an awareness of the role of law and the place of individual
rights in terms of securing consent to a constitutional framework. In both cases,
accounts of hegemony which rely solely on Gramscis analytical framework com-
promise their ability to comprehend the nature of social order in contemporary
societies. In effect, we must go beyond Gramsci if we are to gain an adequate
understanding of how social life is organized in the final years of the twentieth
century.75

71
Davies, Cultural Project of Neoliberalism, pp. 1619.
72
Sassoon, Family, Civil Society, and the State.
73
Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London, 1988), pp. 197221.
74
Bellamy, Italian Tradition, pp. 3367.
75
See Robert Cox, Civilisations and World Politics, New Political Economy, 1 (1996), pp. 14156.
20 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny

Put most strongly, it is our view that there is no a priori reason why we should
restrict our consideration of social formations to the broad categories of state and
civil society. Nor do these categories have to be understood solely in relation to
Marxist debates. The Italian school, and especially its second generationthose
whose claim to a Gramscian mantle extends no further than an initial reading of
Cox, Gill et al.would do well to consider Gramscian-derived readings alongside
those which might be developed from a broad range of other theoretical sources,
evaluating more strategically where Gramscis ideas remain appropriate and useful,
and where they do not. In this sense we wish to steer a middle course between those
who see in Gramscis ideas the Rosetta stone of world order studies, and those who
would dismiss outright the relevance of his ideas for understanding todays world.

Historicizing the new Gramscians

While we can sympathize with Coxs claim that a textual exegesis of Gramsci would
probably be inconclusive, we find it disconcerting that no attempt has yet been made
to take stock more fully of the bountiful literature on Gramscis work and engage
with it. Such a critical engagement is long overdue, and we believe that it should
comprise at least three initial steps.
The first preliminary step must be to acknowledge the interpretive difficulties
surrounding not only the appropriation but also the application of Gramscis work.
The bulk of his most interesting writings have come to us in a fragmentary form,
have been self-censored, and remain unedited for final consumption. They thus
demand careful reinterpretation simply to arrive at Gramscis own point of
departure. It is not enough merely to indicate why a Gramscian turn is attractive; we
must also pay serious attention to justifying how and why Gramscis work should be
developed in certain directions and not others.
The second step must be to question just how far Gramscis concepts can be
adapted for use in the international domain. The Gramscian concepts most heavily
utilized in IR are the trinity of hegemony, civil society and historical bloc. Yet, it is
not at all clear that these concepts, and the unity of analysis they represent, are the
most intellectually effective ways of examining the structures, dynamics and
phenomena subsumed under the notion of world order. The key here, we believe, is
the issue of whether Gramsci could conceive of a global civil society. The historical
nature of his concepts means that they receive their meaning and explanatory power
primarily from their grounding in national social formations, and they were used
exclusively by Gramsci in that capacity. This is not to say that they cannot be
adapted for other uses; but rather (again) to point out that if we do so, it is
incumbent upon us to justify how and why we do so. And in view of the initial
interpretive challenges facing anyone using Gramscis work, it should by now be
clear that such a task cannot be taken lightly.
Finally, we need to establish a more critical engagement with Gramscis method.
In particular, the new Gramscians need to consider carefully whether his method
both allows them to sustain the epistemological and empirical claims which they
seek to uphold and provides a framework suitable for exploring the most salient
aspects of the problem of world order today. Does Gramscis method hold to a form
 IR theory and the new Gramscians 21

of historicism that overcomes, as Gill claims, the subjectobject duality which so

bedevils modern social science? We are not convinced of this claim, although it is
clear that there is much that is attractive in Gramscis method. Similarly, does
Gramsci provide the analytical tools to explore the strength of global hegemony, if
in fact his conceptual framework was designed to assess the strength and weakness
of hegemony with reference to national social formations? Here difficult questions
arise about the Marxian framework within which Gramsci operated. Does this
continue to remain valid today in analytical terms? Indeed, are there parts of
Gramscis theoretical project which might be strengthened by non-Marxist accounts
of social order and interstate relations, and what might this mean for his method?
Clearly Gramscis mantle has enabled and, in certain respects, legitimated the
emergence of a respected and widely held counter-discourse within IR that operates
antithetically to the perceived mainstream. Nevertheless, this counter-discourse must
not itself remain immune from critical engagement. Maintaining such an immunity
would be to abandon one of the cardinal benefits of historicizing the ideas we use to
comprehend the present social order. With this in mind, we suggest that now is the
time to reassess the validity and nature of this counter-discourse, in terms of both its
portrayal of contemporary social order and the theoretical lineage it claims for itself.