Gramsci, A., Hoare, Q., & Nowell-Smith, G. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London,: Lawrence & Wishart.
“…there exists an art as well as a science of politics" (251).
Gramsci begins this brief selection from Selections From the Prison Notebooks by making a comment about separations of powers: “…is a product of the struggle between civil society and political society in a specific historical period. This period is characterized by a certain unstable equilibrium between the classes, which is a result of the fact that certain categories of intellectuals…are still too closely tied to the old dominant classes” (245).
The process of socialization, or the important power of ideas, is one feature that shapes Gramsci’s thought. “If every State tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilization and of citizen…and to eliminate certain customs and attitudes and to disseminate others, then the Law will be its instrument for this purpose” (246).
The State is controlled by those who are in power in civil society. “In reality, the State must be conceived of as an ‘educator’, in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type or level of civilization” (247). The power is exerted, when it can be, through socialization. When it can not be, it is imposed by Law. “The Law is the repressive and negative aspect of the entire positive, civilizing activity undertaken by the State” (247).
“Political intuition is not expressed through the artist, but through the ‘leader’; and ‘intuition’ must be understood to mean not ‘knowledge of men’, but swiftness in connecting seemingly disparate facts, and in conceiving the means adequate to particular ends—thus discovering the interests involved, and arousing the passions of men and directing them towards a particular action” (252). Power is not crude deployment of material resource, but rather though ideational influence.
The Ethical State: “…every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level…which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes” (258).
Ability of a group to have influence in society without having to take the power of the state is Gramscian hegemony. “State = political society + civil society, in other words, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (263).
“The expressions ‘ethical State’ or ‘civil society’ would thus mean that this ‘image’ o fa Satat without a State was present to the greatest political and legal thinkers, in so far as they placed themselves on the terrain of pure science…” (263).
“A totalitarian policy is aimed precisely: 1. at ensuring that the members of a particular party find in that party all the satisfaction that they formerly found in a multiplicity of organizations, i.e. at breaking all the threads that bind these members to extraneous cultural organisms; 2. at destroying all other organizations or at incorporating them into a system of which the party is the sole regulator. This occurs: 1. when the given party is the bearer of a new culture—then one has a progressive phase; 2. when the given party wishes to prevent another force, bearer of a new culture, from becoming itself ‘totalitarianism’—then one has an objectively regressive and reactionary phase, even if that reaction (as invariably happens) does not avow itself, and seeks itself to appear as a bearer of a new culture” (265).
“..hegemony and dictatorship are indistinguishable, force and consent are simply equivalent; one cannot distinguish political society from civil society; only the State, and of course the State-as-government, exists, etc” (271).
