Such problems are of great importance. They determine so-called spiritual crises and every so often confront us with so-called affairs. Socialism is an integral vision of life: it has a philosophy, a mystique, a morality. The association would be the proper place to discuss these problems, clarify them and propagate them.
To a large extent, the question of the intellectuals would also be solved. The intellectuals represent a dead weight in our movement because they do not have a specific role in it which fits their capabilities.
They would find it; their intellectualism, their intelligence, would be put to the test. By establishing this cultural institute, the socialists would deal a fierce blow to the dogmatic and intolerant mentality created in the Italian people by Catholic and Jesuit education. The Italian populace lacks the spirit of disinterested solidarity, love of free discussion, the desire to discover the truth with uniquely human means, which reason and intelligence provide.
The Socialists would give an active and positive example of this. They would contribute powerfully to the creation of a new morality, freer and more open-minded than the present one, more inclined to accept their principles and goals.
In England and Germany there were and are powerful organizations of proletarian and socialist culture. In England the Fabian Society, which belonged to the International, is particularly well known. It has succeeded, moreover, in involving a large part of the English intellectual and university world in this work of civilization and liberation.
Given the environment and the maturity of the proletariat in Turin, the first core group of a distinctly socialist and proletarian cultural organization could and should arise here. Together with the party and the Labour Confederation, it would become the third organ of the movement for the vindication of the Italian working class.
Unsigned, Avanti! This reply to the article signed Most humbly and called Tra la cultura e lignoranza Between Culture and Ignorance , is intended as a practical illustration of one of the major goals which the proposed cultural association should set itself.
I think that as such he should have clear and precise criteria on organization, more so than any other militant in the socialist movement: if it is true that the concept of organization is basic in socialist thought, it is also true that the profession, the specific activity of the organizer, bears with it a greater amount of responsibility. I say this because Most humbly writes and raises objections as a disorganized person might. In other words he fails to transfer the concepts that inform his specific activity to another activity.
He does not. According to his tastes and inclinations he can find books, newspapers, magazines. Participating in our movement contributes greatly to the development of ones intelligence.
If someone has the necessary requisites for developing his own culture, there is no reason to make him remain ignorant. But we should avoid wanting to make everybody cultured because, in many cases, a false culture stuffed with a bit of everything can be more harmful than simple ignorance Quoted in CF, p. Nor does he bother to consider whether those who belong to his federation, when they reflect on what he has written, might not generalize it and dissolve the organization because the workshop is sufficient to create the proletarian souljust as the chance to buy books and reviews is sufficient for the person who wants to become educated, because capitalist society naturally engenders the class struggle, just as it naturally engenders class thinking and the clash between two ways of thinking, two sets of ideals.
Because of his activity, however, Most humbly is convinced that the workshop is not enough, that class solidarity if it is to take active effect and triumph must be organized, disciplined and limited. In other words, he is convinced that nature, necessity, is only such in so far as it is transformed, through thought, into an exact awareness of ends and means.
Therefore, he propagandizes the need to create specific organs of economic struggle capable of articulating this necessity, of purifying it of every sentimental and individualistic obstruction and of forming proletarians in the socialist sense. Why not transfer these concepts to cultural activity? Because Most humbly, like so many others in this fine country, lacks the habit of generalization, of synthesis, which is necessary if one wants complete people and not people who take each instance in isolation, of now I see you now I dont, of tomorrow yes today no, of ifs and buts, etc.
Most humbly has a concept of culture that is inaccurate too. He believes that culture equals knowing a little of everything, that it equals the Popular University. I give culture this meaning: exercise of thought, acquisition of general ideas, habit of connecting causes and effects. For me, everybody is already cultured because everybody thinks, everybody connects causes and effects. They therefore waver, disband, soften, or become violent, intolerant, quarrelsome, according to the occasion and the circumstances.
Ill make myself clearer: I have a Socratic idea of culture; I believe that it means thinking well, whatever one thinks, and therefore acting well, whatever one does. And since I know that culture too is a basic concept of socialism, because it integrates and makes concrete the vague concept of freedom of thought, I would like it to be enlivened by the other concept, that of organization.
Let us organize culture in the same way that we seek to organize any practical activity. Philanthropically, the bourgeoisie have decided to offer the proletariat the Popular Universities. As a counterproposal to philanthropy, let us offer solidarity, organization. Let us give the means to good will, without which it will always remain sterile and barren. It is not the lecture that should interest us, but the detailed work of discussing and investigating problems, work in which everybody participates, to which everybody contributes, in which everybody is both master and disciple.
Naturally, for it to be an organization and not a confusion, it must interpret a need. Is this need widespread or is it that of a few? The few can begin: nothing is more pedagogically effective than an active example for revealing needs to others, for making them acutely felt.
One can do without the buffet for the few and tomorrow one can do without it for the many. Culture understood in the humanistic sense is itself a joy and an intrinsic satisfaction. The clubs, the groups cannot suffice. They have practical needs and are themselves caught up in the vortex of current events. And then there is another reason.
As well as lacking the ability to generalize, many Italians have another deficiency, which is historically due to the lack of any tradition of democratic life in our country: they are unable to carry on different activities in a single place.
The majority are people of just one activity. And there will be no shortage of problems to discuss, not least because the problems must not so much count in and for themselves, as for the way in which they are treated. But this can be dealt with another time if the proposal has really found an echo among comrades or if the proclaimed necessity of the association is not merely someones wishful thinking.
Unsigned, Avanti Piedmont edition, 24 December Is there that much point in discussing just now a problem like that of a single language? If it really is a problem and not a scholastic question, I think there is. I am convinced that all mans historical activity is a unity, that thought is a unity. I thus see in the solution of any one of the problems of culture the potential solution of all the others. I believe it is useful to accustom peoples minds to grasp this unity in the many facets of life, to accustom them to the organic search for truth and clarity and to applying the fundamental principles of a doctrine to every occasion.
Intransigence occurs in thought before it occurs in action, and it must. Zamenhof in Earlier, Gramsci had published a readers letter proposing the adoption of Esperanto, and had appended to it his sub-editorial comment criticizing the suggestion on grounds similar to those stated here CF, pp.
The Avanti! Gramsci replied, again anonymously, presenting himself as a student preparing my thesis on the history of the language, trying to apply the critical methods of historical materialism to this research as well. He pointed out the absurdity of rejecting an idea in theory and yet supporting it in practice CF, pp. The debate therefore led Gramsci to make a more or less explicit attack on the backwardness and superficiality of the partys approach to cultural questions.
We will thus not leave the job of weighing up our varied activity to caprice, to the play of forces beyond our comprehension. The advocates of a single language are worried by the fact that while the world contains a number of people who would like to communicate directly with one another, there is an endless number of different languages which restrict the ability to communicate. This is a cosmopolitan, not an international anxiety, that of the bourgeois who travels for business or pleasure, of nomads more than of stable productive citizens.
They would like artificially to create consequences which as yet lack the necessary conditions, and since their activity is merely arbitrary, all they manage to do is waste the time and energy of those who take them seriously. They would like artificially to create a definitively inflexible language which will not admit changes in space and time.
In this they come head on against the science of language, which teaches that language in and for itself is an expression of beauty more than a means of communication, and that the history of the fortunes and diffusion of a given language depends strictly on the.
In one of his earlier articles on Esperanto, Gramsci had written: Should not intransigence be understood primarily as intransigence with wrongheaded ideas? It arose under the impetus of seventeenth-century dogmatism and the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment. The aim was to give rise to the language of the bourgeois cosmopolis, the unity of bourgeois thought created by the propaganda of the Encyclopaedists.
Catherine II of Russia made the state spend a stack of money for the compilation of a dictionary of all languages, the cocoon of the inter- linguistic butterfly. But the cocoon never matured, because there was no live embryo inside it. In Italy this anxiety became a national one and was expressed in the Accademia della Crusca, purism and the ideas of Manzoni. But the beauty. Ascoli See F. Lo Piparo, Lingua intellettuali egemonia in Gramsci, Bari , p. The Accademia della Crusca published a dictionary in which listed pure Tuscan words i.
Other purists followed suit. Alessandro Manzoni opposed them by advocating modern educated spoken Florentine as a model. It is not the language that is beautiful but poetic masterpieces, and their beauty consists in their adequately expressing the writers inner world. In this sense a line from the Divine Comedy is as beautiful as a childs expression of nave wonder as it admires a toy. He answered: all Italians will have to speak Tuscan and the Italian state will have to recruit its elementary teachers in Tuscany.
Tuscan will be substituted for the numerous dialects spoken in the various regions and, with Italy formed, the Italian language will be formed too. Manzoni managed lo influence on changes in forms of speech. Books act to regulate and conserve the most widespread and oldest linguistic forms. The same thing that happens to the dialects of a nation, which slowly assimilate literary forms and lose their peculiar characteristics, will probably happen to literary languages when confronted with a language that surmounts them.
But this language could be one of those existing now: that for instance of the first country to found socialism, which would become attractive and would seem beautiful because through it our civilization, asserted in one part of th-M in so far as the shared life of the nation gave rise to numerous and stable contacts between the various parts of the nation; that the spread of a particular language is due to the productive activity of the writings, trade and commerce of the people who speak that particular language.
In the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries Tuscany had writers like Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli and Guicciardini who. Croce argued Estetica, [], Bari , pp. It had bankers, craftsmen and manufacturers who carried Tuscan products and the names of these products throughout Italy.
Later, it reduced its productivity of goods and books and thus its linguistic productivity as well. A few years ago, Professor Alfredo Panzini published a dictionary of the modern spoken language; it shows how many Milanese words have reached as far as Sicily and Apulia. Milan sends newspapers, reviews, books, goods and commercial travellers throughout Italy and it therefore also sends some characteristic expressions of the Italian language spoken by its inhabitants.
If a single language, one that is also spoken in a given region and has a living source to which it can refer, cannot be imposed on the limited field of the nation, how then could an international language take root when it is completely artificial and mechanical, completely ahistorical, not fed by great writers, lacking the expressive richness which comes from the variety of dialects, from the variety of forms assumed in different times?
But they reply: Esperanto intends to be no more than an auxiliary language, and anyway the best proof of its validity is the fact that over a million people already speak it and it allows you to dispense with interpreters at international congresses and to work quickly.
They say: the Esperantists are like the man who walked in front of the philosopher who denied movement. But the comparison is inexact. The Esperantists understand each other at congresses of Esperantists, just as a group of deaf-mutes would understand each other at their congress by signs and nods.
We would not advise someone to learn deaf and dumb language for this reason. Furthermore, congress delegates would have to be chosen from among Esperantists, and this would introduce a criterion of selection completely extraneous to political currents and ideas. The justification of the movement is thus no more than sophistry, it can only seem persuasive for a moment.
And the argument for the auxiliary function of Esperanto collapses as well. When might Esperanto be auxiliary? And to whom? The majority of citizens carry out their activity stably in a fixed place and do not need to correspond too often by letter with other countries. Let us have no doubt about it: Esperanto, the single language, is nothing but a vain idea, an illusion of cosmopolitan, humanitarian, democratic mentalities which have not yet been made fertile and been shaken by historical critical thinking.
What attitude should the Socialists adopt towards the promoters of single languages, the Esperantists? They must simply uphold their own doctrines and fight those who would like the Party to become the official champion and propagator of Esperanto the Milan section must still house a request from comrade Seassaro which explicitly asks for full adoption of Esperanto by the Party. The Socialists are struggling for the creation of the economic and political conditions necessary to install collectivism and the International.
When the International is formed, it is possible that the increased contacts between peoples, the methodical and regular integration of large masses of workers, will slowly bring about a reciprocal adjustment between the Aryo-European languages and will probably extend them throughout the world, because of the influence the new civilization will exert. But this process can then happen freely and spontaneously.
Linguistic pressures are exerted only from the bottom upwards. But this language could be one of those existing now: that for instance of the first country to found socialism, which would become attractive and would seem beautiful because through it our civilization, asserted in one part of the world, is expressed, because in it books will be written that no longer will be critical but will be descriptive of lived experiences, because in it novels and poems will be written that will vibrate with the new life that has been established, with the sacrifices made to consolidate it and with the hope that the same will occur elsewhere.
Only by working for the coming of the International will Socialists be working for the possible coming of a single language. The attempts that one can make now belong to the realm of Utopia. They are a product of the same mentality that wanted the phalansteries and happy colonies. In history, in social life, nothing is fixed, rigid or definitive. And nothing ever will be. New truths increase. Marx and Engels had remarked on Fourier, Owen and Cabet in the Communist Manifesto: They still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding little phalanstres, of establishing home colonies, of setting up a little Icariaduodecimo editions of the New Jerusalemand to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.
New and ever superior needs are created by new living conditions. New moral and intellectual curiosities goad the spirit and compel it to renew itself, to improve itself, to change the linguistic forms of expression by taking them from foreign languages, by reviving dead forms and by changing meanings and grammatical functions.
In this constant effort towards perfection, in this flow of liquefied volcanic matter, utopias, arbitrary acts and vain illusions like that of a present single language and of Esperanto burn up and are annihilated. Camillo Prampolinis Giustizia is offering its readers a survey of the opinions expressed in the socialist weeklies on the controversy between the editors of Avanti!
The Difesa of Florence and the Grido of Turin, the two most rigid and cultural exponents of the doctrine of intransigence, conduct broad theoretical speculations which we cannot possible summarize and which there would in any case be little point in reproducing, sincedespite the fact that these two newspapers claim to be genuine interpreters of the proletariat and to have the great mass with themour readers would not be sufficiently learned to understand their language.
And the implacable Giustizia, to avoid accusations of malevolent irony, quotes two passages at random from an article in the Grido, concluding: It would be hard to achieve greater proletarian clarity than this. Comrade Prampolini offers us an occasion to take up a question of no.
When this article was written, the PSI leadership, supported by Avanti! Let us admit that the article in the Grido was the ultimate in difficulty and proletarian obscurity. Could we have written it otherwise? It was in reply to an article in La Stampa, and the Stampa piece had used a precise philosophical language which was neither a superfluity nor an affectation, since every current of thought has its particular language and vocabulary.
Our reply needed to stay on the same ground as our opponents thought, we needed to show that even with, indeed because of that current of thought which is our own, the current of thought of a socialism which is neither scrappily put together nor childishly simple , the collaborationist line was wrong. In order to be easy we would have had to falsify and impoverish a debate which hinged on concepts of the utmost importance, on the most fundamental and precious substance of our spirit.
Doing that is not being easy: it amounts to fraud, like the wine merchant who passes off coloured water as Barolo or Lambrusco. A concept which is difficult in itself cannot be made easy when it is expressed without becoming vulgarized. And pretending that this vulgarization is still the same concept is to act like trivial demagogues, tricksters in logic and propaganda.
So why Camillo Prampolinis cheap irony about the interpreters of the proletariat who cant make themselves understood by the proletarians? Because Prampolini, with all his good sense and rule of thumb, thinks in abstractions. The proletariat is a practical construct: in reality there are individual proletarians, more or less educated, more or less equipped by the class struggle to understand the most refined socialist concepts.
The socialist weeklies adapt themselves to the average level of the regional strata they address. Turin is a modern city.
Capitalist activity throbs in it with the crashing din of massive workshops which concentrate tens of thousands of proletarians into a few thousand cubic meters. Turin has over half a million inhabitants. The human race is divided here into two classes with distinguishing characteristics not found elsewhere in Italy.
We dont have democrats and petty reformists in our way. We have a bold and unscrupulous capitalist bourgeoisie, we have strong organizations, we have a complex and varied socialist movement, rich in impulses and intellectual needs. Does comrade Prampolini think that in Turin the Socialists should conduct their propaganda on shepherds pipes, talking idyllically about goodness, justice and Arcadian fraternity?
Here the class struggle lives in all its raw grandeur, it is not a rhetorical fiction, a projection of scientific and predictive concepts into social phenomena that are still nascent and developing.
Of course, in Turin too the proletarian class is continually absorbing new individuals who are not intellectually developed, not able to understand the full significance of the exploitation to which they are subjected.
For them it will always be necessary to start from first principles, from elementary propaganda. But the others? The proletarians who have already progressed intellectually and are already used to the language of socialist criticism?
Who ought to be sacrificed, whom should one address? The proletariat is less complicated than might appear. They have spontaneously formed an intellectual and cultural hierarchy, and reciprocal education is at work where the activity of the writers and propagandists cannot penetrate.
In a complex and varied environment like that of a major industrial city the organs of capillary transmission of opinion, which the will of the leaders would never succeed in creating and setting up, arise spontaneously.
And are we supposed to remain for ever at the Georgics, at rustic and idyllic socialism? Are we supposed to go on repeating the ABC with monotonous insistence, because there is always someone who doesnt know it?
We are reminded here of an old university professor who for forty years was meant to be running a course of theoretical philosophy on the final evolutionary being.
Every year he began a review of the precursors of the system and he talked about Lao-tse, the old man- young boy of Chinese philosophy, the man born at the age of eighty. And so the final evolutionary being became a legend, an evanescent chimera, and the only living reality for all those generations of students was Lao-tse, the old man-young boy, the child born at the age of eighty. This is what happens to the class struggle in Camillo Prampolinis old Giustizia: it too is an evanescent chimera, and every week what it writes about is the old man-young boy who never matures, who never evolves,.
According so legend, he remained in his mothers womb for sixty years and was born with white hair. This anecdote of the professor and the Lao-tse paradox was a favourite one of Gramscis. The serial novel is, if it can be so described, a powerful factor in the formation of the mentality and morality of the people. Millions of women and young people read these fables offered in parsimonious doses by the big and even the small newspapers.
The story runs for whole seasons at a time: the art of the novelist consists essentially in ending each instalment with an adventure that starts with an enigmatic sentence. The genre originated in the nineteenth century. By it already had astute practitioners, and it reached a kind of peak around with Alexandre Dumas, Eugne Sue and George Sand, who was very skilful at stimulating her readers curiosity.
In a theatre article of 21 April CF, p. We have chosen to keep it in this edition because of its connections with Gramscis work on popular fiction during his imprisonment see section IX below. Books were expensive and most readers made do with those printed in the papers, which could be cut out like coupons and collected once their format was standardized at the bottom of a page.
The sudden broadening- out of the novel to a relatively mass readership was accompanied, in the case of novelists like Sue and Sand, by an interest in socialist and philanthropic subject matter. Gaboriau continued the tradition of the serial novel. With Sue, Dumas, Sand and Fval, the serial novel still belongs to literature.
Writing too much harms ones style, yet these are writers, and also original inventors. The Three Musketeers may more or less take its inspiration from previous historical novels but, in a certain sense, it has a new physiognomy. It is original. The Mysteries of Paris was a genuine creation: through it a new world was introduced into literary tradition.
George Sand belongs indisputably to the history of literature. With Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau, literature declines although the latter conceived a new genre, the detective novel.
It is after them that the modern serial novel begins, which nearly always has a most banal form and a stupid content. It is dependent on the serial novel that preceded it but, with a few honourable exceptions, has completely lost all its character and style. It retains nothing from its Romantic forerunners except the clever and sensational plot, which is also carried over into theatrical works after the nauseating example of Dennery.
For later comments by Gramsci on these novels, see Section IX below. Now it is a lachrymose literature only suitable for stupefying the women, girls and youngsters who feed on it. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. I, PP. Pergamon Journals Ltd. This volume contains an excellent translation by William Boelhower and informative, short prefaces to its ten sub-sections. Most of the texts are taken from passages of the Prison Notebooks previously not translated into English.
Moreover, there are selections from his journalistic output unknown to English-reading audiences. By second nature he thought of socialist politics as an extension of cultural enlightenment.
He admired Italian bourgeois reviews ,! He therefore thought the Italian Futurists were revolutionaries even if he had reservations about theirextravagances. He was sensitive to the tensions created between metropolitan languages and theit country bumpkin dialect cousins.
Language held the key to codes and these codes were translated into power. Buy This Book in Print. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.
Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. As a matter of fact, Gramsci did not publish a book, including his notes which were written in Prison between - After he died in , Prison Notebook was published, including various collections.
In this sense, it sometimes causes seeing different perspectives of the same subject while the researchers were reading on the Gramscianism. Nevertheless, a common literature is originated from the works of Robert W. Cox, Stephen Gill, William I.
Robinson, Anrico Augelli and Craig Murphy. Main problematic of Gramsci is how existing groups and social classes formed the hegemony through creating their own intellectuals and the bourgeoisie. Realists regard the hegemony as it represents the dominance of one state over another. But for Gramsci, hegemony is formed through a social and political control mechanism. These controls have intellectual, ethical and cultural meaning when it continues through consent of the social classes and groups.
Even both notions living together for the continuation of hegemony, the relations among classes, state and civil society within hegemonic order based on consent rather than coercion. In this respect, coercion and consent have been merged since the consent for the continuation of hegemony was protected by coercion Barrett, The Gramscian analyses of international relations mainly contributed to understanding the debates in the post-Cold-War era. Thus, the single power position of the US in the world politics brought the notion of hegemony to the forefront.
Especially, the notion of hegemony and world order are popularly debated in the analyses of the international relations. So, these are the main issues in the post-Cold War era. The Concept of Eurocentrism According to Edward Said 10 , after the Renaissance and Reform processes, the development in science and technology brought the supremacy of the West. Moreover, with the emergence of the capitalist social structure and inequality of the other parts of the world as a result of colonial history, the hegemonic position of the West was formed Said, So, under this hegemonic positioning of the West, Eurocentric perspective was developed and widened to the world with the new conceptions supporting the Western supremacy.
In this new identity construction process, Eurocentric thinkers gave supremacy over the Western self and 58 lowered the Eastern cultural perspectives. This issue also affected to the emergence of one sided history, which is showing the West in the center of the human civilization.
The development of Eurocentrism and in relation to this the formation of Western identity perspective provided a progressive characteristic in the scope of rationality of the actions and the development of liberal social and economic models.
So, this created an interventionist mentality for the Western political sphere. In this regard, major interventions were made in the name of widening the Western civilization that had a colonial perspective behind it.
The historical narrative of Western colonialism concerned to present the East with all manner of regressive and anti-developmental debates. This treatment ensured that slavery and stagnation would be the fate of the East McDougall, So, the Eurocentric understanding separated the West as at the heart of enlightenment and the East as at the hearth of the medieval darkness in its least developed function. Moreover, after the nineteenth century the idea of superiority of Europe over the East leads to increase the interventionist policies based on the western supremacy perspective over other nations of other parts of the world See Amin, These changes also affected the social sciences in terms of the dominance of Eurocentric concepts.
In this respect, the modernist approaches motivated the West to spread own thoughts over other nations by colonizing them. This colonization period affected the colonized countries to have instability in their political systems, especially after the colonization period. However, at the end it affected to spread Eurocentric perspectives to these colonized countries, which made them a part of Western intellectual and social development process. Indeed, to be regarded as Eurocentric in research and analyses, it is not important to write only on the West.
However, many Eurocentric books can be written about the other parts of the world, even about the global south. The important thing here is how the situation is seen and analyzed either with a Eurocentric perspective or other approach used to define the concept. One of the important reasons of this incomprehensibility is because of the major analyses using the Eurocentric perspective is becoming under the research area of the social sciences.
As a result of this, Eurocentric concepts dominate the research methods and analyses of the social sciences. According to Gurminder Bhambra 5 , Eurocentrism is the imagination that considers the important developments in the history of Europe has a special influence in the historical development of the world.
In this regard, Eurocentric is used to refer the writers, who explicitly celebrate all the things Western. In relation to the explanations of Eurocentrism, Gramscian concept concerns the civil society for the formation of both hegemony and the counter hegemonic resistance. As a matter of fact, the existence of a powerful civil society is a European phenomenon that developed through the industrialization process.
Within this civil society perspective of Gramscian scholars, major debates are going on the formation of the hegemony in its socially constructed nature. It is because of the existence of the civil society background of the hegemonic power.
In this regard, because of the hegemonic power base of the civil society, probability for counter hegemony is shown very limited. Also, the general representation of the working class is regarded as captured by the power of global capital Cox, This is one of the 59 issues that Gramscian concept of hegemony is analyzed within a Eurocentric conception because of it is based on the civil society background. Importantly, the concept of Eurocentrism has been challenged by many Gramscian scholars such as Robert Cox through an analysis of the hegemonic nature of it See Cox and Sinclair, - Cox has used Gramscian conception of hegemony for the analysis of the international relations to counter the dominant ideologies of the time such as neorealism.
Even challenging major theoretical arguments of neorealism, his position of the critic always stayed under the Eurocentric perspective. This is mainly because of the nature of the development process of both theoretical positions, which were in the Western cultural perspective. The analyses based on Gramscian concept of hegemony mainly deals with the formation of hegemony starting from the civil society level Gramsci, In this respect, as explained previously, it is the most useful to analyze the formation of the hegemony in the countries where civil society is developed.
Not surprisingly, these countries are in the West as well as the countries emerged under Western cultural development process. So, this makes them be under the domination of Eurocentric perspectives. It is mostly used to analyze the decline of the power of historical hegemonic countries such as the decline of the British Empire and the emergence of the US hegemony in the post-WWII period. In this respect, his starting point of the analysis is the ethnic exploitation of the North towards the South See Gramsci, Later, he developed his conception for the analysis of the competition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
In this regard, his ideas have been shaped from the existence of inequalities not only in the proletariat - bourgeoisie competition, but also including the peasants and the other subordinated groups in the society.
Moreover, starting from the North - South Italy example, this perspective provides the way of analysis in international relations concerning the coalition of subordinated countries against to the existing hegemonic power of the world. However, as explained previously, this conception considers a strong civil society base of the formation of the hegemony as well as the emergence of a counter hegemonic process.
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