The Modern State and Future Society: Gramsci’s Two Conceptions of the “Ethical State”

ABSTRACT

Gramsci’s concept of the “ethical state” has been interpreted as a synonym for the “regulated society”—a future society in which everybody participates in governance following the rationalization of labor. However, this reading has neglected the idea of the “integral state,” Gramsci’s other conception of the ethical state, which highlights social mobility between the ruling class and the ruled. Moreover, according to this reading, educational reform is necessary to close the gap in cultural capital, thereby promoting the talented among the ruled to participate in governance. A careful examination of Gramsci’s concept of the ethical state reveals that it contains two distinct visions for mass democracy: whereas the integral state signifies that anybody can govern, a regulated society assumes that everybody governs. Even if the latter scenario cannot be adopted in our times, it shows—even more than Gramsci realized—that the former scenario that stresses social mobility and the role of education in it is the crux of the modern state.

KEYWORDS:

• Gramsci
• regulated society
• ethical state
• cultural capital
• Marxism

List of Abbreviations of Gramsci’s works

Quaderni del Carcere = QSelections from the Prison Notebooks = SPNFurther Selections from the Prison Notebooks = FSPrison Notebooks Vol. II = PN2Prison Notebooks Vol. III = PN3

Acknowledgments

I thank Francesca Antonini, Richard Bellamy, Fabio Frosini, Cécile Laborde, Robert Levine, Robert Lumley, and James Martin for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this article. I also thank the editors of The European Legacy and two referees for their invaluable comments for revision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bellamy and Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State, 125–26.

2. Golding, Gramsci’s Democratic Theory, 111–18.

3. Lo Piparo, Lingua, Intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci, 150 n. 1.

4. Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory, 4–5; Bellamy, “Croce, Gramsci,” 314–37.

5. Barbagli, Educating for Unemployment; Bobbio, Profilo ideologico del novecento italiano, chap. 4.

6. De Rosa, Storia del Movimento Cattolico, vol. 1, 107–8.

7. Gentile, “Origins and Doctrine of Fascism,” 140–42, 158–59.

8. Croce, Etica e Politica, 210–17, 268–71.

9. Of course, being cultured can be related to one’s economic status. Yet cultural capital is conceptualized as a variable independent of economic capital: the selection of books or preferences in arts and music that children receive depend on their parents’ cultural tastes. See, Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 71–106. As I will argue, Gramsci interestingly shared this Bourdieuan perspective in developing his view of educational reform.

10. The issue of the contradiction inherent in Gramsci’s simultaneous holding of these two distinct viewpoints would require a book-length study. Here I can only point out that it is seen in Gramsci’s idea of the “ethical state,” which has superficially been equated with his Marxist vision of the future society.

11. Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, 15, §10, 1765; SPN, 244. References to the Quaderni (Q), which originally comprised 29 notebooks, include the number of the notebook, followed by the number of the passage (§), and of the page(s). Hereafter references to the various editions of the Notebooks are cited in the text.

12. Some have regarded the “integral state” as central to Gramsci’s state theory. See Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, chap. 2, and Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, chap. 1.

13. Mosca, Elementi di scienza politica, chap. 2.

14. D’Orsi, “One Hundred Years,” 80–84; Finocchiaro, “Croce and Mosca,” 117–44; Martin, Piero Gobetti, 82–83; Medici, La Metafora Machiavelli; Zarone, Classe Politica e Ragione Scientifica.

15. Finocchiaro, Beyond Right and Left, 117, 132. Finocchiaro succinctly points out that education plays a significant role in implementing Gramsci’s elitist democracy, yet he does not account for how it takes place.

16. See, for example, Liguori, “Società Regolata,” 773–74; Losurdo, Antonio Gramsci, 192.

17. Gramsci focused on the upward mobility of the governed subaltern social groups to the governing role. However, this role could not be simultaneously occupied by both the old liberals and the newly recruited members: the old liberals would be demoted to the role of the governed. As a result, it is reasonable to describe Gramsci as encouraging mobility “between the governing and the governed.”

18. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 57.

19. Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, 290.

20. Gramsci assigned the role as an educator of the subaltern social groups to the “Modern Prince” (Q, 13, §1, 1559; SPN, 131). The concept of the Modern Prince, however, was elaborated upon Gramsci’s criticisms of the parliamentary multi-party system and the need of establishing instead the all-inclusive party that represents the collective will of all the people (Q, 6, §136, 800; SPN, 265). In the Modern Prince, therefore, like in the regulated society, there is no distinction between the governing and the governed: the purpose of the Modern Prince is to make all the people able to govern when they need to do so, rather than narrowing the gap between the governing and the governed as educational reform in the integral state aims for. Hence, I do not see the Modern Prince as holding the same educative function as his proposed educational reform.

21. Commentators exploring Gramsci’s educational reform have been inclined to emphasize its contemporary relevance, rather than how it aimed to remedy the gap of cultural capital in Italy at the time. For major studies, see Entwistle, Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling; Borg, Buttigieg, and Mayo, Gramsci and Education; and Mayo, “Antonio Gramsci and Educational Thought,” 601–4.

22. Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 71–106.

23. It is important to note that there has been little examination of the similarity between Bourdieu’s and Gramsci’s views of education, and between, as succinctly expressed, Bourdieu’s cultural capital and Gramsci’s “trick,” as I demonstrate here. As far as I know, the only suggestion that Gramsci upheld a theory of cultural capital has been made by Livingstone in “Working-Class Learning, Cultural Transformation, and Democratic Political Education: Gramsci’s Legacy,” 222–23.

24. See also Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, 187.

25. Finocchiaro, Beyond Right and Left, 115–16. Although inspiring, Finocchiaro’s view tends to overemphasize the theoretical closeness of Mosca and Gramsci in terms of their shared elitist democracy. By contrast, Gramsci’s educational reform uniquely focused on the gap of cultural capital as a key factor in preventing an increase in social mobility. As such, Gramsci and Mosca have different views on parliament, political parties, and education, to mention only a few issues, but these are beyond the scope of this article.

26. Sassoon, Gramsci and Contemporary Politics, 16–17.

27. As this distinction was crucial for Gramsci, he applied it to other cases of legislators and functionaries: “Since all men are ‘political beings,’ all are also ‘legislators.’ But distinctions will have to be made”—the distinctions “between ordinary men and others who are more specifically legislators (Q, 14, §13, 1668; SPN, 265–66). As for the state functionaries, Gramsci remarked, “every society has had its own system of selection and its own type of functionary to be trained. The reconstruction of how all these elements have evolved is of capital importance. The problem of functionaries partly coincides with that of the intellectuals” (Q, 13, §36, 1632; SPN, 186).

28. Mosca, Elementi di scienza politica, 608–9.

29. Pace Finocchiaro, who overemphasizes the closeness between Mosca and Gramsci, this passage demonstrates that this is not always the case. Far from his elitist democracy, as I argue, Gramsci upheld the other project of allowing the alleged fundamental distinction between these two social strata to wither away with the idea of a regulated society. The dilemma was that a regulated society aimed to abolish this fundamental distinction on which elitist democracy rested. See Finocchiaro, Beyond Left and Right, 175–77.

30. Bellamy and Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State; Texier, “Razionalità rispetto allo Scopo e Razionalità Rispetto al Valore nei Quaderni del Carcere.”

31. Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–69.

32. In this respect, pre-prison Gramsci’s view on “relics” echoes his discussion here. See Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 422–23.

33. Martin, Gramsci’s Political Analysis, 62.

34. See my earlier discussion of Buci-Glucksmann’s analysis in the section “Two Conceptions of the Ethical State.”

35. Crick, Democracy, 95.

36. See, e.g., Brighouse, School Choice and Social Justice; Swift, How Not to Be a Hypocrite.

37. Crick, Democracy, 95.

Additional information

Funding

The author acknowledges receipt of financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (17K13677 and 20K13411).

Notes on contributors

Takahiro Chino

Takahiro Chino is Associate Professor of Political Thought at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. His work revolves around Italian political thought and global intellectual history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His publications include “Gramsci’s Critique of Croce on the Catholic Church,” History of European Ideas 46, no. 2 (2020): 175–89.