Logos and Kratos: Gramsci and the Ancients on Hegemony
Benedetto Fontana *
The purpose of this paper is to locate Gramsci's concept of hegemony, and its related ideas of civil society, the national-popular and the people-nation, within the political thought of classical antiquity. 1 In so doing, the paper seeks to identify strands or elements within aspects of ancient political thought which may usefully be seen as conceptual prefigurations or as political anticipations of Gramsci's hegemony. It will show that Gramsci shares with the ancients specific theoretical, linguistic, and intellectual topoi. Hegemony has hitherto been located within the context, both theoretical and historical, of debates and controversies arising out of the Marxist and later Leninist revolutionary tradition. It is rightly seen as a notion developed by Gramsci to explain revolutionary failure in Italy and in the West generally, and consequently its antecedents are traced to the problems attendant upon the collapse of the Second International and the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. 2 While such an approach has been useful in revealing the immediate (both political and tactical) constraints acting upon Gramsci's thinking, it has overlooked passages in his writings which reveal an interest in, and [End Page 305] familiarity with, philosophical and theoretical themes originally formulated and elaborated by classical political thought.
I. In a note entitled "Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing" Gramsci establishes a distinction between intellectuals who "know" and the "people-nation" that "feels." The former may know but do not always understand or feel, while the latter may feel but does not always know. The intellectual, in order to know something politically and socially, not merely abstractly or philosophically, must understand it with feeling and passion. As Gramsci writes:
The intellectual's error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned (not only for knowledge in itself but also for the object of knowledge); in other words that the intellectual can be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated--i.e. knowledge. One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. 3
The merely abstract knowledge of the intellectual becomes life and politics when linked to the experiential and passionate feelings of the people. At the same time, the feeling-passion of the people acquires the character of knowledge. Of course such a formulation is reminiscent of Marx's comments in the Theses on Feuerbach. 4 The dyadic relation between intellectual and people-nation, and between knowledge and feeling-passion, both parallels and informs the relation between common sense and good sense. Common sense is opinion which is incoherent and ambiguous 5 but which may nevertheless contain elements of truth to the extent that they are proliferated throughout a people. Good sense, on the other hand, is the common sense of the people as their passion and experience are imbued with knowledge and reason--that is, as the people begin to "think" coherently by producing their own intellectuals, the organic intellectual, or the democratic philosopher. 6 [End Page 306]
Gramsci recalls the problem originally posed by Plato and Aristotle and running through the entire history of Western political thought up to thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, and Croce: namely, the relation between knowledge and politics, philosophy and rhetoric, ruler and people, reason and desire/appetite. 7 This relation poses the question regarding the role and status of reason. It is the way reason (the logos as transcendent reason or as speech and language) is perceived that moves the theory in either an ossified (absolutist) or open (pluralistic) direction. The former is a Platonic formulation, while the latter is sophistic and rhetorical. Gramsci, like others before him (Cicero and Marx, for example), recognizes that the logos or its elaboration in a philosophy is merely sterile and ineffectual without its grounding within a particular socio-political formation. That is to say, it is not enough to know the "truth" as such--philosophy and knowledge can only achieve political and historical import through their dissemination and proliferation throughout a social group or society. Such a necessity points to the necessary role speech, language, and rhetoric play as the vehicles by which the people are persuaded and their consent is obtained. Such an activity, of course, is a major element in Gramsci's understanding of the movement from feeling to knowledge or the movement from a particular (pre-political) to a hegemonic (political) consciousness. 8 Hegemony in Gramsci takes many forms and works at various levels. It describes the movement from the economic-corporative to the political 9 --from the particular to the universal, exemplified by Gramsci in his contrast between the particulare as understood by Guicciardini and the collective will embodied in Machiavelli's new prince. 10 Hegemony also means the progressive formation of alliances centered around a given social group. A group is hegemonic to the extent that it exercises intellectual and moral leadership over other groups, such that the latter become "allies" and "associates" of the former. Domination is instead the exercise of coercion or "armed force" over other groups. Gramsci says,
The supremacy of a social group is manifested in two ways: as "domination" and as "intellectual and moral leadership." A social group is [End Page 307] dominant over those antagonistic groups it wants to "liquidate" or to subdue even with armed force, and it is leading with respect to those groups that are associated and allied with it. 11
In effect, a socio-political order--or what Gramsci calls the "integral State"--represents a hegemonic equilibrium characterized by a "combination of force and consent which are balanced in varying proportions, without force prevailing too greatly over consent." 12 Force and consent, domination and leadership, together embody the political, such that the state in Gramsci is characterized by two distinct, but interwoven, spheres: "dictatorship + hegemony," and "political society + civil society," where the synthesis of the two spheres denotes for Gramsci the meaning of "state." 13
II. Hegemony in ancient political thought has both a philosophical and a political meaning, and both senses of the term are embodied in the famous statement of Isocrates, logos hegemon panton. 14 If the assertion is translated as "speech and language are the leader and guide of all things," 15 then the relation between logos and hegemonia describes a power relationship based on the generation and dissemination of consent. Such generation assumes a particular form of knowledge and practice--the art (ars or techne) of rhetoric, which presupposes a particular relation between the speaker (intellectual) and his audience, which, in turn, assumes a particular socio-political structure or order in existence which makes both necessary and useful the relation between the speaker/intellectual and the assembly/audience. 16 It is only in a political community such as the polis [End Page 308] that the logos as hegemon would be capable of generating consent by means of the persuasive and rhetorical devices of public speaking. Thus, Gramsci's hegemony, viewed as the proliferation of a conception of the world throughout a society by means of the generation of "permanent consent," has its antecedents in the debates and controversies regarding the nature and role of rhetoric in both political activity and political thought.
That rhetoric (oratory) is disparaged by Gramsci in his critique 17 of the Renaissance humanists (as well as in his discussion of the relation between national languages, vernaculars, and dialects) further indicates the importance of this particular interpretation of hegemony as a modern version of classical rhetoric--that is, the modes and ways (both moral-intellectual and technical) by which public opinion is organized and political consensus is achieved. 18 Certainly, where the people organized into an assembly do not exist, or where the people for various historical reasons are not yet perceived as a political force, oratory and rhetoric are mere antiquarianism and sterile intellectualism, which reinforce the divorce between the culture of the colti and the culture of the semplici. Indeed, Gramsci's critique of the Italian Renaissance and his mordant analysis of the ruling classes of the Italian city-states underline the gulf between the culture of the intellectuals and the culture of the people. Such a gulf is cumulative and concentrated; it is self-reinforcing and self-reproducing. Secular (such as a Leonardo or a Guicciardini) or clerical (the Roman Curia as an international organization), economic or cultural, political or moral, the common thread that ties all these diverse socio-cultural and socio-political layers together is Gramsci's distinction between the cosmopolitan intellectual and the national-popular or organic intellectual.
The cosmopolitan intellectual is a type that emerges with the destruction of the Roman republic, the rise of the principate, and most critically, according to Gramsci, the displacement of political power from the Italian peninsula to the provinces of the Empire. 19 Such a displacement strictly parallels the rise of military despotism as the prevailing form of rule within the Empire. At the same time, as the army became the dominant force within the Empire, the rise and consolidation of the Christian Church as a social, cultural, and political force injected into the cultural and intellectual milieu of the Empire a new type of intellectual, the cleric. 20 The priest-intellectual at first was a national-popular intellectual in the sense that the type found its roots within the life and activity of the various nations and peoples of the Empire--the very name of the church, ekklesia, suggests its originally popular roots. Eventually the victory of the Christian Church over the Roman and pagan social-political order transformed the [End Page 309] national-popular leaders into cosmopolitan intellectuals uprooted and divorced from the life of the common people. Whether secular or religious, the separation of the centers of power from the life of the ordinary people is signaled by the difference in language and speech between one and the other, a difference which becomes greater as the language of the ruling groups becomes more ossified, florid--that is, purely rhetorical, a style which is merely literary and affected, solipsistically concerned with its own formal rules of speech and syntax. 21 At the same time the language of power becomes increasingly distant from social life and increasingly inaccessible to the people. 22
In any case, given a socio-political order constructed along the lines of a polis such as pre-Hellenistic Athens, the knowledge of rhetoric--argumentation, the ways and means (logical, structural, physico-emotional, and dramatic) by which one addresses a body of people--is neither mere literary affectation nor lifeless academic exercise of a school. 23 Rather, it is directly connected to social and political practice. 24 Rhetoric is crucial to a citizen's life both in the assembly and in the law courts. To possess this knowledge is therefore to possess the means to assert one's will over others. The use of a specific language within a given historical context shows the relative power equation of diverse groups. Thus, as Gramsci points out, the rise and decline of the vernacular is a barometer that tracks the rise and decline of the relative power of the lower classes within a given society. 25 In this context, therefore, hegemony describes a form of knowledge that depends upon a close relationship between the intellectual and the people, in the same way that rhetoric as a form of knowledge depends upon the existence of a popular assembly whose persuasion and manipulation is the object of the speaker/intellectual. But it should be noted that the orator, in the very process of addressing the people, is assuming a position of moral-intellectual leadership with respect to them, while still remaining a part of them. He is of the people, because the effectiveness of the speech depends on his establishing a link--and he must be present in the assembly to address the people. He is superior to them, because he possesses a knowledge which enables him to generate arguments and reasons that will persuade the audience and elicit their support. [End Page 310] In a democratic polis such as Athens, where demos and ekklesia are coterminous, orator and statesman are one and the same: the politikos is the leader who looks after the interests of the body of citizens. 26
What Gorgias of Plato's dialogue calls rhetorike techne is a skill or a craft devoid of substantive value or of any claim to objectivity or absolute truth. 27 The instruments or tools of this art are words, speech, and language. Lacking any natural or objective telos, its only end is to use words convincingly, to create a desired effect. It teaches nothing but itself--to the extent that it does posit something, a value, a morality, a philosophy--the teaching is always provisional, relative to its context, and therefore subject to change and reformulation. At the same time, however, the utility and effectiveness of rhetoric is itself a function of a particular moral-intellectual culture--what Gramsci calls a conception of the world and a way of life--without which rhetoric would have no value or meaning. In the democratic polis, rhetoric means liberty and power. Demokratia, rule of the people, is in Athens traditionally associated with freedom and equality. Parrhesia, freedom of speech, or the "liberty to say everything" is a central element in the construction and elaboration of the art of speaking, the logon techne. The terms isegoria (equal right to speak), isonomia (equality under the law), and isokratia (equal right to rule) denote various forms of political equality which together embody democratic rule and all directly relate to rhetoric as a political craft.
In the Gorgias, Plato attacks such a rhetoric, strips it of its Gorgian and Isocratean cultural elements, and transforms it tout court into a mere technique. 28 He brings the art to its logical conclusion and makes Callicles construct a theory of Machtpolitik, whose statesman prefigures Machiavelli's new prince. Ma-chiavelli's metaphor of the fox and the lion, fraud and force, neatly captures the uses of rhetoric: "the one who knows best how to play the fox comes out best, but he must understand well how to disguise the animal's nature and must be a great simulator and dissimulator." 29 Simulation and dissimulation--elements of what both Plato and Machiavelli call appearance, which is crucial in the construction of a given reality--are ironically dependent upon an accurate and perceptive analysis of the subject or audience (social psychology, socio-cultural values, emotive symbols, language, social-political status, etc.). The construction of cultural and ideological structures of power is the modern equivalent of rhetorical practice, and to this extent, as Gramsci recognizes, hegemony also involves the use of fraud and deception. [End Page 311]
III. The second meaning of the proposition logos hegemon is Platonic: logos as reason, 30 the ruler of spirit and appetite, not only the guide to but also the arbiter of the "truth." Here knowledge, and those who possess knowledge, are independent of social and historical structures, such that the subject of knowledge is a reality which only reason is able to penetrate. Plato establishes the philosophic logos as the determinant of all reality and makes it the master and ruler over politike praxis. In effect logos hegemon encompasses within itself two different forms of consciousness or knowledge which exist together in a state of reciprocal and competitive, if not contradictory, tension. Logos viewed as speech and language presents a form of knowledge which is dependent both on the subject that knows or bears this knowledge and on the object to which the knowledge is addressed. As such it is fluid, in constant movement, and dependent upon context and perspective of both subject and object. Indeed, it is the product of this interaction between the two terms. This is the sophistic knowledge against which Plato wrote and in response to which he constructed his own version of the logos as philosophic reason. Speech and language inevitably lead the discussion to a consideration of the nature and role of ethnicity, nation, and people. From the sophists to the nineteenth-century Romantics--whose advent, it should not be forgotten, was both a response to and a further elaboration of the historical and philological researches and studies of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century thought--a close connection was seen between language and "people-nation." From its structural characteristics, such as syntax, grammar, and idioms to its elaboration in various types of literature, poetry, epic, fables, folklore, myths, and legends, attempts were made to derive and specify concrete expressions and manifestations which together would constitute the life and culture of a given people. Isocrates, famous for his emphasis on speech and on the importance of rhetoric as a form of knowledge, conceived of Hellas as a cultural unit precisely on this basis. A consciousness relying on a shared culture and common language and literature was identified by Isocrates as the defining characteristic that provided the ground on which the competitive and fiercely ambitious Greek city states could come together. 31 Speech and language, therefore, originate within a concrete particularity, such as
Logos as philosophic reason postulates a trans-historical, trans-national form of knowledge, whose "truth" or validity is independent of the context within which it may have arisen or within which it is inserted. Such a reason tends toward a universality which would level or negate the multiform particularities issuing from the speech and languages of diverse social groups. In the Republic Plato's reason points to the construction of a method by which the universal and absolute validity of statements and concepts may be demonstrated. The method is what he calls dialectic, and it is at once political, philosophical, and educational: each is but a different incarnation of reason, reflected through the activity of diverse social groups and expressed in the state as an ensemble of interwoven relations.
It is in this sense that Gramsci, in numerous passages of the Notebooks, defines the state in the Aristotelian and Hegelian sense as "ethical" and as an "educator." 33 If the state is conceived as ethical and cultural, it acts as an educational and thus "philosophical" agent, which creates and structures the conditions within which its members may pursue spiritual activities and develop into rational beings. As such the state is not merely force and coercion, as the Augustinians and their liberal descendants would have it; it is also culture and a way of life and thus embodies both kratos and ethos. As Gramsci puts it, the political is hegemonic is educational. 34 What connects these terms is the concept of reason as the element by which appetite and the "biological," "animal," and the "primordial" are sublimated and overcome. The overcoming of the primordial means the passage of humanity from the world of brute appetite to the world of culture and spirit. 35 In an early essay (1916) Gramsci identifies the nature and sense of the relation between philosophic reason and politics and at the same time moves it away from its purely Platonic and Crocean interpretation:
G. B. Vico ... gives a political interpretation of the famous dictum of Solon which Socrates subsequently made his own in relation to philosophy: "Know thyself." Vico maintains that in this dictum Solon wished to admonish the plebians, who believed themselves to be of bestial origin and the nobility of divine origin, to reflect on themselves and see that they had the same human nature as the nobles and hence should claim to be their equals in civil law. Vico then points to this consciousness of human equality between plebeians and nobles as the basis and historical reason for the rise of democratic republics of antiquity. 36 [End Page 313]
The common people are exhorted by a popular leader (demagogos) 37 such as Solon to "reflect" on themselves and their opponents and to transform their own self-conception--and therefore also of the nobles and the rest of the world--in order to acquire both equality (isegoria and isonomia) and political power (isokratia). Gramsci, citing Vico who in turn is citing Solon and Socrates, presents the logos in both its guises, as philosophic reason and as speech and language. At the same time there takes place a movement from one belief or self-image to another--from the belief in bestiality (self) and divinity (other), to a belief in a common humanity affirmed and validated by a common speech and a common language. A once hegemonic conception of the world--the beast/god duality--has been transformed and transcended into a new one which expresses a common life (defined by the newly established political constitution). Solon and Socrates together represent an ironical and paradoxical development. Solon is the politikos who initiated the process which eventually led to the supremacy of the people and their democratic institutions. Socrates is the philosopher (critic/intellectual) whose logoi (the formation of a "critical understanding of self," 38 to use Gramsci's phrase) were deliberately constructed to question and to disconcert the established and conventional conception of the world. Nevertheless, it is only under the free institutions of the Athenian demokratia that a critic and ironist such as Socrates, not to mention the radically anti-democratic Plato, could emerge and practice their art and their philosophy--that is, speak and teach in public. Thus, Solon/Socrates together embody the unstable tension inherent in the notion of logos hegemon as speech and language and as philosophic reason. If Solon represents the beginning of the process by which the people came to acquire self-rule and self-mastery, Socrates represents the problems a democratic politics faces when confronted by the cultural criticisms and moral strictures of philosophic reason. 39
In effect hegemony (or the state viewed as ethics and as culture) means both self-discipline and self-mastery: it means obeying a law one has commanded for oneself (to use a formulation common to both Plato and Rousseau). While the primacy of reason reveals the idealistic nature of Gramsci's hegemony, his historicism and radical anti-essentialism firmly locate the logos within social and material reality. Indeed, while thinkers from Plato to Croce have sought to maintain the integrity of reason and to preserve its autonomy by circumscribing its activity within an aristocratic culture, in Gramsci the logos is transformed into a hegemony described by the synthesis of philosophy and politics, thought and the people-nation. [End Page 314]
Thus, logos as reason (the Platonic formulation) and logos as speech and language (the sophistic formulation): in the former, reason is the autonomous master of desire and appetite; in the latter reason is purely calculating and instrumental, the servant of appetites and desires. One posits the absolute integrity of reason and therefore of thought in confrontation with the world; the other their mutual penetration and permeability. The opposition and simultaneous interdependence of the two is neatly captured in Cicero's formula, ratio et oratio: reason and speech together are the foundation of politics and the state. 40
These two senses of logos parallel Gramsci's understanding of hegemony. On the one hand, it is understood as describing competing and antagonistic conceptions of the world, each struggling or reacting against the other. Here the aspect of particularity, social specificity, concrete individuality and manifold plurality, is stressed and highlighted. On the other hand there is the notion of hegemony seen as a movement or development which originates in individuality and particularity but which culminates, or should culminate, in the overcoming of the particular and its transformation into the general and the universal.
IV. Finally, there is yet a third way to understand logos hegemon. We should recall that to Aristotle speech and language are the underlying foundation of the polis, which would mean that to him the logos is inherently and necessarily political and social. In Aristotle "political" means to move from the particular to the universal, from the sphere of private interests to the sphere of general and universal interests. In Aristotle rule over slaves (despoteia), in the family, or in the village is a pre-political or non-political type of rule. Only in the polis is political rule truly possible. 42
More specifically, in the Politics Aristotle discusses hegemonia as leadership and as the opposite of domination. He says:
Training for war should not be pursued with a view to enslaving men who do not deserve such a fate. Its objects should be these--first, to prevent men from ever becoming enslaved themselves; secondly, to put [End Page 315] men in a position to exercise leadership [hegemonian]--but leadership directed to the interest of the led, and not to the establishment of a general system of slavery [panton despoteias]; and thirdly, to enable men to make themselves masters [despozein] of those who naturally deserve to be slaves. 43
In this passage a distinction is established between leadership as rule over equals, and in their interest, and despotism as rule over unequals (slaves), and in the interest of the ruler. For Aristotle only the Hellenic ethnos is morally and rationally (that is, according to physis) capable of ruling and being ruled in this sense of hegemonia. Other non-Hellenic nations, considered outside the Hellenic cultural and ethnic world, may be subdued and enslaved. 44
When the hegemon is a state (such as Athens or Macedon), hegemony describes a system of alliances in which the leading state exercises power over mutually consenting states. The Delian League as originally established by Athens was precisely such a hegemonic system, a free leadership of states, until it was transformed into the Athenian Empire, a system where allies were turned into subjects. 45 In his orations Isocrates refers continually to Athens as a hegemonic state, both when he is looking back at the past, before the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War, and when he is looking toward the future, in his exhortations to the Athenians to reconstitute a new confederacy or league. Empire (arche) passed from Athens to Sparta to Thebes. In the end the Greek states, though they managed to escape the despotism of Persia and Macedon, reverted to the anarchy of constant warfare among themselves. 46 In these discourses 47 Isocrates sets up a dichotomy similar to that established by Aristotle: hegemony is leadership exercised by a state over consenting allies, while despotism represents the exercise of domination and coercion over recalcitrant and opposing states or peoples. Athens failed as a great state and as a hegemonic power because it confused the two forms of rule: it exercised despotism over fellow Greeks, as if they were barbarians. Athens will recapture its preeminence and supremacy only when it pursues a hegemonic policy of alliance formation, which would require the identification of interests and values shared by all Hellas.
What is significant is that Isocrates sees Athens as the hegemonic leader of other Greek states because he considers Athenian life and culture morally and intellectually superior and above all others (most especially the non-Greek). To [End Page 316] Isocrates Athens is the school of Hellas, the teacher and guide not just of Hellenes, but through them, of the world. In the Panegyricus he writes:
So far has Athens distanced the rest of mankind in thought and speech that her pupils have become the teachers of the rest of the world; and she has brought it about the name of "Hellenes" is applied rather to those who share our culture than to those who share a common blood. 48
It is this common culture, disseminated and proliferated throughout the Greek world, that will give Athens the power to organize the Greek states into a free alliance directed against the despotism of the barbarian Persians. Imperialism and empire directed by Athens as the hegemonic power benefit the common interests of all the Hellenes and are therefore justified. 49 Cultural and political hegemony are not simply related, they are reciprocally and dynamically symbiotic.
Hegemony as a system of alliances among various social groups within a given socio-political order is, of course, one sense in which Gramsci uses the concept. But Gramsci also directly uses hegemony in the sense that Isocrates, Aristotle, and the ancient Greeks understood it. In a note discussing the notion of "great power" in international politics Gramsci says that "the great power is a hegemonic power, the head and guide of a system of alliances and ententes...." 50 This formulation, of course, is analogous to Gramsci's characterization of the supremacy of a social group in terms of the exercise of moral and intellectual leadership over allied and associated groups, and of the exercise of domination--"even with armed force"--in order to subdue antagonistic groups. 51 The note further identifies three elements as determinants of the power position of states in the international arena: 1) extent of territory (including population size); 2) economic strength; and 3) military force. A fourth, separate and special, point is what he calls the "imponderable" element of "ideology," or the extent to which a state may present itself as leading or "representing" the "progressive forces of history." An example of the latter is France during the Revolution and the Napoleonic age. Since the American Revolution and certainly since the Second World War, the United States has presented itself, in its rise to hegemonic world status, as the representative and carrier of the ideals of political liberty and economic progress. What is important here is Gramsci's observation that "to have all the elements ... which lead to victory [in war] means to be able to exert the diplomatic pressure of a great power, that is, to obtain a measure of the results of a victorious war without needing to fight." 52 To obtain one's ends in a situation of [End Page 317] conflict without resorting to war--that is, by diplomatic, economic, or ideological methods--is the distinguishing mark of a hegemonic power.
In either case it is evident that in both Aristotle and Gramsci hegemony describes the exercise of power where a common or non-antagonistic system of autonomous or at least semi-autonomous groups has been established. Where this system cannot be established or where it has broken down--such that the interests (economic) and values (cultural and moral) of the actors are diametrically opposed and not reconcilable--the normal or operative exercise of rule is domination or despotism. Despotism, however, is not for Aristotle (or for fifth and fourth century Greeks) simply a term describing an oppressive or coercive rule. Despoteia means 1) the rule of a master (despotes) over his household of slaves (the master/slave relation); and 2) despotism as a political system or order (despotic rule over subjects). In Aristotle these two forms are intimately connected, and are opposed to rule in the polis, where liberty, equality, and self-government prevail. Aristotle's "general system of slavery" and "masters of those who deserve to be slaves" explicitly connect despotism as a form or system of government to despotism as a relation between masters and slaves. 53 Greek political thought and Greek cultural attitudes, especially in the pre-Hellenistic era, explicitly and invidiously associated the "general system of slavery" as a "barbarian" form of rule, appropriate to the servile and slavish nature of non-Greeks, especially Asians (Egyptians, Lydians, Medes, Persians, etc.). 54 Whether in purely political tracts, such as those of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, or in dramatic or literary works, as in Aeschylus and others, 55 the contrast is made between the liberty of Europe (Hellas) and the despotism of Asia (Persia and others), between the free life of the polis and the slavery of the various Eastern empires and kingdoms. 56 The distinction is political, but it is also cultural and linguistic: it is the logos, as both reason and speech/language, which differentiates rule over slaves from rule over free citizens, as well as free government in the West from despotic government in the East.
Such a distinction between the liberty of the West and slavery of the East is a thread that runs throughout the history of political and critical thought in the Western world, from its origins with the Greeks to its contemporary manifestations within certain groups of American and European intellectuals. It is a topos appropriated by Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus and passed on during the Renaissance to such thinkers as Machiavelli and Guicciardini, which becomes a fundamental principle in thinkers as diverse as Montesquieu, Hegel, Marx, and Weber. Gramsci, [End Page 318] too, follows this tradition. 57 In a note where he addresses the differences between the social and political realities Lenin and his Bolsheviks had to confront and those obtaining in the West, he writes:
In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West there was a proper relation between the State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. 58
Here we have the dichotomy between state (political society) and civil society, where the former represents force and coercion and the latter a cultural-economic apparatus of permanent persuasion. Civil society is the sphere of liberty, where consent and persuasion are generated and organized. It is the ground of ideological, cultural, and religious struggle, itself constituted by voluntary and secondary associations such as political parties, trade unions, interest groups of various kinds, sects and churches, schools and universities, and civic and charitable organizations. Gramsci further notes:
The massive structures of modern democracies, both as State organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the "trenches" and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely "partial" the element of movement which before used to be "the whole" of war.... 59
In the West, because civil society is highly complex and articulated, a direct assault on the state (the war of movement) is not possible. Only a war of position, that is, the organization and deployment of ideological and cultural instruments of struggle, can undermine and eventually overcome the established social order. Gramsci explains, "the war of position in politics is the concept of hegemony." 60 The statement that "In the East the State was everything" is strikingly similar to Aristotle's "general system" of subjection where all political and social meaning emanates from an autocratic structure of power. Hegemony as leadership of either free citizens or free social groups is therefore precluded.
Hegemony understood as rule in the interest of the ruled, but also as a system of alliances (of groups or of states), mutually imply each other: the construction of a structured network of alliances founded upon the consent of the [End Page 319] constituent members presupposes a universality, or at least a potential mutuality, of interests and values. In saying this we have at the same time moved our discussion to yet another level of meaning of the term hegemony, the level, or the sphere, of civil society. Hannah Arendt, for instance, argues convincingly that the rise and growth of the Roman imperium was a process by which a civil society in Italy was generated. 61 On the other hand the Delian League is an example of the failure of
The rise and expansion of the Roman republic in Italy is an instance of the movement from the particular to the universal, from the narrowly economic and corporate to the hegemonic. The contrast between Athens and Rome is nicely demonstrated by Machiavelli in the Discourses. 62 He identifies "three methods" of expansion: 1) by establishing a confederation or a league of several republics or states, this method being practiced by the Etruscans, the Aetolians, and the Achaeans; 2) by conquering a people and making them "immediately subjects, and not associates," a policy followed by Athens and Sparta; and 3) by "making associates of other states," reserving to oneself the supreme authority, a method developed by the Romans. As Machiavelli writes,
Of these three methods, [the Spartan and Athenian] is perfectly useless, [for they] perished from no other causes than from having made conquests they could not maintain. For to undertake the government of conquered cities by violence, especially when they have been accustomed to the enjoyment of liberty, is a most difficult and troublesome task; and unless you are powerfully armed, you will never secure their obedience nor be able to govern them. And to be able to be thus powerful it becomes necessary to have associates by whose aid you can increase the population of your own city.... Rome ... followed the ... [last] plan, and did both things, and consequently rose to such exceeding power.... Having created for herself many associates throughout Italy, she granted to them in many respects an almost entire equality [con equali legge vivevano seco], always, however, reserving to herself the seat of empire and the right of command. 63
This reference is interesting on various levels. It begins with what to Ma-chiavelli is almost a general law of politics: conflict, competition, and discord as the existential, almost ontological, constitutive elements of political life; and it ends with the foundation of an area and space--both territorial and socio-political-- [End Page 320] within which certain forms of conflict are excluded (but not eliminated, though monopolized by the hegemon or by the imperium of the Roman magistrates). The process itself is defined by the calibrated, sequential use of dominio and direzione, dictatorship and hegemony, each element of the pairs alternating as a new level (in terms of territory and population) is attained and then surpassed.
As Machiavelli makes clear in the Discourses, following writers such as Cicero, Sallust, and Livy, the very foundation of the Roman civitas or state is the result of a long process of struggle and discord between two antagonistic groups originally alien and strangers to each other. 64 The civitas is itself the product of an alliance or association between the patricians and the plebeians and their transformation into the populus Romanus. In turn the republic expanded throughout Italy by transforming enemy states and peoples into allies (socii) and "friends (amici) of the Roman people," who eventually gained the rights of citizenship. Thus, the Roman civitas, at first an alliance (societas) of disparate tribes and clans of the nascent city-state, gradually became a societas Romana, an alliance of disparate peoples, tribes, and city-states that had originally formed the Italian political landscape.
The second point lies in the manner in which Machiavelli links territorial expansion to population growth. As we have seen, Gramsci makes a similar connection in his note on the hegemonic state. In both cases the hegemonic power must confront and resolve the problem of language, culture, and ethnicity: as it grows and expands in territory and as new populations are assimilated, some kind of common language and common culture must emerge if the new political order is to endure for any significant length of time. The problem becomes especially acute if the new peoples and populations "have been accustomed to the enjoyment of liberty," as Machiavelli puts it. The phrase "enjoyment of liberty" can only mean that the newly acquired people or newly conquered state is not merely politically autonomous but that it has developed its own traditions, religion, customs, ways of life, and perhaps even its own literature and sophisticated culture embodied in highly articulated and ramified forms of speech, language, and modes of thinking and acting. Such a socio-cultural order cannot be assimilated merely through violence and domination. The rising power must develop intricate political instruments to bind its interests to those of the conquered groups. As Gramsci points out,
In the hegemonic system, there exists democracy between the leading group and the groups which are led, to the extent that the development of the economy, and thus the legislation which expresses such a development, favor the molecular passage from the led to the leading group. [End Page 321] In the Roman Empire, there was an imperial-territorial democracy in the concession of citizenship to the conquered peoples, etc. Democracy could not exist under feudalism, because of the constitution of the closed groups, etc. 65
In effect the expansion is not only economic (production, taxation, trade and commerce) but also ethico-political (that is, normative systems of belief and ways of life). One of these instruments is the intellectual who has established links with the people-nation, the "democratic philosopher" or the national-popular intellectual. The "molecular passage from the led to the leading group" describes the movement of local economic and cultural elites into the Roman leading groups, and their transformation into hegemonic and national--not to mention imperial--actors and groups. Such were Marius or Cicero, who as novi homines represented the growing importance of Italian cities and their local leading groups in Roman politics.
In addition, both Machiavelli and Gramsci play on the ironic nuances entailed by the phrase "unless you are powerfully armed" (Machiavelli) and by the observation that ideological and diplomatic influence will produce the "results of a victorious war without needing to fight" (Gramsci). For in both cases military power and victory in war are usually the products of political institutions and moral-ideological elements. The war with Hannibal is a case in point. Another is the Social War which the Romans won only by granting to their Italian allies political and legal concessions whose prior denial had originally sparked the conflict. Thus, "imperial-territorial democracy" and "concession of leadership," while describing what Gramsci means by hegemony in its territorial and demographic guises, also assume the concentration and deployment of domination and "armed force"--terms which for Gramsci define "dictatorship" or the state understood in its narrow organizational and bureaucratic sense. Machiavelli often links expansion of population with military force and coercion, but his formulation of it is especially relevant to our discussion:
Those who plan that a city should become a great power ought with all their ingenuity to strive to make it full of inhabitants....This is done in two ways: through love and through force. Through love, by keeping the ways open and safe for foreigners who wish to come to live in it, in order that everyone may live there gladly; through force, by destroying the cities nearby, and sending their inhabitants to dwell in your city.... 66
"Love" recalls Gramsci's formula of the leadership of allied groups (friends), and "force" parallels his domination of antagonistic groups (enemies) one wishes to "liquidate even with armed force." Certainly no rising power will accept the [End Page 322] independence of a powerful and aggressive neighbor: the growth of Rome required the destruction of Alba Longa in the same way that the rise of the United States as a continental power required the "ruin" of the various native American confederacies. For both Machiavelli and Gramsci, force and consent, dictatorship and hegemony, and violence and persuasion therefore mutually reinforce each other. It is the expansion in territory and in population--that is, hegemony and the growth of a civil society--which makes the use of force and coercion both possible and effective. The extended territory and the multiplicity of groups and peoples within it together form a "great State" able to use and deploy military forces according to political and diplomatic necessity. At the same time such a deployment enables the state to attain its goals without needing to use armed force. That is, diplomatic, ideological, and cultural instruments of persuasion and leadership become useful and important relative to force and violence.
On the other hand, Gramsci notes, hegemony or imperial-territorial democracy could not exist under feudalism because its social and political organization was founded on castes and on "closed groups." 67 Of course the latter are instances of the economic-corporative, a pre-hegemonic, pre-political form of social organization as well of social consciousness. In this sense the emergence of a civil society spelled the disintegration of feudalism and the rise of the modern world. Feudalism could conceive of a civil society only as a theological ideal, that is, as the res publica Christiana, or as a religious social order, that is, the Catholic Church.
In a note on Italian humanism and the Renaissance Gramsci asserts that humanism was
"ethico-political," not artistic. It was a search into the bases of an "Italian State" which should have been born together and parallel with France, Spain, England. In this sense humanism and the Renaissance have Machiavelli as their most representative exponent. He was "Ciceronian," as Toffanin asserts [in Che cosa fu l'umanesimo], because he looked for its bases in the period preceding the Empire, the imperial cosmopolis (and in this sense Cicero is a good point of reference in his opposition first to Catilina, and later to Caesar--that is, in his struggle against the newly emerging forces both anti-Italian and cosmopolitan in nature). 68
It is clear that Cicero is pictured as a national-popular intellectual (along with Machiavelli) who represents the values and interests of the Italian towns and municipalities. Cicero is the representative of that very societas Romana created by the Roman republic through its hegemonic expansion into an "imperial-territorial democracy." The Roman republic may be conceived as a socio-political [End Page 323] order (civitas), in which the city of Rome (urbs) represented the center and locus of a civil society held together by a complex articulation of language, culture, and ideology embodied in independent institutions and associations. It was "ethico-political," in the sense that it maintained a balance between hegemony and dictatorship, force and consent, liberty and authority. On the other hand, Caesar and Octavian represent the destruction of such a system and its replacement by an imperial cosmopolis dominated by extra-Italian, cosmopolitan intellectuals recruited from the provinces of the Roman Empire. The movement from the national-popular to the cosmopolitan, in terms of the structure of power and relations of force within the empire, is a movement from societas and hegemony to despotism and military autocracy. 69
By the turn of second century BC the Roman state, by means of a deft combination of diplomatic, political, and economic measures, had created a kind of Italian "nation" whose regions and localities were linked intellectually and morally (not to mention socially and economically). Prominent and newly enfranchised members of local oligarchies and elites were slowly coopted into the Roman network of amicitia and clientela, whose practical interrelationships may be seen in the various writings and speeches of Cicero. The demands of the Italians for more rights as well as citizenship became an important issue in the power struggle within the Roman oligarchic factions. As the political and social relations between Rome and Italy began to coalesce into a new type of state, intellectuals such as Cicero began to address it conceptually and politically and to place it within the context and tradition of Greek political thought and practice. Cicero was well positioned to play such a role: he was Italian, yet at the same time a Roman whose family had acquired its citizenship about six generations earlier. He took the Stoic idea of the universal fatherland--the kosmos--which transcended individual fatherlands, and applied it to Roman and Italian political realities. 70 In the process, however, the concept, in the hands of a Roman and a practical politician, was transformed and politicized.
In De officiis Cicero describes particular kinds of socio-cultural and political association or community: tribe, people, language, municipality, and finally state, where the last is seen as the highest sphere which encompasses the others. 71 At the same time, he talks of Italy as the patria or fatherland in which are located these other forms of social organization. He writes: [End Page 324]
And what of our country [patria] herself.... How beauteous is Italy, how renowned are her cities [oppidorum].... How splendid is her metropolis [urbis], how enlightened her citizens [civium], how majestic her commonwealth [rei publicae].... 72
And in De legibus he states that all inhabitants of Italian towns and cities are members of two fatherlands (patriae): their birthplace, a patria by nature (according to physis), and the Roman state or commonwealth, a patria described by civil law and right and by citizenship (according to nomos or convention). 73 The latter is superior to the former. It is through membership in the state, as a citizen, that one achieves a political status and a political consciousness. He explains:
But that fatherland must stand first in our affection in which the name of state [rei publicae] signifies the common citizenship of all of us. For her it is our duty to die, to her to give ourselves entirely, to place on her altar, and, as it were, to dedicate to her service, all we possess. But the fatherland which was our parent is not much less dear to us than the one which adopted us. Thus I shall never deny that my fatherland is here, though my other fatherland is greater and includes this one within it. 74
In Cicero the Italian is a citizen of two cities: one by nature or birth, the other by law and citizenship. The second civitas, however, is the product of the imperial expansion of the Roman republic and the transformation of the conquered peoples into citizens. But this changes the character not only of the hegemonic power, but also of the allied state: for the latter is now a constituent (related and allied to others) of a greater and superior political order. Political identity was defined by membership in the Roman civitas, and legal and juridical rights constituted the core of Roman citizenship. Of course the civitas was itself conceived as an association of cives. Romanitas, therefore, encompassed a complex of social, political, cultural, and psychological factors. Objectively, it meant the bundle of rights that defined the legal and political existence of the citizen. Subjectively, it entailed the sense of belonging to a community that transcended the narrow limits of personal, individual, or group identity--whether conceived in terms of the Stoic belief in a human kosmopolis (Cicero's societas hominum), religion, or in terms of place of birth, ethnicity, dialect, tongue, or tribal origin. At the same time, these particularities are not annihilated or destroyed, but rather preserved and individuated within the larger whole. Thus, to become a Roman citizen [End Page 325] is to enter a universal realm of right and law, while retaining the uniquely local characteristics of town and city. 75 Such a notion of citizenship would seem to presuppose the autonomy of a multiplicity of local bodies and groups.
V. As a Marxist revolutionary and historicist, Gramsci would certainly understand the importance of historical context in ascribing meaning and purpose to ideas whose history is rich with many over-lapping and sedimented layers. This paper has attempted to uncover one layer of the intellecual landscape of Gramsci's hegemony by relating the concept to its antecedents in classical political thought. The parallels it has tried to establish lead to two major points. First, in both cases, the ancient and the Gramscian, hegemony was formulated and used within the context of political and social conflict. Hegemony may be seen as the generation of organized power within a given structure and its deployment against an external and countervailing force. Hegemony thus describes a movement toward the establishment of "permanent consent" (Gramsci) or a system of alliances (Isocrates and Aristotle) precisely because the prevailing relations of power and the established socio-political structures are fundamentally antagonistic. In both cases the paradigmatic measure of the political is conflict between mutually opposing interests--that is, precisely the model that Plato desired to transcend.
At the same time (and this is the second point), the double aspect or meaning of hegemony--the formulation of a particular conception of life, and its elaboration and dissemination throughout a society--is paralleled in the Isocratean formulation logos hegemon. As such, the term encompasses the philosophical and political tension expressed by the antagonism between the Gorgianic and the Platonic logos. The former is rhetorical and focused on the generation and organization of power; the latter is philosophic and directed toward the rational understanding of reality. While one looks toward the particular (power), the other aims at the universal (reason). Gramsci's hegemony, therefore, describes a double movement of reciprocal transformation: as philosophy moves toward politics, politics becomes philosophy. As such, it exhibits a duality and a tension not unlike those evinced by the conflict between sophistic rhetoric and philosophic reason.
Baruch College, the City University of New York.
Notes
* For helpful comments I thank Joseph A. Buttigieg, Joseph V. Femia, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Dante Germino, Cary J. Nederman, the journal's anonymous readers, and especially Doris L. Suarez.
1. See Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton, 1996). See also Ober's Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, 1999), 473, and his "Civic Ideology and Counterhegemonic Discourse: Thucydides on the Sicilian Debate," Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology, eds. Alan Boegehold and A. C. Scafuro (Baltimore, 1994), 102-26.
2. See Gwyn A. Williams, "The Concept of 'Egemonia' in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some Notes on Interpretation," JHI, 21 (1960), 586-99; Leonardo Paggi, Antonio Gramsci e il moderno principe (Rome, 1970); Christine Buci-Glucksman, Gramsci et l'Etat: pour une théorie matérialiste de la philosophie (Paris, 1975); and Perry Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci," New Left Review, 100 (1976-77), 5-78; Sergio Caprioglio (ed), Antonio Gramsci: Cronache torinese, 1913-1917 (Turin, 1980), xxix-xxxvi, and Dante Germino, Antonio Gramsci: Architect of a New Politics (Baton Rouge, 1990), 25-36; also Franco Lo Piparo, Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci (Bari, 1979).
3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1973), 418, henceforth cited as SPN.
4. Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 143-45.
5. Gramsci, SPN, 423.
6. Ibid., 328-36, and the note on " 'Language,' Languages and Common Sense," 348-50. On the democratic philosopher, see Benedetto Fontana, Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli (Minneapolis, 1993), 31-22, 71-72, 106-7
7. See, for example, Gramsci's comments in SPN, 350; and his Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (4 vols.; Turin, 1975), II, 1331-32, henceforth cited as QC. See also, QC, I, 114; also Antonio Gramsci, "Socialism and Culture," in Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920, ed. Quintin Hoare, tr. John Mathews (New York, 1977), 10-13, in Italian "Socialismo e cultura," Il Grido del popolo, 29 January 1916, in Scritti giovanili 1914-1918 (Turin, 1977), 22-26.
8. Gramsci, SPN, 326-36, QC, II, 1378-87.
9. Gramsci, QC, III, 1579-89. The literature on Gramsci's hegemony is legion. Both informative and illuminating are Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley, 1980); Giorgio Nardone, Il pensiero di Gramsci (Bari, 1971); A. R. Buzzi, La teoria politica di Gramsci, tr. Sandro Genovali (Florence, 1973); and Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought (Cambridge, 1988).
10. Gramsci, QC, II, 690, 750, 772, 1261, 1325.
11. Ibid., III, 2010.
12. Ibid., 1638.
13. Ibid., II, 763-64.
14. Isocrates, Nicocles, 5-9: 
"... [W]e shall find that none of the things which are done with intelligence take place without the help of speech, but that in all our actions as well as in all our thoughts speech is our guide [hegemona logon]...." Citations from the ancients are from the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). See Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, tr. Gilbert Highet (3 vols.; New York, 1944), III; The Conflict of Cultural Ideals in the Age of Plato, 88-91. Jaeger translates hegemona as "leader" (89). See also T. A. Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought (New York, 1968), 115-42; and Yun Lee Too, The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 200-232.
15. The logos may mean not merely speech and language but also discourse and argument, whether spoken or written. Isocrates, like Plato, sees the logos as the expression of a truth, and he locates this truth within a given cultural context, in space and time. Thus, unlike Plato's conception, the logos is not a transcendent and ahistorical form, and its emergence and proliferation presuppose a concrete socio-cultural structure. Jaeger (Paideia, III, 79) writes: "... the logos, in its double sense of 'speech'and 'reason,' becomes for Isocrates the symbolon, the 'token' of culture.... [which] assured rhetoric of its place, and made the rhetorician the truest representative of culture."
16. See Too, 1-9, 10-35, 164-71. See also Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca, 1998), 47-51, 52-53, 88.
17. Gramsci, QC, II, 905-7; III, 1828-29, 1889-93, 1912-14, 2350.
18. On this, see Gramsci, QC, II, 1005, 1123-24; III, 1889-93.
19. Gramsci, QC, III, 1523-24, 1959-60. This last citation should be compared to III, 1936.
20. Ibid., II, 768-69; III, 1514, 1524.
21. See Gramsci's notes on the history of Latin and its relation to the vernacular: QC, I, 353-57.
22. See Lo Piparo, Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci, 153-58, 160-66; also Leonardo Salamini, The Sociology of Political Praxis: An Introduction to Gramsci's Theory (London, 1981), 181-96.
23. George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, 1963); and see M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1983).
24. See Ober, The Athenian Revolution, "Public Speech and Power of People," 18-31, and "Power and Oratory in Democratic Athens: Demosthenes 21, Against Meidias," 86-106; also Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca, 1996), 2-35.
25. Gramsci, QC, I, 354.
26. Yunis, 8, 10.
27. Plato, Gorgias, 452-53, 456-57, 459-60. See Sinclair, 62, 73-77. See Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore, 1991), 95-112, and Robert Wardy, The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and Their Successors (London, 1996), chs. 2 and 3.
28. Gorgias, 482-93.
29. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 18.
30. Plato, Republic, 441 E-442 C. See also, Sir Ernest Barker, Greek Political Theory: Plato and His Predecessors (London, 1970).
31. Jaeger, III, 71-83.
32. See Too, 179-81, 183-84.
33. Gramsci, QC, II, 1048-50, 1222-25; III, 2302-3, 2313-14.
34. Gramsci, QC, II, 1330-32.
35. Ibid., III, 2160-64. See also Gramsci's letter to his wife, Lettere dal carcere, eds. Sergio Caprioglio and Elsa Fubini (Turin, 1965), 313-14; on which see Benedetto Fontana, "The Concept of Nature in Gramsci," The Philosophical Forum, 27 (1996), 220-43.
36. Gramsci, "Socialism and Culture," in Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920, 10 (Gramsci's emphases). For the modern historiography on Solon, see Victor Ehrenburg, From Solon to Socrates: Greek History and Civilization during the 6th and 5th Centuries BC (London, 1973), 56-76.
37. See Giambattista Vico, Scienza nuova seconda, Opere (8 vols., Bari, 1911-41), IV, 414-22; also Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton, 1985), 197-206.
38. Gramsci, SPN, 333-34.
39. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, 156-66, 184-89.
40. Cicero, N. D., II, 78-79, 133, 147-58.
41. See George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World 300 BC-AD 300 (Princeton, 1972), Chapters One and Three.
42. Aristotle, Politics, 1252 a-1253 a.
43. Politics, 1333 a 39-1334 a 5.
44. Politics, 1252 b, 1255 a.
45. See Ehrenburg, 45, 196, 219. Throughout his History Thucydides uses the term hegemonia in various ways to describe or characterize diverse relations and actions, ranging from military leadership or generalship in the field (I, 128; II, 11; III, 105, 107) to power (I, 94, 130; IV, 91; V, 7; VII, 15) to political leadership (I, 4, 25, 38, 76, 95-96; III, 10; V, 16, 47, 69; VI, 76, 82; VII, 56).
46. See Christian Habicht, Athens from Alexander to Antony, tr. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
47. See Too, 10-34, 36-40, 61-73.
48. Panegyricus, 50.
49. Jaeger, III, 106-31.
50. Gramsci, QC, III, 1598.
51. See above, and Gramsci, QC, III, 2010.
52. Gramsci, QC, III, 1598.
53. Aristotle, Politics, 1277 b, 1278 b-1279 b.
54. See Pericles Georges, Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience: From the Archaic Period to the Age of Xenophon (Baltimore, 1994), 13-46, 180-206.
55. Ibid., 96-102, 111-14.
56. See Ehrenburg, 110-21, 361-71.
57. See SPN, 416-18.
58. Gramsci, SPN, 238.
59. Ibid., 243.
60. Gramsci, QC, II, 973.
61. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1982), 187-88.
62. Discourses, 2.3, 4. See Fontana, Hegemony and Power, 141-44.
63. Discourses, 2.4.
64. Discourses, 1.4, 5, 6.
65. Gramsci, QC, II, 1056.
66. Discourses, 2.3.
67. Gramsci, QC, II, 1056.
68. Gramsci, QC, III, 1936.
69. On this, see Benedetto Fontana, "Caesarism in Gramsci," paper delivered at an International Conference on Bonapartism, on the bicentenary of the 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, sponsored by the German Historical Institute and the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, 9-11 April 1999, Hunter College, City University of New York.
70. See Neal Wood, Cicero's Social and Political Thought (Berkeley, 1988).
71. Cicero, De officiis.
72. Cicero, Quir., 4.
73. Cicero, De legibus, II.5.
74. Ibid., II.5.
75. See also Ad. Q. fr., I, 1, 2; and Pro Balbo, VIII, 21-22.
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