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《国际政治经济学》文献资料（Marxism and Constructivism in Political Economy）Gramsci, Hegemony, and International Relations. An Essay in Method

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Millennium:Journal of International Studies Vol.12,No.2 Gramsci,Hegemony and International Relations:An Essay in Method* Robert W.Cox Some time ago I began reading Gramsci's Prison Notebooks.In these fragments, written in a fascist prison between 1929 and 1935,the former leader of the Italian Communist Party was concerned with the problem of understanding capitalist societies in the 1920s and 1930s,and particularly with the meaning of fascism and the possibilities of building an alternative form of state and society based on the working class.What he had to say centred upon the state,upon the relationship of civil society to the state,and upon the relationship of politics,ethics and ideology to production.Not surprisingly,Gramsci did not have very much to say directly about international relations.Nevertheless,I found that Gramsci's think- ing was helpful in understanding the meaning of international organisation with which I was then principally concerned.Particularly valuable was his concept of hegemony,but valuable also were several related concepts which he had worked out for himself or developed from others.This essay sets forth my understanding of what Gramsci meant by hegemony and these related concepts,and suggests how I think they may be adapted,retaining his essential meaning,to the under- standing of problems of world order.It does not purport to be a critical study of Gramsci's political theory but merely a derivation from it of some ideas useful for a revision of current international relations theory.1 Gramsci and Hegemony Gramsci's concepts were all derived from history-both from his own reftections upon those periods of history which he thought helped to throw an explanatory light upon the present,and from his personal experience of political and social struggle.These included the workers'councils movement of the early 1920s,his participation in the Third International and his opposition to fascism.Gramsci's ideas have always to be related to his own historical context.More than that,he was constantly adjusting his concepts to specific historical circumstances.The concepts cannot usefully be considered in abstraction from their applications,for when they are so abstracted different usages of the same concept appear to contain contradictions or ambiguities.2 A concept,in Gramsci's thought,is loose and elastic and attains precision only when brought into contact with a particu- 162 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on Ocober 10,2010

lar situation which it helps to explain-a contact which also develops the mean- ing of the concept.This is the strength of Gramsci's historicism and therein lies its explanatory power.The term 'historicism'is however,frequently misunder- stood and criticised by those who seek a more abstract,systematic,universalistic and non-historical form of knowledge.3 Gramsci geared his thought consistently to the practical purpose of political action.In his prison writings,he always referred to marxism as 'the philosophy of praxis'.4 Partly at least,one may surmise,it must have been to underline the practical revolutionary purpose of philosophy.Partly too,it would have been to indicate his intention to contribute to a lively developing current of thought, given impetus by Marx but not forever circumscribed by Marx's work.Nothing could be further from his mind than a marxism which consists in an exegesis of the sacred texts for the purpose of refining a timeless set of categories and concepts. Origins of the Concept of Hegemony There are two main strands leading to the Gramscian idea of hegemony.The first ran from the debates within the Third International concerning the strategy of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of a Soviet socialist state;the second from the writings of Machiavelli.In tracing the first strand,some commentators have sought to contrast Gramsci's thought with Lenin's by aligning Gramsci with the idea of a hegemony of the proletariat and Lenin with a dictatorship of the proletariat.Other commentators have underlined their basic agreement.5 What is important is that Lenin referred to the Russian proletariat as both a dominant and a directing class;dominance implying dictatorship and direction implying leadership with the consent of allied classes(notably the peasantry).Gramsci,in effect,took over an idea that was current in the circles of the Third International: the workers exercised hegemony over the allied classes and dictatorship over enemy classes.Yet this idea was applied by the Third International only to the working class and expressed the role of the working class in leading an alliance of workers,peasants and perhaps some other groups potentially supportive of revol- utionary change. Gramsci's originality lies in his giving a twist to this first strand:he began to apply it to the bourgeoisie,to the apparatus or mechanisms of hegemony of the dominant class.?This made it possible for him to distinguish cases in which the bourgeoisie had attained a hegemonic position of leadership over other classes from those in which it had not.In northern Europe,in the countries where capitalism had first become established,bourgeois hegemony was most complete. It necessarily involved concessions to subordinate classes in return for acqui- escence in bourgeois leadership,concessions which could lead ultimately to forms of social democracy which preserve capitalism while making it more acceptable to workers and the petty bourgeois.Because their hegemony was firmlyentrenched in civil society,the bourgeoisie often did not need to run the state themselves. Landed aristocrats in England,Junkers in Prussia,or a renegade pretender to the mantle of Napoleon I in France,could do it for them so long as these rulers recognised the hegemonic structures of civil society as the basic limits of their political action. 163 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on October 10.2010

This perception of hegemony led Gramsci to enlarge his definition of the state. When the administrative,executive and coercive apparatus of government was in effect constrained by the hegemony of the leading class of a whole social forma- tion,it became meaningless to limit the definition of the state to those elements of government.To be meaningful,the notion of the state would also have to include the underpinnings of the political structure in civil society.Gramsci thought of these in concrete historical terms-the church,the educational system,the press, all the institutions which helped to create in people certain modes of behaviour and expectations consistent with the hegemonic social order.For example, Gramsci argued that the Masonic lodges in Italy were a bond amongst the government officials who entered into the state machinery after the unification of Italy,and therefore must be considered as part of the state for the purpose of assessing its broader political structure.The hegemony of a dominant class thus bridged the conventional categories of state and civil society,categories which retained a certain analytical usefulness but ceased to correspond to separable entities in reality. As noted above,the second strand leading to the Gramscian idea of hegemony came all the way from Machiavelli and helps to broaden even further the poten- tial scope of application of the concept.Gramsci had pondered what Machiavelli had written,especially in The Prince,concerning the problem of founding a new state.Machiavelli,in the fifteenth century,was concerned with finding the leader- ship and the supporting social basis for a united Italy;Gramsci,in the twentieth century,with the leadership and supportive basis for an alternative to fascism. Where Machiavelli looked to the individual Prince,Gramsci looked to the Modern Prince:the revolutionary party engaged in a continuing and developing dialogue with its own base of support.Gramsci took over from Machiavelli the image of power as a centaur:half man,half beast,a necessary combination of consent and coercion.To the extent that the consensual aspect of power is in the forefront,hegemony prevails.Coercion is always latent but is only applied in marginal,deviant cases.Hegemony is enough to ensure conformity of behaviour in most people most of the time.The Machiavellian connection frees the concept of power (and of hegemony as one form of power)from a tie to historically specific social classes and gives it a wider applicability to relations of dominance and subordination,including,as shall be suggested below,relations of world order.It does not,however,sever power relations from their social basis (i.e.,in the case of world order relations by making them into relations among states narrowly conceived)but directs attention towards deepening an awareness of this social basis War of Movement and War of Position In thinking through the first strand of his concept of hegemony,Gramsci reflec. ted upon the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and sought to determine what lessons might be drawn from it for the task of revolution in Western Europe.9 He came to the conclusion that the circumstances in Western Europe differed greatly from those in Russia.To illustrate the differences in circum- stances,and the consequent differences in strategies required,he had recourse to the military analogy of wars of movement and wars of position.The basic differ. 164 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on Odlober 10,2010

ence between Russia and Western Europe was in the relative strengths of state and civil society.In Russia,the administrative and coercive apparatus of the state was formidable but proved to be vulnerable,while civil society was undeveloped. A relatively small working class led by a disciplined avant-garde was able to overwhelm the state in a war of movement and met no effective resistance from the rest of civil society.The vanguard party could set about founding a new state through a combination of applying coercion against recalcitrant elements and building consent among others.(This analysis was particularly apposite to the period of the New Economic Policy before coercion began to be applied on a larger scale against the rural population.) In Western Europe,by contrast,civil society,under bourgeois hegemony,was much more fully developed and took manifold forms.A war of movement might conceivably,in conditions of exceptional upheaval,enable a revolutionary vanguard to seize control of the state apparatus;but because of the resiliency of civil society such an exploit would in the long run be doomed to failure. Gramsci described the state in Western Europe(by which we should read state in the limited sense of administrative,governmental and coercive apparatus and not the enlarged concept of the state mentioned above)as 'an outer ditch,behind which there stands a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks'. In Russia,the State was everything,civil society was primordial and gelati- nous;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.10 Accordingly,Gramsci argued that the war of movement could not be effective against the hegemonic state-societies of Western Europe.The alternative strategy is the war of position which slowly builds up the strength of the social founda- tions of a new state.In Western Europe,the struggle had to be won in civil society before an assault on the state could achieve success.Premature attack on the state by a war of movement would only reveal the weakness of the opposition and lead to a reimposition of bourgeois dominance as the institutions of civil society reasserted control. The strategic implications of this analysis are clear but fraught with difficulties. To build up the basis of an alternative state and society upon the leadership of the working class means creating alternative institutions and alternative intellec- tual resources within existing society and building bridges between workers and other subordinate classes.It means actively building a counter-hegemony within an established hegemony while resisting the pressures and temptations to relapse into pursuit of incremental gains for subaltern groups within the framework of bourgeois hegemony.This is the line between war of position as a long-range revolutionary strategy and social democracy as a policy of making gains within the established order. Passive Revolution Not all Western European societies were bourgeois hegemonies.Gramsci dis- tinguished between two kinds of societies.One kind had undergone a thorough 165 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on Oclober 10.2010

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