Page 75 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

early 1920s to the 1960s. But it recurs also within particular intellectual
careers, as for example, in Goldmann’s progress from a sociology of
the world vision, which stressed the intellectual creativity of social
classes and groups, to a sociology of the novel, which sought to establish
a rigorous homology between the development of a literary form and
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that of the commodity market. It even recurs within particular texts.
Witness Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, which begins from
an initial determination to vindicate the rationality of praxis, by
demonstrating that human history can be understood entirely in terms
of human projects, or “totalizations’; but proceeds to a substantive
emphasis on the ways in which real popular revolutions, confronted
by scarcity, collapse into “seriality”. 69
Such pessimism is, of course, typically Weberian. Paradoxically, it
is Gramsci, perhaps the western Marxist thinker least influenced by
Weber, who was to produce by far the most theoretically persuasive,
and indeed influential, Marxist theory of legitimation. As is well known,
Gramsci substituted, for the more orthodoxly Marxist base/
superstructure model, a civil society/political society model, which
derived both from Hegel and from Marx, certainly, but which had
nonetheless hitherto commanded relatively little attention amongst
Marxists. Political society here refers to the coercive elements within
the wider social totality, civil society the non-coercive. Where most
Marxists had previously stressed politico-economic coercion, and where
Weber had stressed legitimation, Gramsci chose to point in the direction
of both, and towards their inextricable interconnection in the
maintenance of social stability. Hence the famous formula: “State =
political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by
the armour of coercion”. The term hegemony here refers to something
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very similar to Weber’s legitimate authority, to the permeation
throughout the whole of society of a system of values and beliefs
supportive of the existing ruling class. This is, in effect, a value consensus,
and one very often embodied in common sense, but one constructed,
however, in the interests of the ruling class.
“The intellectuals”, Gramsci argues, “are the dominant group’s
‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and
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political government”. They are not in themselves an autonomous
and independent social class, but are, rather, the “functionaries” of
the superstructures. Gramsci distinguished between “organic”
intellectuals on the one hand, that is, the type of intellectual which

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