<i>The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism</i> by Peter D. Thomas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".