Reviews for Hegemony and revolution

The average rating for Hegemony and revolution based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-07 00:00:00 James Husband Good god this book was tedious. Walter Adamson is not a clear expositor of Gramsci's more complex ideas, and his analysis of the more straightforward ones is pedestrian. He has a dislike for Lenin, whom he never really analyses in any depth, and gets wrong repeatedly. At one point he misquotes Gramsci to further his case. Gramsci says in the Prison Notebooks that the concept of hegemony originated with Lenin, but Adamson says "the broadly cultural orientation implicit in hegemony as a form of rule, and the educational orientation implicit in it in opposition to "economic-corporative," owe a considerable debt to Croce and very little if anything to Lenin" (p. 172). He cites SPN 55-6:fn5, and provides the following Gramsci quote: "Contemporaneously with Croce, the greatest modern theorist of the philosophy of praxis [Lenin], on the terrain of political struggle and organization and with a political terminology, gave new weight - in opposition to various "economistic" tendencies - to the doctrine of hegemony as the complement to the theory of the state-as-force." However, the quote on that page actually says, "gave new weight - in opposition to various "economistic" tendencies - to the front of cultural struggle, and constructed the doctrine of hegemony as the complement to the theory of the state-as-force." Clearly this vitiates Adamson's claim, so the omission is quite suspect. Generally, Adamson seems to prefer the earlier Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach to the later Marx of Capital, but seems to have a fairly weak grasp of both; the latter he assimilates too easily to later Marxists like Plekhanov. In general, he fails to assess the accuracy of Gramsci's interpretation of Marx, or his remarks about how to interpret a thinker. This would've been an interesting topic to pursue because Gramsci's interpretations of e.g. Marx and Machiavelli are somewhat idiosyncratic. He also never considers how Gramsci's political concepts might be related to, or grow out of, the ones Marx develops in his three major works on French politics (I think there are definite affinities). In general, he's quite bad at giving both sides of the debates Gramsci was in, which suggests his grounding in the literature of those with whom Gramsci was engaging is very weak. His own position seems to lapse at times into a kind of vulgar sociological holism - 'everything is related to everything else' - which effectively blocks doing the kind of causal analysis Gramsci is clearly interested in. Finally, he claims to have discovered two different concepts of hegemony, and that nobody else has detected this. But his claim is unconvincing. He distinguishes (a) hegemony in contrast to domination, and (b) hegemonic in contrast to 'economic-corporative'. In reality, these are not 'two concepts' of hegemony. Hegemony is a form of rule by a class; calling a class 'hegemonic' as opposed to 'economic-corporative' means it is a class that rules society (as opposed to pursuing its own economic interests in a narrow corporate manner), and rules through hegemony. It is akin to declaring to have discovered two concepts of anger because one can distinguish between anger itself and angry people. That gives you a taste of how unsophisticated the analysis is in this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-02 00:00:00 Doug Roman Not all of the selections in this volume are the complete texts. The edited texts are "On the Common Saying", "Metaphysics of Morals" & "Contest of Faculties." A later edition of this book includes three more short items and a postscript concerning scholarly issues since its first publication in 1970.