GRAMSCI'S SOCIOLOGY OF POWER

What can you say about Gramsci's sociology of power?



What can you say about Gramscian sociology of power?

Introduction

Antonio Gramsci was one of the pioneers of Western or humanistic Marxism a tradition that opposed orthodox Marxism for its determinism and its objective materialist conception of history. Disenchantment among Marxists with the prevailing orthodoxy was fueled by unfolding historical events (Marx, 1978, p55). By the mid-1930s, economic depressions had come and gone without producing the systemic collapse of capitalism that Marx had predicted (Bellamy, 2003, Pp.98). World War I, from 1914 to 1918, and the subsequent disintegration of proletarian internationalism nourished the suspicion that the European masses had ceased to be a revolutionary force if indeed they ever were.

The rapid rise of fascism and Nazism in the years following the war reinforced the gathering sense that Marx's predictions were mistaken. In place of deterministic modes of analysis, a new breed of Marxist, influenced by Hegelian categories of thought, began to highlight the importance of human agency, of creative human action, in historical development. Every contribution Gramsci made to Marxist theory was underpinned by his belief in the power of the reflective human subject. This belief itself may have been spawned by his own triumph over personal adversity (Bellamy, 2003, Pp.98).

Discussion and Analysis

In Gramsci's view, political modernity coincides with the strengthening of civil society as a cohesive relation-al context, and, at the same time, with the construction of states in the strict sense. Whereas the medieval state formations (economic-corporative phase) had been essentially a mechanical bloc of different social groups, the modern state has replaces the mechanical bloc of social groups with their subordination to the hegemony of the dominant group. The expanding ability and the historically progressive function of the new dominant group (bourgeoisie) revolve around the construction of a full political and territorial unity of the state, and around the development of dynamic and cohesive societies (Kellner, 2008, pp. 30).

The bourgeoisie is for Gramsci the first ruling class in history to function as a body in continuous movement, basically able to absorb the whole society by elevating it to its own cultural and economic level. Politics changes its status in relation to pre-modern societies, as long as its main task is not to impose on society a certain order and obedience to the established authority, but to actively involve society in development processes and, to this aim, to transform its organization and composition. Hence the effort to work out an organic passage of people from other classes to the bourgeois class is, for Gramsci, the salient feature of early modernity. The ethical function of democratic rights and the pedagogical function of the institutions are dependent on this fundamental character of the bourgeoisie (Gramsci, 2001, Pp56).

The State represents in this light all the functional apparatuses needed to harmonize civil society and political government, that is, to homogenize the first as a function of the latter. The dual dynamic subsumptive and inclusive - that characterizes the ...