Category Archives: Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci: On Hegemony

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

In Antonio Gramsci’s first Prison Notebook—he wrote 29 of them—he’s still using hegemony in the sense of a crude political leadership, much in the same way as he used it in his seminal essay “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.” … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Marxism, Power, The State | 2 Comments

Guha: Dominance Without Hegemony?

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Intro & Ch. 1] Intuitively, it’s odd that the Subaltern Studies crowd has drawn so heavily on Gramsci, since he had surprisingly little to … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Critique, Hegemony, Historical-Geographies, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Power, The State, Violence | 5 Comments

Suffering for Territory

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Moore, Donald. 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This is a hard book to summarize because of the intricacy of the argument, its theoretical architectures, and its deep ethnographic empirics—they are … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Governmentality, Historical-Geographies, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment

Laclau and Mouffe on Hegemony

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd Edition. London: Verso. The authors situate their book with what they perceive as a crisis of Marxism in the mid 1970’s, and they position … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Marxism, Power, The State | 3 Comments

Stuart Hall (Gramsci and Us)

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Happy May Day!

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Everyday Life, Hegemony, Marxism, The State | Comments Off on Stuart Hall (Gramsci and Us)

Hegemony à la Raymond Williams

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Ch. 6] Williams claims hegemony goes beyond both conceptions of “culture” and “ideology”: for culture, because of “its insistence on relating the ‘whole social process’ to specific distributions of power … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Marxism, Power | Comments Off on Hegemony à la Raymond Williams

Hegemony and the Philosophy of Praxis

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

After reading Antonio Santucci’s short political biography on Gramsci and after re-reading some of the Prison Notebooks (edited and translated by J. Buttigieg), I want to offer a reading of the relation and significance of “hegemony” within what Gramsci conceives … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Dialectics, Hegemony, Historical Materialism, Marxism, The State | 2 Comments

Machiavelli’s The Prince

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

How to summarize The Prince? It begins by parsing all the different kinds of possible principalities: hereditary, won by force, one by popular elections, etc. His main concern is how Princes can attain and maintain new principalities, the making, unmaking, … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Niccolo Machiavelli, Power, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Machiavelli’s The Prince