The Historical Bloc: Toward a Typology of Weak States and Contemporary Legitimation Crises

Abstract

During the heyday of Euro-communist parties in France, Spain and especially Italy, it was commonplace to see Gramsci as the key figure of Western Marxism. Commentators including Bobbio, Femia, Buci-Glucksmann, Mouffe, Salvadori, Showstack-Sassoon and others were thus wont to regard Gramsci as the preeminent theorist of civil society and hegemony, and the person most suited to renew political sociology within a Marxist framework.¹ From a contemporary perspective, however, one encounters a problem in some of these accounts which has been reproduced in much of the work on Gramsci taken up recently in international relations and other disciplines. Many tend to suggest that the key difference between social democratic, Marxist-Leninist and Western Marxist thinkers can be explained in terms of the correct emphasis on religion, ideology, culture, law, politics and the superstructure more generally that can be found in the writings of Gramsci, Lukacs, Korsch, Sartre and other Western Marxists. The matter is not so straightforward, however, and the reasons for Gramsci’s originality go well beyond his concern with folklore, language, religion, literature and other phenomena that one normally associates with the Marxist concept of the superstructure. This chapter suggests that Gramsci’s contemporary relevance is to be sought in his attempt to develop an alternative to the base-superstructure model by way of an innovative elaboration of Sorel’s notion of the historical bloc.