Many students of International Relations would consider Robert W. Cox's greatest contribution to be his opportune introduction of Antonio Gramsci's work to a field that seemed bent on forgetting its own traditions of rich, historicist theorising about fundamental social change. Gramsci offered a non-economistic way to understand fundamental questions about collective action at a time when the dominant liberal and ‘realist’ traditions began to embrace neat (and often simplistic) models of individual rational choice – and when at least one important group of critical scholars (scholars orienting their work towards the transformation of the social worlds that the dominant traditions treat as given) adopted a ‘rational-choice Marxism’ that passed over many of the same issues ignored by ‘structural realists’ and neo-liberal ‘new’ institutionalists.

Yet, as we argue here, much of the specific power of Gramsci's non-economistic and critical analysis that first attracted many students of International Relations to his work comes not from his own innovations in theory, but from the core conceptual breakthrough in the politically much more ambiguous theory of Georges Sorel. It is Sorel's concept of the motivating social ‘myth’, and his modern exemplar, the proletarian general strike, that provide Gramsci with a fundamentally different answer to the collective action ‘problems’ posed by liberal rationalist social theorists. The field of International Relations, as yet, may not have fully absorbed the distinctively ‘Gramscian’ contribution of identifying the fundamental progressive social myth of the industrial age not as that of Sorel's general strike, but as that of the party oriented towards the creation of an ethical state where the distinction between ruler and ruled is no longer essential.

Gramsci's concepts allow scholars to transcend some of the current debates dividing the field of international relations (IR) while preserving the insights of the major traditions, whether ‘realist’ or ‘idealist’, ‘structural’, or ‘historical’, at the same time that they help us break the habit of reifying the nation-state by turning our attention toward the deeper sources of social continuity and change. This paper discusses these benefits of employing Gramsci's insights and illustrates them with conclusions from a study of American foreign policy toward the Third World in the Reagan and Bush era.

GRAMSCI'S CONCEPTS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The field of international relations studies the consolidation of power over large populations and territories in a world of multiple, territorially separate, power centres. Gramsci's concern in his investigations of ‘hegemony’ and the broader notion of ‘supremacy’ was also to understand the dynamics of the consolidation of power, including those dynamics in international relations. Thus, in his commentary on the history of modern Italy, Gramsci is able to treat both the Renaissance state system and politics within the twentieth-century state within the same framework and with the same concepts.

We see Gramsci's sociology of power as beginning with the distinction between rule by ‘force’ and rule through ‘consensus’, borrowed from Machiavelli.