¹ We should note that some of the conceptual difficulty and cumbersome aspect of our topic comes from the very concept of ‘international’ (coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1780). This not only implies that global or worldwide relations and movements are confined to relations among pre-constituted nations it presupposes a national and international distinction without explicitly explaining it. This is the very question that many debates around the nation-state and globalisation revolve including whether Gramsci's concepts can be ‘internationalised’. Gramsci himself uses ‘internazionale’ often (although with overtones of the Communist International) but he also frequently uses the terms ‘mondo’ (world) and ‘mondiale’ (worldwide) which have certain advantages but are mostly translated as ‘international’. As we shall demonstrate, Gramsci's consistent attention to international dimensions of analysis allows him to situate domestic examinations in wider contexts without falling into the above issues with the term ‘international’.

² We use the term ‘domestic’ in reference to phenomena at the ‘national level’ where using the term ‘national’ may inaccurately imply a connection to a political strategy of constructing the nation, as we will discuss below.

³ While we do not wish to expand our contention beyond the scope of an article length study, the presumed abstract lines between national and international deriving from mainstream approaches to International Relations can hardly be used to criticise Gramsci unless we are to ignore much of the engagement for which he is famous.

⁴ Even advocates of the applicability of Gramsci's concepts to contemporary international analysis, often labelled ‘neo-Gramscians’, describe their method as ‘internationalising’ or ‘translating’ Gramsci's concepts his focus on the state to the international level. This arguably stems from Robert Cox's seminal article on developing a Gramscian approach to International Relations, see: Cox, Robert, ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations’, Millennium, 12:2 (1983), pp. 162–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Morton, Adam David, ‘Historicizing Gramsci: Situating Ideas In and Beyond their Contexts’, Review of International Political Economy, 10:1 (February, 2003), pp. 118–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morton, Adam David, Unraveling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (London: Pluto, 2007)Google Scholar; Morton, Adam David, ‘Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution and the International’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35:3 (2007), pp. 597–621CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morton, Adam David, ‘Disputing the Geopolitics of the States System and Global Capitalism’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20:4 (2007), pp. 599–617CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Morton, Adam David, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011)Google Scholar.

⁶ Jessop, Bob, State Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 105Google Scholar. In a different way, Ian Bruff has also emphasised the ‘simultaneous relatedness and methodological distinctiveness’ of the national and international in Gramsci although his purpose is to use the strength of Gramsci's approach to draw out the national distinctiveness of European varieties of capitalism, Bruff, Ian, ‘European Varieties of Capitalism and the International’, European Journal of International Relations, 16:4 (2010), pp. 615–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Germain, Randall D. and Kenny, Michael, ‘Engaging Gramsci: International Relations Theory and the New Gramscians’, Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Indeed, a fundamental point of contention is whether there is a coherent ‘neo-Gramscian’ school of IPE. Those working with Gramsci in IR have tended to resist such a label, Gill, Stephen, ‘Epistemology, Ontology, and the “Italian School”’, in Gill, S. (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 21–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, while critics such as Germain and Kenny, and others have sought to generalise about such work, see also Ayers, Alison J., ‘Introduction’, in Ayers, A. J. (ed.), Gramsci, Political Economy, and International Relations Theory: Modern Princes and Naked Emperors (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Saurin, Julian, ‘The Formation of Neo-Gramscians in International Relations and International Political Economy’, in Ayers, Alison J. (ed.), Gramsci, Political Economy, and International Relations Theory: Modern Princes and Naked Emperors (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 23–43, p. 29Google Scholar. Interestingly, though a critic, Saurin recognises the lack of a single ‘neo-Gramscian’ position and suggests that such critique is more accurately directed at ‘neo-Coxians’ than ‘neo-Gramscians’, Saurin, ‘The Formation’, pp. 23–43.

⁹ Saurin, ‘The Formation’, p. 31. We will discuss below how the common invocation of the sporadic nature of Gramsci's writings to render dubious and partial readings of his prison writings has a long history, one that is being undermined by research more directly tied to Gramsci's actual writings.

¹⁰ Worth, Owen, ‘Beyond World Order and Transnational Classes: A (Re)Application of Gramsci in Global Politics’, in McNally, Mark and Schwarzmantel, John (eds), Gramsci and Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 9Google Scholar. Worth provides a telling example in that he explicitly departs from the position that Gramsci's concepts ‘cannot be transposed to the international/global arena’ but abides by the structure of the argument premised on a notion that this requires such a transposition. In a more recent article, Worth does not repeat such a claim about Gramsci but more subtly invokes a similar dynamic whereby the work of the ‘neo-Gramscians’ scholarship ‘moved Gramsci into the realm of the international’ even though later he recommends a return to Gramsci's writings for an improved approach to international analysis, Worth, Owen, ‘Recasting Gramsci in International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 37 (2011), pp. 373–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Cutler, A. Claire, Gramsci, Law and the Culture of Global Capitalism, in Bieler, Andreas and Morton, Adam David (eds), Images of Gramsci (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 133–48, at p. 142Google Scholar. After this sentence Cutler cites Germain and Kenny (1998), as is the common pattern that we are hoping to change.

¹² Femia, Joseph, ‘Gramsci, Machiavelli and International Relations’, The Political Quarterly, 76:3 (July 2005), pp. 341–9, at pp. 341, 342, 343CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Buck-Morss, Susan, ‘Sovereign Right and the Global Left’, Rethinking Marxism, 19:4 (October 2007), pp. 432–51, at p. 440CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This contention then leads Buck-Morss to turn to the writings of Carl Schmidt to theorise ‘global hegemony’. For further examples of more subtle ways in which this influence has operated see Green, Marcus and Ives, Peter, ‘Review’, Rethinking Marxism, 23:2 (April 2011), pp. 282–91, esp. pp. 289–90CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹⁴ Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, p. 17.

¹⁵ Morton, ‘Historicizing Gramsci’.

¹⁶ Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, p. 9; and Saurin, ‘The Formation’, pp. 30–1.

¹⁷ Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, p. 12.

¹⁸ See Buttigieg, Joseph, ‘The Prison Notebooks: Antonio Gramsci's Work in Progress’, Rethinking Marxism, 18:1 (2006), pp. 37–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, Peter, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 45–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘Gramsci from One Century to Another: An Interview by Giorgio Baratta’, in Ives, Peter and Lacorte, Rocco (eds), Gramsci, Language and Translation (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2010), pp. 101–6, at p. 102–3Google Scholar.

²⁰ Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Hoare, Quintin and Nowell Smith, Geoffrey (eds) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 384Google Scholar. As we will explain below, to facilitate our philological method, we will follow the standard practice of referencing Gramsci's Prison Notebooks by providing the Notebook number preceded by a Q (for ‘Quaderno’, Notebook, in Italian), and then a § prior to the note (or section) number, in this case Q16§2. This enables the reader to understand where in Gramsci's actual notebooks the text is from as well as locate it in various anthologies and translations. We will follow this with the citation of the translation used.

²¹ Francioni, Gianni, L'Officina Gramsciana: Ipotesi sulla struttura dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’ (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1984)Google Scholar.

²² Morton, ‘Historicizing Gramsci’, p. 120; Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, pp. 18–24.

²³ Morton, ‘Historicizing Gramsci,’ p. 129; Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, pp. 24–36.

²⁴ As Thomas illustrates, Anderson's project is further complicated by his own appeals to diverse perspectives: ‘Although he stressed on numerous occasions that the central terms of his study were dictated by Gramsci's own incomplete conceptual structure (philology seemingly being invoked in the sense of textual limitation), “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” in actual fact proceeded in a more eclectic mode. Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bordiga, Althusser, Poulantzas, Miliband and Mandel were all called on different occasions as witnesses to the development of the concept of hegemony and related terms. The analysis of the antinomies contained in Gramsci's own elliptical formulations thus regularly gave way to an excavation of their theoretical and political precedents and contemporary reverberations, before returning with the resources thus gained to continue the task of philological elucidation, strictly understood. In this sense, Anderson's essay reproduced something of the fragmentary structure of the very text that it proposed to analyse: detours via detours, a labyrinth within a labyrinth.’ Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, esp. pp. 52–3. See Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, (1976–7), pp. 5–78.

²⁵ Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, especially Chapter 2.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 167.

²⁷ Ibid., pp. 173–4.

²⁸ Ibid., pp. 182–94; see also Jessop, State Power, pp. 112–16; and Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, pp. 89–90.

²⁹ Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, pp. 80–3.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 82.

³¹ Shilliam, Robbie, ‘Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of “Primitive Accumulation”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33 (2004), pp. 59–88, at p. 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Shilliam, ‘Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of “Primitive Accumulation”’, p. 73. As Thomas cautions, furthermore, ‘in reality, despite Gramsci's emotionally charged personal reaction to Trotsky, the terms of their analyses are remarkably similar and complementary’, in that the latter analysed state weakness in the East and the former theorised ‘the implications for revolutionary strategy of what Trotsky described as the “heaviest reserves” of the bourgeoisie in the West’. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, pp. 173–4.

³³ McNally, Mark, ‘Gramsci's Internationalism, the National-Popular and the Alternative Globalisation Movement’, in McNally, Mark and Schwarzmantel, John (eds), Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 58–76, at pp. 60–1Google Scholar.

³⁴ McNally, ‘Gramsci's Internationalism’, pp. 61–4.

³⁵ McNally, ‘Gramsci's Internationalism’, pp. 64–5, see also Saccerelli, Emanuele, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

³⁶ See Boothman, Derek, ‘The Sources for Gramsci's Concept of Hegemony’, Rethinking Marxism, 20:2 (2008), pp. 201–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Political Writings 1921–1926 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), pp. 444–5Google Scholar.

³⁸ Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, pp. 457–8. See also Rosengarten, Frank, ‘The Contemporary Relevance of Gramsci's Views on Italy's “Southern Question”’, in Francese, Joseph (ed.), Perspectives on Gramsci: Politics, Culture and Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 134–44Google Scholar; Morton, ‘Disputing the Geopolitics’; Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, pp. 137–70. Perhaps not surprisingly, Shilliam cites Anderson to support his claim that Gramsci's analysis was too confused to provide insight into the material logic of uneven development. Shilliam, ‘Hegemony’.

³⁹ Femia, ‘Gramsci’, p. 347.

⁴⁰ That Saurin relies on Femia to such an extent in a polemic that chastises ‘neo-Gramscians’ for not reading Gramsci as a Marxist is particularly bewildering. As noted above, in our view, many of the social sciences – including the secondary literature relied upon by favourably cited critics such as Germain and Kenny – have been guilty of reading Gramsci in a non-Marxian way: this is not limited to ‘neo-Gramscian IR’, nor indeed does Saurin make a case vis-à-vis ‘neo-Gramscian IR’ beyond echoing Germain and Kenny's criticism that Robert Cox in particular was influenced by a number of non-Marxian thinkers in his reading of Gramsci.

⁴¹ Q13§20, Gramsci, Selections, p. 135.

⁴² Q13§20, Gramsci, Selections, p. 133.

⁴³ Femia, Joseph, ‘Gramsci, Machiavelli and International Relations’, Political Quarterly, 76 (2005), pp. 341–9, at pp. 346–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Femia, ‘Gramsci’, p. 345.

⁴⁵ Q15§4, Gramsci, Selections, pp. 144–5; Femia, ‘Gramsci’, p. 347.

⁴⁶ Femia, ‘Gramsci’, p. 347.

⁴⁷ Q6§12, Gramsci, Selections, p. 258.

⁴⁸ Q6§88, Gramsci, Selections, p. 263.

⁴⁹ Q6§88, Gramsci, Selections, p. 263.

⁵⁰ Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del Carcere, 4 volumes, Gerratana, Valentino (ed.) (Turin: Einaudi, 1975)Google Scholar. The English translation of this critical edition is still under way; the first three volumes of the five volume work have been published by Columbia University Press, edited and translated by Joseph Buttigieg. However, when Germain and Kenny were writing their seminal intervention, only the first two volumes comprising Notebooks 1–5 were available in English (French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese translations have been published). Thus, many of these debates have been heavily influenced by the partial English anthologies of Gramsci's writings especially Gramsci, Selections.

⁵¹ Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci’, p. 4; Saurin, ‘The Formation’, pp. 33–4; Worth, ‘Beyond’, p. 21.

⁵² Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, for example, pp. 4–9; Saurin, ‘The Formation’, pp. 26–33; Femia, ‘Gramsci’, pp. 342–5.

⁵³ Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, pp. 4, 7–8, 13, 20.

⁵⁴ Gramsci, Selections, p. 55.

⁵⁵ See Valentino Gerratana, ‘Prefazione’, in Gramsci, Quaderni, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii or Buttigieg, Joseph, ‘Preface’, in Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 1, Buttigieg, Joseph (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. xvi–xviiiGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Joseph Buttigieg, ‘Introduction’, in Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 1, p. 25.

⁵⁷ Q19§24, Gramsci, Selections, p. 63; Gramsci, Quaderni, p. 2014.

⁵⁸ Q25§5, Q25§2, Q19§24, Q19§28, Q19 §26, Gramsci, Selections, pp. 52–102.

⁵⁹ Gramsci, Selections, pp. 53, 58–64.

⁶⁰ Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, p. 7, emphasis added.

⁶¹ If Germain and Kenny are arguing that this neo-Gramscian innovation is a new way of considering civil society at the global level that differs from the status of the international in Gramsci's analysis that would be another story. But they are not making such an argument: they contend that Gramsci's conception of civil society is confined to the domestic level. Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, pp. 3–21.

⁶² Gramsci, Selections, p. 350.

⁶³ Q10§44, Gramsci, Selections, p. 349.

⁶⁴ For example, Q10II§61, Gramsci, Selections, pp. 117–8; and Q29§3, Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from Cultural Writings, Forgacs, David and Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (eds) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 183Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ See Green, Marcus and Ives, Peter, ‘Subalternity and Language: Overcoming the Fragmentation of Common Sense’, Historical Materialism, 17 (2009), pp. 3–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Q6§78, Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3, Buttigieg, Joseph (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 58Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Q6§78, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3, p. 58.

⁶⁸ Morton, ‘Waiting for Gramsci’.

⁶⁹ It is worth noting that this is one of many examples of Gramsci's use of ‘hegemony’ in the international domain, which according to Germain and Kenny he does not do.

⁷⁰ Q6§78, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3, pp. 60–1.

⁷¹ Q6§78, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3, p. 60.

⁷² Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, p. 14.

⁷³ See Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, p. 14.

⁷⁴ Q13§7, Gramsci, Selections, p. 242.

⁷⁵ Q13§7, Gramsci, Selections, p. 243.

⁷⁶ Q13§7, Gramsci, Selections, p. 243. Thus, to be clear, contra those who would understand ‘civil’ as necessarily a ‘national’ category in Gramsci's thought and in sympathy with Thomas, discussed above, we argue that this discussion in Gramsci's work illustrates that he understood it as a relational category that could operate beyond the ‘nation’ or ‘State’ classically understood.

⁷⁷ Saurin, ‘The Formation’, p. 38.

⁷⁸ Gramsci, Selections, pp. 240–3.

⁷⁹ Gramsci, Selections, p. 240.

⁸⁰ Q14§68, Gramsci, Selections, p. 241.

⁸¹ Morton, ‘Waiting for Gramsci’, p. 615. Morton has expanded this point in reference to his analysis of contemporary Mexico, see Morton, Revolution and State, for example, pp. 59–60 and 99–131.

⁸² See, for example, Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, p. 14, p. 17.

⁸³ Q21§5, Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, p. 208.

⁸⁴ Q21§5, Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, pp. 208–9.

⁸⁵ Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging’, p. 14, emphasis added. In their discussion of civil society Germain and Kenny cite a total of eight pages from the prison notebooks – pages 12, 419–25 (421), 263 – and an article by Sassoon, Anne Showstack, ‘Family, Civil Society, and the State: The Actuality of Gramsci's Notion of “Societa Civile”’, Dialektik, 3 (1995), pp. 67–82Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci’, pp. 7, 14, 15; Saurin, ‘The Formation’, pp. 34–5.

⁸⁷ See Ives, Peter, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Global English: Language Politics in Globalisation Debates’, Political Studies, 58 (2010), pp. 516–35, at pp. 523–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁸ Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, p. 27.

⁸⁹ Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Social Function of the National Party’ (1918) as quoted and discussed in Morton, ‘Waiting for Gramsci’, pp. 616–7.

⁹⁰ See Ives, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 525–27.

⁹¹ Brennan, Timothy, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 214–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. At the same time Brennan embraces Perry Anderson's reading of Gramsci that we have criticised above, see p. 241.

⁹² Q3§87, Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, Buttigieg, Joseph, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 86–7Google Scholar.

⁹³ Q3§88, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, p. 90.

⁹⁴ Q10II§61, Gramsci, Selections, pp. 117–8.

⁹⁵ Q10II§61, Gramsci, Selections, pp. 117–8.

⁹⁶ Femia, Joseph, Gramsci's Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁷ Interestingly, Gramsci states that it started as a ‘national institution’ but became an international association in 1910 with a deposit of invested capital, in compliance with the laws of the State of Illinois, see Q5§2, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, p. 270. Gerratana confirms what Gramsci himself notes, that this information is from an article in La Civiltà Cattolica (21 June 1928), although the defining of it as an international organisation based on its economic activity instead of its legal self-proclamation fits well within Gramsci's analysis as we shall see.

⁹⁸ Q5§1, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, pp. 267–9.

⁹⁹ Q5§2, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, p. 269.

¹⁰⁰ Two notes later, Gramsci makes the provocative suggestion of further study of the ideological nexuses between Americanism and Saint-Simonism whereby ‘Rotarianism would be a modern Saint-Simonism of the right’, Q5§4, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, p. 273.

¹⁰¹ Q5§2, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, p. 273.

¹⁰² Q22§2, Gramsci, Selections, p. 286.

¹⁰³ Q5§61, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, p. 319.

¹⁰⁴ Q5§61, Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2, pp. 318–19.

¹⁰⁵ Q13§36, Gramsci, Selections, p. 188.

¹⁰⁶ Q13§17, Gramsci, Selections, p. 182.

¹⁰⁷ Q17§22, Gramsci, Selections, pp. 372–3.