The Prince and the Modern Prince.pdf (original) (raw)
The intention in the present paper is foremost to discuss the relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli and identify the extent to which Machiavelli has influenced certain Gramscian concepts such as power and hegemony. Moreover, the task to identify similarities not only in major Machiavellian and Gramscian concepts such as power and consent, but also in the thinkers’ projects and aims will be undertaken. Machiavellian ideas such as the nature of political knowledge, the new principality, the concept of a people, the relation between thought and action, force and consent will be compared to ideas that are considered to be Gramsci's original contributions to Marxist political theory such as the concept of hegemony as the unity of knowledge, action, ethics, politics and ideology that eventually crystallizes as the dominant way of life.
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The Modern Prince: Gramsci's Reading of Machiavelli
History of Political Thought, 2017
Gramsci's 'modern Prince' has often been interpreted in relation to his theory of political parties. According to this reading, Gramsci was constrained by carceral censorship to use this Machiavellian metaphor as a 'codeword'. This interpretation has tended to direct attention away from the novelty of Gramsci's reading of The Prince in the Prison Notebooks. This article argues that a contextualist and diachronic reading of the development of the figure of the modern Prince allows it to be understood as also a novel contribution to the Machiavelli scholarship of Gramsci's time and the tradition of 'democratic' readings of The Prince.
Gramsci and The Prince: Taking Machiavelli outside the realist courtyard?
n the field of political theory, few authors have spurred intellectual tirades and triggered collective fantasy as much as the sixteenth-century Florentine Secretary Niccoló Machiavelli. Despite all controversies, in the discipline of International Relations (IR) Machiavelli and his The Prince have been almost exclusively associated with classical realism. This largely unchallenged association contributed to the edification of the myth of The Prince as the ruthless symbol of raison d’état, carrying transcendental lessons about the nature of politics and a set of prescriptions on how helmsmen should behave to seize, maintain, and reinforce their power. The realist hijacking of Machiavelli is at the core of the foundation of classical realism as an IR theory and its location at the very epicentre of IR as a discipline. This appropriation has, in turn, obscured alternative myths of The Prince, which depart from Machiavelli’s reflections on the Principati nuovi to read The Prince as a radical manifesto for political change. The opening of the semantic space in the field of IR – spurred by the so-called interpretive turn – offers an opportunity to break this monochromatic reading. This article delves into two competing myths of The Prince: the classical realist myth and Gramsci’s ‘progressive’ one to demonstrate its contested nature.
Gramsci's "Modern Prince" and the Contingencies of Political Struggle
The Gramscian proposition of the "modern Prince", like most of the concepts elaborated by Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, has always been open to interpretative controversy. These exegetical controversies stem from two main factors: the fragmentary nature of the prison writings and the method of work employed by Gramsci. The aim of this article is to apply the methodological perspective of "social contextualism" to the understanding of the Gramscian concept of the modern Prince. There is a threefold advantage in applying this methodology to the reading of Gramsci's political theory: 1) it allows one to grasp the unitarity between theory and practice in Gramscian political elaboration, linking the militant Gramsci with the theoretical Gramsci (the pre-prison and prison writings); 2) it allows one to identify how the theory of the party present in the "Lyon Theses" was maintained and further developed in the Prison Notebooks; and, consequently, iii) it further allows one to identify the proposition of the modern Prince as the most advanced development of a theory of the party that had already been conceived by Gramsci in the period before his imprisonment.
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