a different level of relationships. Even in the period around World War I, however, when the issues underlying their differences still provided flammable tinder for politics, some major figures worked to combine their apparently divergent perspectives and to bring them to bear conjointly upon social science.
With the rise of Marxian methods of inquiry, there developed Marxian variants that attempted to combine Marxism with approaches influenced by neo-Kantian thought. Two of these focus on the relationship between ideas and power and are especially pertinent to anthropological understandings. One is represented by the work of Karl Mannheim (1893–1947); the other, by that of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937).
Mannheim was destined to become one of the “free-floating” intellectuals he later described. Born in Budapest, he joined the radical “Sunday Circle” that included Gyorgy Lukács; and, like Lukács, he fled to Germany in the wake of the failed Hungarian revolution in 1919. Hitler’s grasp for power in 1933 then forced him to move to England. While in Germany, he—like Lukács—came into contact with Max Weber, then intent on developing his neo-Kantian approach to a systematic sociology, and both Lukács and Mannheim would attempt to combine Marx with Weber. In History and Class Consciousness (1971), Lukács used Weber’s concept of “objective possibility” to endow the Marxian proletariat with a “potential” (as opposed to an empirical) class consciousness. Yet where Lukács then opted for communism, Mannheim moved toward sociology.
Mannheim accepted the hypothesis of a link between forms of knowledge and social groupings, but he also insisted in Weberian fashion that class intersected with many other memberships in generational cohorts, status groups, professions, and elites. His methodology, used to demonstrate the ties between social entities and ideas, was “essentially anthropological” (Wallace 1970, 174). His essay on “Conservative Thought” in Germany (1953) pointed to the declining nobility as the main social base of support for an intelligentsia that produced conservative theories. The work also exemplified Mannheim’s major concern with the social role of intellectuals. In a second work, Ideology and Utopia (1936), Mannheim counterposed varieties of ideology that supported the status quo, as against forms of utopian thought that envisioned alternative futures. He delineated different kinds of utopias: the orgiastic chiliasm of Thomas Münzer’s Anabaptists; the liberal-humanitarianism of the Enlightenment, which embraced the idea of rational progress as well as German pietism’s faith in progress under the stewardship of God; conservative counterutopias; and socialist-communist utopias. In Mannheim’s method, each of these perspectives was to be depicted in its own terms, as a prerequisite for an eventual evaluative solution (1936, 98). His great hope was that sociology would affect politics by communicating to the contending participants the sources of their modes of action and would thus facilitate negotiations among them.
Gramsci combined Marx and neo-Kantianism in a different way, developing an approach to understanding how ideas are generated and distributed within a field of force. Born in Sardinia, he went on to study linguistics in Turin, where he was drawn into politics and became a leader of Italian communism. Arrested by the fascist regime in 1926, he was sent to prison, where he died in 1937.
A major influence on Gramsci was his intellectual engagement with the philosopher, historian, and political figure Benedetto Croce. Croce’s historical work focused primarily on Italy, but he was strongly influenced by Dilthey and fused his vision of a psychological and phenomenological history with the Italian idealist tradition. Croce intentionally neglected the social and economic side of history and wrote Italian history as a political quest for moral consensus and liberty. Gramsci criticized Croce for his idealism but sought to translate his “ethico-moral moments of consent” into Marxian terms. He did this through his writings on the concept of “hegemony,” in which he argued that class domination and influence did not merely rest on the formal political system and the state-operated apparatus of coercion but spread beyond state and politics into the social and cultural arrangements of daily life. “To win hegemony, in Gramsci’s view,” writes Terry Eagleton, “is to establish moral, political and intellectual leadership in social life by diffusing one’s own ‘world-view’ throughout the fabric of society as a whole, thus equating one’s own interests with the interests of society at large” (1991, 116).
The concept of hegemony has political roots. Initially used by Lenin to refer to political domination, it was elaborated by Gramsci to suggest that in the capitalist societies of the West—contrary to what might be true in Eastern Europe—political power could be gained through the construction of a predominant consensus rather than through revolutionary violence. In the West, states did not preempt all social arenas, relying instead on managing society through social and cultural influence; this, in turn, would allow opposition parties to resist this influence by developing counterhegemonic forms of their own. The balance between hegemony and counterhegemony would always be in flux. Thus, hegemony was envisaged not as a fixed state of affairs but as a continuous process of contestation.
As a political leader in a country only recently unified and marked by strong local and regional traditions built up around numerous towns, each surrounded by its own rural dependency, Gramsci was keenly aware of the sterility of a class-oriented politics anchored in a paradigm of a generalized working class conscious of universal interests. His political project was therefore to draw into an alliance segments of the working class, peasant groups, artisans, white-collar employees, and fractions of other classes. Such an alliance would then function as a “historic bloc”—unified politically as well as “culturally” under the leadership of the Communist Party and its allies.
Perhaps because Gramsci did not want to attract the attention of his prison guards, he was never explicit about how he envisaged the interplay between hegemonic processes and the state. Yet as Mussolini’s chief political captive he surely did not think that state power could be won through song and dance alone. Once it is acknowledged, however, that hegemony must always be projected against the backdrop of the state, it becomes possible to identify hegemonic processes not only in the sphere of civil society outside the state but within state institutions as well. The state manages “ideological state apparatuses,” such as schools, family, church, and media, as well as apparatuses of coercion (Althusser 1971), and state officials contend over policies within these institutional precincts. They do so, moreover, in interaction with society’s open arenas. A number of different studies have exemplified these processes in the fields of education (Ringer 1969; Bourdieu 1989), in the social management of the state (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Rebel 1991), in penology (Foucault 1977), and in military doctrine (Craig 1971). Anthropologists have made use of the notion of hegemony as well, though all too often stripping it of its political specificity and intent (Kurtz 1996).
Drawing on Italian history, literature, and folklore, Gramsci sought to identify the social groups and cadres that “carried” the hegemonic process, as well as the centers and settlement clusters that took leading roles in the production and dissemination of hegemonic forms. In adopting this perspective, he was strongly influenced by his training in the Italian neo-linguistic (or spatial) school developed primarily by Matteo Giulio Bartoli at the University of Turin. These neo-linguists described language change as a process whereby dominant speech communities built on their prestige to influence surrounding subaltern settlements (Lo Piparo 1979). Anthropologists familiar with the diffusionism of the American culture-historical school will recognize parallels with the idea of culture centers, sites of unusually intense cultural productivity that transmit traits and influences to the surrounding culture areas. Like these ethnologists, Gramsci did not see such relations as merely linguistic but as involving other aspects of culture as well. At the same time, he differed from the American scholars in clearly understanding that the hegemonic process did not move by its own momentum. It summoned up and employed power to produce and distribute semiotic representations and practices, favoring some and disfavoring others. Its effects would thus be uneven in form and intensity, affecting classes and groups differentially. Drawing distinctions among locations and groups of people, the process produced tensions among them, as well as between the hegemonic center and the groups within its sphere of influence.
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