Gramsci and Althusser Encountering Machiavelli: Hegemony and/as New Practice of Politics
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Gramsci and Althusser Encountering Machiavelli: Hegemony and/as New Practice of Politics Panagiotis Sotiris 1 Accepted: 29 October 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser encountered Machiavelli’s work and they both attempted to rethink the very possibility of political practice through their respective readings of the Florentine thinker. In a certain way for both Gramsci and Althusser, the reading of Machiavelli was the experimental site where they elaborated their own conceptions of politics, either in the form of Gramsci’s quest for the ‘modern Prince’, the political and organizational form of a potential hegemony of the subaltern, or in the form of Althusser’s constant redefinition of a potential new practice of politics in a communist perspective. The reading of Machiavelli was for Althusser also one of the terrains upon which he attempted to confront Gramsci, something that is particularly evident in a series of Althusser’s texts in the 1970s from Machiavelli and Us to the recently published Que faire? The aim of this article is to do a comparative reading of the approaches to Machiavelli offered by Gramsci and Althusser, focusing in particular on the tensions running through Althusser’s reading of Gramsci’s writings on Machiavelli. In particular, I will offer a reading of Althusser’s extensive criticism of Gramsci in 1977– 1978, linking it to his critique of Eurocommunism. Then, I will go back to Gramsci, and in particular Notebook 13, in order to bring forward not only the aspects of Gramsci that Althusser tended to overlook but also how Gramsci is in fact thinking the very question that Althusser attempted to pose, namely that of a new practice of politics for communism. Keywords Machiavelli . Althusser . Gramsci . Marxism . Communism . Politics
* Panagiotis Sotiris [email protected]
1
Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece
Jus Cogens
1 Introduction In the summer of 1961, Louis Althusser makes a multiple discovery and encounter of Italy, Machiavelli, Gramsci and Franca Madonia.1 It is actually Franca Madonia that describes, in a letter to Althusser, how he had created a personal myth of this miraculous encounter: ‘you have made out that summer a myth, you have lived, lived it in its entirety as a true miracle, the house, the places and Italy, Machiavelli and Gramsci, and me.’ (Althusser 1997a, p. 165) And indeed one might say that Machiavelli would become one of Althusser’s main interlocutors in the years to come, not just a central reference but also a thinker that actually presented in the eyes of Althusser a materialist practice of theory. At the same time, Althusser’s encounter with Machiavelli is also Althusser’s encounter with Gramsci, both Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli and Gramsci’s broader work in the Prison Notebooks. This would be the beginning of Althusser’s complex and uneven relation to both Machiavelli and Gramsci. In this article, I would go back to Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli but also of Gramsci on Machiavelli a
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