Constellations - 2022 - Maccaferri - Reclaiming Gramsci S Historicity A Critical Analysis of The British Appropriation

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DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12614
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Reclaiming Gramsci’s “historicity”: A critical

analysis of the British appropriation in light of the
“crisis of democracy”
Marzia Maccaferri
School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Correspondence
Maccaferri Marzia School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Email: m.maccaferri@qmul.ac.uk
Any approach to the legacy of Antonio Gramsci represents a substantial challenge. Today, the thinking of this Italian
intellectual is not only acknowledged as one of the most significant contributions to 20th century social theory, but has
also been one of the most frequently employed frameworks for different disciplines and approaches. His categories,
and especially his further development of the concept of hegemony, have provided the basis for new approaches in
fields that include international relations, political theory, critical geography, literary criticism, media studies, and fem-
inism, and for entirely new fields such as cultural and postcolonial studies.1 The international success of Gramsci’s
work, now considered essential reading in political theory, derived from the political and cultural atmosphere of Cold
War Europe as well as from its very favorable reception within the emancipation movements in the United States.
While this first phase of the international spread of Gramsci’s thinking was characterized by the explicitly political use
of his writing within the context of Marxist internationalism (Liguori, 2012), a second phase, coinciding with the new
century and reaching almost all corners of the globe, has been characterized by a shift in the application of Gramscian
theoretical instruments which has sometimes resulted in the detachment, often unintentional, of his concepts from
the Marxist spheres in which they were forged (Filippini, 2017; Frosini, 2008).
The “globalization” of Gramsci, or, to paraphrase Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), the provincialization of Gramsci
(meaning the fragmentation and weakening of Gramsci’s concepts as a way of giving them new life in different con-
texts; see also Harootunian, 2020) is not incompatible with a philological reading of his work, as Joseph Buttigieg
(1990) and Italian scholarship have abundantly demonstrated (Baratta, 2000; Cospito, 2016; Di Meo, 2020; Frosini
& Liguori, 2004; Francioni & Giasi, 2020). However, the propensity to distance the central and most prolifically applied
concept, “hegemony,” from the “rhythm of his thought” (Cospito, 2016) has clearly been fraught with potential dan-
ger (Baker, 2016). The wide dissemination and application of Gramscian concepts and thinking has also been given
impetus by the recent “global rise of populism,” seen as further confirmation of Gramsci’s theoretical modernity
(Mouffe, 2018). While these developments have emphasized the emancipatory and critical spirit of Gramsci’s reflec-
tions, they have also given rise to new interpretations in varying contexts, and have prevented a full appreciation and
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2 MACCAFERRI
further operationalization of Gramsci’s theoretical apparatus in fields such as historiography and intellectual history
(Denning, 2020; Harker, 2021; Lacy, 2014; Kaye, 1992).
In this article, I tease out the different aspects of the appropriation of Gramsci’s thinking by Anglo-Marxism,
from the 1960s onward, in the context of the British debate, in the field of political theory, regarding the “crisis of
democracy.” Building on a methodological platform located at the intersection of transnational intellectual history and
hegemony theory, I offer a more theoretically nuanced articulation of “Gramscianism,” restoring the importance that
Gramsci gave to a historical perspective, by critically evaluating three of the British appropriations: the application
by Perry Anderson, the uses made by Stuart Hall, and the displacement into the area of populism by Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe. Although overlooked more recently in favor of other frameworks of investigation (Pensky, 2019),
research into the Anglo-Marxist school of thought, and especially into the “New Left,” was a discrete area of interest
in the 1990s (see Dworkin, 1997; Roberts, 1997); nevertheless, the isolation of a distinct “British case” might appear
to be an artificial heuristic operation in light of the porous borders of the well-documented international reception
of Gramsci’s thought (see Boothman et al., 2015; Descendre et al., 2020; Manduchi et al., 2017; Schirru, 2009). How-
ever, the first publication outside Italy of any of Gramsci’s writing was the English translation of some shorter extracts,
in, 1957, followed in, 1971 by Selections From the Prison Notebooks (hereafter SPN) (Gramsci, 1971), which triggered
the emergence of Gramsci as a global phenomenon.2 The history of his reception, application, adaptation, and further
circulation in the English-speaking context was therefore of central importance (Buttigieg, 2018).
While most scholarship on Gramsci does accept his historical approach as central (especially Burgio, 2014), this
article’s critical investigation into the appropriation and transmutation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in the anglo-
phone context reveals that Gramsci’s “historicity”—the historical perspective and awareness that was an inherent ele-
ment of his thinking—has been increasingly set aside, and in consequence the theoretical novelty of his reflections has
not been fully captured. Gramsci’s interest in the “production of the past within the present” (Q 10 II § 41: 1310; Q 11
§ 12: 1376, SPN: 323) provides him with a basis for developing the theoretical matrix of “conceptions of the world” (Q 4
§ 1: 419; Q 101 § 5: 1217; Q 1.1 § 10: 1231) as a particular understanding of politics as temporal “displacements,” and
as a “reconfiguration” of different layers of history (Q 11 § 12: 1375−79, SPN: 323−325; Q 13 § 17: 1585, SPN: 182).3
Drawing on recent trends in the studies into Gramsci’s plural temporalities (Morfino, 2020; Thomas, 2017), my argu-
ment is based on the idea that Gramsci’s thought is constantly situated: always driven by the necessity “of seeing things
historically” (Q 10 II § 28: 1266, SPN: 369) and motivated by thinking in historical and contextual, but never absolute,
terms. Gramsci’s reflections on politics as a plurality of temporalities informs most of his themes, including the forma-
tion of the modern state and the role of intellectuals (Q 7 § 16: 865−867, SPN: 236−238; Q 12 § 1: 1513−1540, SPN:
5−14), the hierarchy between philosophy and ideology (Q 7 § 35: 883−886, SPN: 351−357; Q 11 § 12: 1379, SPN:
325; Q 11 § 62; 1487, SPN: 404), and in particular his innovative reflections on language and dialects (see Ives, 2004).
Moreover, Gramsci’s consideration of the “Southern Question” (see Urbinati, 1998) and, in particular, his engagement
with Bukharin’s teleological conception of linear historical time (Q 11 § 26: 1431−1434; extract in SPN: 425−427; see
Frosini, 2003) are intrinsically connected to his conception of the coexistence of multiple temporalities.
The history of the alleged “abuse and misuses” of Gramsci’s thinking is as long as the history of his reception, and
has unfolded in step with Gramsci’s continuing success (see Davidson, 2008; Diggins, 1988). To avoid the exaggerations
that either limit its application to his specific historical time or, in diametrical opposition, generate new formulations
that risk breaking the connection between events and their historical context, which for Gramsci was an essential
relationship, I approach ideas, and the texts and intellectual networks that are their channels, as mobile by nature
(Baring, 2016). Framing my argument in such a way assumes a methodological approach to the connection between
theory and history that remains better captured by the term “praxis” and by what Gramsci understood as the relation-
ship between ideology and philosophy: an integral and nonreductive conception of the world (Cospito, 2019; Thomas,
2009). My intention here is not to establish a full set of new norms for the interpretation of Gramsci, but, more in keep-
ing with the stage of my research, to emphasize the importance of understanding the concept of hegemony as both a
political practice and at the same time a historical process: to use Gramscian terms, a dynamic relationship between
different layers of “displaced pasts” that have been “reconfiguring” in the ongoing process of “translating” history and
MACCAFERRI 3
theory (see Boothman, 2008; Thomas, 2019). This approach has implications for further research, which I will intro-
duce in the final section. I propose that the issue of hegemony should be seen as a complex intertwining of temporali-
ties that cuts across individuals, social groups, and institutions, and is—according to Gramsci—multiple, stratified, and
also affected by spatiality. This plural temporality is a process in which the ongoing results are not by accumulation
but, on the contrary, by cross-negotiation with hegemonic apparatuses and intellectuals playing a pivotal role, and in
which a “situated praxis” (Tosel, 2016) displays the dialectical drive toward “unity of the society,” a critical and prac-
tical human activity (described by Gramsci as “the historical bloc”; see Sotiris, 2018). According to Anne Showstack
Sassoon (2000), one of Gramsci’s major contributions is the recognition of the importance of historical reflection as a
precondition for expanding democracy and as the foundation for construction of a theoretical and political agenda,
rather than using history merely to denounce the past. While acknowledging the weight of history, Gramsci derived
“a theoretical and political agenda from the problems and possibilities of the present and future rather than from a
programme of the past” (p. 4). Within this conceptual boundary, hegemony can therefore be regarded as a form of
articulation and intertwining of different times and temporal experiences simultaneously present at a particular his-
torical conjuncture, which provides the basis for progressive and transformative political action. In line with Gram-
sci’s innovative notion of “translatability”—close to the concept of “transposability,” which involves finding matches
or differences between “idioms”—I would suggest that the history-theory nexus can be understood as the ability to
transpose—finding correspondences or differentiations—between temporally and spatially different political and cul-
tural ways of thinking and acting in a country at a given moment.4 From this angle, Gramsci’s historicity resumes its
crucial importance as the method for reformulating Marxism as a “philosophy of praxis” and “living philology” (Thomas,
2020).
It is evident that the temporal dimension of hegemony, although generally marginalized by the authors examined
in this article, is conceptually related to Gramsci’s theory of subalternity (see Chakrabarty, 1998; Ekers et al., 2012;
Spivak, 2007). In this regard, Gramsci’s changing paradigm of inquiry, from focusing on strategies of inclusion to ques-
tioning the social and cultural conditions of subordination and exclusion, represents a crucial shift not only for political
theory but also for historical analysis. The outbreak of “history from below” in the 1960s and the distinctive British
Marxist historiography, for which the study of class formation was linked with the cycles of hegemony, can be paral-
lel to the process investigated in this article. The British Marxist understanding of historical development led to the
establishment of a distinctive approach to democratic and socialist strategies in which the recovery of the past was
also a project that would assist a theoretical and political understanding of the present (see Kaye, 1992).
My account of Gramsci’s undertaking remains epistemologically limited to a historical reconstruction of British
Marxist political and intellectual discourse. Reclaiming Gramsci’s historicity and “his” hegemony as historical cate-
gories proves valuable for my approach to a transnational discourse that was reconsidering the dyad of materialism
and democracy, and had been welcoming the “linguistic turn.” In this regard, exploring the sphere of the main Anglo-
phone appropriations of Gramsci’s thinking may offer us an interdisciplinary resource that can help us to understand
the current crisis of democracy and give us the opportunity for political action and renewal.
1 “APPROPRIATING” GRAMSCI’S HEGEMONY: PERRY ANDERSON
Gramsci’s thinking arrived in Britain across a broad spatial, historical, and cultural gap. The Notebooks had for a long
time been principally an Italian concern, closely connected to the history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and
the way in which its post-WWII leader Palmiro Togliatti had tried to foster a link between Marxism and the national
intellectual tradition. The first printing (Gramsci, 1948–1951), edited by Togliatti himself in collaboration with Felice
Platone, created a sort of double register for the study of Gramsci in which historical reconstruction and critical eval-
uation ran in parallel with applications of his thought to contemporary politics. This is the background for the partic-
ular impact of the Italian thinker in Britain. It is generally thought that his ideas contributed to freeing British Marx-
ism from “economism” and helped the Left to interpret Thatcherism and the process of globalization. This translation
into the British context involved the overdevelopment of one aspect of Gramsci’s work at the expense of others; the
4 MACCAFERRI
explanation for this imbalance lies in the political needs that his texts have served to fulfil (Forgacs, 2002; see also Eley,
1984; Williams, 1960, in which the author keeps “egemonia” in Italian; Williams, 1975).
The turning point in British awareness of Gramsci came in 1971, with publication of the first extensive selec-
tion of his writings in English. Although SPN reflected the Italian version, edited by Platone and Togliatti and pub-
lished by Einaudi (Gramsci, 1948–1951), the two translators Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith had access to
Gramsci’s original manuscripts and the first draft of Valentino Gerratana’s critical Italian edition, which was to be pub-
lished in 1975. The “Introduction,” largely written by Hoare, presented a strong “leftist” Gramsci, in harmony with the
radical interpretation favored by the British readership and in explicit opposition to the “inter-class” version endorsed
by the PCI. In order to provide a better translation of Gramsci’s language, Hoare and Nowell Smith adopted neolo-
gisms and created a completely new English vocabulary; this both refreshed British political discourse and influenced
the global reception and reworking of Gramsci’s thinking (Boothman, 2013; Boothman et al., 2015). The earlier arrival
in the Anglophone world of translations of some of Gramsci’s (1957a, 1957b) writing had exerted some influence,
especially in relation to the formation of the British Marxist school of historiography. Eric Hobsbawm’s (1959) book
on archaic forms of social movement in Italy and Spain, for example, used Gramsci’s conceptualization of the “South-
ern Question” and an embryonic formulation of hegemony. However, Perry Anderson’s engagement in the pages of
the New Left Review with Gramsci’s concepts, especially that of “hegemony,” opened the way for their wider exposure
in British intellectual circles. Before he published “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” (1976a)—an essay that is still
much quoted in the Anglo-American theoretical debate notwithstanding its inconsistencies and distortions have been
abundantly demonstrated (Buttigieg, 1994; Dal Maso, 2021; Francioni, 1984; Thomas, 2009)—Anderson employed
Gramsci’s theoretical framework in his article “Origins of the present crisis” (Anderson, 1964), in which he offered a
structural analysis of British historical development through the prism of Gramsci’s “passive revolution.” Much influ-
enced by Tom Nairn (1964a, 1964b, 1964c, 1964d), who had come into contact with Gramsci’s oeuvre during his time
in Italy at Pisa’s Scuola Normale Superiore, Anderson was particularly inspired by Gramsci’s endeavor to view Ital-
ian history as diverging from what had been seen as the normal pattern of bourgeois historical development. Ander-
son argued that the particular character of England’s modern history was as exceptional as Italy’s failed national and
bourgeois revolutions (examples of what Anderson called “historical pathology”). In the Italian case, the Risorgimento,
understood as a failed revolution, had relegated the progress of Italian society to a premodern stage; in the English
case, by contrast, construction of a “historical bloc” from the landowning class, representing aristocratic capitalism,
and a “supine bourgeoisie,” the social class of mercantile capitalism, created a traditional hegemonic culture and ulti-
mately prevented the formation of a radical proletariat. “Passive revolution,” like other terms used by Gramsci, has
different meanings in the Notebooks and underwent a process of transformation from a concept developed to indi-
cate the absence of revolutionary politics—the Jacobin moment—in the process of nation-building in Italy, to, in the
third and final phase of Gramsci’s reflections, a theoretical and historical term emphasizing the logic of the process of
modernization and the social displacement of capitalism (see Thomas, 2015; Voza, 2004). Explicitly drawing on Gram-
sci’s analysis of Italian history, and also inspired by his observations on the French, German, and British bourgeois
revolutions (Q 1, § 41: 53; SPN: 77), Anderson’s application of this thinking failed to understand that the main purpose
of Gramsci’s historical reflections had been to explain the rise of Italian Fascism in the context of the inherent and
insuperable tension between democracy and the state.5
The development of the Gramscian Nairn–Anderson thesis might be better understood in the light of its first
appearance, in the Italian journal Il Contemporaneo (Nairn, 1963), and when placed in the context of the debate within
Italian Marxism, which from the 1960s onward expressed increasing hostility toward the approved version of Ital-
ian Gramscianism (Liguori, 2012). However, Gramsci’s thinking, filtered by the lens of Nairn and Anderson, won over
a new British audience: portraying a highbrow Gramscianism, which became very popular in academic circles, their
thesis represented a powerful alternative to the cultural Marxism of E. P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and Stuart Hall
(Davis, 2006, 2013). Furthermore, as a concrete political project, Anderson’s Gramscianism provided an appealing first
theoretical attempt at a critique of Laborism and the stagnant corporatism of the British Labor Party in the 1960s and
1970s (see Campsie, 2021; Wickham-Jones, 2003). It is therefore clear that this particular assimilation of Gramsci’s
MACCAFERRI 5
ideas enjoyed extensive popularity, and it continues to attract interest and support, especially within post-New Labor
discourse (see the reissue of Nairn’s essay of 1977 in Nairn, 2019).
Anderson’s particular interpretive perspective found fuller articulation in his essay “The Antinomies of Antonio
Gramsci” (1976a) and book Considerations on Western Marxism (1976b); both texts had a major influence on almost
everyone who subsequently engaged with Gramsci’s thinking. The purpose of Anderson’s analysis was to focus on
“the precise forms and functions of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in his Prison Notebooks, and to assess their inter-
nal coherence as a unified discourse; to consider their validity as an account of the typical structures of class power
in the bourgeois democracies of the West; and finally, to weigh their strategic consequences for the struggle of the
working class to achieve emancipation and socialism” (1976a, p. 7). Anderson focused his attention on Gramsci’s the-
ory regarding the different political structures of the East and West and the correspondingly different revolutionary
strategies appropriate to each, which determined the contrasting practices of the “war of maneuver,” for the former
case, and the “war of position,” for the latter. His main theoretical objectives were, first, to emphasize the idea that
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony both had continuity with and was a distortion of Lenin’s notion, and, second, to argue
that Gramsci had inaccurately separated the theory of hegemony from its original basis in class structure and, above
all, by the importance he awarded to the autonomous dimension of culture. Anderson argued that “against [Gramsci’s]
own intention, formal conclusions can be drawn from his work that lead away from revolutionary socialism” (p. 58).
Drawing on Gianni Francioni’s (1984) extensive examination, Peter Thomas (2009) has presented a very thorough
critique of the theoretical and philological limits of Anderson’s analysis, whose conceptual slippage in regard to Gram-
sci’s thinking about hegemony was due to his lack of attention to the chronology of passages in the Notebooks. A
criticism that had been already raised by Buttigieg (1994, 2018) and reproposed by Juan Dal Maso (2021). Anderson
(2017) has recently presented a more nuanced version of his argument. It is noteworthy, however, that his interpre-
tation keeps circulating in the British cultural Marxist debate, mainly thanks to Anderson’s ability to offer a totalizing
picture of Gramsci’s political thought, and his assumptions regarding this represented a fresh impetus for all Anglo-
phone Marxists (Pensky, 2019; see also Blackledge, 2004).
The attraction of Anderson’s analysis of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony was boosted by its shared ground with the
well-known critique by Louis Althusser in Lire le Capital (Althusser et al., 1965): both approaches agree on the need to
unveil the “false” revolutionary nature of Gramsci’s political thought (Matthews, 2013). Althusser had started reading
Gramsci in the 1950s in the Italian left-wing press and thanks to the circulation in France of a number of unauthorized
translations, and made some positive comments in his article “Contradiction et surdétermination” (Althusser, 1965). In
the turmoil leading up to 1968, however, he developed an increasingly harsh critique of Gramsci alongside his condem-
nation of Sartre’s existentialism. While Jacques Texier’s very successful but incomplete translation of the Notebooks
appeared in, 1966, a fuller French version was not published until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although Althusser
was extremely critical of Gramsci’s approach, he was in fact also the principal conduit for the arrival of Gramsci’s
thinking in French theoretical debate (Marasco, 2019); this followed a course that ran broadly parallel to Gramsci’s
theoretical fortunes in the Anglophone world. These parallel trajectories have provided the background for all further
developments in British Gramscianism and Gramscian studies including, most recently, the “postmodern post-Marxist
Gramsci” offered by political theory (Thomas, 2019).
2 “TRANSLATING” GRAMSCI’S HEGEMONY: STUART HALL
Having made its forceful entry into the British environment, the concept of hegemony started to emerge in the
1970s as an explanation for the way that popular and shared ideas could overdetermine social reality at a particu-
lar political conjuncture. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony could be described as a response to the monolithic notion
of ideology, involving introduction of the idea of processes of transaction and negotiation between a complex web
of different hegemonies (ideological, economic, political, linguistic, and cultural). However, the danger of an unwar-
ranted extension of this understanding is that Gramsci’s hegemony will principally be seen as a “field” of lived social
6 MACCAFERRI
relationships in a given social formation disconnected from historical sedimentation. From this perspective, hege-
monic politics becomes the process of securing the consent of a newly formed collective political subject in oppo-
sition to an already existing one, and hegemony emerges as a process of linear temporalities which culminates in a
contemporaneous unity (see Thomas, 2020). Given the criticism directed at Perry Anderson, it is ironic that he argued
that Stuart Hall’s application of Gramsci’s thinking was responsible for further “misuses” of the concept of hegemony.
Reiterating his unchanged and particular understanding of Gramsci, he observed that in the years of consensus under
Thatcherism “the accent fell too persistently on ideological capture at the expense of material inducements, and ide-
ological motifs themselves became—never explicitly, but with insufficient precaution—too liable to disconnexion from
any social anchorage, as if they could float free in any political direction [. . . ]. Hall could and would never have taken
this step. But the door was left ajar for it” (Anderson, 2017, p. 92).6
Hall discovered Gramsci in 1964 when he met the cultural theorist Lidia Curti, who brought with her a copy of
the Italian edition of Gramsci’s Letters when she first enrolled at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in
Birmingham.7 Starting his activity there and initiating a distinct field of British cultural studies (Morley & Chen, 1996),
Hall made prominent use of the concept of hegemony in his analysis of areas of cultural struggle such as race, iden-
tity, and gender (Matthews, 2013). More importantly for the focus of my analysis, he was at the same time employing
the concept to deconstruct the consensus enjoyed by Margaret Thatcher: he argued that her success resulted from
the establishment of a new conservative “historical bloc,” whose primary feature had been the capacity to “seize” the
apparatus of popular culture and, in consequence, the consent of the working class. He saw this development as a
new British form of what Gramsci had called “trasformismo” (transformism): “the neutralization of some elements in an
ideological formation and their absorption and passive appropriation into a new political configuration” (Hall, 1983,
p. 31). Gramsci had introduced his own particular version of trasformismo in his discussion of the Moderates of Italy’s
liberal era (Q 1, § 44: 40−54; revised in Q 19 § 24: 2010−2034; extract in SPN: 57−59). While Hall used various core
concepts from Gramsci’s lexicon to address Thatcher’s political revolution, including “organic crisis” and “regressive
modernization,” “hegemony” constituted the main theoretical pillar for his analysis of Thatcherism (Shock, 2020).
Hall had delineated the concept of, “Thatcherism” in an article in the magazine Marxism Today some months before
the Conservative Party’s victory in the British general election of, 1979, and developed his formulation in later arti-
cles; here, he described it as a political phenomenon because it was a cultural one. In phrases such as “the Thatcherites
know that they must ‘win’ in civil society” and “they understand [. . . ] the consequences of the generalization of
the social struggle to new arenas and the need to have a strategy” (Hall, 1983, p. 31), abundant use was made of
Gramsci’s lexicon and conceptual constructs; the new course of British politics was depicted as a distinctive and hege-
monic narrative whose political nature could best be understood by employing the perspective of cultural analysis. For
Hall, then, a Gramscian approach was crucial not only because he “refuses any idea of a pregiven unified ideological
subject,” which frees the realm of culture and ideas from the cage of materiality, but, above all, because he awarded a
central importance to “the ‘plurality’ of selves or identities of which the so-called ‘subject’ of thought and ideas is com-
posed” (Hall, 1986, p. 22). Hall never laid out a properly developed theory around his adopted concept of “hegemony,”
but its great evocative power gave the word an enduring status.8 In a further analytical development, he linked it to
his use of the concept of “authoritarian populism” (Hall, 1982). Building on Nicos Poulantzas’ (1978) notion of “author-
itarian statism”, which referred to the outcome of a shift away from a political culture of consent and toward a system
based on explicit coercion, Hall put forward “authoritarian populism” as a better description of the hegemonic project
of Thatcherism by developing Gramsci’s conception of hegemony to mean “ruling by consensus,” in the context of the
crisis of the social democratic model. While Poulantzas’ characterization of authoritarian statism as a response to the
crisis of Western capitalism was strongly influenced by the experience of the Greek dictatorship of the 1970s, Hall
introduced the more nuanced concept of “populism” to address the phenomenon of Thatcherism. He sought to under-
stand the simultaneous presence in post-Fordist British society of both the process of traditional political legitima-
tion and the discursive resemioticization of national identity, the latter induced by a premodern nostalgia for empire
and the “moral panic” over immigration (1978), which he described as the main feature of Thatcherite authoritarian
MACCAFERRI 7
populism. The zenith of this hegemonic project was the emotional engagement of the public over the Falklands–
Malvinas war, colorfully analyzed by Hall (1982) in his article “The empire strikes back.”
Undoubtedly, the notion of “authoritarian populism” nets some of the crucial features of the distinction between
the “political” and the “economic” that Gramsci had advanced by developing his concept of hegemony. Although Gram-
sci’s conception is to be understood as an ensemble of social relations in which there is no separation, but correlation,
between political and economic aspects of hegemony, drawing from Gramsci’s elaboration, Hall (1980) yet furthered a
clear distinction between Thatcherism as a populist project—acknowledged as “a remarkable and intensive ideological
struggle”—and fascism, to which the former had been equated in some superficial left-wing analyses.9 An important
aspect of Hall’s argument condemned this tempting simplification, emphasizing the fact that “unlike classical fascism,
[Thatcherism] has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institution in place” (Hall, 1979, p. 15).
He also condemned another “temptation,” the simplistic application of a clichéd “Marxism as a theory of the obvious”
in an attempt to portray the new phenomenon as an expression of capital and the bourgeoisie; Hall argued that this
venture was pointless and shortsighted (1987, p. 19), and went as far as to demand the abandonment of the notion
of false consciousness (1983, 1988a). In addition, he paid particular attention to distinguishing between what was
“popular” and what he described as the “populist” traits of Thatcherism: an imaginary entirely consistent with tradi-
tional moral values, “Englishness,” patriotism, and patriarchy; and a vision of the future based on and legitimized by
looking backward. In the article “Gramsci and Us” (Hall, 1987), this nostalgic orientation toward the past was char-
acterized by the oxymoron “regressive modernisation.” Gramsci’s passages on Italian “backwardness” were echoed in
Hall’s analysis of “the British social formation: that it never properly entered the era of modern bourgeois civilisation”
(Hall, 1987, pp. 17−18); this can also be compared with Anderson’s (1992) reflections on British society and politics.
In Hall’s view, Thatcherism appealed to the electorate by basing the construction of its hegemonic project on the coex-
istence of premodern Victorian values and the drive toward a new modernity based exclusively on the behavior of
individuals in a free-market society. In this way, Hall’s Thatcherism was a “reactionary modernisation” just as Italian
Fascist corporatism, analyzed by Gramsci in terms of passive revolution and hegemony, had been a modernizing and
regressive force: “Gramsci was conducting this exercise in very similar political circumstances for the Left—retreat
and retrenchment of the working-class movement, ascendancy of fascism, new surge of capital ‘with its intensified
economic exploitation and authoritarian cultural expression’” (Hall, 1989, p. 125).10 .
Early evaluations of Hall’s “uncritical use of Gramsci’s [. . . ] hegemony” were put forward by Jessop et al. (1984,
p. 38) and, indirectly, by Raymond Williams (1983) in regard to “authoritarian populism.” In contrast with Hall’s political
concept, Williams proposed that of “constitutional populism” (pp. 157−174), which put more emphasis on the role of
the repressive state apparatus and moved the needle of analysis a few degrees back toward Poulantzas’ argument.
Meanwhile, Jessop et al. (1984) offered a more systematic critique. Their principal concern was Hall’s presentation
of Thatcherism as rigidly homogeneous, “an excessively unified image” (p. 38), which they considered an unhelpful
characterization for comprehension of the political magnitude of the phenomenon. Although their argument started
by analyzing authoritarian populism as a hegemonic project, it went on to examine the limitations of Hall’s theory
of ideology, and concluded by discarding his translation of Gramsci’s hegemony into British politics in the 1970s and
1980s. Clearly, Hall had a sophisticated command of Gramsci’s thinking, and had thought carefully about how to make
the best use of Gramsci’s concepts. However, by advocating a radical resemioticization of the political as a way of
emphasizing the necessity of engaging in the ideological struggle, Hall’s thesis focused primarily on mainstream public
discourse and popular culture (see, for example, the debate over the BBC discussed by McGuigan, 1992). The strident
tones of the altercation over “authoritarian populism” had consequences: there followed a string of accusations and
recriminations among Britain’s left-wing intellectuals that persisted for a long time (Davis, 2004).
The divergence between the fields of political theory and cultural studies over the application of Gramsci’s concepts
in the attempt to explain Thatcherism is a powerful legacy of Hall’s intellectual activity and scholarship, but it trans-
mitted a diminished translation of Gramsci’s thinking into the Anglophone context. Hall’s analysis of the language of
Thatcherism and the struggle within civil society employed Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in order to understand
the discursive dislocation of the social and political topography of Britain, making appropriate use of the concept as a
8 MACCAFERRI
process of continuing negotiation. However, it also subsumed a linear development of hegemony’s temporal regimes
that implied a synchronic system of power. Hall frequently repeated “Gramsci’s argument about hegemony being
impossible to conceptualise or achieve without the ‘decisive nucleus of economic activity’” (1988b, p. 105). However,
as Jessop et al. pointed out, Hall’s interpretation of Gramsci regarded the link between the economy and hegemony as
implicit, obviating the need for further analysis: economic structures and capitalism were treated as the natural prac-
tices of social relations, rather than historical processes with interconnected layers of different temporalities. Indica-
tive in this respect is Alexander Gallas’ most recent theoretical analysis of Thatcherism as “a class political regime”
rather than a hegemonic project. While Gallas suggests that there could be forms of leadership and domination with-
out hegemony, he considers that “the term is reserved for political projects that secure (broad or modest) active pop-
ular consent”; with this affirmation, he presupposes the self-sufficiency of one political or social actor in regard to
the others and consequently a hierarchical and one-dimensional conception of temporality that points to a unique and
inevitable conclusion (2016, p. 28). The power of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony lies in, first, its emphasis on the “con-
crete hegemonic apparatus”—a key aspect largely overlooked in the Anglophone world—and, second, its connection
with the interpenetration of political and historical moments. Although Hall was true to Gramsci in his understanding
of hegemony as a crucial discursive aspect of the ideological and political struggles in “civil society,” his contribution
was, however, somewhat rigid in seeing it as an external and immutable process.
3 THE DISPLACEMENT OF HEGEMONY: ERNESTO LACLAU AND CHANTAL

MOUFFE
Coming from a structuralist background, Stuart Hall welcomed Gramsci as a sort of defense against “theoreticism”
(Filippini, 2017, p. 119) and used the Sardinian’s conceptual toolbox as an essential point of reference for his studies.11
As a public intellectual and a leading scholar, Hall exerted a major influence on British historical and critical produc-
tion to the extent that British historiography might need to be decoupled from Thatcherism as its starting point (Hilton
et al., 2017). It is noteworthy that, similarly, British historiography should also be liberated from another indirect Gram-
scian category, the notion of omnipotent neoliberalism in the long 1980s, which was built on his conceptions of Amer-
icanism and Fordism (Torres, 2013; Lash, 2007). Drawing on a Marxist background and moving away from the disci-
pline of history, Ernesto Laclau, in collaboration with Chantal Mouffe, used Gramsci’s thinking to cleanse the concept
of hegemony of any remaining essentialism and establish the politics of hegemony as a linear and transitory discursive
achievement.
In Laclau and Mouffe’s initial joint work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) and then in Laclau’s On Populist Rea-
son (2005) and The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (2014) and Mouffe’s On the Political (2005) and For a Left Populism
(2018), hegemony has been conceptualized as a network of discursive social relations linked together in a set of equiv-
alences. There is an abundance of critical literature on the development of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony,
bearing testimony to the centrality of Gramscian concepts in the theoretical outlook of post-Marxism (Butler et al.,
2000).12 The Laclau–Mouffe poststructuralist interpretation has been accused of distorting the “whole system” of
social and political formations elaborated by Gramsci, by applying his categories axiomatically and promoting a sort
of ahistorical, if not anti-historical, “sterilization” of his thought (see Clarke, 1991; Eagleton, 1991; Thomas, 2009). In
post-Marxist perspectives, there is a notable fragmentation of Gramsci’s hegemony and class structure into a plural-
ity of subjectivities reorganized within a discourse of “popular common sense” in which ideas and demands appear
as discursively detached from their particular temporalities and historical contexts of production. In Mouffe’s (1979)
first contribution on Gramsci for the English reader, the influence of Althusser is very evident. Althusser’s critique of
Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis focused on what he believed to have been a fundamental conceptual error: Gramsci,
had been responsible for a rearticulation of western Marxism stripped of its revolutionary notion. At much the same
time as Althusser’s (1965) analysis, a similar interpretation started to gain momentum in Italy, which, as discussed ear-
lier, contributed to the Nairn–Anderson thesis (Frosini, 2008; see also Losurdo, 2017). This shift was not just a distinct
MACCAFERRI 9
watershed within Western Marxism, separating the initial impact of Gramsci’s work, bound up with Togliatti’s repre-
sentation, from the second phase connected to the different “national” uses—and abuses—of his thinking, among which
Althusser’s interpretation has a central place. In addition, by relegating Gramsci to the sphere of “right-wing drift”—
while Georg Lukács was seen as left-wing drift—Althusser contributed to creating the space for an incorporation of
Gramsci mainly through the “less politically charged” prism of culture (see Sotiris, 2016). The critique of Gramsci’s
historicism concentrates on the philosophical bond between humanism and Marxism that allowed history to lapse into
an ideological concept of temporality, and consequently to become a uniform and homogeneous present (Tosel, 2020).
According to Panagiotis Sotiris, Althusser was not ready to accept the complexity and full force of Gramsci’s elabora-
tions of praxis “as a theoretical form that transcends the philosophy/scientific theory dichotomy, as an actual historical
materialism, a laboratory of concepts that would enable us to think the complex and overdetermined histories and
historicities traversing the terrain of social praxis, that had to be conceptualized and at the same time transformed”
(Sotiris, 2017). In a similar way, I would suggest, Althusser was not prepared to adopt what had been for Gramsci the
empirical purpose of his elaboration: hegemony as a central organizing perspective that condenses the plural historical
times and layers of history, enabling their conceptualization and therefore their transformation.
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony undoubtedly gives ideas and concepts a very prominent role; his frequent references
to Roman Catholicism indicate that he understood them as potentially autonomous in relation to capitalist social and
economic relations but still exerting intellectual and political force (see Semeraro, 2016). In his account of the intel-
lectual origin of Gramsci’s hegemony, Hobsbawm (1977) links this to his awareness of the imposing presence of the
Church. In their work, however, Laclau and Mouffe primarily consider hegemony as a potential and temporary discur-
sive construction of the political; in this construction, society and the identity of the social are prior to the political
articulations that take place among social actors. In other words, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the social order is
always contingent; within this, hegemony has the capacity to shape political identities through what they call “articula-
tory practices.” With this increased emphasis on the practice of discourse and on social practice (what Gramsci termed
“common sense”), hegemony is transformed into the popular and, in line with a further stage of their theoretical devel-
opment, into populism.13 They build their argument upon an equation of politics with populism, and hegemony with
common sense. This process of displacement relies on the idea of ideology as a unifying discursive practice and ends up
by detaching it from any material context, an outcome in diametrical opposition to Gramsci’s intention when he drew
on the original Leninist content of “hegemony” to develop his own concept (Di Meo, 2020). While for Gramsci the tem-
poral dimension of hegemony is characterized by an asymmetrical dialectic between the different layers of political
and civil society, in Laclau and Mouffe’s displacement the emphasis has instead been given to a one-dimensional time
understood as a locus of political activity. The role of the cultural dimension, which has a crucial function in Gramsci’s
concept of hegemony, is almost absent from Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation.
A strong critique of this interpretation has been provided from a more traditional Gramscian perspective (Bellamy,
1987, 1994; Femia, 1993; Robinson, 2005). Firstly, by diluting Gramsci’s construction both Laclau and Mouffe have
not only left the realm of Marxism but, more importantly, they have failed to grasp the novelty of his thinking, in which
hegemony is conceived of as a temporal and spatial process of qualitatively different forms of hegemonic practice
(see also Gerratana, 1997). Gramsci considered hegemony the most profound method of understanding “democracy,”
because it is the way for the “popular” to become “political” (Q 8, § 191: 1956), and not the reverse. Secondly, in the
dehistoricization of Gramsci’s concepts, hegemony and common sense appear to become the very “voluntarist” ten-
dency that he warned against. Laclau and Mouffe’s Gramsci figured as a precursor to a politics of radical democracy
in which hegemony is essentially the same as a new “populist” common sense. The collectivist element is an essen-
tial component of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, but was in danger of being gradually removed by a series of partial
reorganizations of Gramsci’s theoretical apparatus. This finally becomes apparent when Laclau makes use of another
Gramscian tool in order to give substance to the nonevaluative aspect of his populism and “injects Caesarism into a
politics of hegemony” (Urbinati, 2014, p. 156). By seeing the option of the strong leader as superior to the concept
of the “collective intellectual” put forward by Gramsci in the construct of the “new prince” (Q 13 § 1: 1555−1561;
SPN: 125−33; see Fontana, 1993; Neubauer, 2019), Laclau has finally disengaged hegemony from its map of layers
10 MACCAFERRI
of temporality. Although Gramsci had often discussed “il popolo” (“the people”) in his preprison writings (see Cardosi,
2014), he rarely used the term on its own in the Notebooks, where it is more frequently linked to “nazione” (nation)
as “popolo-nazione” (“people and nation,” with the adjective often translated as “national-popular”) in discussion of
the role of culture and the intellectuals, and in conjunction with the concept of the historical bloc (Aggio, 2019). He
needed to find a new expression to emphasize the new political subjectivity, which he suggested was a formation of
plural layers of history during the process of Italian unification and state-building, juxtaposed with the highly charged
associations that the concept of “the people” has in Italian (Mordenti, 2019). Gramsci uses the word “populismo”
only three times in the Notebooks, in relation to popular literature, none of them included in the 1971 translation
(Q 6, § 168: 820; Q 15, § 58: 1820; Q 23, § 1: 1185), to mean “andare verso il popolo” (“moving toward the people”). In
Gramsci’s theoretical system, one of the primary examples of a plural temporality that contributed to the formation
of the historical bloc is language (Q 11, § 12: 1375; SPN: 323). The concept of hegemony is the theoretical tool that
can reestablish within the historical bloc both the plurality of temporalities and the result of these processes of circu-
lar sedimentation. In view of the complexity of Gramsci’s thought, it might be simplistic to view hegemony as a field
in which “common sense” can be resemioticized in order to achieve political consensus, despite the specific layers of
historical temporalities; more importantly, this might be unproductive.
The recovery of Gramsci’s “real” meaning, despite its philological importance, is not my epistemological aim, and
from my perspective it would not substantially improve the methodology of historical analysis (for further discussion,
see Morton, 2003). My interest here lies in drawing attention to the repeated transformations of the concept of hege-
mony and the removal of “key determinants” (Skinner, 2002) from the theoretical and historical reflections in Gram-
sci’s thinking. The continuity between hegemony and populism introduced by Hall has certainly become a powerful
theoretical construct in Laclau and Mouffe’s conception, but has at the same time moved further away from Gramsci’s
original thinking, with the result that posthegemony discourse, building on their work, has translated his category into
a mere “system of consensus.” Some scholarship has been in danger of adopting this oversimplification: “for Gramsci,
power is grounded in consent, and force is employed only secondarily [. . . ]. Coercion supplements consent, rather than
vice versa. Hegemony is, in Gramsci’s view, the bedrock of social order.” (Beasley-Murray, 2010, p. 1). In the passage to
which this refers (Q 12 § 1: 1519; SPN: 12), Gramsci focuses on the role played by intellectuals in the formation of the
historical bloc, a concept that had already been discussed in his consideration of the “Southern Question”, and which
provided the basis for the development of his theory of hegemony (Burgio, 2014). Although the question of power is
ever-present in Gramsci’s work, in this case it is not central to his reflections. It is interesting, though, that the relation-
ship between intellectuals and the world of production, constantly mediated by the entire social fabric (Q 12 § 1: 1518;
SPN: 12), was for Gramsci a function of hegemony, but has been transmuted by the recent theory of post-hegemony
into the binary choice of consent or direct domination, in reference to the paradigm of liberal democracy against the
dictatorship of the proletariat (see Thomas, 2019).
4 CONCLUSION: HEGEMONY AS A HISTORICAL PROCESS. A RESEARCH

HYPOTHESIS
As this article has shown, the crucial importance of history in Gramsci’s “officina” (“workshop”), to use Francioni’s
(1984) expression for his theoretical armory, has not been one of the major aspects of his application in Anglophone
Gramscianism. Focusing on the “British” reception before and after the key moment of publication of Selections from
the Prison Notebooks in 1971, this study has examined three modes of interpretation, highlighting the way that each
reception foregrounds different applications of Gramsci’s thinking: revolutionary strategy in Perry Anderson’s appro-
priation, cultural transformation in Stuart Hall’s translation, and populist displacement in the work by Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe. The ground-breaking concept of hegemony lies at the center of these reflections. What started
with Anderson’s ahistorical appropriation of Gramsci’s concept and continued with Hall’s prioritization of its cultural
element, the prism through which he examined Thatcherism, has gone one stage further in its discursive disjuncture
MACCAFERRI 11
by Laclau and Mouffe. The dialectical and asymmetrical encounter of the different “times” in the politics of hegemony,
which is the innovative aspect of Gramsci’s reflection “on the production of the past within the present,” has been
increasingly marginalized; in Laclau and Mouffe’s much-discussed theoretical perspective, hegemony is understood
as implying a process of symmetrical unification of the plurality of subjectivities, which means that because this pro-
cess can be displaced and rearranged in order to achieve a variety of outcomes, hegemony can be appropriated by any
agency for any political purpose.
On more than one occasion Gramsci had professed his intention to write a “theory of history and historiography,”
considering himself a “historian of historical development” (Q 24 § 15: 2268).14 Historical reconstruction as an epis-
temological purpose was not, of course, the central focus of his interest, which lay in the “evolutionary logic of his-
torical processes” (Burgio, 2014, p. 129). Gramsci’s reflections were committed to paper during a period of epochal
transformation, marked by the challenges of mass society, a new form of capitalism, and the threat to democracy;
he addressed this, with the aim of absorbing and taking on the new reality, in the arena of the critique of method-
ological individualism, by making new use of the vocabulary from different theoretical traditions in order to refine
and “translate” his own analytical tools (see Filippini, 2017). His complex argument about the confluence of phi-
losophy and history in the politics of hegemony was not seen as a hierarchical process, but instead in terms of a
dialectical relationship between temporalities. In this regard the concepts of translatability and praxis provide an orga-
nizing perspective that presupposes political intervention and strategies. Gramsci’s historicity lies in conceiving a “the-
ory of history and politics” whose primary concern was to dissect constellations of events and processes, and which
could provide a framework for understanding the “political condition.” This “evolutionary logic” concentrates on the
dynamics within popular, economic, and political movements, which could be transformed and institutionalized by a
systematic exposition by intellectuals. From this perspective hegemony, understood as a process, relates to history,
understood as a form of situated praxis, and consists of a multiplicity of temporalities that are not deposited as succes-
sive stages of historical development but as a matrix of cultural and political cross-negotiations, in which hegemonic
apparatuses and intellectuals play a dialectical role. The result of this activity is the “historical bloc” (Morfino, 2020;
Sotiris, 2018).
With this emphasis, the understanding of hegemony as a map of “layers of history” and conflictual “plural temporali-
ties” offers a theoretical and methodological perspective with the potential to open up a new range of broader research
questions. As a result of the dominance of the English language and the undoubted intellectual vigor of the authors
examined here, their appropriation of Gramsci’s thinking has launched it on a trajectory that has prioritized particu-
lar aspects, and which in the long term, as I have shown, has obscured the complex correlation of all its constituent
elements. The aim here, however, in reclaiming Gramsci’s historicity, is not to ignore the approaches that his legacy
has generated but, instead, to restore the full complexity of his thinking to their operationalization. The conception of
hegemony as an intertwining of temporalities creates the theoretical space that enables the practice of transformative
“conjunctural” politics. Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony, rather than “using” history to understand and denounce
the contradictions of the past as having been projected into a particular “political condition”, also incorporates the
time and mode of an alternative political intervention (Badaloni, 1981). Gramsci’s historicity lies in the theoretical
process of historicizing the “political-popular” and the “national-popular,” a process that is an essential instrument for
making political actions meaningful and effective. Clearly, this perspective needs to be understood in the context of
his “political” interest in history: his aim was to unravel the origins of Italian Fascism and to understand why the coun-
try’s left had proved unable to counter this. The reading of hegemony historical cognitive map might suggest broader
questions about Gramsci’s views on the state and democracy, especially in light of the function of the political party: in
this interpretation, democracy, the terrain of modern politics, is characterized by an irreducible tension between the
popular basis of political power and the political practices that regulate it (see Vacca, 2021, especially pp. 218−242). A
fresh focus on hegemony as an asymmetrical interpenetration of temporalities might place a new emphasis on Gram-
sci and historiography and raise new questions about the diffusion and reception of Gramsci’s thinking, especially in
response to the challenge posed by the recent “transnational turn” (Armitage, 2014; for a response, see Pocock, 2019).
In this regard, restricting our discussion to the context analyzed in this article, notable issues are the “prehistory” of
12 MACCAFERRI
Gramsci’s appropriation by British cultural Marxism and the impact of this appropriation on the origins of both British
Marxist historiography and “history from below.” In this regard, a new inquiry into the origins of Anglo-Marxism might
be fruitful. Concepts such as Gramsci’s “historical bloc” allow us to rethink radical politics in a strategic way, as well as
to rethink the intellectual history that relates to it.
NOTES
1
In view of the vast number of references, a comprehensive bibliography cannot be presented here. For an updated
online bibliography relating to Gramsci studies, see the Fondazione Gramsci Rome website: http://bg.fondazionegramsci.
org/biblio-gramsci. For recent critical accounts, see Antonini et al. (2019), Cadeddu (2020), Dainotto & Jameson (2020), and
Frosini & Giasi (2019).
2
In 1957 the first two short selections from Gramsci’s writings were published, one in the United Kingdom (The Modern Prince
and Other Writings, translated by Louis Marks) and one in the United States (The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, trans-
lated by Carl Marzani). The following year, José Aricó began a translation into Spanish intended for Latin American readers,
whose publication was preceded by a highly influential account of Gramsci’s revolutionary strategy written by the Argen-
tinian Marxist Héctor Agosti. Nonetheless, Gramsci’s work did not circulate much until the mid-1970s, after publication of
Selections From the Prison Notebooks in English (1971) and prior to the release of a French translation (1979) (Lussana, 1997).
An earlier translation of some of Gramsci’s writings had been started by Hamish Henderson just after WW2, attested to by
the correspondence between Henderson and Gramsci’s closest friend Piero Sraffa conserved in the Sraffa Papers (SP), Wren
Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. This attempt, however, was never published (Boothman, 2013). Later, Henderson played
a central role in the publication of Gramsci’s letters, first in The New Reasoner (Gramsci, 1959a, 1959b) and afterwards in the
New Edinburgh Review (1974). For an account of Henderson’s interest in Gramsci, see Neat, 2007, pp. 242–255.
3
On the first page of his first notebook, dated February 8, 1929, Gramsci listed the topics that he intended to study: (1) the
theory of history and historiography; (2) the evolution of the Italian bourgeoisie up until 1870; (3) the formation of groups
of intellectuals (Q 1. I/I bis: 5) The notebook’s opening passage was not included in the translation by Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. References in this article to Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) follow the accepted
international standard giving the notebook number (Q) and paragraph number (§), followed by a page reference to the Italian
critical edition edited by Valentino Gerratana and published by Einaudi in 1975. I also give page references, when available,
to the paragraphs included in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (SPN), translated by Hoare and Nowell Smith and published
in London in 1971. The critical edition in English, edited by Joseph Buttigieg and interrupted by his death (published by
Columbia University Press in 1992, 1996 and 2007) only covers Notebooks 1–8.
4
Curiously, it was Carl Marzani, the first person to translate any of Gramsci’s work into English for publication in the United
States, who emphasized that for the Italian thinker the real meaning of the act of translation was primarily conceptual and
not merely linguistic; in his introduction to The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, Marzani said that “idiomi” (“idioms”) were
to be understood as “the cultural ensemble [and] ways of thinking and acting in a country at a given time” (Gramsci, 1957b,
p. 59).
5
It is worth reporting the original: “In England, where the bourgeois revolution took place before that in France, we have a
similar phenomenon to the German one of fusion between the old and the new—this notwithstanding the extreme energy
of the English ‘Jacobins,’ that is, Cromwell’s Roundheads. The old aristocracy remained as a governing stratum, with certain
privileges, and it too became the intellectual stratum of the English bourgeoisie (it should be added that the English aristoc-
racy has an open structure, and continually renews itself with elements coming from the intellectuals and the bourgeoisie).”
SPN: 77.
6
Considering Lenin’s conception as the purest meaning of hegemony, Anderson provides a decontextualized history of hege-
mony’s projections in different spaces and times in The H-word (2017).
7
Lidia Curti (2017) has recalled this episode: “I first met Stuart Hall in Birmingham, UK, in 1964. He was starting his work
there, and I was a newcomer at the Centre with a copy of Gramsci’s Lettere dal carcere under my arm. We were both in our
early 30s and already engaged on a utopian journey to a revolution that seemed not too far away.”
8
For an account of the success of Hall’s use of “hegemony,” which placed a particular emphasis on personal experience in the
political struggle, see Pimlott (2017); see also Shock (2020).
9
For the debate on Thatcherism, see Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (2018).
10
For an analysis of the overextension of Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, although from the perspective of inter-
national political economy, see Callinicos (2010). For discussion of Gramsci’s analysis of fascism in the Notebooks, see
Gagliardi, 2016.
11
In one of his last pieces of writing, first published in 2011, Hall restated the crucial importance of Gramsci to an understand-
ing of “the neoliberal revolution” (2015, p. 13).
MACCAFERRI 13
12
For the academic and popular success of the Laclau–Mouffe body of work, both as a collaborative output and as two dis-
tinct lines of research, see Baker (2016) and D’Eramo (2013). For a critical analysis of Laclau’s theoretical approach in his
appropriation of Gramsci’s thinking, see Balsa (2019), Thomas (2017), and Boucher (2008).
13
Anderson has ironically observed that “[i]n this account, Togliatti, Tito and Mao were commendably national-populist”
(2017, p. 99).
14
This passage was also not included in SPN.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Marzia Maccaferri is based at the School of Politics & IR, Queen Mary University of London. Her research inter-
sects intellectual and European history with political theory. She works on the reception of Gramsci’s Notebooks
into British Cultural Marxism; she also studies the discursive recontextualisation of populism in contemporary
Italy and Britain. Recent publications are: ‘Populism and Italy: a theoretical and epistemological conundrum.’ Mod-
MACCAFERRI 17
ern Italy 27(1), 2022: 5–17; ‘The delegitimisation of Europe in a pro-European country. “Sovereignism’ and pop-
ulism in the political discourse of Matteo Salvini’s Lega.” Co-authered with George Newth. Journal of Politics and
Language. 2022; ‘Euroscepticism between Populism and Technocracy: The Case of Italian Lega and Movimento 5
Stelle.’ Co-authered with Franco Zappettini. Journal of Contemporary European Research. 17 (2), 2021: 239–257.
How to cite this article: Maccaferri, M. (2022). Reclaiming Gramsci’s “historicity”: A critical analysis of the
British appropriation in light of the “crisis of democracy”. Constellations, 1–17.
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Reclaiming Gramsci’s “historicity”: A critical

Constellations. 2022;1–17. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cons 1

1 “APPROPRIATING” GRAMSCI’S HEGEMONY: PERRY ANDERSON

2 “TRANSLATING” GRAMSCI’S HEGEMONY: STUART HALL

3 THE DISPLACEMENT OF HEGEMONY: ERNESTO LACLAU AND CHANTAL

4 CONCLUSION: HEGEMONY AS A HISTORICAL PROCESS. A RESEARCH

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