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Gramsci and The Prince: Taking Machiavelli outside the realist courtyard?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2016

Caterina Carta
Caterina Carta*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, International Relations, International Affairs Department, Vesalius College (VUB)
*
*Correspondence to: Dr Caterina Carta, Vesalius College, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050, Brussels, Belgium. Author’s email: ccarta@vub.ac.be
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Abstract

In the field of political theory, few authors have spurred intellectual tirades and triggered collective fantasy as much as the sixteenth-century Florentine Secretary Niccoló Machiavelli. Despite all controversies, in the discipline of International Relations (IR) Machiavelli and his The Prince have been almost exclusively associated with classical realism. This largely unchallenged association contributed to the edification of the myth of The Prince as the ruthless symbol of raison d’état, carrying transcendental lessons about the nature of politics and a set of prescriptions on how helmsmen should behave to seize, maintain, and reinforce their power. The realist hijacking of Machiavelli is at the core of the foundation of classical realism as an IR theory and its location at the very epicentre of IR as a discipline. This appropriation has, in turn, obscured alternative myths of The Prince, which depart from Machiavelli’s reflections on the Principati nuovi to read The Prince as a radical manifesto for political change. The opening of the semantic space in the field of IR – spurred by the so-called interpretive turn – offers an opportunity to break this monochromatic reading. This article delves into two competing myths of The Prince: the classical realist myth and Gramsci’s ‘progressive’ one to demonstrate its contested nature.

Keywords

Niccoló MachiavelliAntonio GramsciHans J. MorgenthauEdward H. CarrThe Prince
Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 345 - 366
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2016 

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107 See diffusely Machiavelli in Rinaldi (ed.), Discorsi Sopra la Prima Decade di Tito Livio, Book 1, LVIII and Book 2, LVII, pp. 742–3.

108 Ibid., Book 1, LVIII, p. 709.

109 ‘Una Moltitudine sanza Capo’ is the title of Book 1, XLIV, p. 643. The reference is to Titus Livy, Ad Urbe Condita, III, p. 51.

110 Gramsci, QC13, p. 88.

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120 Compare with Croce’s reference to Marx as ‘the Machiavelli of the proletariat’ in Croce, Benedetto, Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1968), p. 112 Google Scholar.

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123 Ibid., p. 104.

124 A revolution, in this perspective, would not stem either from the deterministic conflation of the contradictions of capitalism or from the rationalistic design of a class of enlightened intellectuals, as respectively Marx and Croce assumed. Departing from Cuoco’s distinction between passive and active revolution, Gramsci suggests that a revolution takes steps from the capacity of the intellectuals to elaborate the rudimentary ‘ideas of the people’, who ‘at times glimpse nearly instinctively, often follow with enthusiasm, but seldom are able to form by themselves’.

125 Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. XVIII, p. 101.

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127 Gramsci, QC13, p. 152.

128 Beyond Marxism, Gramsci was greatly influenced by his linguistic background and attracted by the works of scholars such as Croce’s Hegelian linguistic and Bartoli’s connection between ‘linguistic influence’ and ‘cultural power’ (Bartoli as quoted in Peter R. Ives, ‘Vernacular materialism: Antonio Gramsci and the theory of language’ (unpublished PhD thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University Toronto, Ontario, May 2008), p. 54. Gramsci saw the study of language as an integral part of studies of cultural hegemony and the Italian nation. Indeed, in Italy the question of language was no mere academic disquisition. The use of dialects in a country that underwent different foreign dominations outlived the 1870 unification. The ‘imposition’ of Italian as the national language was urged by Mussolini in 1931–2. While Croce espoused the ideal of a national language as the cradle of the nation, Gramsci warned against the perils of an elite-imposed language and advocated a common language grounded on a unified national experience.

129 For Machiavelli it is the spirit of laws, imitation of great examples, education and civic culture that make a united people strong. For Gramsci, the conditions for popular accomplishment is culture, defined as ‘the organisation, discipline of one’s inner self; a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s historical value, one’s own function in life, one own rights and obligations’. Gramsci, Antonio, ‘Socialismo e Cultura’, in David Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader – Selected Writings 1916–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 57 Google Scholar.

130 Lefort, Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel, p. 246.

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134 Lefort, Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel, pp. 248–51.

135 Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, pp. 65–6; Frosini, Fabio, ‘Luigi Russo e Georges Sorel: Sulla Genesi del “Moderno Principe” nei “Quaderni del carcere” di Antonio Gramsci’, Studi Storici, 54:3 (2013), pp. 543–590 Google Scholar.

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137 See, for example, the objections moved by Femia, ‘Gramsci, Machiavelli and International Relations’; and Germain, Randall D. and Kenny, Michael, ‘Engaging Gramsci: International Relations theory and the new Gramscians’, Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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