Abstract
In order to consider the advantages, pitfalls, and potential of employing the concept of hegemony in philosophy and the history of science, we must first of all reflect on how Antonio Gramsci is directly or indirectly present in this field of enquiry. It is a question well worth asking as Gramsci’s thought did not enter into these disciplines in a direct manner. Internationally, the influence of his Prison Notebooks was felt rather late—between the 1960s and 1970s—and only in a subordinate position within science studies. Indeed, at the end of the 1980s, Anglo-American philosophy of science could still avoid dealing with Gramsci when discussing the relationship between science and power. Thirty years later, it would be almost inconceivable to do so. Crucial concepts such as “hegemony,” "subalternity," and "civil society" have been thrust into philosophy as well as cultural studies, history, the history of ideas, and other areas of social and humanistic research. To this it must be added that the growing interest of historians of science in the political dimension of their subject has led to a re-evaluation of central categories of Gramscian thought, first and foremost that which has repeatedly been indicated as the cornerstone of his philosophical framework: hegemony.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Although the theme of hegemony in the political and cultural spheres preceded Gramsci’s reflection, his posthumous work constituted the culmination of earlier debates and conceptions, especially those developed in the prerevolutionary and revolutionary Soviet Union, with which he was acquainted (Brandist 2015). This is why an analysis of the relevance of the category of hegemony in science studies has to directly refer to Gramsci’s legacy.
- 2.
Cf. Rouse (1987). In this work, Rouse attempted to open up Anglo-American philosophy of science (starting with authors such as Thomas S. Kuhn) to the ‘continental’ European influences of the Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault.
- 3.
Hall’s account is still relevant (1980). A vigorous revival of Gramsci’s philosophical thought in English-language circles is evidenced by Thomas (2009).
- 4.
On the phases of Gramsci’s reception, see Hobsbawm (2011: 334–343).
- 5.
Nieto-Galan (2011: 464–467) provides an overview of Gramsci’s presence in history of science.
- 6.
Cf. Kołakowski (1978: vol. 1, chap. 15, “The Dialectic of Nature”).
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
As discussed in Chap. 5.
- 10.
Cf. Chap. 5.
- 11.
Bauman could have used a collection of selected writings translated into Polish in two volumes: A. Gramsci, Pisma wybrane (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1961).
- 12.
Bauman and Tester (2001: 24–25): “To put it in a nutshell, I owe to Gramsci an ‘honorable discharge’ from Marxist orthodoxy. [...] If there was a disenchantment, it concerned the ossified from which the ‘official’ vulgate version of Marxism was given, and more than anything else the official bar on applying Marxist critique to ‘really existing socialism’, coupled with effacing or playing down the ethical core and source of Marxist teachings. In a paradoxical way Gramsci saved me from turning into an anti-Marxist, as so many other disenchanted thinkers did, throwing out on their way everything that was, and remained, precious and topical in Marx’s legacy. I read good things in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: there was a way of saving the ethical core, and the analytical potential I saw no reason to discard from the stiff carapace in which it had been enclosed and stifled.
Well, I presume one could learn such truths from other people, or even discover them on one’s own. But frankly speaking, to a person like me, trying hard to stay inside the Weltanschauung in which I came to feel home, the fact that the hint came from a thinker whose Marxist credential even officialdom’s stalwarts did not dare to question certainly helped. And the encounter with the Prison Notebooks could not have come at a better moment of my life: I had, so to speak, ‘matured’ with their ingestion and absorption.”
- 13.
See Thompson’s reprimand of Leszek Kołakowski (1978: 93–192).
- 14.
Geymonat (1958: 148): “Non si tratta evidentemente di disconoscere l’importanza del pensiero di Gramsci [...] ma soltanto di decidere se – una volta abbandonata questa tematica [la polemica con Croce] – si possano ancora trovare, ed. in quale misura nell’opera di Gramsci gli elementi fondamentali al fine di risolvere i nuovi problemi filosofici di oggi.”
- 15.
- 16.
Tronti (1959: 156): “Gramsci è un pensatore tipicamente e, io direi, fondamentalmente italiano. L’Italia è il suo ambiente naturale; in essa egli affonda le sue radici nel più profondo tessuto nazionale. Finiremmo per restringere e non per ampliare, per diluire e non per approfondire la figura storica di Gramsci, se volessimo dargli un respiro europeo. I suoi problemi e il modo di trattare i problemi, la sua cultura e la forma della sua ricerca culturale, i suoi interessi, il suo linguaggio, la sua educazione, la stessa sua sensibilità umana, tutto vive in Italia. Ecco perché, secondo me il punto fondamentale, anche se non esclusivo, di una ricerca intorno al pensiero di Gramsci, deve fare perno intorno all’ambiente del pensiero italiano.”
- 17.
Tronti (2006: 30): “Ora, il presupposto è questo: che un’ideologia è sempre borghese: perché è sempre un riflesso mistificato della lotta di classe sul terreno del capitalismo.
Il marxismo è stato concepito come “ideologia” del movimento operaio. E qui è un errore di fondo. [...] Marx non è l’ideologia del movimento operaio: è la sua teoria rivoluzionaria [...]. Marx è stato e rimane il punto di vista operaio sulla società borghese. [...] Marx è la scienza del proletariato.”
- 18.
Concerning the link between cultural studies and New Left, cf. Hall (1980: 58).
- 19.
See Burke (1986) for a reconstruction of Marxist approaches to popular culture. It will be interesting to note the divergence between the interpretations of Gramsci marked by the political distancing between the immigrant Bauman, mentioned above, and the British members of the New Left, which he considered a “Woodstock avant la lettre”. Cf. Tester and Hviid Jacobsen (2005: 45). In this context, Bauman also accuses the British New Left of being too prone to Althusserian structuralism.
- 20.
Williams (1977, chap. 6 “Hegemony” and chap. 7 “Traditions, Institutions, and Formations”).
- 21.
On the relationship between subalternity and autonomy with reference to Gramsci and Thompson, see Modonesi (2014: esp. 4–6).
- 22.
These cautions did not save Ginzburg from criticism regarding his effective ability to deal with popular culture without isolating it or hypostatizing it (Zambelli 1979).
- 23.
Modonesi (2014) has developed an articulated political theory that goes beyond past separations and connects subalternity (and its correspondent, hegemony) to antagonism and autonomy as categories capable of capturing various levels and moments of the construction of political subjectivity.
- 24.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmx4c/episodes/player (accessed June 10, 2016).
- 25.
- 26.
Cf. Harding (1998), even if the horizon of the reflections is far from the Gramscian matrix of subaltern studies.
- 27.
Cf. Hankinson Nelson (1990: 316): “Scrutinizing and evaluating the values, political and otherwise, incorporated in our approaches to human and nonhuman nature, and taking responsibility for their consequences, must, without the assumption of false boundaries, become part and parcel of good scientific practice. And because not anything goes in science, insofar as values, politics, and science are interfused, the same holds of values and politics.”
- 28.
Mollica (1985: 31–32). It should be noted that Mollica’s interpretation of the Notebooks was already affected by the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.
- 29.
Cooter (2013: 156): “There is never an escape from the historical apriori.”
- 30.
In an article often cited in history of science, Secord (2004) discussed the dynamics of science as dynamics of communication and circulation. However, the political dimension remained unexplored.
References
Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. 1970. Lire le Capital. Paris: Maspero.
Antonini, Francesca. 2014. Science, history and ideology, Gramsci’s Prison notebooks. Journal of History of Science and Technology 9: 64–80.
Basaglia, Franco, ed. 1967. Che cos’è la psichiatria? Parma: Amministrazione provinciale di Parma.
———, ed. 2014. L’istituzione negata: Rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico. Milan: Baldini&Castoldi.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1964. Zarys marksistowskiej teorii społeczeństwa. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Ital. trans. Margherita Rytel Sansoni. Lineamenti di una sociologia marxista. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971.
Bauman, Zygmunt, and Keith Tester. 2001. Conversations with Bauman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boothman, Derek. 1994. Gramsci, Croce e la scienza. In Gramsci e l’Italia, ed. Ruggero Giacomini, Domenico Losurdo, and Michele Martelli, 171–178. Napoli: La città del sole.
Brandist, Craig. 2015. The dimensions of hegemony: Language, culture and politics in revolutionary Russia. Leiden-Boston: Brill.
Brzeziński, Dariusz. 2014. Myśl społeczna Zygmunta Baumana przed marcem 1968: Od ‘mechanistycznej’ do ‘aktywistycznej’ wersji marksizmu. Politeja 32: 161–181.
Bucciantini, Mario. 2011. Esperimento Auschwitz. Turin: Einaudi.
Burke, Peter. 1986. Revolution in popular culture. In Revolution in history, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulaš Teich, 206–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooter, Roger. 1984. The cultural meaning of popular science: Phrenology and the organization of consent in nineteenth-century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooter, Roger with Claudia Stein. 2013. Writing history in the age of biomedicine. New Haven-London: Yale University Press.
Cooter, Roger. 2014. Neural veils and the will to historical critique: Why historians of science need to take the neuro-turn seriously. Isis 105: 145–154.
Cooter, Roger, and Stephen Pumfrey. 1994. Separate spheres and public places: Reflections on the history of science popularization and science in popular culture. History of Science 32: 237–267.
Cospito, Giuseppe. 2008. Il marxismo sovietico ed Engels: Il problema della scienza nel Quaderno 11. In Gramsci nel suo tempo, ed. F. Giasi, 747–765. Rome: Carocci.
Frosini, Fabio. 2003. Gramsci e la filosofia: Saggio sui Quaderni del carcere. Rome: Carocci.
Garin, Eugenio. 1958. Antonio Gramsci nella cultura italiana. In Studi gramsciani: Atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11–12 gennaio 1958. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
———. 1997. Con Gramsci. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Gentili, Dario. 2012. Italian theory: dall’operaismo alla biopolitica. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Geymonat, Ludovico. 1931. Il problema della conoscenza nel positivismo: saggio critico. Torino: Bocca.
Geymonat, Ludovico. 1958. Per un intervento al convegno di studi gramsciani. In Studi gramsciani, atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11–13 gennaio 1958, 147–148. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
———. 1972. Storia del pensiero filosofico e scientifico. Milano: Garzanti.
Ginzburg, Carlo. [1976] 1999a. Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ‘500. Turin: Einaudi.
———. 1999b. History, rhetoric and proof: The Menahem Ster Jerusalem lectures. Hanover-London: University Press of New England.
———. 2000. Rapporti di forza: Storia, retorica, prova. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Gramsci, Antonio. 2007 [1975]. Quaderni del carcere. Turin: Einaudi.
Guha, Ranajit. 1990. Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India. Durham-London: Duke University Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1980. Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture and Society 2: 57–72.
Hankinson Nelson, Lynn. 1990. Who knows: From Quine to feminist empiricism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14: 575–599.
Harding, Sandra. 1986. The science question in feminism. Pittsburgh: Cornell University Press.
———. 1993. Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is ‘strong objectivity’? In Feminist epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 49–82. New York: Routledge.
———. 1998. Is science multicultural? Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 2011. How to change the world: Tales of Marx and Marxism. London: Abacus.
Intemann, Kristen. 2010. 25 years of feminist empiricism and standpoint theory: Where are we now? Hypatia 25(4): 778–796.
Joravsky, David. 1961. Soviet Marxism and natural science, 1917–1932. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kołakowski, Leszek. 1978. Main currents of Marxism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kreps, David, ed. 2015. Gramsci and Foucault: A reassessment. Furnham-Burlington: Ashgate.
Levi, Primo. 2007. I sommersi e i salvati. Turin: Einaudi.
Longino, Helen. 1990. Science as social knowledge: Values and objectivity in scientific inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mannheim, Karl. 1929. Ideologie und Utopie. Bonn: Cohen. Engl. trans. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1949.
Modonesi, Massimo. 2014. Subalternity, antagonism, autonomy: Constructing the political subject. London: Pluto Press.
Mollica, Richard F. 1985. From Antonio Gramsci to Franco Basaglia: The theory and practice of the Italian psychiatric reform. International Journal of Mental Health 14: 22–41.
Nieto-Galan, Agustí. 2011. Antonio Gramsci revisited: Historians of science, intellectuals, and the struggle for hegemony. History of Science 49: 453–478.
Omodeo, Pietro Daniel. 2010. La via gramsciana alla scienza. Historia Magistra 4: 53–68.
———. 2015. Review-interview with Roger Cooter: The critical intellectual in the age of neoliberal hegemony. Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 4(5): 1–5:20.
Palladini Musitelli, Marina, ed. 2008. Gramsci e la scienza: Storicità e attualità delle note gramsciane sulla scienza. Trieste: Istituto Gramsci del Friuli Venezia Giulia.
Radice, Lucio Lombardo. 1971. Preface to Friedrich Engels, Dialettica della natura, 7–26. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Raina, Dhruv. 2011. Institutions of knowledge: Framing the translation of science in colonial South Asia. Asiatische Studien LXV/4: 945–967.
———. 2012. The naturalization of modern science in South Asia: A historical overview of the processes of domestication and globalization. In The globalization of knowledge in history, ed. Jürgen Renn. Berlin: Edition Open Access.
Rouse, Joseph. 1987. Knowledge and power: Toward a political philosophy of science. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press.
Said, Edward W. 1994. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Secord, James A. 2004. Knowledge in transit. Isis 95: 654–672.
Shapin, Steven, and Barry Barnes. 1977. Science, nature and control: Interpreting mechanics’ institutes. Social Studies of Science 7: 31–74.
Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1995. Situating the subaltern: History and anthropology in the subaltern studies project. Journal of Historical Sociology 8: 395–429.
Steila, Daniela. 1996. Scienza e rivoluzione: La recezione dell’empiriocriticismo nella cultura russa (1877–1910). Florence: Le Lettere.
Tester, Keith, and Michael Hviid Jacobsen. 2005. Bauman before postmodernity: Invitation, conversations and annotated bibliography 1953–1989. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press.
Thomas, Peter D. 2009. The Gramscian moment: Philosophy, hegemony and Marxism. Leiden-Boston: Brill.
Thompson, E.P. 1963. The making of the English working class. London: Victor Golancz Ltd.
———. 1978. The poverty of theory and other essays. London: Merlin Press.
Tronti, Mario. 1958. Alcune questioni intorno al marxismo di Gramsci. In Studi gramsciani, atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11–13 gennaio 1958, 305–321. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
———. 1959. Tra materialismo dialettico e filosofia della prassi: Gramsci e Labriola. In La città futura: Saggi sulla figura e il pensiero di Antonio Gramsci, ed. A. Caracciolo and G. Scalia. Milan: Feltrinelli.
———. 2006. Operai e capitale. Rome: DeriveApprodi.
Vasoli, Cesare. 1956. Un dibattito sulla cultura marxista. Il Ponte 12: 1751–1760.
———. 1966. Gramsci, il materialismo storico e l’ ‘ortodossia. Il Ponte 22: 1088–1108.
Williams, Raymond. 1973. Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. New Left Review 82: 3–16.
———. 1977. Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wright, Steve. 2002. Storming heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto Press.
Young, Robert M. 1992. Science, ideology and Donna Haraway. Science as Culture 3: 165–207.
Zambelli, Paola. 1979. Uno, due, tre, mille Menocchio? Della generazione spontanea (o della cosmogonia ‘autonoma’ di un mugnaio cinquecentesco). Archivio storico italiano 137: 51–90.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Omodeo, P.D. (2019). Hegemony and Science: Epistemological and Historiographical Perspectives. In: Political Epistemology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23120-0_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23120-0_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-23119-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-23120-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)