The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Edited by William K. Carroll
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Canada
ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS
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© William K. Carroll 2024
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1 Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 1 William K. Carroll
I GRAMSCI IN CONTEXT
2 Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary 31 Nathan Sperber and George Hoare
3 Gramsci, Marx, Hegel 48 Robert P. Jackson
4 ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’: constancy, change and collective will in Gramsci’s concepts 66 Derek Boothman
5 Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks: passive revolution, relations of force, organic crisis
Francesca Antonini
6 Hegemony as a protean concept 99 Elizabeth Humphrys PART II THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW POLITICAL VOCABULARY
7 The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks 118 Panagiotis Sotiris
8 State, capital and civil society 136 Marco Fonseca
9 Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political
Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido
10 Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: the passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity
Adam David Morton
11 War of maneuver and war of position: Gramsci and the dialectic of revolution
Daniel Egan
12 Welding the present to the future ... thinking with Gramsci about prefiguration
Dorothea Elena Schoppek
13 The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy
Alexandros Chrysis
PART III GRAMSCI FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
14 Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism
Jonathan Joseph
15 Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy
Bob Jessop
16 Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living
Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen
SECTION
17 Hegemony, gender and social reproduction
Anna Sturman
18 Cultural studies: the Gramscian current
Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam 19 Antonio Gramsci and education
Peter Mayo
20 Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and post-Western Marxism
Sourayan Mookerjea
SECTION C:
Contributors
Francesca Antonini is an Assistant Professor in History of Political Thought at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
Derek Boothman is a Full Professor (retired) in the Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione (DIT) at the Università di Bologna, Italy.
Ulrich Brand is Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna, Austria.
Marco Briziarelli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, United States of America.
William K. Carroll is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, Victoria Canada.
Alexandros Chrysis is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.
Laurence Cox is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.
Daniel Egan is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA.
Marco Fonseca is an Instructor in the Department of International Studies at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Carlos L. Garrido is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA.
George Hoare in an independent researcher in political theory, based in London, UK.
Elizabeth Humphrys is Senior Lecturer and Head of Social and Political Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Didarul Islam is a graduate student in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.
Robert P. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Political Thought in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
Bob Jessop is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, retiring in 2021; he was previously Reader in Government at the University of Essex, UK.
Jonathan Joseph is a Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.
Peter Mayo is a Professor in the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at the University of Malta.
Sourayan Mookerjea is Director of the Intermedia Research Studio, Department of Sociology, at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada.
Adam David Morton is a Professor in the Discipline of Political Economy within the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Thomas Muhr is Principal Investigator at the Centre for International Studies (CEI-IUL), ISCTE-University Institute Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal.
Henk Overbeek is Emeritus Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Jean-Pierre Reed is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Philosophy in the School of Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA.
Dorothea Elena Schoppek is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany.
Panagiotis Sotiris teaches philosophy at the Hellenic Open University in Greece.
Nathan Sperber is Docteur associé with the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France.
Anna Sturman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, Australia.
Kevin Surprise is a Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA.
x The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Markus Wissen is a Professor of Social Sciences at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany.
Owen Worth is Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Acknowledgements
I had been ruminating on the need for a companion to Antonio Gramsci for some time, when Harry Fabian, Elgar’s Commissioning Editor, invited me in May, 2021 to edit this collection. Of course, I leapt at the opportunity, and so I am grateful, in the first place, to Harry, for extending that invitation, and for all his subsequent support in the preparation of this volume. In the summer of 2021, I set about writing a detailed prospectus for the Companion. In my conception, it would begin with an examination of Gramsci’s life and times and, within that context, the development of his thought, but would also unpack the central ideas in his reformulation of historical materialism and reflect on his continuing influence across many fields in the social sciences and humanities and in strategic thinking on the left. In the fall of 2021 I began contacting prospective contributors, and was pleasantly surprised that nearly all of the scholars I approached immediately agreed to participate. I am grateful to all the authors contributing to this collection, for their dedication to this project (including peer reviewing of each other’s work) and its occasionally tight deadlines. Finn Deschner came onto the project in March, 2023, as editorial assistant, and has done superbly in getting the full manuscript into final form. I also appreciate the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in funding Finn’s position.
Victoria, Canada April, 2023
1. Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
William K. Carroll
INTRODUCTION
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has been hailed as the ‘theoretician of superstructures’ (Texier, 2014) yet eulogized as ‘a practical politician, that is to say a combatant’ (Togliatti, 1979, p. 161). He has been mourned as an anti-fascist martyr (Charles, 1980), declared ‘dead’ as a source of political insight (Day, 2005), and remembered sympathetically as ‘the Hunchback from Sardinia’ whose own subalternity was a ‘formative factor’ in his radical thought (Germino 1990, pp. 1, 24). These varying appraisals are testimonies to Gramsci’s rich and contested legacy. In Perry Anderson’s estimation, Gramsci’s thought
aimed to an extent unlike that of any previous Marxist at a unitary synthesis of history and strategy, covering at once the legacy of the pre-capitalist past, the pattern of the capitalist present and the objective of a socialist future in his country. (Anderson, 2022, p. 78)
Particularly since the 1970s, when Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of the Prison Notebooks was published in Italian (Gramsci, 1975) and anthologies of his work began to appear in translation (e.g. Gramsci, 1971), Gramsci’s thought has permeated a great range of scholarship and has informed the strategic thinking of left-wing activists (and also right-wing intellectuals (George, 1997)) around the world. Nearly a century after his arrest and imprisonment (and nine decades after what Peter Thomas (2009) has called the Gramscian moment of 1932, when the Italian political prisoner reached particularly stunning theoretical and strategic insights after years of incarceration and reflective writing) Antonio Gramsci remains an iconic political and intellectual figure, on a global scale (Dainotto and Jameson 2020).
Although the main reason for Gramsci’s continuing influence stems from the perspicacity of his thought, a contributing factor has been the critical ‘openness’ of his approach to analysing the human condition (Marzani, 1957, p. 6).
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Building on Marx, Gramsci developed a dynamic and holistic framework for political analysis and strategic thought, based in concrete history and geared toward actualizing the possibilities for revolutionary transformation of the capitalist way of life. And, like Marx’s concept of alienation, which has fuelled deep insights within historical materialism on the character of advanced capitalism (Marcuse, 1964; Ollman, 1971; Musto, 2021) while also having been taken up by other scholars within mainstream sociology and related fields (Seeman, 1975), Gramsci’s core concepts have shaped thinking both within historical materialism and without. Indeed, a Google search returns more than 60 million results with the h-word ‘hegemony’.
Yet this remarkably wide reach, combined with the openness of Gramsci’s approach to language, with many keywords borrowed and repurposed from other writers (including hegemony itself as well as such Gramscian concepts as historical bloc, passive revolution and wars of position and maneuver), poses challenges in assembling a compendium of works on Gramsci and his thought. To be clear at the outset: Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist. He co-founded the Communist Party of Italy and at the time of his arrest by Mussolini’s police in 1926 was General Secretary of the party and a member of the Italian Parliament (with diplomatic immunity that his jailers ignored). The entire corpus of his Prison Notebooks, encompassing 3,369 pages in the critical edition of 1975 (Gramsci, 1975), presents a brilliant elaboration of historical materialism, pulling its centre of gravity back to the foundations Marx laid in 1845 in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (Marx, 2002). In developing further what he called (borrowing from Labriola, (Mustè, 2021)) ‘the philosophy of praxis’, Gramsci attended in particular to Italian and European history and the economic, political and cultural practices and relations that organize consent to a capitalist way of life, as well as the practices that in challenging that hegemony point in a quite different direction.
Given that Gramsci’s thought was thoroughly grounded in historical materialism, a Companion to his thought also should be centred in that perspective. This volume follows that precept. Rather than widen the focus to include work that invokes keywords from Gramsci’s theoretical vocabulary without embracing his problematic, the chapters that follow hue closely to Gramsci’s formulations, situated within the living tradition of Marxism. Within that tradition’s broad scope, the Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci offers a comprehensive set of chapters presenting and reflecting on Gramsci’s many contributions to critical social science, social and political thought and emancipatory politics. As Burawoy (1990) has observed, historical materialism is a vibrant, open research programme.1 The goal in this collection, then, is not to exhume the intellectual remains of a century-old corpus. It is, rather, to bring Gramsci’s insights – theoretical and substantive – to life by engaging not only with his
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
3
original work but with the various streams of broadly Marxist scholarship that have flowed directly from that work.
A further consideration in framing and compiling this collection is that Antonio Gramsci, although remarkably well read in the social sciences and humanities of his time, was not an academic. Mentored at the University of Turin by Matteo Bartoli, one of Italy’s leading comparative philologists, Gramsci dropped out of his Bachelor’s programme in 1915, to pursue full-time activism and journalism (see Chapter 2). Although his incarceration necessitated a shift from writing newspaper articles on the immediacies of the day-to-day struggles to the ‘disinterested’ writing strategy he adopted in the Notebooks, removed from the pressures of the contingent and immediate (see Chapter 18), those notes were not written for a detached academic readership.
In consideration of Gramsci’s insistence on a philosophy of praxis, linking theory and practice, this Companion intends to be of maximal value and interest not only to a wide range of scholars, but to activists and to students (many of whom may be in the process of becoming activists).2 This objective further underlined the need for a treatment that begins with a close engagement with Gramsci’s world and worldview, but extends to the subsequent development of his ideas, up to and including contemporary issues. This volume, therefore, is divided into three parts.
In Part I, contributing authors situate Gramsci’s thought within the broad context of his life and times. These chapters engage closely with Gramsci’s work in ways that accentuate and reflect on the context of his life, his influences and in turn his immediate influence, particularly within historical materialism. The contents of Part I, especially when read alongside Gramsci’s own writing on philosophy, politics and history, provide a foundation for the chapters comprising Part II. These chapters present key themes within Gramsci’s perspective, connecting them to the wider framework of his thought, but also tracking their further development within the subsequent Gramscian stream of historical materialism. Part III offers the most contemporary analyses. Complementing Part I, which places Gramsci’s breakthroughs in context, and Part II, which focuses on key concepts and traces theoretical threads from Gramsci forward, these chapters are organized around major fields of scholarship in which Gramscian perspectives are particularly salient in the 21st century. They connect Gramsci’s original problematic with specific domains within recent and contemporary scholarship, wherein Gramscian scholars have applied that problematic in the analysis of late capitalist modernity.
PART I. GRAMSCI IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS TIME
Placing Gramsci in the context of his time means situating him in the Europe and more specifically, the Italy, of the 20th century’s early decades. Gramsci
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
engaged deeply with a wide gamut of philosophers, from the Renaissance political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli, through to contemporaries of various political stripes – Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Georges Sorel etc. Concurrently, his thought developed through participation in debates within historical materialism and the socialist left, particularly through the critical stances Gramsci took toward the deterministic reading of Marx that became predominant in the 2nd International, the positivism of leading Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin, and the bureaucratic centralism that characterized Joseph Stalin’s leadership in the Soviet Union.
Gramsci described his own method as philological. As Ludovico de Lutiis (2021) notes, philology, the ‘methodological expression’ in the study of language ‘of the importance of particular facts’, underlies Gramsci’s writings in the Notebooks and lies at the centre of various reflections; it is indispensable for reconstructing an author’s thought and, indeed, the past. An approach to understanding language and culture within historical context, philology was strongly differentiated from the structural linguistics initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure, which, particularly as later appropriated by poststructuralism, emphasized the internal construction of meaning within systems of signification, detached from concrete historical practice and extra-linguistic relationality.3 The attraction of Euro–North American intellectuals in the 1960s–1990s to the self-enclosed insularity of this theory of language and meaning seemed to consign philological scholarship to the margins. In more recent years, as its socio-ecological limits became increasingly evident, the leading edge of poststructuralism has morphed into ‘new materialism’ – characterized by Terry Eagleton as ‘really a species of post-structuralism in wolf’s clothing’ which ‘emerged in part to replace a currently unfashionable historical materialism’ (2016, pp. 11, 17). Meanwhile, and notably in Italy through Rome-based Fondazione Gramsci and the International Gramsci Society and its journal,4 a new generation of scholars has approached Gramsci, fittingly, from the philological and historical materialist perspective he himself favoured.
The chapters comprising Part I of this Companion take up this same perspective, presenting Gramsci’s thoughts within the context of his life and times, and thereby penetrating into the social and political moorings of his conceptual universe.
As Dante Germino (1990, p. 7) has observed, ‘the roots of the mature Gramsci’s revolutionary critique of society extended deeply into the Sardinian soil of his youth’. Gramsci’s experiences as ‘a Sardinian hunchback from history’s margins’ (Germino, 1990, p. 265) – his own subalternity – grounded his politics as he became active as a journalist and organizer in his 20s, after moving to Turin, a major industrial centre, to take up university studies in 1911. In Chapter 2, Nathan Sperber and George Hoare recount Gramsci’s life and times, focusing on the two-decade period of Gramsci’s political activism
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5
and intellectual production, from his early political writing in 1914 to his transfer to a clinic in Rome, extremely weak and exhausted, in 1935. Incarcerated from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937, with the intent ‘to stop this brain from working for twenty years’, the unintended consequence was the Prison Notebooks, a pursuit of politics ‘by other means’, in a novel melding of theory and action and a profound contribution to revolutionary strategy.
The four chapters that follow Sperber and Hoare’s biographical overview dive into Gramsci’s oeuvre, setting it within the context of his times. In two highly complementary companion pieces, Robert Jackson and Derek Boothman focus attention on intellectual currents with which Gramsci engaged in developing his own approach to philosophy and politics. These careful readings add nuance to our understanding of Gramsci’s Marxism.
Of course, no one is born a Marxist, or a liberal or a fascist. Moreover, these worldviews are neither static nor homogeneous. As Gramsci observed in the Prison Notebooks (and as Robert Jackson recounts in Chapter 3), Marx’s own concept of the organization of collective agency remained entangled within elements such as Jacobin clubs, trade organization and ‘secret conspiracies of small groups’ (Gramsci, 2011, vol 1, p. 154). In the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, the prevailing tendency within Marxism, codified in the Second International (1889–1916) offered a deterministic, ‘stagist’ account of history, within which mass political agency was subordinated to a faith in the inevitability of a final economic crisis, provoked by capitalism’s structural contradictions, which would usher in socialism.
Jackson notes how Gramsci’s newspaper article, ‘The revolution against Capital’, published a few weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of state power in November 1917, rejected Marxism as a deterministic orthodoxy but celebrated how the Bolsheviks were ‘living out Marxist thought – the real undying Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism’ (Gramsci, 1994, p. 40). In Chapter 4, Derek Boothman’s close reading of this article, its reception and its reverberations in the Prison Notebooks, tracks the development of Gramsci’s anti-determinist, open Marxism, which Gramsci eventually called the philosophy of praxis. While rejecting positivist readings of Marx (including Nicolai Bukharin’s reduction of Marxism to sociology, in his Historical Materialism (1925)), Gramsci embraced the dialectic at the centre of Marx’s thinking – that people make their own history, though not in conditions chosen by them. Gramsci’s Marxism was rooted in his appropriation of Marx’s (2002 [1845]) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which open by criticizing the one-sidedness of ‘all hitherto-existing materialism’, namely, the omission of human sensuous activity – praxis – as integral to materiality itself. As Marx went on to note, this ‘active side’ of material reality was grasped philosophically by idealism, which Hegelian dialectics took to its limit.
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Boothman calls attention to the emphasis on collective will and transformative agency running throughout Gramsci’s thought. This may surprise readers familiar with Gramsci as a theorist of ‘dominant ideology’ (as in Abercrombie et al., 1980). It points us toward the Hegelian current that was retained in Gramsci’s mature work. If Hegel’s unique achievement was to join ‘the two moments of philosophical life, materialism and spiritualism, dialectically’ (Gramsci, 2011 [2007], vol. 2, p. 143) – enabling one to gain a ‘full consciousness of contradictions’, positing oneself ‘as an element of the contradiction’ and ‘rais[ing] this element to a principle of politics and action’ (Gramsci, 2011 [2007], vol. 2, p. 195) – historical materialism brought this dialectical holism to fruition. In advancing this interpretation, as Jackson points out in Chapter 3, Gramsci criticized both the mechanical materialism of Bukharin and the ‘philosophy of the spirit’ espoused by Benedetto Croce, a neo-Hegelian and the leading Italian philosopher of the 20th century’s first half. Indeed, Gramsci’s historical materialism, the philosophy of praxis, was developed as a critique of what Jackson calls Croce’s pathological dialectic: his ‘subjective account of history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than specific conditions of class struggle posed by problems of historical development,’ as Adam Morton (2005, p. 439) has put things.
Gramsci’s conception of history as praxis is unfolded further in Francesca Antonioni’s essay on historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks (Chapter 5). Importantly, this conception entails a close relationship between history, theory and strategy. As she points out, ‘in Gramsci there is no clear distinction between historical investigation, theoretical reflection and political strategy, each aspect stimulates the other two and is in turn influenced by them’ (this volume, p. 89. For Gramsci, historical reality consists of a multi-tiered ‘relation of forces in continuous motion’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 172), whose trajectory depends on the strategies and struggles of contending agencies. Antonioni reconstructs Gramsci’s view of (European) history as three moments: the first marking the rise of the bourgeoisie up to the French Revolution of 1789, the second encompassing the making of European capitalism under bourgeois hegemony, the third (commencing in the latter decades of the 19th century) witnessing in World War I and the Russian Revolution the inception of the organic crisis of the capitalist world. Transitions from one to another occurred through specific combinations of ‘objective conditions and subjective tendencies’. If the French Revolution epitomized transition under the control of a vigorous and hegemonic bourgeoisie, elsewhere (and particularly in Italy) passive revolutions achieved transformation less through hegemonic leadership than through slow, ‘molecular’ shifts (see also Chapter 10). The fascism that arose in the 1920s amid intensified class struggle and that was consolidated, as passive revolution, in the 1930s, was not only an attack on labour and the left, but entailed an element of state-corporate planning – a new
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strategy for managing capitalism without encroaching on its economic nucleus of private profit. Although as Antonioni notes, Gramsci’s analysis of fascism does not directly bear upon the rise of right-wing populism in the current organic crisis (see Chapter 21) she invites us to adopt Gramsci’s basic attitude, to understand what is really changing and why, and to explore the implications for the elaboration of an alternative political strategy.
As a final contribution to Part I and a bridge to Part II, in Chapter 6 Elizabeth Humphrys ponders the concept at the centre of Gramsci’s theoretical/strategic universe: hegemony. Humphrys traces its development, which was inspired by Lenin’s use of the term in the strategy of a worker–peasant alliance that enabled the Bolsheviks to gain state power in Russia in 1917. Given the extremely uneven development of capitalism in Italy and as a southerner himself, early on Gramsci recognized the need for such a strategy, uniting subaltern classes of Italy’s developed ‘North’ and underdeveloped ‘South’. As he wrote in 1925,
the proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. (Gramsci, 1990, p. 443)
In the Notebooks, in dialogue with Machiavelli and Croce, he extended and deepened his notion of hegemony, from a strategic concept describing a class alliance to a complex theoretical concept. Gramsci took on the challenge of explicating how hegemony – rule with consent of the ruled, leadership as persuasion armoured with coercion – is accomplished, and how an alternative hegemony (sometimes called a counter-hegemony, although Gramsci never used that term) might be advanced through organizing subaltern groups around an alternative social vision. In introducing the conceptual armamentarium associated with hegemony in the Gramscian sense, Humphrys’ essay, along with other chapters in Part I, sets the scene for the chapters in Part II. The theoretical/strategic concepts featured in the latter chapters expand the meaning of hegemony in its various facets, and explore subsequent scholarly and political engagement with these concepts.
PART II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW POLITICAL VOCABULARY
Perry Anderson (1976) avers that Western Marxism emerged out of the defeat of the left in the 1920s and 1930s, in which Gramsci participated. That defeat brought the ‘rupture of political unity between Marxist theory and mass
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
practice’ (p. 55), leading to ‘a seclusion of theorists in universities’ (p. 92). This tendency is best exemplified by the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, who offered penetrating analyses of the contradictions of advanced capitalism but fell silent as to how an exit from capitalism could possibly be brought about. Gramsci was an exception. An activist first, a prisoner later, Gramsci was never cloistered in academe, and in prison he committed himself, as Sperber and Hoare recount in Chapter 2, ‘to pursue politics by other means’. In the Prison Notebooks he developed a rich political vocabulary, attuned precisely to the strategic challenge of creating revolutionary transformation under conditions of advanced capitalism.
The middle chapters of this Companion unpack the keywords of that vocabulary. Each chapter presents Gramsci’s original formulation of a core theoretical conception, and tracks the application of his insights, theoretically and strategically, in subsequent scholarship, primarily within the historical materialist tradition. Given the close interrelations of Gramsci’s dynamic concepts, the focus in these chapters on core concepts does not seal one concept off from others. Rather, authors consider how a given thematic fits within the larger Gramscian problematic, and how it has been taken up in subsequent scholarship.
Gramsci’s concern to deliver a holistic and dynamic analysis of capitalist modernity, carrying real strategic value, is well registered in his concept of historical bloc. In Chapter 7, Panagiotis Sotiris subjects this complex concept to meticulous dissection, relying on Gramsci’s Notebooks and on more recent discussions. ‘Historical bloc’ enabled Gramsci to reformulate the relation between structure and superstructure, core to historical materialism, in fully dialectical terms, consistent with his view of history. In a famous passage that Sotiris quotes, Gramsci states that ‘structure and superstructures form an “historical bloc.” That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 366). The key word here, differentiating Gramsci’s formulation from a mechanical and reductionist approach, is ensemble: both structure and superstructure are riven with contradiction and discord; there is no linear, causal relation between them. Historical bloc not only gives Gramsci a perspective on the dynamic unity of the economic, the political and the cultural-ideological; as a strategic node in Gramsci’s thought, historical bloc ‘points to what a strategy for hegemony implies’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 125). If capitalism’s ruling class rules through the complex assemblage of a hegemonic historical bloc, Sotiris, following Gramsci, concludes that the struggle for an alternative hegemony must be the struggle for a new historical bloc. In practice, this means ‘an articulation of transition programmes emanating from the collective struggle, ingenuity and experimentation of the subaltern classes along with the new organizational forms, new
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
political practices, and new political intellectualities that can turn them into historical reality’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 134).
In Chapter 8, Marco Fonseca begins from the concept of historical bloc, and proceeds to examine its mutually-constitutive, historically emergent elements. Gramsci saw state, capitalism and civil society as interpenetrating fields of capitalist modernity, furnishing the terrain upon which a distinct way of life takes shape and is reproduced, contested and transformed. Marx and Engels (and Lenin) had conceptualized the state primarily as an apparatus of political coercion, protecting the private property at the core of capitalism. Gramsci retains this insight, but extends our understanding of the capitalist state, which he called the integral state, to comprise a dialectical ensemble of state apparatus and civil society, blending coercive and persuasive forms of power. As for capital, in Fordism (see also Chapter 16) – the mass production of commodities for mass consumption, entailing deskilled labour, relatively high wages calibrated to increasing labour productivity, and the burgeoning of consumer goods – Gramsci recognized the predominant form that industrial capital would take in the 20th century. This not only produced a plethora of commodities, it also required and thus came to produce new forms of proletarian subjectivity. This latter production process ramified from early managerial efforts to inculcate discipline into the mass workforce by promoting puritanical values to the active, educative role of the state, through schooling and social programmes, in creating conditions for a new type of worker: a worker who ‘feels that he/she has, in fact, made all the decisions and ‘succeeded’, as measured by increasingly complex psychological, social and developmental indicators, in adjusting and creating the ‘internal equilibrium’ needed to live successfully in the modern world’ (Fonseca, this volume, p. 143. Key to creating such internal equilibrium are the ‘private’ associations of civil society, formally distinct from the ‘public’ realm of the state yet intimately tied to it. The former, including clubs, church groups and worker associations, comprise the sphere of ethical life, where people acquire the ‘common sense’ that informs their voluntary subjection to market society as a matter of ‘free choice’. Increasingly, the state depends on its
dialectical unity with civil society understood as a system of “trenches and fortifications” or an ensemble of private or civilian associations where a hegemonic process works to generate new forms of voluntary submission and consensus for both capital and state and, more broadly, the existing historical bloc. (Fonseca, this volume, p. 139)
Fonseca’s engagement with recent literature underlines the continuing relevance of this formulation, in understanding the rise of neo-fascism in the
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
current crisis as well as the ‘joyful alienation’ of atomized individuals in the consensual service of domination.
Within Marxist thought, the ideological basis for voluntary submission to domination has been theorized by means of both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ concepts of ideology (Larrain, 1983). In the negative concept, whose clearest exemplar is Lukács’ (1972) analysis of reification (which was based on Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, and subsequently elaborated by the Frankfurt theorists), ideology secures submission through mystification. Gramsci is the key theorist of the positive concept. For him, ideology is not false consciousness, but a fundamental aspect of political struggle.
In their discussion of intellectuals, ideology and the ethico-political (Chapter 9), Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido unfold Gramsci’s positive concept of ideology. Famously, Gramsci held that all people are intellectuals, that reflection and inference are universal human capacities. However, only some groups specialize, as organizers of culture, in the philosophical and conceptual elaboration of ideas. Among them are the traditional intellectuals – survivals from pre-capitalist times who continue to perform ideological functions (e.g. clergy, academics) – and the organic intellectuals, whose organizational practices are crucial to the life of capitalism’s fundamental classes. If capital’s organic intellectuals include managers and industrial technicians, liberal economists, lawyers, accountants, mainstream journalists and the managers and minions of the culture industries, organic intellectuals also develop within the proletariat, key examples being labour activists and trade-union political economists. Reed and Garrido observe that organic and traditional intellectuals who are aligned with the capitalist order serve as the bourgeoisie’s ‘deputies’ (Gramsci’s term). Their task is to elaborate, refine and promote the ideas of modern market society, thus providing ‘moral and intellectual’ leadership in organizing consent to the capitalist way of life (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 12, 453). In contrast, the proletarian organic intellectual’s remit is to create ideological conditions for subalterns to gain collective agency in the struggle for socialism. Clearly, Gramsci’s depiction here is not descriptive (the aspirations of many labour activists stop well short of socialism); it is strategic, and normative. Importantly, he recognizes that this process is not unilateral but dialectical, with both sides – the leaders and rank-and-file – learning from each other in a creative collaboration through which ‘the links between reason and emotion and theory and practice are secured in critical and participatory pedagogy’ (Reed and Garrido, this volume, p. 164). The ‘common sense’, often fragmented and inchoate, that informs subaltern practice includes a nucleus of ‘good sense’, grounded in experience and at odds with the ruling hegemony. In fostering counter-hegemonic world views, the task is to refine this nucleus by dis-articulating it from hegemonic meanings and re-articulating it to a socialist conception of the world. Such moral and intellectual reformation, organized to
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
some extent through a revolutionary party, enables subalterns to pass from an understanding of their immediate interests (what Lenin called trade-union consciousness) to a broad recognition of the need for fundamental socio-political transformation. For Gramsci, this process is crucial to the formation of an alternative historical bloc.
In Chapter 10, Adam Morton picks up the thread of Antonioni’s discussion in Chapter 5 of passive revolution in the geopolitical-economic making of capitalist modernity, and braids it with Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development. Trotsky’s (2008 [1932], pp. 3–5) complex concept, which Gramsci adopted, includes the insight that the geographical unevenness of capitalist development creates a dynamic in which centre and periphery shape each other’s development, in dialectical combination. Gramsci went on to consider how that dynamic has shaped the conditions for capitalist state formation ‘from above’ on the periphery of the capitalist heartland.5 In passive revolution, ‘the state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle for renewal’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 105), a scenario noted by Gramsci in his analysis of the Southern Question within Italy, but applicable to other contexts of ‘revolution from above’, particularly within the dynamic of uneven capitalist accumulation (see for instance Morton’s (2003) own research on Mexico). As Morton notes (this volume, p. 179), (at least) two related processes define the essential form of passive revolution: (1) the revolution issues ‘from above’, without popular initiative and (2) the revolution is pushed along a conservative path that protects and even restores the basis for ruling-class power. Morton’s chapter follows the development of passive revolution in Gramsci’s (and subsequent) thought, arguing that this concept provides ‘a lateral field of causality to the structuring condition of uneven and combined development’ (this volume, p. 182), situated, as it is, in the nexus between state forms and uneven/ combined development.
Some interpreters of Gramsci generalize the concept of passive revolution to signify a ruling class strategy deployed particularly in settings of organic crisis, to pacify and incorporate dissent by implementing co-optative reforms. Following this line of thought, Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1979) has argued that top-down passive revolution calls for a counter-strategy of ‘anti-passive revolution’. A key strategic element in the latter is what Daniel Egan calls the dialectic of position and maneuver. In Chapter 11, he interrogates the military metaphor, repurposed by Gramsci from historian Hans Delbrück, which contrasts the war of maneuver and war of position. In the struggle for hegemony, the latter becomes particularly important within advanced capitalism. The expansion of civil society and thus the integral state creates ‘a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements’ (Gramsci, 2007, vol. 3, p. 169) – necessitating a dialectic between conjunctural struggles focused on seizing state power (the war of maneuver) and the protracted struggle, resembling trench
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
warfare, to create the conditions, in an alternative historical bloc, for socialism. Importantly, although the war of position ‘must create a new civil society expressing social relations appropriate for a socialist mode of production’ (Egan, this volume, p. 196), the two kinds of warfare are not sequential but dialectically related. Just as success in trench warfare requires identifying the enemy’s weakest point and staging a direct assault on it (a war of maneuver), socialist revolution requires a war of position that gains ground within and transforms civil society while also developing a well-organized political instrument – a party – capable of centralized leadership in transforming the state. In criticizing post-Gramsci arguments that envisage a two-stage revolutionary process (first war of position, then war of maneuver), Egan implores us ‘to recognize the moments of force that are inherent in a counter-hegemonic strategy, just as moments of consent are inherent in the use of revolutionary coercion’ (this volume, p. 201).
The dialectic of position and maneuver thus recommends both the creation of ‘a new civil society’ and a new political instrument (Harnecker, 2007) that can guide a multifaceted and multi-scalar process of transformation. Dorothea Schoppek and Alexandros Chrysis take up these linked issues respectively, in Chapters 12 and 13. An illuminating contemporary example of their interpenetration has been offered by Michelle Williams in her study of the war of position and maneuver in Kerala, India. There, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has long practised a ‘counter-hegemonic generative politics that attempts to establish new institutions and practices that extend the role of civil society over the state and the economy’ (Williams, 2008, p. 9). Through governing within a succession of coalitions while fostering organic ties to Kerala’s vibrant popular sector, the party has coordinated grass-roots initiatives, decentralized, self-reliant development and participatory democracy. Over decades, this war of position has shifted power within civil society, and has fostered one of the highest levels of quality of life in the majority world. As Williams (2008, p. 156) concludes, for such an alternative project to take root, ‘a new type of political party’ must forge a ‘synergistic relation’ with civil society ‘to ensure that the necessary institutional spaces are created and the capacity for civil society participation is developed’. Another compelling contemporary example of prefigurative change within a war of position comes from Venezuela, in the communes, councils and missions that, within the Bolivarian revolution, have advanced local forms of participatory democracy (Duffy, 2012; Bean, 2022).
In ‘Welding the present to the future’ (Chapter 12), Dorothea Schoppek traces the theme of prefigurative politics within Gramsci’s thought, beginning with the insights he achieved during the Red Biennium (1919–1920, see Chapter 4) of intense proletarian mobilization in Italy in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Gramsci’s activism and journalism around the 1919
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
Factory Councils movement in Turin drew his attention to the need to create the embryonic structure of socialism, ‘to weld the present to the future, satisfying the urgent necessities of the present and working usefully to create and “anticipate” the future’ (Gramsci, 1919). This concern with prefigurative politics, including the importance of moral and intellectual reformation (connecting with themes explored in Chapter 9) is at the centre of this chapter. After reviewing critiques of the anti-statist, nonstrategic and often co-optative tendencies in prefigurative politics as practised today, particularly in the global North, Schoppek revisits Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, for further insight. She concludes that prefigurative politics should be conceptualized not as a free-standing project but ‘as an integral strategic part of a war of position in the struggle for hegemony’ (Schoppek, this volume, p. 215).
Alexandros Chrysis carries these ideas further in his incisive account of Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy. As we have seen, Gramsci’s thinking is predicated on his dialectical conception of the integral state, as ‘dictatorship + hegemony’ – a unity of coercion and consent, extending well beyond the state apparatus per se. In building a counter-hegemony, the proletariat and its allies must develop capacity for both forms of power. The Modern Prince, the revolutionary party, is the vehicle for this. In view of the tendency for subaltern consciousness to be fragmented and focused on immediate interests, this political party must function as ‘the collective teacher of the proletariat and its allied groups’ (Chrysis, this volume, p. 227). Yet in view of the coercive power concentrated in the capitalist state, this party must combine ‘the power of ideas with the power of arms’ (ibid.), providing organization and direction within the counter-hegemonic historical bloc and thereby enabling the collective use of force in a war of maneuver. Chrysis goes on to critique several strands of recent scholarship (and activism) – epitomized in Holloway’s (2002) notion of changing the world without taking power – that underestimate the need for a revolutionary party capable of leading both a war of position and a war of maneuver. Instead, and in view of the failures of anti-capitalist movements detached from revolutionary parties to ‘change the world’ in real, substantive terms, Chrysis concludes that it is time to reach the ‘critical balance’ between movement and party.
PART III. GRAMSCI FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Our current setting is, in many ways, different from the Europe Gramsci knew in the first three decades of the 20th century. Yet, compelling similarities also stand out. Like us, Gramsci lived through a global organic crisis. In Gramsci’s time, this took the form of a ‘crisis of European civilization that had been building since 1870’, ignited by the collapse of the world market with World War I (Vacca, 2020b, p. 29). His activism, journalism and later
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
carceral writing took place amid the ensuing political crisis, including the Russian Revolution and the crisis-ridden interwar years (punctuated by the Great Depression) during which fascism took hold in Italy and other capitalist states. In our time, no less a hegemonic authority than the World Economic Forum has announced a ‘polycrisis’, a convergence of cascading crises marked by geopolitical confrontations, resource rivalries, economic instability and climate breakdown, ‘with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part’ (World Economic Forum, 2023, p. 57). When we ponder the relevance of Gramsci in the context of our times, we need to keep both the divergences and the parallels in mind.
More than any other Marxist of the early 20th century, and particularly since the Prison Notebooks became more widely available in the 1970s, Gramsci’s ideas have influenced a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This Companion’s third part tracks the application of Gramsci’s approach to the philosophy of praxis across these fields, conveying a sense of continuing relevance and power of these ideas – as tools for understanding the changing complex of hegemonic apparatuses and the struggles and collective agencies pressing for transformative change in the world today.
Philosophical and Political–Economic Issues
The first three essays in Part III are of broad theoretical significance as they take up central philosophical and political–economic issues surrounding hegemony and hegemonic struggle today. Jonathan Joseph, in Chapter 14, critically engages with poststructuralist readings of Gramsci (most influentially, Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) post-Marxism), and then turns to recent work that resituates Gramsci’s thought within an influential philosophical movement linked to contemporary historical materialism: critical realism. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe sought to rescue Gramsci from the economic reductionism they viewed as essential to Marxism. But, as Joseph notes, their constitutive conception of discourse tends to reduce reality to the ideas we have about it, with deleterious analytical and political ramifications. Alternatively, through a critical-realist lens, hegemony is conceived ‘in relation to those social structures and generative mechanisms that represent its conditions of possibility’ (Joseph, this volume, p. 250). Along these lines, Gramsci’s thought can be viewed as a post-positivist intervention that attends to both the social structures through which hegemony is reproduced (structural hegemony) and the concrete hegemonic projects through which collective agency is formed in defence of or in opposition to the ruling order (surface hegemony). On the latter, Joseph points to recent work (e.g. Davies, 2011) that draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
emergent, networked forms of governance disperse power, as an element of neoliberal hegemonic strategy.6
In the latter decades of the 20th century, as the post-war class compromise dissolved and as neoliberalism became more clearly articulated, Bob Jessop (1983) applied Gramscian analysis to the emerging order, theorizing the hegemonic projects and corresponding accumulation regimes of late capitalism. Pondering the shifting terrain of state and capital, Jessop built on the Gramsci-influenced analyses of French regulation theory (Aglietta 1979) and state theorist Nico Poulantzas (1978). Jessop’s neo-Gramscian framework has been very influential among social scientists (‘hegemonic project’, a term he introduced, returns more than 20,000 results in Google Scholar). More recently, he has collaborated with Ngai-Ling Sum, whose cultural political economy combines a strong semiotic analysis with Jessop’s neo-Gramscian political economy. Jessop and Sum’s work, discussed by Jessop in Chapter 15, exemplifies the continuing value of Gramsci’s insights and the added value that issues from integrating those insights with contemporary social-scientific thought. As Jessop notes, cultural political economy aligns with Gramsci’s own approach: it retains Marx’s abstract analysis of the capitalist mode of production while focusing on concrete conjunctures, the dynamic movement of leadership within them and the semiotic clusters of meaning activated in reproducing/contesting hegemony (on the last of these, see also Ives’s (2004; 2005) insightful analyses).
Gramsci’s notes on Americanism and Fordism have inspired a long train of analyses of the distinct forms of advanced capitalism, typically focused on the Global North. In Chapter 16, Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen look beyond global capitalism’s core, explicating how the generalization of Fordism has brought an ‘imperial mode of living’ predicated on North–South relations that are both imperialist and ecologically destructive. Clearly, the ‘consumer society’ that blossomed in the North had its dark underbelly. Concomitantly, it enabled commodification to enter the pores of working-class life, in an inner appropriation of human subjectivity. Although Fordism fell into crisis in the 1970s, its transmogrification into neoliberal post-Fordism only intensified this process. In our time, as the real costs, both in super-exploitation of labour and environmental ruin, are primarily borne in the South, a ‘new compromise between the elites and subalterns’ is struck, further deepening the imperial mode of living as this way of life becomes globally generalized. Brand and Wissen conclude that the current conjuncture offers three options – an authoritarian stabilization of the imperial mode of living (the project of the Northern extreme right), a passive revolution, through ecological modernization, to green capitalism, and an ‘emancipatory social-ecological alternative’ centred on care rather than profit. I will revisit the third option in this chapter’s conclusion.
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Social and Cultural Reproduction
Marx’s (1967) abstract reproduction schemes, in the second volume of Capital, pioneered a macroeconomic analysis of capital as self-expanding value, but it was Gramsci who, in his analysis of hegemony, took up the broader, concrete issue of how capitalist social formations are reproduced. As generalized commodity production, capitalism produces not only monetized goods and services; its ‘second product’, requiring a continual and contested process of social reproduction, is human beings and their creative capacities, commodified as labour power (Lebowitz, 2020). Producing that second product has been a gendered process, sited in such institutions as the family, schools, health care and other components of the welfare state. In the past half-century, socialist-feminist scholars have developed a Gramscian perspective on social reproduction that offers keen insights on gender and hegemony. In Anna Sturman’s contribution to this Companion (Chapter 17), Gramsci’s reflections on Americanism and Fordism offer an opening for feminist analysis and critique, beginning with the patriarchal nuclear family as a hegemonic form within capitalism. While taking note of some deeply problematic currents that have emerged within the ambit of feminism as the organic crisis of neoliberalism has deepened (see also Chapter 22), Sturman provides a compelling account of how social-reproductive feminism has amplified some key Gramscian insights on hegemony and counter-hegemony. She argues that participation ‘in expansive acts of care and solidarity which fall beyond the formal workplace’ is integral to building a counter-hegemonic historical bloc. As the morbid symptoms of ecological collapse proliferate, our understanding of the stakes widens to include the conditions for socio-ecological reproduction – as in a stable climate, fertile soils, green urban infrastructure and health/ healthcare in the broadest of senses.
Integral to social reproduction, of course, is cultural reproduction, as Chapters 18, 19 and 20 in this volume affirm. In the first of these, Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam reflect on the Gramscian current in cultural studies, which blossomed as an interdisciplinary field from its centre in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The intellectual leadership of Raymond Williams (1977) and Stuart Hall (1980) inspired many in the Anglosphere to rediscover Marxism through a Gramscian lens while accentuating the cultural moment in their analyses. Gramsci’s own expansive concept of media, which refused the technological fetishism that is typical in media studies and emphasized the social organization of communication, offers an especially relevant perspective in our times of digital social media and platform capitalism. Indeed, in attending to the social media prosumer as a new kind of active audience whose self-activation via digital practices seems to shape their own
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received a dorsally-placed accessory gland, open to the exterior by a median aperture placed ventrally a little way behind the mouth.
Life-history.—The egg undergoes a large portion of its development within the body of the mother. In Linguatula taenioides, which lives in the nasal cavities of the dog, the eggs pass away with the nasal excretions. If these, scattered about in the grass, etc., be eaten by a rabbit, the egg-shell is dissolved in the stomach of the second host and a small larva is set free. In Porocephalus proboscideus and others, which inhabit the lungs of snakes, the eggs pass along the alimentary canal and leave the body with the faeces. They also must be eaten by a second host if development is to proceed.
The larva which emerges when the egg-shell is dissolved has a rounded body provided with two pairs of hooked appendages, and a tail which is more or less prominent in different species (Figs. 259, 260). Each appendage bears a claw, and is strengthened by a supporting rod or skeleton. Anteriorly the head bears a boring apparatus of several chitinous stylets. The various internal organs are in this stage already formed, though in a somewhat rudimentary state, and it is doubtful if the anus has yet appeared.
F . 259. A late larval stage of Porocephalus proboscideus, seen from the side. Highly magnified. (From Stiles.) 1, primordium of first pair of chitinous processes; 2, primordium of second pair of chitinous processes; 3, mouth; 4, ventral ganglion; 5, receptaculum seminis; 6, oviduct; 7, ovary; 8, anus; 9, vagina.
By means of its boring apparatus, and aided by its hooked limbs, the larva now works its way through the stomach-walls of its second host, and comes to rest in the liver or in some other viscus. Its presence in the tissues of its second host causes the formation of a cyst, and within this the larva rests and develops. In man, at least, the cysts often undergo a calcareous degeneration, and Virchow states “dass
F . 260. Larva of Porocephalus proboscideus, seen from below. Highly magnified. (From Stiles.) 1, Boring, anterior end; 2, first pair of chitinous processes seen between the forks of the second pair; 3, ventral nerve-ganglion; 4, alimentary canal; 5, mouth; 6 and 7, gland-cells.
beim Menschen das
Pentastomum am häufigsten von allen Entozoen zu Verwechselungen mit echten Tuberkeln Veranlassungen giebt.” The larva moults several times, and loses its limbs, which seem to have no connexion with the paired hooks in the adult (Fig. 256). The internal organs slowly assume the form they possess in the adult. The larva is at first quite smooth, but as it grows the annulations make their appearance, arising in the middle and spreading forward and backward (Fig. 259). In this encysted condition the larva remains coiled up for some months, according to Leuckart; six in the case of L. taenioides, and a somewhat shorter period, according to Stiles,[385] in the case of P. proboscideus.
The frequency of what used to be called Pentastoma denticulatum (= the larval form of L. taenioides) in the body of man depends on the familiarity of man with dogs. Klebs and Zaeslin found one larva in 900 and two in 1914 autopsies. Laenger[386] found the larva fifteen times in about 400 dissections, once in the mesentery, seven times in the liver, and seven times in the wall of the intestine. After remaining encysted for some time it may escape, and begins wandering through the tissues, aided by its hooks and annulations, a proceeding not unaccompanied by danger to its host. Should the latter be eaten by some carnivorous animal, the larva makes its way into the nasal cavities or sinuses, or into the lungs of the flesh-eating creature, and there after another ecdysis it becomes adult. If, however, the second host escapes this fate, the larvae re-encyst themselves, and then if swallowed they are
said to bore through the intestine of the flesh-eater, and so make their way to their adult abode.
F . 261. Encysted form of Porocephalus protelis, × 1, lying in the mesentery of its host. (From Hoyle.)
Systematic.[387]—The Pentastomida are a group much modified by parasitism, which has so deeply moulded their structure as to obscure to a great extent their origin and affinities. The larva, with its clawed limbs, recalls the Tardigrades and certain Mites, e.g. Phytoptus, where only two pairs of limbs persist, and where the abdomen is elongated and forms a large proportion of the body. The resemblances to a single and somewhat aberrant genus must not, however, be pressed too far. The striated muscles, the ring-like nature of the reproductive organs and their ducts, perhaps even the disproportion both in size and number of the females to the males, are also characters common to many Arachnids.
The Pentastomida include three genera, Linguatula, Fröhlich, Porocephalus, Humboldt, and Reighardia, Ward.[388] The first two were regarded by Leuckart as but sub-genera, but Railliet[389] and Hoyle[390] have raised them to the rank of genera. They are characterised as follows:—
Linguatula, body flattened, but dorsal surface arched; the edges of the fluke-like body crenelated; the body-cavity extends as diverticula into the edges of the body.
Porocephalus, body cylindrical, with no diverticula of the bodycavity.
Reighardia, devoid of annulations, transparent, with poorly developed hooks and a mouth-armature.
The following is a list of the species with their primary and secondary or larval hosts:—
i. Linguatula pusilla, Diesing, found in the intestine of the freshwater fish Acara, a South American genus of the Cichlidae. This is possibly the immature form of L. subtriquetra.
ii. L. recurvata, Diesing, found in the frontal sinuses and the trachea of Felis onca.
iii. L. subtriquetra, Diesing, found in the throat of Caiman latirostris and C. sclerops, perhaps the mature form of L. pusilla.
iv. L. taenioides, Lamarck, found in the frontal sinuses and nasal chambers of the dog and ounce, and in the nasal cavities of the wolf, fox, goat, horse, mule, sheep, and man, and in the trachea of the ounce. The immature form has been found in or on the liver of the cat, guinea-pig, and horse; in the lungs of the ox, cat, guinea-pig, porcupine, hare, and rabbit; in the liver and connective tissue of the small intestine of man; and in the mesenteric glands of the ox, camel, goat, sheep, antelope, fallowdeer, and mouse.
v. Porocephalus annulatus, Baird, found in the lungs of the Egyptian cobra, Naja haje; the immature form is thought to live encapsuled in a species of Porphyrio[391] and in the Numidian Crane.
vi. P. aonycis, Macalister, from the lungs of an Indian otter taken in the Indus.
vii. P. armillatus, Wyman, found in the adult state in the lungs of certain African pythons, and in the lion; in the larval form it occurs encysted in the abdomen of the Aard-wolf, the mandril, and man—usually in negroes. Its migrations in the body of its second host sometimes cause fatal results.
viii. P. bifurcatus, Diesing, found in the body-cavity of certain snakes, and in the lungs of boa-constrictors and the legless lizard, Amphisbaena alba. Possibly an immature form.
ix. P. clavatus, Lohrmann, found in the lungs of the Monitor lizard.
x. P. crocidura, Parona, found in the peritoneum of the “musk-rat” Crocidura in Burmah. Probably a larval form.
xi. P. crotali, Humboldt, found in the lungs, body-cavity, kidneys, spleen, and mesentery of many snakes and lizards, and of the lion and leopard. The immature forms occur in the liver and abdominal cavity of species of opossum, armadillo, mouse, raccoon, bat, and marmoset.
xii. P. geckonis, Dujardin, found in the lungs of a Siamese gecko.
xiii. P. gracilis, Diesing, found free in the body-cavity or encapsuled on the viscera and mesenteries of South American fishes, snakes, and lizards,
xiv. P. heterodontis; Leuckart, found encapsuled in the abdominal muscles and mesentery of a species of Heterodon.
xv. P. indicus, [392] v. Linst., found in the trachea and lungs of Gavialis gangeticus.
xvi. P. lari, Mégnin, found in the air-sacs of the Burgomaster or Glaucous gull, Larus glaucus of the Polar seas.
xvii. P. megacephalus, Baird, found embedded in the flesh of the head of an Indian crocodile, C. palustris, the “Mugger.” Probably a larval form.
xviii. P. megastomus, Diesing, found in the lungs of a fresh-water tortoise, Hydraspis geoffroyana.
xix. P. moniliformis, Diesing, found in the lungs of pythons.
xx. P. najae sputatricis, Leuckart, found encapsuled in the abdominal muscles and peritoneum of the cobra, Naja tripudians. Probably a larval form.
xxi. P. oxycephalus, Diesing, found in the lungs of crocodiles and alligators.
xxii. P. platycephalus, Lohrmann, habitat unknown.
xxiii. P. subuliferus, Leuckart, in the lungs of the cobra Naja haje.
xxiv. P. teretiusculus, Baird, found in the lungs and mouth of certain Australian snakes.
xxv. P. tortus, Shipley, found in the body-cavity of a snake, Dipsadomorphus irregularis, taken in New Britain.
xxvi. Reighardia, sp., Ward, found in the air-sacs of Bonaparte’s gull and the common North American tern.
CHAPTER XXI PYCNOGONIDA[393]
Remote, so far as we at present see, from all other Arthropods, while yet manifesting the most patent features of the Arthropod type, the Pycnogons constitute a little group, easily recognised and characterised, abundant and omnipresent in the sea. The student of the foreshore finds few species and seldom many individuals, but the dredger in deep waters meets at times with prodigious numbers, lending a character to the fauna over great areas.
F . 262. Pycnogonum littorale, Ström, × 2.
The commonest of our native species, or that at least which we find the oftenest, is Pycnogonum littorale (Phalangium littorale, Ström, 1762). We find it under stones near low water, or often clinging louse-like to a large Anemone. The squat segmented trunk carries, on four pairs of strong lateral processes, as many legs, long, robust, eight-jointed, furnished each with a sharp terminal claw. In front the trunk bears a long, stout, tubular proboscis, at the apex of which is the mouth, suctorial, devoid of jaws; the body terminates in a narrow, limbless, unsegmented process, the so-called “abdomen,” at the end of which is the anal orifice. The body-ring to which is attached the first pair of legs, bears a tubercle carrying four eye-spots; and below, it carries, in the male sex, a pair of small limbs, whose function is to grasp and hold the eggs, of which the male animal assumes the burden, carrying them beneath his body in a flattened coherent mass. In either sex a pair of sexual apertures open on the second joints of the last pair of legs. The integument of body and limbs is very strongly chitinised, brown in colour, and raised into strong bosses or tubercles along the middle line of the back, over the lateral processes, and from joint to joint of the limbs. The whole animal has a singular likeness to the Whalelouse, Cyamus mysticeti (well described by Fr. Martins in 1675), that clings to the skin of the Greenland Whale as does Pycnogonum to the Anemone, a resemblance close enough to mislead some of the older naturalists, and so close that Linnaeus, though in no way misled thereby, named it Phalangium balaenarum. The substance of the above account, and the perplexity attending the classification of the animal, are all included in Linnaeus’s short description:[394] “Simillimus Onisco Ceti, sed pedes omnes pluribus articulis, omnes perfecti, nec plures quam octo. Dorsum rubrum, pluribus segmentis; singulis tribus mucronibus. Cauda cylindrica, brevissima, truncata. Rostrum membranaceum, subsubulatum, longitudine pedum.
Genus dubium, facie Onisci ceti; rostro a reliquis diversum. Cum solo rostro absque maxillis sit forte aptius Acaris aut proprio generi subjiciendum.... Habitat in mari norvegico sub lapidibus.”[395]
F . 263. Dorsal view of Nymphon brevirostre, Hodge, × 6. Britain.
The common Pycnogonum is, by reason of the suppression of certain limbs, rather an outlying member than a typical representative of the Order, whose common characters are more strikingly and more perfectly shown in species, for instance, of Nymphon. Of this multiform genus we have many British species, some of the smaller being common below tidemarks, creeping among weeds or clinging like Caprellae with skeleton limbs to the branches of Zoophytes, where their slender forms are not easily seen. In contrast to the stouter body and limbs of Pycnogonum, the whole fabric of Nymphon tends to elongation; the body is drawn out so that the successive lateral processes stand far apart, and a slender neck intervenes between the oculiferous tubercle and the proboscis; the legs are produced to an amazing length and an extreme degree of attenuation: “mirum tam parvum corpus regere tam magnos pedes,” says Linnaeus. Above the base of the proboscis are a pair of three-jointed appendages, the two terminal joints of which compose a forcipate claw; below and behind these come a pair of delicate, palp-like limbs of five joints; and lastly, on the ventral side, some little way behind these, we find the ovigerous legs that we have already seen in the male Pycnogonum, but which are present in both sexes in the case of Nymphon. At the base of the claw which terminates each of the eight long ambulatory legs stands a pair of smaller accessory or “auxiliary” claws. The generative orifices are on the second joint of the legs as in Pycnogonum, but as a rule they are present on all the eight legs in the female sex, and on the two hindmost pairs in the male. One of the Antarctic Nymphonidae (Pentanymphon) and one other Antarctic genus less closely related (Decolopoda) have an extra pair of legs. No other Pycnogon, save these, exhibits a greater number of appendages than Nymphon nor a less number than Pycnogonum, nor are any other conspicuous organs to be discovered in other genera that are not represented in these two: within so narrow limits lie the varying characters of the group.
In framing a terminology for the parts and members of the body, we encounter an initial difficulty due to the ease with which terms seem applicable, that are used of
F . 264. Nymphon brevirostre, Hodge. Head, from below, showing chelophores, palps, and ovigerous leg
more or less analogous parts in the Insect or the Crustacean, without warrant of homology. Thus the first two pairs of appendages in Nymphon have been commonly called, since Latreille’s time, the mandibles and the palps (Linnaeus had called them the palps and the antennae), though the comparison that Latreille intended to denote is long abandoned; or, by those who leaned, with Kröyer and Milne-Edwards, to the Crustacean analogy, mandibles and maxillae. Dohrn eludes the difficulty by denominating the appendages by simple numbers, I., II., III., ... VII., and this method has its own advantages; but it is better to frame, as Sars has done, a new nomenclature. With him we shall speak of the Pycnogon’s body as constituted of a trunk, whose first (composite) segment is the cephalic segment or head, better perhaps the cephalothorax, and which terminates in a caudal segment or abdomen; the “head” bears the proboscis, the first appendages or “chelophores,” the second or “palps,” the third, the false or “ovigerous” legs, and the first of the four pairs of “ambulatory” legs. The chelophores bear their chela, or “hand,” on a stalk or scape; the ambulatory legs are constituted of three coxal joints, a femur, two tibial joints, a tarsus, and a propodus, with its claws, and with or without auxiliary claws.
The Body.—The trunk with its lateral processes may be still more compact than in Pycnogonum, still more attenuated than in Nymphon.
In a few forms (e.g. Pallene, Ammothea, Tanystylum, Colossendeis) the last two, or even more, segments of the trunk are more or less coalescent. In Rhynchothorax the cephalic segment is produced into a sharp-pointed rostrum that juts forward over the base of the proboscis. The whole body and limbs may be smooth, tuberculated, furnished with scattered hairs, or sometimes densely hispid.
F . 265. A, Colossendeis proboscidea, Sabine, Britain; B, Ammothea echinata, Hodge, Britain; C, Phoxichilus spinosus, Mont , Arctic Ocean (The legs omitted )
The proboscis varies much in shape and size. It may be much longer or much shorter than the body, cylindrical or tumid, blunt or pointed, straight or (e.g. Decolopoda) decurved; usually firmly affixed to the head and pointing straight forwards; sometimes (Eurycide, Ascorhynchus) articulated on a mobile stalk and borne deflexed beneath the body.
Chelophores.—The first pair of appendages or chelophores are wanting in the adult Pycnogonum, Phoxichilus, Rhynchothorax, and Colossendeis. [396]
In Ammothea and its allies they are extremely rudimentary in the adult, being reduced to tiny knobs in Tanystylum and Trygaeus, and present as small twojointed appendages in Ammothea; in this last, if not in the others also, they are present in complete chelate form in the later larval stages.
F . 266. A, B, Chelophores of Ascorhynchus abyssi, G.O.S. A, Young; B, adult. (After Sars ) C, Anterior portion of Ammothea hispida, Hodge, Jersey: late larval stage (= Achelia longipes, Hodge), showing complete chelae. D, Chela of Eurycide hispida, Kr.
In Eurycide, Ascorhynchus, and Barana they are usually less atrophied, but yet comparatively small and with imperfect chelae, while in some Ascorhynchi (A. minutus, Hoek) they are reduced to stumps.
F 267 Chelae of species of Nymphonidae: A, Nymphon brevirostre, Hodge; B, Boreonymphon robustum, Bell; C, Chaetonymphon macronyx, G.O.S.; D, Nymphon elegans, Hansen.
In Pallenopsis the scape of the chelophore consists of two joints, as also in Decolopoda and some Ascorhynchus: in Nymphon, Phoxichilidium, Pallene, and Cordylochele of one only; in all these the terminal portion or “hand” forms a forcipate “chela,” of which the ultimate joint forms the “movable finger.” In some species of Nymphon the chela is greatly produced and attenuated, and armed with formidable serrate teeth on its opposing edges; in others it is shortened, with blunter
teeth; in Boreonymphon robustum the claws are greatly curved, with a wide gap between. In this last, and in Phoxichilidium, the opposing edges are smooth and toothless. In Cordylochele the hand is almost globular, the movable finger being shortened down, and half enclosed by the other.
F 268 Proboscis and chelophores of Cordylochele longicollis, G.O.S. (After Sars.)
Palpi.—The second pair of appendages, or palps, are absent, or all but absent, in the adult Pycnogonum, Phoxichilus, Phoxichilidium, Pallene, and their allies. In certain of these cases, e.g. Phoxichilidium, a knob remains to mark their place; in others, e.g. Pallenopsis, a single joint remains; in a few Pallenidae a sexual difference is manifested, reduction of the appendage being carried further in the female than in the male. The composition of the palps varies in the genera that possess them. In Nymphon there are five joints, and their relative lengths (especially of the terminal ones) are much used by Sars in defining the many species of the genus. The recently described Paranymphon, Caullery, has palps of six or seven joints. In the Ammotheidae the number of joints ranges from five or six in Tanystylum to nine (as a rule) in Ammothea and Oorhynchus, or ten, according to Dohrn, in certain species of Ammothea. Colossendeis and the Eurycididae have a ten-jointed palp, which in this last family is very long and bent in zigzag fashion, as it is, by the way, also in Ammothea. The terminal joints of the palp are in all cases more or less setose, and their function is conjecturally tactile.
Ovigerous Legs.—Custom sanctions for these organs an inappropriate name, inasmuch as it is only in the males that they perform the function which the name connotes.[397] They probably also take some part, as Hodgson suggests, in the act of feeding.
F . 269. Eurycide hispida, Kr., showing stalked proboscis and zigzag palps
F 270 Ovigerous legs of A, Phoxichilus spinosus, Mont ; B, Phoxichilidium femoratum, Rathke; C, Anoplodactylus petiolatus, Kr.; D, Colossendeis proboscideus, Sab.
F . 271. Terminal joints of ovigerous leg of Rhynchothorax mediterraneus, Costa
Phoxichilidium five, Anoplodactylus six, Phoxichilus seven; in Paranymphon eight; in Pycnogonum nine, with, in addition, a terminal claw; in the Ammotheidae from seven (Trygaeus) to ten, without a claw; in Pallenidae ten, with or without a claw; in Rhynchothorax, Colossendeis, Eurycide, Ascorhynchus, Nymphon, ten and a claw. The appendage, especially when long, is apt to be wound towards its extremity into a spiral, and its last four joints usually possess a peculiar armature. In Rhynchothorax this takes the form of a stout toothed tubercle on each joint; in Colossendeis of several rows of small imbricated denticles; in Nymphon and Pallene of a single row of curious serrate and pointed spines, each set in a little membranous socket.
In Pycnogonum, Phoxichilus, Phoxichilidium, and their immediate allies they are absent in the female; in all the rest they are alike present in both sexes, though often somewhat smaller in the female than in the male. They are always turned towards the lower side of the body, and in many cases even their point of origin is wholly ventral. The number of joints varies: in
F 272 Nymphon brevirostre, Hodge Terminal joints of ovigerous leg, with magnified “tooth.”
F . 273. Nymphon strömii, Kr. Male carrying egg-masses on his ovigerous legs.
F . 274. Terminal joints (tarsus and propodus) of legs. 1, Chaetonymphon hirtum, Fabr ; 2, N strömii, Kr ; 3, Nymphon brevirostre, Hodge; 4, Ammothea echinata, Hodge; 5, Ascorhynchus abyssi, G.O.S. (All after Sars.)
Legs.—The four pairs of ambulatory legs are composed, in all cases without exception, of eight joints if we exclude, or nine if we include, the terminal claw. They vary from a length about equal to that of the body (Pycnogonum, Rhynchothorax, Ammothea) to six or seven times as much, perhaps more, in Nymphon and Colossendeis, the fourth, fifth, and sixth joints being those that suffer the greatest elongation. The seventh joint, or tarsus, is usually short, but in some Nymphonidae is much elongated; the eighth, or propodus, is usually somewhat curved, and usually possesses a special armature of simple or serrate spines. The auxiliary claws,
sometimes large, sometimes small, lie at the base of the terminal claw in Ammotheidae, Phoxichilidae, in Phoxichilidium, in most Pallenidae, in nearly all Nymphonidae. Their presence or absence is often used as a generic character, helping to separate, e.g., Pallene from Pseudopallene and Pallenopsis, and Phoxichilidium from Anoplodactylus; nevertheless they may often be detected in a rudimentary state when apparently absent. The legs are smooth or hirsute as the body may happen to be.
F 275 Legs of A, Pallene brevirostris, Johnston; B, Anoplodactylus petiolatus, Kr.; C, Phoxichilus spinosus, Mont.; D, Colossendeis proboscidea, Sabine; E, Ammothea echinata, Hodge, ♂.
F . 276. Boreonymphon robustum, Bell. Male with young, slightly enlarged. Faeroe Channel.
Glands.—In some or all of the appendages of the Pycnogonida may be found special glands with varying and sometimes obscure functions. The glands of the chelophores (Fig. 280, p. 522) are present in the larval stages only. They consist of a number of flask-shaped cells[398] lying within the basal joint of the appendage, and generally opening at the extremity of a long, conspicuous, often mobile, spine (e.g. Ammothea (Dohrn), Pallene, Tanystylum (Morgan), Nymphon brevicollum and N. gracile (Hoek)). They secrete a sticky thread, by means of which the larvae attach themselves to one another and to the ovigerous legs of the male parent. In Nymphon hamatum, Hoek, the several filaments secreted by the separate sacculi of the gland issue separately. In Pycnogonum the spine on which the gland opens is itself prolonged into a long fine filament, and here, according to Hoek, the gland is in all probability functionless and rudimentary. Hoek has failed to find the gland in Ascorhynchus, and also in certain Nymphonidae (e.g. Boreonymphon robustum, Bell), in which the young are more than usually advanced at the time of hatching. The gland has also been described by Lendenfeld and others in Phoxichilidium, whose larvae do not cling together but live a parasitic life; in this genus the long spine or tubercle is absent on which the orifice is usually situated, and, according to Lendenfeld, the secretion issues from many small orifices set along the opposing edges of the chela. Of the two species described by Dohrn as Barana castelli and B.
arenicola, the former has the spine of inordinate length, more than twice as long as the whole body, chelophore and all; while in the latter (which species rather resembles Ascorhynchus) the spine is altogether absent.
In the palps and ovigerous legs of the adult are found glandular bodies of a hollow vesicular form with a simple lining of cells, the vesicle being divided within by a septum with a central orifice, the outer and smaller half opening to the exterior. These glands are probably of general occurrence, but they have been but little investigated. They lie usually in the fourth and fifth joints of the palp, and the third and fourth joints of the ovigerous leg. Hoek describes them in Discoarachne (Tanystylum) as lying within the elongated third joint of the palp, and opening by a sieve-plate at the end of the second joint. In Ammothea (Dohrn) and Ascorhynchus (Hoek) they open on a small tubercle situated on the fifth joint of the palp. In Nymphon, Hoek describes them as opening by a small pore on the fourth joint of the ovigerous leg. Dohrn failed to find them in Pycnogonum, but in Phoxichilus, Phoxichilidium and Pallene he discovered the glands appertaining to the palps, though the palps themselves have disappeared in those genera; he has found the glands also in Ammothea, in larvae that have not yet attained their full complement of legs.
The males in nearly all cases are known to possess glands in the fourth joints or thighs of all the ambulatory legs, and these glands without doubt act as cementglands, emitting, like the chelophoral glands of the larvae, a sticky thread or threads by which the eggs and young are anchored to the ovigerous legs. In some species of Nymphon and of Colossendeis Hoek could not find these, and he conjectures them to be conspicuous only in the breeding season. While in most cases these glands open by a single orifice or by a few pores grouped closely together, in Barana, according to Dohrn, and especially in B. arenicola, the pores are distributed over a wide area of the femoral joint.[399] In Discoarachne (Loman) and Trygaeus they open into a wide chitinised sac with tubular orifice. While the function of these last glands and of the larval glands seems plain enough, that of those which occur in the palps and ovigerous legs of both sexes remains doubtful.
In their morphological nature the two groups of glands are likewise in contrast, the former being unicellular glands, such as occur in various parts of the integument of the body and limbs of many Crustacea; while the latter are segmentally arranged and doubtless mesoblastic in origin, like the many other segmental excretory organs (or coelomoducts) of various Arthropods.
By adding colouring matters (acid-fuchsin, etc.) to the water in which the animals were living, Kowalevsky demonstrated the presence of what he believed to be excretory organs in Phoxichilus, Ammothea, and Pallene. These are small groups of cells, lying symmetrically near the posterior borders of the first three bodysegments, and also near the bases of the first joints of the legs, dorsal to the alimentary canal.[400]
Alimentary System.—The proboscis is a very complicated organ, and has been elaborately described by Dohrn.[401] It is a prolongation of the oral cavity, containing a highly developed stomodaeum, but showing no sign of being built up of limbs or gnathites. The mouth, situated at its apex, is a three-sided orifice, formed by a dorsal[402] and two lateral lobes; and hence the proboscis has been assumed by some,
