Power, hegemony, and social reality in Gramsci and Searle

Abstract

This paper reconstructs Gramsci’s account of social objects in light of recent developments in analytic social ontology. It combines elements of Gramsci’s account with that of John Searle, and argues that when taken together their theories constitute a robust account of social reality and a nuanced view of the relation between social reality and power. Searle provides a detailed analysis of the creation of social entities at the level of the agent, while Gramsci, by employing his concepts of hegemony and domination, is able to provide an analysis of the differential ability of societal subgroups to construct the social world.

Keywords:

• social ontology
• hegemony
• Gramsci
• Searle

Notes

1. This account of the aims of social ontology is greatly informed by the work of Thomasson (2003, 2009), as well as Searle (1995, 2010), Tuomela (2003, 2013), and Frank Hindriks (2011). Given the connections aimed at in this paper, it should also be noted that the term ‘social ontology’ was brought into the modern lexicon in the context of an analysis of Marxist thought by Gould (1978).

2. This section embraces an interpretation developed by Alessandro Salice in a seminar on Gramsci at the University of Vienna in 2012 and sketched in Salice (2009).

3. The title of Bukharin’s original text in English is Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology. Gramsci, however, refers to it as ‘Il Saggio Populare’ (‘The Popular Manual’). I follow him in that usage. For further discussion of this issue see J.A. Buttigeig, ‘Notes’ in A. Gramsci (1991, p. 520).

4. The second part of the reference is to the original section in Gramsci’s notebooks.

5. For further discussion of this point see Fontana (2012).

6. The following distinctions are worked out by Searle (2010, p. 18).

7. For a discussion of the difficulty of defining ‘historical’ in Gramsci, and the relation of ‘historical’ to ‘social’, ‘conventional’, and ‘artificial’, especially with respect to the relation between ‘social object’ and ‘historical object’, see Salice (2009).

8. Gramsci’s use of consent here is idiosyncratic. It is meant as a description of the psychological state of the subjects of rule, denoting some kind of acceptance. It is not meant to carry with it the normative connotations that it traditionally does, say, for example, in social contract theory (Femia, 1981, p. 37–43).

9. There is some tension between those who wish to analyze social reality in terms of social objects and those who wish to analyze social reality in terms of social facts (Thomasson, 2003, 2009, Epstein, 2014, Searle, 2014). It appears that Gramsci, who discusses social objects, and Searle, who discusses social facts, may be in disagreement on this issue. However, as Gramsci is not working with the same distinctions, language or conceptual background we can remain neutral on the issue here.

10. We of course do not have to accept some of Searle’s more controversial claims about the primacy of language in social reality. For a critique of these claims see Hindriks (2011).

11. An account of hierarchical groups is given by Tuomela (2013).

12. This is not to suggest that a Gramscian analysis should take on board the contentious claim that all status functions necessarily come with deontic powers (Tuomela, 2013, p. 240).

13. For a detailed account along these lines see Tuomela (2013, p. 223).

14. This picture is somewhat simplified for the sake of analysis. Belief systems are not formed and do not exist in isolation; they are often constituted relationally and depend on more than simple group membership. Nonetheless, simplifying from these complications gives us a clearer idea of how this process functions in general.

15. The question of how to engage in this type of critique has not been dealt with in this paper. Nonetheless, further exploration of Gramsci may prove useful in developing such a method, as much of his work concerns practical issues of this nature, rather than the more theoretical issues dealt with here. This can be seen in Gramsci’s influence on cultural studies.