THE USES AND ABUSES OF GRAMSCI

ABSTRACT Antonio Gramsci is today the most translated Italian theorist. His theory has been used extensively in English language publications in cultural studies and international relations. This article examines the use, abuse and fruitful additions to Gramsci of Stuart Hall, Edward Saïd, Ranajit Guha, Robert Cox, Stephen Gill and Adam Morton. Its object is to examine their fidelity to what the mainstream Italian philology of Gramsci has written about his concepts and their order. KEYWORDS Cox • Gramsci • Guha • Hall • Morton • Saïd The theme of this paper was suggested to me by the speech that Guido Liguori made when he launched the International Gramsci Society of the Asia-Pacific. Guido noted that Gramsci is the most translated Italian author after Machiavelli and that his theory is today used worldwide, above all in ‘cultural studies’. He also remarked that in Italy in the last decade there has been, rather, a close ‘philological ’ reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (QC) to establish with precision his use of each of the terms that are now common discourse in domains as varied as sociology, literary criticism and international relations: hegemony, intellectuals, common sense and so on. Guido suggested that both areas of research could learn from the other: the philologists through recognizing and accepting that Gramsci’s work would always be the starting point for further amplification and development in its application to new historical realities; and the ‘applied Gramscians ’ through recognizing and acknowledging some limit to creative extension of his work by reference to what he really wrote about such matters as hegemony. This set me thinking. Gramsci himself had recognized that no theory, even that of Marx, could be treated as if the author were a Messiah who had laid down a nostrum once and for all. That work would have sense mad