Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis unites Reformation and French Revolution

Evidence

Gramsci sees Marxism as involving a “reformation”: “The philosophy of praxis corresponds to the nexus Protestant Reformation plus French Revolution: it is a philosophy which is also a politics and a politics which is also a philosophy.” (See too “Brief Notes on Machiavelli’s Politics” on pp. 132-3.) Here we find one of the couples of opposed but dialectically united concepts which run through Gramsci’s work, and whose shifting, and by no means always consistent combinations make it so hard to arrive at any definitive interpretation of his thought. Revolution/Reformation here can be related to the other Gramscian couplets State/civil society, force/consent, domination/ leadership, war of manoeuvre/war of position, etc. which recur throughout the Prison Notebooks. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 375

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the paired dialectical couplets — force/consent, war of manoeuvre/war of position, State/civil society — that scaffold Gramsci’s whole theory of hegemony for the reader’s toolkit.
• XREF: War of position vs war of manoeuvre and force/consent are the exact concepts the Islamophobia readings build on for cultural hegemony analysis. — connects to: Economic mystification parallels medieval theology and requires a grassroots Reformation. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1813