Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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historian, and political figure Benedetto Croce. Croce’s historical work focused primarily on Italy, but he was strongly influenced by Dilthey and fused his vision of a psychological and phenomenological history with the Italian idealist tradition. Croce intentionally neglected the social and economic side of history and wrote Italian history as a political quest for moral consensus and liberty. Gramsci criticized Croce for his idealism but sought to translate his “ethico-moral moments of consent” into Marxian terms. He did this through his writings on the concept of “hegemony,” in which he argued that class domination and influence did not merely rest on the formal political system and the state-operated apparatus of coercion but spread beyond state and politics into the social and cultural arrangements of daily life. “To win hegemony, in Gramsci’s view,” writes Terry Eagleton, “is to establish moral, political and intellectual leadership in social life by diffusing one’s own ‘world-view’ throughout the fabric of society as a whole, thus equating one’s own interests with the interests of society at large” (1991, 116).
The concept of hegemony has political roots. Initially used by Lenin to refer to political domination, it was elaborated by Gramsci to suggest that in the capitalist societies of the West—contrary to what might be true in Eastern Europe—political power could be gained through the construction of a predominant consensus rather than through revolutionary violence. In the West, states did not preempt all social arenas, relying instead on managing society through social and cultural influence; this, in turn, would allow opposition parties to resist this influence by developing counterhegemonic forms of their own. The balance between hegemony and counterhegemony would always be in flux. Thus, hegemony was envisaged not as a fixed state of affairs but as a continuous process of contestation.
As a political leader in a country only recently unified and marked by strong local and regional traditions built up around numerous towns, each surrounded by its own rural dependency, Gramsci was keenly aware of the sterility of a class-oriented politics anchored in a paradigm of a generalized working class conscious of universal interests. His political project was therefore to draw into an alliance segments of the working class, peasant groups, artisans, white-collar employees, and fractions of other classes. Such an alliance would then function as a “historic bloc”—unified politically as well as “culturally” under the leadership of the Communist Party and its allies.
Perhaps because Gramsci did not want to attract the attention of his prison guards, he was never explicit about how he envisaged the interplay between hegemonic processes and the state. Yet as Mussolini’s chief political captive he surely did not think that state power could be won through song and dance alone. Once it is acknowledged, however, that hegemony must always be projected against the backdrop of the state, it becomes possible to identify hegemonic processes not only in the sphere of civil society outside the state but within state institutions as well. The state manages “ideological state apparatuses,” such as schools, family, church, and media, as well as apparatuses of coercion (Althusser 1971), and state officials contend over policies within these institutional precincts. They do so, moreover, in interaction with society’s open arenas. A number of different studies have exemplified these processes in the fields of education (Ringer 1969; Bourdieu 1989), in the social management of the state (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Rebel 1991), in penology (Foucault 1977), and in military doctrine (Craig 1971). Anthropologists have made use of the notion of hegemony as well, though all too often stripping it of its political specificity and intent (Kurtz 1996).
Drawing on Italian history, literature, and folklore, Gramsci sought to identify the social groups and cadres that “carried” the hegemonic process, as well as the centers and settlement clusters that took leading roles in the production and dissemination of hegemonic forms. In adopting this perspective, he was strongly influenced by his training in the Italian neo-linguistic (or spatial) school developed primarily by Matteo Giulio Bartoli at the University of Turin. These neo-linguists described language change as a process whereby dominant speech communities built on their prestige to influence surrounding subaltern settlements (Lo Piparo 1979). Anthropologists familiar with the diffusionism of the American culture-historical school will recognize parallels with the idea of culture centers, sites of unusually intense cultural productivity that transmit traits and influences to the surrounding culture areas. Like these ethnologists, Gramsci did not see such relations as merely linguistic but as involving other aspects of culture as well. At the same time, he differed from the American scholars in clearly understanding that the hegemonic process did not move by its own momentum. It summoned up and employed power to produce and distribute semiotic representations and practices, favoring some and disfavoring others. Its effects would thus be uneven in form and intensity, affecting classes and groups differentially. Drawing distinctions among locations and groups of people, the process produced tensions among them, as well as between the hegemonic center and the groups within its sphere of influence.
In identifying the cadres at work in cultural dissemination, Gramsci was especially interested in how intellectuals, whom he saw as ideological specialists in formulating and explaining bodies of ideas, interacted with the carriers of what he called “common sense,” the general understandings current among the popular masses. He saw this interaction as dynamic, with donors and recipients of ideas engaged in active interchange, each motivated by their own interests and perspectives. Since such interchanges were always contested, they gave rise to “unstable equilibria” between superordinates and subalterns.
Both Mannheim and Gramsci sought to combine Marxian grand theory with the local, regional and national particularism demanded by the neo-Kantians. For both men, this took the form of arguing that class was a major determinant of social alignments but that it was only one such determinant among many others. Both Mannheim and Gramsci related modes of ideation to the role of particular classes and groups, and both thought that common ideas might have a role to play in the rise of wider movements. Gramsci’s work, in particular, offers a perspective on how such coalitions, organized to expand and solidify cultural influence, connect with power. Both figures were also concerned with how ideas were generated and disseminated, an interest that underlies their efforts to comprehend the role of intellectuals. This interest focused explicitly on the group affiliation and activities of particular kinds of “brain-workers.” Yet it represents an advance from the mere charting of the relationship of ideas to interest groups, toward understanding how in fact ideas were constructed and propagated.
Pragmatism in Anthropology
Pragmatism had already scored major victories in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but its impact on anthropology came later, in the period in and around World War I, and at first affected England primarily. There British functionalism—associated with the names of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown—began to insist on looking at systems of ideas in terms of their practical contributions to activity systems and societal arrangements. This stance excluded a concern with understanding ideas in their own right. Such a practice-oriented approach appealed to Marxists, especially those who preferred to regard ideas as epiphenomena of a determinant economic base. This pragmatic view of ideas was reinforced further by the rise of logical positivism—less a philosophy than an attitude of distrust of abstractions—which was ready to relegate all statements that failed to pass the test of logical consistency and empirical verification to the scrap heap.
The ascendance of these new perspectives yielded both benefits and losses. Tying ideas to their social context challenged scholars to go beyond seeing ideas as the abstract musings of the Spirit and to grasp their connections with the world. Discounting the influence of ideas and ideologies, however, also exacted a political and intellectual price, in that it caused the followers of pragmatism to neglect the significance of ideas in rousing and mobilizing people for action. Thus, many a well-intentioned rationalist simply would not believe, until it was too late, that scientifically unverifiable and irrational ideas could yet appeal to large numbers of people, and that beliefs in witchcraft, eliminationist anti-Semitism, or millenarianism could be taken seriously by apparently reasonable persons.
The new intellectual pragmatism proved extremely influential in anthropology, initially with markedly positive results. By emphasizing practice over ideation, stressing what was done over what was thought and said, functionalists and Marxists—each in their own way—scored important theoretical and methodological points.