Giuseppe Cospito

Reconstructing the evolution of Gramsci’s judgement about the Russian Revolution implies an overall rethinking of his own relation to Marx as well as to Kant. Already in the spring of 1917, Gramsci foresaw that the February Revolution could become a proletarian revolution and that this would realise in fact Kant’s moral: only a society completely freed from oppression and exploitation would allow people to be free and autonomous. After the fall of the Winter Palace, Gramsci wrote that the revolution happened “against Marx’s Capital”, or better, against its literal interpretation as spread by the positivistic Marxism of the Second International. Between the end of the 1910s and the beginning of the 1920s, Gramsci thought it possible for Italy and the whole of Europe “to do as in Russia”; yet, from 1924, he started elaborating a different vision of the revolution in the Western World, which in the Prison Notebooks became a contraposition between a war of movement and a war of position. At the same time, he developed the concepts of caesarism/bonapartism and passive revolution which allowed the analysis of phenomena such as americanism and fascism from the perspective of a conservative modernisation, or revolution without a revolution. Still, and most of all, Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony, highlighting the importance of the moment of consensus in the fight for gaining and maintaining power. This drew Gramsci quite far from the marxism-leninism of his time, both from the political and theoretical point of view; for instance, he rejected the “ingenuous realism” of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism in favour of a phenomenalism explicitly drawn by Kant.

This article deals with Antonio Gramsci’s reflection on the categories of “common sense” and “good sense”, from the pre-prison writings onwards. If in the Gramscian journalistic articles these terms are employed in a loose way, in line with the early twentieth-century usages, a significant reflection can be retraced in the Prison Notebook. On the background of the French and notably Italian discussion on the topic in 1930s, Gramsci develops in his carceral notes an original conception of “common sense” and “good sense”, that illuminates also the notions of philosophy and folklore. The categories are problematicised already in Q 1 and receive a first, provisional sistematisation in 1930-1931. 1932 represents a turning point in the reflection in the categories: on the one hand, there is a reading of common sense that describes the generic middle way between folklore and philosophy ; on the other hand, Gramsci isolates the more specific concepts of “good sense” and “common sense”, where the quotation marks signal their specific semantic value. In this second meaning, “good sense” is pivotal to understand Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, as also later occurrences testify.

This essay aims at understanding the different “uses” of the concept of hegemony in Italy and abroad by reconstructing how such term has been interpreted in the different moments of the reception of Antonio Gramsci’s thought. A limited portion of such history will be analyzed: Italy from 1948 to 1975, i. e. from the publication of the first volume of the thematic edition of Gramscis’ Prison Notebooks to the publication of the critical edition by Valentino Gerratana, and France from 1953 to 1975, i. e. from the first anthology of Gramsci’s writings to the presentation in Paris of the critical edition of the Notebooks. A recognition of the remarkable amount of secondary literature dealing with such subject will highlight some tendencies of the first decades of the debate in Italy and France. Such tendencies can be traced in a pattern which includes the growing awareness of the importance of the concept of hegemony, in the whole of Gramsci’s writings, as well as the issue of the relation between hegemony, dictatorship and democracy, direction and dominion; and, further than this, the mapping of the various field of application of the concept of hegemony.