Historical Materialism 22.

2 (2014) 44–62

brill.com/hima

Towards a Theory of the Integral State

Bruno Bosteels
Cornell University
bb228@cornell.edu

Abstract

This review assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Peter Thomas’s long-awaited
study of The Prison Notebooks, based on his extensive research and philological recon-
struction of the critical edition. I distinguish three senses in which the ‘moment’ in the
book’s title can be understood: as the historical moment around 1932 in which Gramsci
proposed the outline of his distinct brand of the philosophy of praxis; as the moment or
momentum that still lies in wait for a future research programme in Marxist philoso-
phy; and as a methodological principle for understanding the dialectic as a theory in
which entities such as state and civil society, but also coercion and consent, far from
allowing the kind of Eurocommunist or post-Marxist instrumentalisations in which
they are seen as part of a chain of binaries, are actually moments of a unified larger
structure that in Gramsci’s work comes to be associated with the idea of the integral
state. This impressive reconstruction of Gramsci’s notebooks, however, also reveals
some major lacunae, above all, in terms of the lack of attention given to Gramscian
developments in the non-European world, in places such as India or Latin America.
This omission is all the more surprising given the longstanding tradition, particularly in
Latin America, of viewing Gramsci as a theorist of the integral state more so than of
hegemony.

Keywords

Gramsci – hegemony – dialectic – state – civil society – passive revolution –

historicism – immanence

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/1569206x-12341353

Towards a Theory of the Integral State 45

Back to the Future of Marxism?

Initially, there seem to be at least two ways of understanding the title of this
book – with each of these readings in turn implying a radically different con-
ception of the aim of the book’s project as a whole.
On one hand, the title refers to the precise historical context of Antonio
Gramsci’s composition of the Prison Notebooks and, more specifically, to the
proposal, around 1932, of his distinct version of the philosophy of praxis.
Thanks to his systematic use and probing (re)translations of the critical edi-
tion of the Quaderni del carcere established by Valentino Gerratana in 1975 and
translated into English by Joseph A. Buttigieg, Peter Thomas is able to recon-
struct this context with a unique combination of scholarly erudition and didac-
tic clarity. He himself explains: ‘The “Gramscian moment” indicated in the title
of this book refers not only to the astounding annus mirabilis of 1932, in which
Gramsci, deepening and articulating the interdisciplinary and multi-faceted
research project, delineates the “three component parts” of the “philosophy of
praxis” in the notions of an absolute “historicism”, absolute immanence and
absolute humanism. It also refers to his integration in this year of his research
into the nature of the modern state, on the one hand, and the social and politi-
cal overdetermination of philosophy, on the other’.1 The goal of The Gramscian
Moment, according to this first understanding of its title, would be primarily
philological and reconstructive in nature. As such, Peter Thomas is entitled to
the claim that his reading finally does justice to the real or original Gramsci
for English-language speakers – let us say, Gramsci as seen by Gramsci, rather
than through the deforming lens of multiple generations of Gramscians who
were not or could not have been trained in the Italian original, let alone in the
critical edition. In this sense, the book is certainly one of the finest Ariadne’s
threads that a reader could wish for to be guided through the labyrinth of the
Prison Notebooks.
On the other hand, in a second reading, it would seem that the ‘Gramscian
moment’ might actually be still to come. Urged on by the promise or the for-
ward-looking occasion provided by the critical edition, rarely taken up so far in
English-language interpretations, Peter Thomas thus also seeks to contribute
to the definition of the future agenda for a fundamental research programme
of Gramscian-inspired Marxist investigations. This too is stated explicitly
from the start: ‘With the proposal of an absolute historicism, absolute imma-
nence and absolute humanism, the Prison Notebooks provide us with valu-
able resources and perspectives for the elaboration of such an independent

1 Thomas 2009, p. xix.

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46 Bosteels

research programme of Marxist philosophy’.2 The goal of the project according

to this second reading would not be philological or reconstructive so much as
constructive and programmatic, perhaps we might even say prescriptive, offer-
ing us an image of Gramsci as seen from within the actuality of the present, yet
with an eye on Marxism’s politico-philosophical future in terms both of what
is to be done and, above all, of what is to be thought. ‘The importance of his
thought for contemporary Marxism consists precisely in this degree of his con-
tinuing historical efficacy, that is, the extent to which the problems he sought
to analyse remain “burning questions of our movement” today’, writes Thomas,
speaking of Gramsci’s actuality for the present conjuncture. ‘Yet such “actu-
ality” should not be confused with identity. Only a reading that refuses the
lures of, on the one hand, interpellation of the present by Gramsci’s discourse
and, on the other, interpellation of the Prison Notebooks by the present, will
be adequate both to grasp the distinctiveness of this incomplete project and
to continue it’.3 This ‘moment’ of Gramsci that is yet to come, in other words,
could also be understood in the sense of his contemporary ‘momentum’, with
Gramsci’s writings giving the impetus for a revitalisation of Marxist theory,
whereby the attention shifts away from philological reconstruction toward
philosophical intervention, and from the meaning of the past toward the
past’s continuing relevance for the present and future of the relation between
Marxism and philosophy: ‘In this sense, we encounter the Prison Notebooks
today as a potential “future in the past”, a neglected moment of the twentieth
century that may offer us a possible point of orientation for the twenty-first’.4
The few questions that I would like to raise in response to this impressive
piece of scholarship can all be said to revolve around the possible links and
the eventual tensions between these two readings of the book and its title. In
other words, my questions concern the following conundrum: how does rely-
ing on a patient historical reconstruction of the original Gramscian moment
surrounding the composition of the Prison Notebooks strengthen the chances
for another Gramscian moment of fundamental Marxist research that might
as yet lie ahead of us? In what way and to what extent can philological accu-
racy and respect for the past contribute to sharpening the edge of Gramsci’s
philosophical and political intervention in the present? Can a reassessment of
our past at the same time serve the forward-looking purpose of a future revit-
alisation of Marxism? Or is there a risk that the concern for patient reconstruc-
tion will have a deadening effect on the political efficacy of Gramsci’s thought?

2 Thomas 2009, p. xxv.

3 Thomas 2009, p. 131.
4 Thomas 2009, p. 442.

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Towards a Theory of the Integral State 47

After all, already in the Greek myth, Ariadne’s thread eventually leads Theseus
to put the Minotaur to death.

In Praise of Philology

In terms of its structure, the book combines equal parts of critical rebuttal
and didactic exposé. More specifically, it is constructed as a prolonged polemic
with Perry Anderson and Louis Althusser’s readings of Gramsci, followed by a
detailed and richly contextualised discussion of the three component parts of
Gramsci’s philosophical research programme: absolute historicism, absolute
humanism, and absolute immanence. Althusser, of course, had picked up on
these three notions as key to his well-known and highly influential critique
of Gramscianism in his contributions to the volume Reading Capital. Peter
Thomas, however, cleverly turns this criticism around so as to show how many
of Althusser’s objections either miss their target or else are better understood
as unwitting self-criticisms. Althusser’s rejection of Gramsci’s historicism, for
example, is proven to have mistaken Gramsci for Croce, while Croce’s own
brand of historicism, which Gramsci criticises as a dialectic of ‘distinctions’
based on an essential historiographical ‘section’ of juxtaposed entities, is shown
to correspond rather well to the Althusserian structuralism of the different
‘instances’ in the structure that is ‘always already’ given in a determinate social
formation: ‘Ironically, it is perhaps the early Althusser’s structuralist model of
the interrelationship between social practices that comes closest to reproduc-
ing Crocean presuppositions within Marxism’.5 At the same time, the philo-
sophical reconstruction of the exact meaning behind notions such as ‘absolute
humanism’ and the ‘earthiness’ or ‘this-sidedness’ (the Diesseitigkeit from the
second of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ that Gramsci never tired of pondering)
of ‘absolute immanence’ allows Peter Thomas throughout his book to retrieve
hidden or subterranean traditions in the theory of history, the theory of subjec-
tivity or personality, and the theory of contingency, which even in Althusser’s
posthumous writings on ‘aleatory materialism’ do not reach the same level of
dialectical sophistication as they do in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.
More broadly speaking, Peter Thomas proposes to read the contrast
between Gramsci and Althusser as the contrast between two dominant mod-
els for understanding the place of Marxism in contemporary philosophical
and political struggles. Each of these models can be assigned to a unique his-
torical moment (Gramsci between 1926 and 1932 and Althusser between 1956

5 Thomas 2009, p. 265.

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48 Bosteels

and the late 1960s), all the while allowing for a possible synchronicity of the
non-synchronous between the two. In fact, also playing on the title of Pierre
Macherey’s important book Hegel or Spinoza, Thomas suggests that the more
relevant alternative for contemporary theory – hinted at yet insufficiently cap-
tured in the struggle over ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ in 1980s cultural studies fol-
lowing above all the work of Stuart Hall – can be encapsulated in the choice
between Gramsci or Althusser. ‘In order to emphasise this more general and
enduring theoretical significance, I propose to refer to these “two types or
poles” in the following study as the Althusserian and Gramscian “moments”
of Marxism’, Thomas explains. ‘In other words, viewed in a “synchronic” sense,
or comprehended sub specie aeternitatis (in the fullest Spinozist i.e. anti-
metaphysical sense of that phrase), the Gramscian and Althusserian moments
today figure as agonists on the Kampfplatz that is contemporary Marxist
theory’.6 The wager is actually double: Peter Thomas not only demonstrates
how the early Althusser’s structuralism can be said to have been preemptively
debunked in Gramsci’s criticisms of Croce; he also hints at more productive
similarities between Gramsci and the late Althusser’s posthumous investiga-
tions into aleatory materialism.

From Hegemony to the Integral State

On the other hand, the polemic with Perry Anderson’s reading of Gramsci –
famously presented, first, in the essay for New Left Review and, then, in the small
book-version of The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci – centres on the various
binaries that are typically said to define the Gramscian theory of hegemony,
also popularised by theorists of ‘radical democracy’ who follow in the footsteps
of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. These are the binaries of hegemony
and coercion, civil society and the state, war of positions and war of manoeu-
vres, and, finally, West and East. Peter Thomas intervenes in this debate by
radically shifting both the meaning of the terms and their orientation: away
from the theory of hegemony as such and toward a refocusing of the inter-
pretation of Gramsci’s key concepts in light of the category of the integral, or
integrated, state. Indeed, if there is one idea that can be said to summarise all
of The Gramscian Moment, it is the one that holds that the author of the Prison
Notebooks is first and foremost a philosopher of the integral state, and not of
hegemony – at least not in the way in which Gramsci’s thought is frequently
summarised, so that hegemony becomes limited to the one-sided lineage of

6 Thomas 2009, pp. 25–6.

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Towards a Theory of the Integral State 49

civil society/war of positions/the West as opposed to state/war of manoeuvres/

the East. Thus, whereas a stark binary opposition between state and civil soci-
ety, for example, served the strategic interests of Eurocommunism in the 1970s
no less than the proposals for a post-Marxist ‘radical democracy’ in the 1980s
and 1990s, Thomas insists on the need properly to grasp Gramsci’s dialectical
rearticulation of the terms in question: ‘Gramsci’s argument that the distinc-
tion between the state and civil society is, properly understood, methodologi-
cal rather than organic, is crucial for grasping the dialectical dimensions of his
new concept of the state’.7
What is true for the binary of civil society and the state also applies to the
other binaries typically associated with Gramsci or Marx, such as consent and
coercion, or superstructure and base. In each of these cases we are not deal-
ing with independent entities or antinomial terms so much as with a dialecti-
cal articulation within a larger unitary apparatus. And this larger apparatus
is precisely what Gramsci seeks to theorise historically in the name of the
‘integral state’, but also in terms of the processes of ‘passive revolution’ and
‘­transformism’ that pertain not only to the singularity of the post-Risorgimento
Italian political path but also define other Western European contexts after the
1848 uprisings and especially in the wake of the 1871 Paris Commune. Integral
state, passive revolution, and transformism are thus three closely associated
terms meant to account for the nature of the state in the period of the organic
crisis of the traditional bourgeois state apparatus.
From the theory of hegemony to the integral state: such would be the shift
proposed as the guiding thread behind The Gramscian Moment. In the author’s
own words: ‘This guiding thread that organises all of Gramsci’s carceral
research can be succinctly characterised as the search for an adequate theory of
proletarian hegemony in the epoch of the “organic crisis” or the “passive revolu-
tion” of the bourgeois “integral State” ’.8 Here, in fact, we are already beginning
to see the interaction at work between the two meanings of the Gramscian
‘moment’ mentioned above: the philological-reconstructive and the political-
programmatic. What is more, we will see that to mediate between these two
meanings, there emerges a third understanding of ‘moment’ that this time is
methodological in nature. The ‘moment’ or ‘momentum’ of Gramsci, then, will
turn out to stand or fall with an adequate theory of ‘moments’ in a well-nigh
Hegelian sense.
Let us consider, for example, the following description of the role of the
concept of the integral state in Gramsci’s research programme. Thomas writes:

7 Thomas 2009, p. 69, n. 89.

8 Thomas 2009, p. 136.

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50 Bosteels

With this concept, Gramsci attempted to analyse the mutual interpen-

etration and reinforcement of ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’ (to be
distinguished from each other methodologically, not organically) within
a unified (and indivisible) state-form. According to this concept, the state
(in its integral form) was not to be limited to the machinery of govern-
ment and legal institutions (the ‘state’ understood in a limited sense).
Rather, the concept of the integral state was intended as a dialectical ter-
rain upon which social classes compete for social and political leadership
or hegemony over other social classes.9

What we obtain here at the level of theory or methodology is nothing less than
a redefinition of the dialectic, based on the interpenetration and mutual rein-
forcement of terms as so many ‘moments’ of a larger unity. To keep insisting on
the tiresome dualisms traditionally associated with Gramsci means to obscure
the dialectical complexity of this unity. Civil society and the state, for example,
must be understood according to this dialectic of moments. They can be seen
as methodologically or analytically separate but, in the historical era marked
by passive revolution, they are also organically linked:

Far from being opposed to the state, civil society in this image appears
as the state’s complement, tending towards and reflecting the rational
organisation, system of rights and juridical equality that distinguish
the modern state. Civil society’s primary role was to act as a mediating
instance or moment of ‘organic passage’ for the subaltern classes towards
the state of the ruling classes: a school of modern ‘statehood’.10

In addition to the pivotal articulation between state and civil society, this
same dialectical logic also applies to a dualism such as that of consent and
coercion. Here Peter Thomas is, if possible, even more explicit about the cen-
tral methodological principle that undergirds his entire reading of Gramsci:
‘Consent and coercion now figure as moments within each other, theoretically
distinct but really united as moments (simultaneously der Moment and das
Moment) of a political hegemonic project’.11 Time and again, we thus obtain a
non-­antinomian articulation of terms such as consent and coercion, or base
and superstructure, as moments within a larger, if also unstable, equilibrium.

9 Thomas 2009, p. 137.

10 Thomas 2009, pp. 143–4.
11 Thomas 2009, p. 167.

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Towards a Theory of the Integral State 51

Peter Thomas, finally laying all his philosophical cards on the table, goes on
to associate this theory of moments with the Hegelian dialectic and its revolu-
tionary impact on the theory of the modern state:

One of the most significant dimensions of Hegel’s ‘Copernican revolution’

in state theory consisted in the elaboration of a notion of an articulated
social totality, defined by its ‘vertical’ integration, rather than ‘horizontal’
differentiation, of different social and political practices. Hegel’s unitary
conception of the social totality radically separates civil society and the
state in an unprecedented manner, before uniting them again as dia-
lectical moments in the substantiation and apprehension – that is, the
actuality [Wirklichkeit] – of the Idea as rational human community. In
Gramsci’s terms, we could say that Hegel’s distinction between them is
more ‘methodological’ than ‘organic’.12

Applied to the relation between civil society and state, this means that we are
dealing with moments that are internal to the self-differentiation of the larger
totality in which they appear as temporary perspectives or differential aspects:
‘These perspectives do not annul or exclude each other because one is capable
of sublating (aufheben, in the fullest Hegelian sense of simultaneous cancella-
tion and preservation) the other and explaining its particularity as a moment
of its own self-determined universality’.13 Contrary to the privileging of civil
society as a sphere outside, or prior to, the state – civil society as the favourite
realm of NGOs, new social movements, and ‘radical democracy’ theorists alike –
this also means that Gramsci comes very close to Hegel, as both of them con-
ceive of the specificity of civil society within a dialectically unified state-form:
‘In both Hegel’s and Gramsci’s versions, civil society is not an uncompromised
“pre-political” realm that lies beyond, or comes before, the state. Rather, it is
an ensemble of practices and relations dialectically interpellated by and inte-
grated within the state’.14
The whole project of Peter Thomas in The Gramscian Moment, in sum, is held
together not just by a double but by a triple understanding of the moment in
its title: (1) the historical moment of the composition of The Prison Notebooks,
to be reconstructed with the precision of philology; (2) the future moment
or momentum of a reinvigorated Marxist research programme, inspired by
Gramsci; and (3) a theory of moments as part of a renewed understanding of
the dialectical method, derived from Hegel.

12 Thomas 2009, p. 175.

13 Thomas 2009, p. 176.
14 Thomas 2009, p. 180.

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52 Bosteels

If we wanted to find a close analogy for this triple understanding of The

Gramscian Moment as indicated in its title, we could think of that classic of
political theory, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition, which similarly can be understood not
only (1) in the sense of J.G.A. Pocock’s fine reconstruction of the Florentine
Renaissance but also (2) in the sense of later Atlantic reincarnations of the
theory of republicanism in eighteenth-century revolutionary thought and,
finally, (3) in the sense in which even a thinker such as Marx, for example, as
shown in readings by the late Althusser or Miguel Absensour, would have gone
through a ‘Machiavellian moment’, with its own theory of the ‘moment’ or
‘fortune’ of strict contingency and true democracy. One of the most intriguing
aspects of The Gramscian Moment, in fact, is the theorisation of a similar idea
of historical temporality, based on the experience of a split or fractured pres-
ent, which Peter Thomas explicitly compares to the late Althusser’s aleatory
materialism. The polemic against the early Althusser’s misreadings of Gramsci,
in other words, is supplemented with a much more promising appeal to the
resonances between Gramsci and the late Althusser’s theory of time, history,
and contingency.

Gramsci at the Margins

Now, impressive as this whole articulation is, can we be sure that it will suf-
fice to produce and safeguard a vital future for Marxist philosophical research?
Can it even account for the actual success and political relevance of alternative
readings of Gramsci – otherwise than by labelling them philologically inac-
curate, or by dismissing them as too banal even to be taken seriously? Finally,
independently of the richness of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, why should
the future of Marxism be limited to a programme for fundamental philosophi-
cal research? Would Gramsci have agreed with this reduction of his lifelong
project to matters of philosophy? These are the three questions – concerning
the place of philology, politics, and philosophy – with which I would now want
to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of The Gramscian Moment.
With regard to the first question, Peter Thomas is fond of quoting Gramsci’s
descriptions of his own project as the work of a philologist. Gramsci writes, for
example: ‘ “Philology” is the methodological expression of the importance of
particular facts understood as definite and precise “individualities” ’.15 Thomas
not only approves of this definition but also justifies the importance of phil-
ological accuracy for understanding Gramsci’s research project as a whole:

15 Quoted in Thomas 2009 at p. 126.

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Towards a Theory of the Integral State 53

‘Seemingly the preserve of pedants, a precise philological reconstruction of

what Gramsci actually wrote in black and white is decisive for an accurate
analysis of his concepts’;16 and, later, after quoting Gramsci’s definition a sec-
ond time around, he adds: ‘In this expanded sense, philology becomes a cen-
tral technique of the art of politics considered as the art of intervening in the
conjuncture on the basis of an analysis of the historical facts that have com-
posed it and which it in turn composes’.17 As someone who has been trained as
a philologist, I cannot but agree with the general gist of this defence of philo-
logical precision, the place of language, or the role of translation. Besides, if
we substituted the more fashionable ‘singularities’ for ‘individualities’ in the
above definition, would not most contemporary thinkers have to agree with
the usefulness and even urgency of Gramsci’s defence of philology? However,
the larger question remains as to whether a philologically correct reading is
enough to raise the profile of Gramsci for future research in Marxist philoso-
phy. Does this emphasis not also run the risk of closing down other interpre-
tive and political possibilities, insofar as we are now supposed to have access
to a well-nigh irrefutable portrait, supported by all the available philological
evidence and presented with a conceptual clarity and conviction that renders
all alternate readings either wrong or banal, if not both?
Put differently, why should philological accuracy and political efficacy
always go hand in hand? Or, rather, even if they should do so in theory, why
do they not always necessarily go together in actual practice? Are we not all
familiar with a great many patent misreadings of Marx, Lenin, or Gramsci (not
to mention Hegel or Heidegger) that nonetheless have been politically and
ideologically significant? Do we not all know cases of key philosophers who
famously and bluntly misread their predecessors? Is this not almost a defin-
ing feature of every great thinker (‘He who thinks greatly must err greatly’, as
Heidegger famously claimed, citing a maxim from Paul Valéry)? So then, what
are we supposed to do with those much more influential interpretations of
Gramsci that, in light of the original Italian manuscripts in their critical edi-
tion, can be shown to have been unilateral or downright wrong?
The reader of this book can come away with the impression that Gramsci,
when properly understood, was right about everything. Such a conviction no
doubt is inevitable when an author spends years and years of solitary research
in the company of a specific thinker, as I imagine was the case of Peter Thomas
with Gramsci. And yet, the reasons for such choices of one thinker or tradi-
tion of thought over another – reasons which are never purely individual or
­contingent but also historically overdetermined – are thereby left severely

16 Thomas 2009, p. 170, n. 39.

17 Thomas 2009, p. 333.

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54 Bosteels

undertheorised, as are the reasons behind the shifting interpretations of

a given thinker or body of work. Might there be more sense in working out
not only all the moments when an author is right on the mark, but also those
moments when he or she is blatantly wrong or dangerously misguided?
Besides, even after making his plea for the importance of philological accu-
racy, does Peter Thomas himself not also confess to an inevitable degree of bias
in any reading? Thus, in another footnote, he admits that ‘any interpretation
“­instrumentalises” a text for purposes distinct from those of its author’.18 This
would seem to contradict, if not annul, the possibility of a philologically accu-
rate and unbiased reading. But, even if a certain degree of instrumentalisa-
tion were inevitable, following an insight that we would expect to come across
more readily in a discussion of Paul de Man or the early Jacques Derrida, how
should we understand the inner logic behind this gap between the purposes of
an author and those of his or her interpreter?
This leads me to my second question. Indeed, insofar as the standard for
judging a specific reading of Gramsci is here first and foremost defined in
terms of philological accuracy or inaccuracy, we are left wondering what to
do with all those famous interpretations that, even while perhaps involving
patent misreadings, have nonetheless marked the Wirklichkeit, or real actu-
ality, of the Gramscian moment for the past several decades. Thomas high-
lights, for example, the usefulness of a unilateral reading of Gramsci’s theory
of hegemony for the purposes of social-democratic agendas as well as for the
legitimisation of 1970s Eurocommunism. Beyond the statement of fact about
these unsavoury alliances, however, in the end we are left with the sense that
all such instrumentalisations can now be set aside as so many mistakes pure
and simple, to be superseded by a reading of the true and proper Gramsci.
This question is perhaps nowhere more urgent than in the case of the
Gramscian theory of hegemony popularised by the work of Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe. Would this work not have been more deserving of a
polemical rebuttal than the much older readings by Louis Althusser and Perry
Anderson? Yet Peter Thomas brushes aside the entire ‘radical-democratic’ tra-
dition as ‘­little more than a second incarceration’, which is ‘just as guilty of
a posthumous miscarriage of justice’ as the Eurocommunist interpretation;19
and, about the interpretation of Gramsci as a harbinger of post-Marxism,
Thomas writes in another footnote – and this is all he writes about it: ‘The con-
version of an unrepentant Communist militant who died in a Fascist prison
cell into a harmless gadfly is surely among the most bizarre and distasteful epi-

18 Thomas 2009, p. 106, n. 53.

19 Thomas 2009, p. 45.

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Towards a Theory of the Integral State 55

sodes of recent intellectual fashion’.20 Surely, given the actual success story of
Laclau and Mouffe’s version of Gramsci and their contributions to the renewed
momentum of Gramscianism, would we not have been better served had Peter
Thomas taken on the challenge of a more painstaking engagement with post-
Marxism, even as a fashionable miscarriage of justice?
More significant than these quick dismissals and negative allusions, how-
ever, are the obvious lacunae in The Gramscian Moment. If we had to name
two places in the world where Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks gained enormous
momentum over the few decades, it would be hard not to mention India and
Latin America. But Peter Thomas does not say a word about the work either
of the ‘subaltern studies groups’ associated with these two regions or of the
slightly older intellectuals who were committed to theorising the place of
‘­passive revolution’ and the so-called ‘transition to democracy’ after the mili-
tary dictatorships in Argentina or Brazil – a story told, for example, by one of its
protagonists in José Aricó’s La cola del diablo: itinerario de Gramsci en América
Latina. This omission is all the more serious insofar as these i­ntellectuals –
few of whom, incidentally, would describe themselves in the first place as
­philosophers – are deeply committed as well to the idea that Gramsci is above
all a thinker, not of hegemony so much as of the integral state. On just one
occasion,21 Thomas quotes the Brazilian Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s work, part
of which has since then been translated in Gramsci’s Political Thought. But by
and large his frame of reference is limited to the Anglo-American, Italian, and
(to a lesser extent) French bibliography on Gramsci.
This is not simply a matter of empirical limitations, or of English as the inev-
itable lingua franca of intellectual and economic exchange. To be sure, Thomas
makes the case that English is ‘the linguistic zone that is arguably now the
centre of international Marxist debates’,22 and that ‘Anglophone Marxism now
occupies a dominant position that is arguably analogous to the role played in
previous periods by German and Russian (and to a lesser extent, in the 1960s,
French) Marxisms: namely, although significant theoretical projects originate
in other languages, translation into the lingua franca is usually the precondi-
tion for their internationalisation and subsequent reception in other, national-
linguistic Marxist cultures’.23 However, while the passage of translation into
English may indeed be an important (though not unavoidable) precondition
for the international influence of a work (I say not unavoidable given the

20 Thomas 2009, p. 57, n. 46.

21 Thomas 2009, p. 156, n. 59.
22 Thomas 2009, p. 15.
23 Thomas 2009, p. 15, n. 58.

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56 Bosteels

g­ rowing phenomenon of periphery-to-periphery translations and exchanges

that bypass the dominance of English), there are good reasons to assert that
the active centre of international Marxist debates has in recent decades shifted
to other, supposedly marginal or peripheral zones, such as Latin America
or Japan.
Thomas in this regard does not seem to be very consistent with one of his own
proposed principles. He himself argues in favour of a complex understanding
of historical and geopolitical oppositions, for example, regarding the East/West
opposition: ‘The question here is not posed in terms of East versus West, but
rather as one of differential times, cultural and political traditions and politi-
cal forms within the West itself’.24 Could we not use this logic of differential
times to interrogate the notion of the West itself, a notion which incidentally
comes into being as we now know it precisely during the Gramscian moment
in the first sense, that is, in between the two World Wars (with Nietzsche, for
example, still speaking of European nihilism and only Spengler or Heidegger
beginning to speak of the decline of the West)? Likewise, Thomas elsewhere
adopts the Gramscian principle of dialectically articulating the national and
international points of view: ‘In other words, the concept of hegemony is the
concrete nationalisation of the international perspective – which can only be
considered concretely in its “national” aspect, that is, its role within any given
national formation. Conversely, the national situation can only be considered,
as Gramsci incessantly repeats, in the international perspective’.25 But here,
too, as with the notion of the uneven and fractured nature of the present, it
would have been a welcome addendum to apply this principle of combined –
national and international – development to our contemporary understanding
of the Gramscian moment or momentum.
In Latin America, it would have been interesting to study how the turn to
Gramsci’s theory of the integral state and passive revolution, in the case of
many Argentine Gramscians, for example, still ended up in a plea for the con-
solidation of the democratic pact after the military dictatorship – with figures
such as Juan Carlos Portantieri, author of the highly influential Los usos de
Gramsci, and Emilio de Ípola, who interestingly enough never reneged on his
Althusserianism as witnessed in Althusser: el infinito adiós, during the so-called
transition to democracy becoming consultants and one-time speechwriters for
Raúl Alfonsín, who in 1983 became the first democratically elected ­president

24 Thomas 2009, p. 201.

25 Thomas 2009, p. 216.

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Towards a Theory of the Integral State 57

after the dictatorship in Argentina.26 Are all such instrumentalisations of

Gramsci’s thought still to be attributed to misguided understandings of the
concepts of hegemony and civil society? Or are they directly linked to the oth-
erwise quite detailed investigations from the hand of these same intellectu-
als into the passive revolutions that transformed the whole Latin American
region over the span of more than a century? In general, should we not engage
with the broader geography and genealogy of international Gramsci studies
in which some of the world’s foremost intellectuals and militant researchers
were involved in the 1970s and 1980s? That is, to pun this time on the title of
Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, should we not also think of one day
putting together a portrait of Gramsci at the Margins?27 Is it even possible to
understand the moment or momentum of Gramsci without such a portrait?28
José Aricó, in the essays collected in La cola del diablo, offers us an initial
set of clues that might help us fill this lacuna in The Gramscian Moment.29

26 The best-known essays that illustrate this use of Gramsci during the Argentine transition
to democracy were collected in Nun and Portantiero (eds.) 1987. For a discussion of
Portantiero’s trajectory, see Mocca 2012.
27 See Anderson 2010. There exists at least one anthology that seeks to go in this direction,
namely, The Postcolonial Gramsci, edited by Srivastava and Bhattacharya. For the case of
Latin America, the voice representing Gramsci in this volume is that of Walter Mignolo,
who quickly moulds Gramsci beyond recognition into a plea for his own decolonial
agenda. For a discussion of the shortcomings of this collection, see the review forum in
Postcolonial Studies 16.1 (2013).
28 Two recent books that could and perhaps should have contributed to this debate in the
end still leave us completely empty-handed. Vivek Chibber, while launching a defence of
the relevance of Marx’s thought over and against the shortcomings of postcolonial theory
in the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, shirks away from the task of addressing this
group’s (mis)appropriations of Gramsci: see Chibber 2013, p. 27; whereas Jon Beasley-
Murray, trained as a Latin Americanist, claims to move out of and beyond hegemony but
does so by relying only on the most caricatured version of Gramsci, limited to all the
familiar binaries based on one quote from the pre-critical edition, and by focusing instead
on the theory of hegemony of Ernesto Laclau as a stand-in for so-called cultural studies
and their use of this concept of hegemony at large. See Beasley-Murray 2011, p. 1.
29 See Aricó 1988. Burgos distinguishes three periods in the reception of Gramsci in
Argentina: the period of the search for a militant alliance with the working class; the
period of exile and self-criticism during the dictatorship; and the reconsideration of
the link between socialism and democracy under Alfonsín. For the second of these
periods, see also the analysis of the Mexican journal Controversia edited by several of
the Argentine Gramscians, in Gago 2012. More recently, for the return to Gramsci in the
context of Kirchnerism in Argentina, see Della Rocca 2013. See also the anthologies edited
by Dora Kanoussi (Kanoussi 1998, 2004a and 2004b). Gramsci plays a pivotal role in Aricó’s
posthumously published seminar on the relation of Marxist politics and economics. See

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58 Bosteels

Going back to several international seminars on Gramsci’s presence in Latin

America, one held in 1980 in Morelia, Mexico,30 and another in September
1985 at the Gramsci Institute in Ferrara, Italy,31 he interrogates precisely the
reasons behind the ‘actuality’ of Gramsci for that historical period in Latin
America, when in Italy and France, contrary to what had been the case in the
1970s, the influence of this thinker already seemed to be waning. For Aricó,
however, the incorporation of Gramscianism into the debate in Argentina was
neither merely academic nor limited to topics for philological reconstruction.
Héctor P. Agosti in the 1950s, for instance, made Gramsci into a key referent for
the Argentine Communist Party and launched among others the concept of
‘interrupted revolution’ as a translation of Gramsci’s ‘rivoluzione fallita’, soon
to be followed in the 1960s and 1970s by the most variegated invocations of
Gramsci as a Sorelian voluntarist, a Togliattian Guevarist, a proto-Maoist and,
finally, a national-popular left-Peronist inspired by the short-lived promise of
the armed wing of the Montoneros. In all of these cases, Aricó insists, the mea-
suring stick for evaluating the actuality of Gramsci for a Marxist programme
of militant investigations was not purely conceptual but politico-ideological –
with the central problem always being the role of culture in the divide or fusion
between the workers’ movement and intellectuals. This is why Aricó wants
his book on the Italian thinker’s itinerary in Latin America to be judged, ‘not
as an exercise in Gramscian philology but as the testimony of an unfinished
quest’, that is, the quest for a unity of theory and practice, just as the aim of the
main journal of the Argentine Gramscians, Pasado y Presente (first period in
Córdoba, 1963–5, and then in Buenos Aires, a short-lived second period with
barely two numbers in 1973), ‘pretended to organise a labour of recuperation
of the hegemonic capacity of Marxist theory, by putting it to the test of the
exigencies of the present.’32 In Los usos de Gramsci, Portantiero likewise sees

‘Gramsci y la teoría política’ in Aricó 2011, pp. 245–318. In English, see also the recent work
of Ronaldo Munck, especially the chapter on ‘Hegemony Struggles’ in Munck 2013.
30 See Labastida and del Campo (eds.) 1985. Interestingly, this volume contains an early
version of Ernesto Laclau’s hegemony theory as well as a detailed rebuttal by Sergio
Zermeño. Shortly before the Morelia conference, another international Gramsci
conference was held in Mexico with the participation of Buci-Glucksmann, Macciocchi
and Portantiero, the proceedings of which are published in Sirvent (ed.) 1980.
31 The conference at the Instituto Gramsci in Ferrara (11–13 September 1985) was devoted
to the topic ‘Political Transformations in Latin America: Gramsci’s Presence in Latin
American Culture’. The proceedings were published in Portuguese in Coutinho and
Nogueira (eds.) 1988.
32 Aricó 1988, pp. 16 and 63. Aricó believes that the label ‘Argentine Gramscians’ may have
been the invention of Ernesto Laclau in an article for the journal Izquierda Nacional in

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Towards a Theory of the Integral State 59

this political ­orientation as the necessary guiding thread to our understand-

ing of the development of all of Gramsci’s thought. For Portantiero, moreover,
this means that in the wake of the crisis of Marxism-Leninism, a crisis that
began in the late 1960s and culminated in the 1970s, the Quaderni del Carcere
may well be less relevant than Gramsci’s youthful texts for L’Ordine Nuovo with
their still untapped potential for a critical reconsideration of council com-
munism, worker’s control, and democratic self-government – in short, for a
practical reevaluation of the principle of unity between socialism and democ-
racy, inspired by the experience of 1920s Turin that some of the Argentine
Gramscians thought could be translated and relived fifty years later on the
other side of the Atlantic.33
Had Peter Thomas taken into account some of these Latin American incar-
nations of Gramscianism, he would have been able to establish a fruitful dia-
logue about the broad conceptual reorientation that also undergirds his own
approach in The Gramscian Moment. In some of the presentations at the meet-
ing in Morelia, for example, scholars already insisted on the need to bypass all
the binaries that at that time were beginning to give way to a watered-down
version of Gramsci for dummies.34 Furthermore, in his influential introduction
to Gramsci in Brazil, which was quickly translated and went through numer-
ous editions in Spanish, Coutinho – like Peter Thomas – takes the central con-
cern of Gramsci’s to be the issue of the integral or amplified state.35 Finally, as
if all this were not enough, over the past year or two some of the most burning
issues in Latin American politics have also been addressed in terms of a battle
over the legacy of Gramsci. Thus, in Bolivia, Luis Tapia analyses the changing
landscape of the past decade as a shift from ‘catharsis’ to ‘transformism’, with
both terms being used in their Gramscian sense, that is, ‘catharsis’ as the shift
from the corporate-economistic to the ethico-political and ‘transformism’ as
the revolution without revolution with which the bourgeois state preserves its
fundamental power structures.36 Meanwhile, Álvaro García Linera, in the inau-
gural speech for his second term as the Vice-President of Bolivia, proposed an

1963, titled ‘Gramsci y los gramscianos’ and signed with the pseudonym of Ricardo Videla.
See Aricó 1988, p. 67.
33 See especially the title essay, ‘Los usos de Gramsci’, in Portantiero 1983, pp. 67–146.
34 See de Riz and De Ípola 1985, p. 66.
35 See Coutinho 1986, pp. 108–29.
36 See Tapia 2011. See also Coutinho 1986, p. 93. Already in 1988 Aricó observes that the
list of works on ‘transformism’ and ‘passive revolution’ in Latin America is too long to
enumerate. In English, see also the recent work of Adam David Morton (Morton 2007 and
2011).

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60 Bosteels

intriguing reuse of Gramsci’s concept of the integral state: this time, however,
not as a phenomenon of the bourgeois state’s expansive development since the
nineteenth century but instead as a name for the move toward a post-­capitalist
future: ‘The social movements can only become state power, they can only
assume the task of constructing an integral state that optimally articulates civil
society with the political state, if they seek gradually to dissolve the monopoly
of the state into society itself.’37 To gauge the importance of this proposed shift
from the ‘apparent state’ to the ‘integral state’, philological accuracy clearly will
prove to be insufficient. Compared to Gramsci’s terminology, Linera’s use of
the concept of integral state is technically imprecise, combining as it does fea-
tures of the history of the expansion of the bourgeois state with the notion of
the absorption of political society back into civil society. Gramsci himself cer-
tainly imagines this to be the path toward a post-capitalist future but without
ever using the term ‘integral state’ for that purpose. Rather, as Coutinho also
insists, it is what Gramsci describes as the regulated society of communist self-
government.38 Still, through Linera’s notion of the integral state, we see once
again how a certain creative (mis)reading appears to be crucial in the contem-
porary regaining of momentum of Gramsci’s thought.
If the Latin American case thus helps us remember the extent to which
the ‘uses of Gramsci’, to borrow Portantiero’s title, always were and continue
to be tactical and strategic – that is to say political – in nature, then why
would the value of Gramsci’s thought primarily have to be phrased in terms
of a revitalisation of (Marxist) philosophy, as is the case in The Gramscian
Moment – e­ specially in the Hegelian definition of philosophy as ‘conception
of the world’, or, ‘its time expressed in thought’?39 Even if, to correct Hegel,
we supplement our understanding of the historicity of dialectical progress by
adding the notions of uneven and combined development, or of the noncon-
temporaneity of the contemporary, what do we gain by concluding this master-
ful revision of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks with a fundamental programme for
philosophical research? But also, and above all, what do we lose in doing so?
In this move from historical materialism to the philosophy of praxis, do we not
lose sight of the actual praxis, precisely by remaining within the disciplinary
bounds of philosophy? And is this praxis not meant to be political before being
philosophical?

37 See García Linera 2010, p. 13.

38 See ‘ “Sociedad regulada” y fin del Estado’, in Coutinho 1986, pp. 122–9.
39 Thomas 2009, p. 289.

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Towards a Theory of the Integral State 61

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