A four-day international Conference on "Gramsci and the Twentieth Century" was held in Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, from April 15 to 18, 1997. Forty-seven speakers, almost all university professors, from nine countries (Argentina, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia, United States) met in the spacious conference hall of the Bank of Sardinia. From 100 to 200 persons, including large contingents of students from local high schools and from the University of Cagliari, attended at least one of the Conference's seven sessions, which were held to mark the 60th anniversary of Gramsci's death on April 27, 1937. The municipal administration of Cagliari, the provincial governments of Cagliari, Ales and Ghilarza, the regional government of Sardinia, the Universities of Cagliari and Sassari, and the Gramsci Foundation Institute of Rome collaborated in sponsoring the Conference, which also had the official approval and patronage of the President of the Italian Republic.
Papers in Spanish were simultaneously translated into English and Italian; papers in Italian and English were also reciprocally translated.
The following individuals presented papers at the Conference:
From Canada: Robert W. Cox, Stephen Gill
From the U.S.: John M. Cammett, Jean L. Cohen, Mitchell Cohen, Benedetto Fontana, Frank Rosengarten, Nadia Urbinati From Mexico: Dora Kanoussi, Reyes Garmendia Ernesto Soto, Marco Velazquez
From Argentina: Juan Carlos Portantiero
From Brazil: Carlos Nelson Coutinho
From Britain: Anne Showstack Sassoon
From Germany: Ursula Aptizsch
From Italy: Alfonso Berardelli, Remo Bodei, Paolo Bonetti, Giuseppe Cacciatore, Michele Ciliberto, Emma Fattorini, Giulio Ferroni, Emma Giammatei, Francesca Izzo, Tommaso La Rocca, Claudia Mancina, Luciano Marrocu, Marcello Montanari, Massimo Montanari, Eugenio [END PAGE 13] Orrù, Maria Carmen Pericolo, Massimo Pivetti, Silvio Pons, Roberto Racinaro, Mario Ricciardi, Nereide Rudas, Giulio Sapelli, Enzo Siciliano, Giancarlo Schirru, Silvano Tagliagambe, Walter Tega, Mario Telò, Maurizio Viroli, Mario Zanantoni, Renato Zangheri
From Russia: Viktor Petrovic Gajduk, Irina Vladimirovna Grigoreva.
The papers covered an extraordinarily wide selection of topics and problems pertinent not only to Gramsci studies proper but also to currently debated issues in Italian and world politics. Among the latter were the causes of the crisis and downfall of communist governments in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe; the areas of compatibility and contradiction in the relationship between socialism and democracy; neo-liberalism and globalization; and ethnic and other particularistic claims on political loyalty and commitment. Among the former were the nature and meanings of civil society and the relationship between civil society and the state in Gramsci's thought; philosophy and religion in the Prison Notebooks; Gramsci's attitude towards the polity of the Soviet Union; Americanism and Fordism (a theme touched on by Massimo D'Alema, general secretary of the PDS, in his address at the closing session of the Conference held in the Cagliari Town Hall); the notion of "crisis" in Gramsci's writing; intellectuals and hegemony; and Gramsci's prison experience and its impact on his world view. Also of considerable practical importance were presentations dealing with the study and diffusion of Gramsci's thought. These included an up-to- date account of the holdings of the "fondo Gramsci" in Rome, John Cammett's explanation of what can be accomplished by consulting the newly created Web page entitled "Resources on Antonio Gramsci" (http://www.soc.qc.edu/gramsci), and two excellent papers on the critical reception of Gramsci in Germany and Russia by Ursula Aptitzsch and Viktor Gajduk, who spoke respectively on the German critical edition of the Letters from Prison and on the tormented history of censorship, selective editing and translating, and politically motivated publishing that marked the history of Gramsci studies in the Soviet Union, and that still today limit to a certain extent a full comprehension of Gramsci's historic achievement.
Renato Zangheri's "introductory considerations" and Eugenio Orrù's closing presentation provide a measure of some of the intellectual and political concerns in evidence at the Conference. Zangheri stressed the "new and complex" quality of the language of the Prison Notebooks which, he feels, reflects Gramsci's "renunciation of an earlier and contemporary dogmatic codification of Marxism." Zangheri was in agreement with several other speakers in his belief that the famous pages on "Americanism and Fordism" in Notebook 22 reveal Gramsci's independent appreciation of American cultural vitality and of the viability of American capitalism at a time--the early to mid- 1930s--when most leaders of the Third International were predicting its imminent downfall. Zangheri also praised Gramsci's clarifications of the philosophy of praxis, which set him apart from the still predominantly positivist brand of Marxism professed by most official exponents of Marxism in the 1930s. Indeed, Zangheri, like Massimo D'Alema and other thinkers of the PDS, [END PAGE 14] seems to be anxious to reclaim Gramsci for the liberal as well as for the socialist project: "I have no doubt that Gramsci was thinking of a constitutional and representative socialist system," Zangheri said. "It is also certain from his explicit assertions that, in the final anlysis, he conceived of the struggle of ideas and the search for truth in terms of individual freedom."
For his part, Eugenio Orrù, director of the Gramsci Institute in Sardinia, spoke on "Subjectivity, identity and pluralism." His paper surveyed both the catastrophic and the progressive features of 20th century world history. Orrù focussed on the janus-faced character of current struggles by oppressed groups, races and nations for a free and independent life, which are in some instances necessary outgrowths of the ideals that animated democratic nations in World War II. Yet Orrù did not fail to register his alarm: "Today, while gigantic processes of globalization advance and materialize, we witness a reawakening, sometimes almost an explosion, of identity and subjectivity which had been previously, at least on the surface, inert and submerged. But this reawakeing has often been tumultuous, disordered and tragic. It is sufficient to think of the former Yugoslavia, of eastern Europe, and of Africa. That is already enough. Nor does western Europe appear to be entirely immune to dangerous epilogues, not even Italy. Just think of the Northern League."
Intellectually ambitious papers on civil society and the state were given by Anne Showstack Sassoon, Jean Cohen, and Robert W. Cox.
Sassoon reviewed the "debate in English" on civil society in an extraordinarily thorough effort to summarize the main ideas of various schools and trends in the present-day sociological and political literature. Running through her analysis was the admonition "not to idealize civil society" and to remember that civil society and political society, although separable for analytical purposes, cannot really be detached from each other, as Gramsci himself made clear in several passages of the Notebooks. Sassoon emphasized the importance of historical context for any productive study of civil society, since it is the specific circumstances of civil society and state at any one moment in time and in any one country that condition the ways in which civil society is conceptualized. For example, during the 1930s, "the expanded role of the state" was a leading political issue not only in the USSR but also in fascist Italy, nazi Germany, and New Deal North America, which led to a redefinition and a "recomposition" of the public and the private realms. Moreover, during the 1930s, "social engineering and attempts to change human beings were being made through concerted state action and through private initiatives." How these two realms articulate with each other are always subject to new and sometimes radical reinterpretation.
Two points made by Sasssoon concern, first, the great importance that Gramsci attributed to the question of civil society in his analysis of transition in the West and in the Soviet Union, and second that for Gramsci, unlike many contemporary social theorists belonging to liberal, non- Marxist schools of thought, "civil society is an analytical concept not a normative one as much of [END PAGE 15] current debate would have it." (emphasis in the original). Gramsci's concerns about the prospects for democratic development in the USSR were caused, Sassoon believes, by his conviction that "a fully developed civil society was a political project to be achieved" that "would not be the automatic outcome of economic transformation and even less brought about by an identity between party and state." In this observation Sassoon joined company with several other Conference speakers who found evidence in the Notebooks for claiming that Gramsci had effectively dissociated himself from the thinking and from the politics of Soviet apologists during the crucial years 1928 to 1935.
Jean Cohen, on the other hand, advocates belief precisely in the "normative thrust" of the idea of civil society denied by Sassoon, since she believes in its inherent "relevance to political projects of democratization." She wants to save the notion of civil society from those on the political Right who strive to appropriate it for narrowly partisan purposes, and from a Left that denies its distinctively liberatory content. Her paper had four parts: 1) a discussion of the context and concerns of the current American civil society debate; 2) an exploration of the "neo-republican" contribution of Robert Putnam to the civil society debate; 3) a critical look at the "reductionist conception of civil society" and its connections to "an untenable theory of American civic decline" (emphasis in original); and 4) an argument that the rhetoric of decline "plays into the hands" of people more concerned with "pushing back the achievements of welfare states. . .and/or reviving 'traditional' (authoritarian) forms of civil society. . .than with its further democratization." Cohen believes that Gramsci's key contribution to the conceptualization of civil society was his "emphasis on its politically-relevant cultural dimension."
Robert Cox, like Sassoon, argues that "to be true to Gramsci's way of thinking, we should try to relate changing meanings of civil society to historical changes in social relations." In other words, like Sassoon, he employs the notion of civil society analytically, not normatively. After briefly reviewing the history of the phrase, Cox identifies two notable changes in the world order that must be taken into account in order to deal realistically with the defining conditions of civil society in the present day: the collapse of "real socialism" which was heralded as a possible rebirth of civil society in countries dominated by a Party-state; and the restructuring of production by globalizing capitalism. New "social cleavages" have vastly complicated what was at one time a world in which the bourgeois/proletarian cleavage could still be claimed by Marxist thinkers as basic to an adequate understanding of society. A crucial judgment underlying Cox's analysis is his view that: "In global governance, the influence of corporate capital and global finance outweigh the autonomy of states which function increasingly as agencies to adjust national economies to the perceived exigencies of the global economy, with competitiveness in world markets as the ultimate criterion of policy." Recalling Gramci's various theorizations of the civil-society/state nexus in the context of the socialist project understood in its broadest terms, Cox believes that the problem for the Left today is "how to bridge the fragmented and often mutually antagonistic forms of [END PAGE 16] consciousness of the opposition to globalization towards the formation of a counterhegemonic bloc of global dimensions."
In the domains of philosophy and religion, Dora Kanoussi, Nadia Urbinati, Mitchell Cohen, Tommaso La Rocca, Benedetto Fontana, and Carlos Nelson Coutinho spoke respectively on "the philosophical coherence of the Prison Notebooks," "the democratic individual in Tocqueville, Dewey and Gramsci," "Tragedy and the fate of Marxism in the 20th century, from Lukàcs to Goldmann," "Gramsci on religion: a teacher of secularism," "What is truth? Modernity and Hegemony in Gramsci," and "The General Will and democracy in Rousseau, Hegel and Gramsci."
Kanoussi, who delivered her paper in Spanish, argues that there is a "theoretical nucleus" at the core of the Prison Notebooks, which are often seen as completely fragmentary and lacking an organizing principle. There is a "rhythm" of thought and a methodological concern in Gramsci's prison writings that give his notes their coherence. At their center are reflections on the process by which Modernity, seen as the leading characteristic of western civilization, enters into crisis, a crisis which "affects the philosophy of praxis itself inasmuch as this philosophy too was born within the very interior of this process" as its critical moment. The critique made possible by the philosophy of praxis, she believes, runs through the Notebooks, and can be traced from its first fairly extensive treatment in Notebook 4 through Notebooks 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 19 and 22.
Urbinati agrees with Kanoussi in her belief that for Gramsci, as for Tocqueville, "democratic society is a synonym of modernity," but emphasizes that for both thinkers, "modernity and democracy reveal themselves clearly only in America"--in relation to which she cites Gramsci's assertion that this condition "exists naturally" in America (Notebook 23, Gerratana edition, p. 2141.) For both Tocqueville and Gramsci, Urbinati claims, the new civilization of the United States was free of all the traditional political and philosophical encumbrances that impeded the full development of democratic institutions in Europe. Gramsci also resembles John Dewey in several ways, one of which is his acceptance of a necessary "conformism" provided that it is limited to socially beneficial routines and habits, and his corresponding notion of individuality, which has nothing to do with the "atomistic individualism" that characterizes the point of view among exponents of an unbridled capitalism in the U.S. Mitchell Cohen devoted his inquiry to the fluctuating currents of dialectical and positivist forms of Marxist thought, from Lukàcs to Goldmann, whom Cohen credits, together with Gramsci, for consistently expounding a dialectical conception of Marxism. His paper asks the question: What happened to dialectical thinking after it was suffocated by Stalinism and fascism?
La Rocca attempts to clarify the particular character of Gramsci's secularism. He argues that Gramsci did not let himself fall into the trap of dogmatic anti-clericalism, because he recognized the enormous importance, for an understanding of Italian culture and society, of religious ideas and sentiments. Gramsci followed Labriola's example in rejecting a simplistic "negative secularism" in [END PAGE 17] favor of a "positive secularism" that could accommodate serious study of religious--especially Catholic--beliefs and practices.
In his paper, Fontana probed the question of "truth" in Gramsci's thought, arguing that in the Notebooks "truth" is a "socially and historically constructed value, whose meaning is constantly in motion." Moreover, for Gramsci, the search for truth is an enterprise properly undertaken collectively. "The altering of men's consciousness occurs on various levels [for Gramsci]," Fontana argues: "the moral, the emotional, the intellectual, and the social. It is the coming together of these moments that establishes the truth." The truth is not, as in Plato or Croce, given by autonomous reason, but rather is an "historical truth" generated by the activity of a given social group. Fontana illustrates his arguments by commenting on the confrontation between Christ and Pontius Pilate, the ironic and paradoxical nuances of which are too complex to be explained here.
Coutinho attempts to establish a direct link between Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of the "general will" in the Social Contract and Gramsci's notion of "collective will." For both thinkers, deliberation about matters of social concern and the entire decision-making process in an authentic democracy must be based on a "consensual inter-subjective interaction." He also argues that Hegel is the thinker who provided Gramsci with the insights he utilized in formulating his concept of civil society. For both Rousseau and Gramsci, the general will must take precedence over the single or particular will, a precedence that has its origins in the political philosophy of Aristotle. This places both thinkers effectively outside the framework of the liberal tradition. Coutinho sees a weakness in Rousseau's formulation in that it rests on "the presupposition that this general will is something that counterposes itself drastically to particular wills and, in the final analysis, represses them (men are 'forced to be be free' in order that they act in accordance with the general will)." Hegel understood this problem, and acknowledged the existence in the Modern Age of a social sphere that had not existed in Antiquity, namely that of "civil society." In the concluding section of his paper, Coutinho proposes the hypotehsis that "if in the work of the Italian thinker, in particular in his specific concept of hegemony, it is possible to single out a reception of what is most valid and lucid in the political reflections of Rousseau and Hegel, this same work also contains some fruitful indications of the way in which to overcome their limits and aporias."
Silvio Pons and Irina Grigoreva had original things to say about Gramsci's views of the Soviet Union as articulated or hinted at in the Prison Notebooks, and readers are encouraged to write to the Gramsci Institute in Rome for copies of these two papers, since I cannot deal with them in this summary. Let it suffice here to say that both Pons and Grigoreva describe a Gramsci who was radically critical of the political involution taking place in the Soviet Union, and who, as evidenced in his commentary on Bukharin's "Marxist" sociology, objected strongly to a type of materialist reductionism--an objection that can be read, implicity, as a criticism of prevailing trends in Soviet political and social thought. [END PAGE 18]
Mario Telò, Giulio Sapelli, Paolo Bonetti, and Stephen Gill dealt in their papers with various aspects of the pages on "Americanism and Fordism" and with the new forms of liberal hegemony in the post-communist world system. Telò thinks that in prison Gramsci acquired the conviction that "American rationalism represented the referential horizon for the historical development of Italy and Europe and, as a consequence, the real challenge to the war of position of the European workers' movement." Gramsci did not agree with the catastrophic view of western capitalism, and in his "strategic orientation" did not share the widely held belief that the crisis of 1929 would lead to a quick resolution of problems that in reality, he thought, would remain unsolved for a long time to come. Despite the depression and the advent of nazism, between 1929 and 1935, in the competition between the two capitalisms, the statist and authoritarian type represented by Germany and Italy, and the liberal democratic type embodied by the United States, it was the latter that held the key to the future of the West.
Sapelli's point of departure is also Americanism and Fordism, but he takes a more critical and oppositional stance towards the current manifestations of the "American century" than does Telò. Like Cox, he sees the long epoch in which nation-states determined the direction of world affairs coming rapidly to a close, to be replaced by a world order on which the 1990 Treaty of Mastricht serves to imprint an extreme form of liberismo that "blocks the use of public spending as a support to production and services and therefore imposes a drastic reduction of state indebtedness." In the presence of still sustained economic growth, Sapelli argues, "instead of using its resources to modernize the capitalist system in its broadened capacity for reproduction, the political, industrial and financial ruling classes of the old demographic regressive bloc cloak themselves in the management of an oligopolistic and oligarchical power that increases corporate privileges and leads state finances to bankruptcy."
In his paper, Bonetti stressed "the profound influence of liberal ideology" on the young Gramsci, and argues that his analysis of liberalism was undertaken from within a liberal framework. Gill's long and wide-ranging paper on "Gramsci, modernity and globalization" attempts " to apply and develop some of Gramsci's conceptualizations of state and civil society, historical bloc and his perspective on civilisations and to relate them to the explanation of the contours of modernity and to the current phase of neo-liberal restructuring of the contemporary capitalist global economy." Prevailing forms of state and civil society are seen by Gill as being in a situation of "organic crisis." In response to that crisis, which is currently being managed more or less to the benefit of the dominant financial and political élite, Gill asks the question: "how are we to sketch the potentials for resistance to neo-liberalism that can assume a more comprehensive counter- hegemonic historical bloc?" He is more explicit than Cox and several other speakers in [END PAGE 19] addressing the problem of how to mobilize and organize resistance to the current hegemony of the neo-liberal project.
Several speakers, notably Reyes G. Ernesto Soto, Juan Carlos Portantiero, and Marcello Montanari, tried to analyze the component features of "the crisis of modernity" at the end of the century. Soto looks at "two expressions of the present political and economic crisis in Mexico: the corrosion of the foundations of the modern Mexican State, and the failure of the neo-liberal economic policies implemented by the Mexican government since 1980." Montanari believes that the old world dominated by nation-states has come to an inglorious end, but that a new subjective agency of change, in Gramscian terms, has yet to appear, an agency, that is, capable of founding a new ethico-political order. Among possible candidates to lead the world into a new age was that of the "American model" of development, an idea which, Montanari argues, was already glimpsed by Gramsci. No doubt this thesis, had there been time and the will to do so at the Conference, would and should have stimulated some lively debate. In any event, this model for the future was not the one envisioned by many of Montanari's fellow speakers. Yet its attractions ought not to be underestimated by people wishing to understand today's Italy. Portantiero addressed himself more to the "cultural crisis" of the late 20th century, claiming that Gramsci provides the basis for constructing a new "totality" of vision in a world that has lost just such an encompassing conception. The most urgent task is to struggle against new forms of utilitarianism and individualism, and to search for new forms of solidarity. The absence of solidarity constitutes a cardinal element of the "crisis of modernity." Giulio Ferroni, Giancarlo Schirru, Marco Velasquez and Marzio Zanantoni made valuable contributions to the discussion of intellectuals, to Gramsci's ideas on language and politics, to "Zapatism" and the historiography of the Mexican revolution, and to the national question. Frank Rosengarten and Nereide Rudas (who is director of the Unversity of Cagliari's Institute of Clinical Psychiatry) explored Gramsci's prison letters as sources for understanding how his confinement affected both his psychological situation and his political perspective.
Unfortunately, the limits of space do not allow for an account of other important presentations. A mere listing of topics not yet mentioned will have to be sufficient:
In session one: "Forms of subjectivity in the 20th century":
Francesca Izzo: Political subjectivity in the century of industrialism
Silvano Tagliagambe: Institutions and modernity
In session two: "Industrialism, socialism, nation":
Michele Ciliberto: The problem of the Italian nation from antiquity
to the modern epoch
Emma Fattorini: Church and political Catholicism in 20th cent. as seen by Gramsci
Maurizio Viroli: Gramsci and the nation [END PAGE 20]
In session three: "Philosophies and politics":
Roberto Racinaro: The Gramscian interpretation of idealism
Claudia Mancina: Praxis and pragmatism: Traces of James in Gramsci
In session four: "Questions of hegemony":
Giulio Ferroni: The parabola of the status of intellectuals in the 20th century
Giuseppe Cacciatore: Gramsci: problems of ethics
Maria Carmen Pericolo: The question of common sense
In session five: "Between philology and history":
Remo Bodei: Forms of politics in mass societies
Emma Giammattei: Gramsci's writing and early 20th C. stylistic-rhetorical models
Alfonso Berardinelli: Gramsci as essayist
Walter Tega: The invention of the historiographical object
Giancarlo Schirru: The Notebooks and the debate on language and nationality in international socialism Mario Ricciardi: Writing and project in the Notebooks
In session six: "Cultural themes":
Massimo Montanari: The Middle Ages in the Notebooks
Mario Zanantoni: On national identity through Gramsci's notes
Luciano Marrocu: The recapture of tradition: the case of George Orwell
In session seven: "Influences and comparisons":
Massimo Pivetti: The analytical importance of the Notebooks and the question of their influence: reflections of a non-specialist