Newsletter - International Gramsci Society

The following extracts from Sue Golding’s Preface to her book may help convey a
general sense of the basic outline of her complex and detailed discussion and of her
stimulating central arguments:
it would not be over-stating the case to say that, in Gramsci’s prison
notebooks, we are given a series of vital and challenging concepts, which,
taken together, begin to articulate the basis of what has come to be known as a
’post’-liberal democracy. His is a theory about democracy that incorporates
the central premiss that society, and indeed, ‘the people,’ must be understood
not simply as entailing a specific historicity—without a natural order or
essence—but as necessarily born out of and sustained by an open, creative,
and immanent intellectual as well as practico-political ‘will.’ His theory takes
this ‘will,’ itself diversified and fractured, as both the ground and the
horizon—as both the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’—of a democratic possibility.
And yet this focus on a subjective will is neither innocent nor without
its consequences: for not only does it challenge certain liberal and idealist
assumptions, it rethinks the entirety of marxism itself. Questions around
objectivity and science and truth are reinscribed to include, indeed to
privelege in a certain sense, the subjective moment. In turn this provides not
only a fundamental rewrite of dialectics as historicized immanence, but
grounds political agency in a radical pluralism and fluid diversity of the social
structure itself.
This book delineates what is entailed in Gramsci’s provocative
proposition. It tries to show why a ‘radical’ openness, diversity, and
contingently formed consent must become the integral basis for a post-liberal
democracy, and why, in becoming that basis, a kind of social ethics, which
Gramsci quite simply calls ‘progressive,’ can be established. Moreover, it tries
to do so by following the methodological and theoretical route Gramsci took,
the dilemmas he encountered, and the resolutions he finally offered. But it
also discusses how, in the end, he is caught in a trap from which he cannot
escape.
. . .
. . . now we come to the troubling difficulty: in relying on a notion of the
social order as a totality, dialectical or otherwise, Gramsci becomes caught in a
kind of gordian knot from which he is unable to escape. For, while he wants
to argue that any democracy configured as a ‘real democracy’ must emerge
from the organic and heterogeneous Sittlichkeit of a specific ‘the people,’ he
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