<i>The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism</i> by Peter D. Thomas

Antonio Gramsci has had something of a spectral presence in geography, often looming in the background of regulation theory and analyses of the local state.Recently, a decided turn to Gramsci can be witnessed in research on political ecology, globalization, philosophy and space.For anyone interested in Gramsci, Peter Thomas' The Gramscian Moment is quickly becoming required reading given its exhaustive presentation of Gramsci's thought and politics.The Gramscian Moment has the ambitious task of providing a philologically accurate reading of Gramsci in the hope of renewing Marxist philosophy and working-class movements.The starting point for Thomas is a philological reconstruction of Gramsci necessary for combating two influential, yet limiting, readings of Gramsci, specifically Althusser's (1970) critiques levelled in Reading Capital and Perry Anderson's (1976) landmark "The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci" published in New Left Review.In Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1970), Althusser levelled a series of criticisms against Gramsci, suggesting that Gramsci's adherence to Hegel leads him to produce a flat totality, incapable of determining social dynamics from a scientific (anti-historicist) vantage point.At the same time, Althusser's infamous antihumanism led him to argue that the Italian's work was tainted by voluntarism and faith in the conscious will of social actors.This reading of Gramsci shaped debates throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and as Thomas argues, continues to hold sway today, predominantly within philosophical circles.If Gramsci is often understood through an Althusserian lens, Perry Anderson's influential criticism of the Prison Notebooks is the second reading of Gramsci through which many approach his work.Anderson argued that Gramsci's work was beset by a number of slippages that ultimately amount to contradictory accounts of the state, hegemony and the relationship between the 'East' and the 'West'.As Thomas recounts, Anderson is suspect of Gramsci's notion of civil hegemony and the situating of political possibilities within wars of position, civil society and cultural struggles.Despite the authoritative and seductive character of Anderson's argument, Thomas argues that his engagement with Gramsci imposes a series of schemas and dualisms onto his work that close attention to his carceral writings do not support.If Althusser provides a problematic philosophical caricature of Gramsci and Anderson asserts the political bankruptcy of his work, Thomas strives to resuscitate Gramsci from these bleak assessments.The remainder of the book is dedicated to this task.However, perhaps more interesting to readers than the responses to Althusser and Anderson is the detailed exposition of Gramsci's method, literary style, politics and philosophy.Although The Gramscian Moment is a long, painstaking read, one comes away with a greatly enriched understanding of Gramsci's broad style of Marxism, both as a political practice and a philosophy, which as Thomas suggests, cannot be teased apart without doing harm to Gramsci's philosophy of praxis.

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