Antonio Gramsci

Discussion

Gramsci as the indispensable theorist of how irrationalist formations reproduce institutionally

Erik Haines:

"Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written in fascist Italian prison between 1929 and 1935, supplies the third element. Gramsci is the indispensable theorist of how irrationalist formations become institutionally reproduced through what he calls the Integral State: the dense network of cultural, educational, religious, and intellectual institutions through which a class formation reproduces its own ideological substrate as common sense. The integral state is not the legislative-administrative state narrowly conceived; it is the wider network through which political society and civil society interpenetrate, such that the cultural-hegemonic work of reproducing a class formation’s worldview happens across an institutional ecology far broader than the formal apparatus of government. Gramsci’s distinction between traditional intellectuals (who present themselves as autonomous from class formations but whose categories of analysis are produced by their class) and organic intellectuals (who self-consciously articulate the perspective of a class formation) provides the analytical key. The romantic-liberal formation is reproduced, in Gramsci’s framework, by traditional intellectuals—figures like McGilchrist, Taylor, and the broader meaning-crisis discourse—who do not understand themselves as class-positioned but whose work performs the cultural-hegemonic function the educated-liberal class requires. Gramsci’s analytical resources let us see this clearly without requiring the conspiracy-theoretical move of attributing the reproduction to a single agent or institutional decision."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)