Gramsci’s Revolutionary Vision: Civil Society and the State

Why do people often consent to systems that work against their own interests? Why did revolution succeed in Russia in 1917 but fail across the more advanced economies of Western Europe? These questions troubled Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist thinker who spent his final years writing in one of Mussolini’s prisons. His answers reshaped Marxist theory and gave us a vocabulary for understanding power that scholars, activists, and political analysts still rely on today. At the centre of his thought sits a single, powerful idea: that the state is not only a machine of force, but also a manufacturer of belief.

Who was Gramsci and why his ideas endure 🔗

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was a communist politician, journalist, and theorist whose most important work was produced under the worst possible conditions. Arrested by the Fascist regime in 1926, he was sentenced by a prosecutor who reportedly demanded that the court stop his brain from working for twenty years. The attempt failed. In prison, Gramsci filled what came to be known as the Prison Notebooks with a wide-ranging study of Italian society and the strategies that might change it.

His significance for Marxist thought lies in a shift of emphasis. Classical Marxism tended to treat the economic base (the relations of production) as the engine of history, with everything else following from it. Gramsci did not abandon economics, but he argued that culture, ideas, and institutions were active forces in their own right, not mere shadows of the economy. This is sometimes called his contribution to Western Marxism, and it opened the door to taking ideology as seriously as wages and factories.

Civil society and political society: two sides of the state 🔗

Gramsci’s most famous distinction is between political society and civil society. For analytical purposes, he divided the superstructure into two levels: the network of organisations usually thought of as private, and the apparatus of the state itself, as explained in Emory University’s overview of hegemony in Gramsci.

The superstructure, reframed 🔗

In standard Marxist theory, the superstructure is everything that grows out of the economic base: law, politics, religion, education, and culture. Gramsci’s innovation was to split this superstructure cleanly in two. Political society covers the institutions that rule through direct command and coercion, such as the government, the army, the police, and the courts. Civil society covers the institutions that shape ideas and beliefs, such as schools, religious bodies, trade unions, the press, and cultural organisations. Crucially, Gramsci insisted that these supposedly private and “non-political” bodies are deeply political, because they organise human consciousness and help reproduce class domination.

Force and consent 🔗

The two spheres do different work. As the Institute of Development Studies summarises, Gramsci saw the capitalist state as two overlapping spheres, one ruling through force and the other through consent. Political society can compel obedience through punishment. Civil society secures something more durable: voluntary agreement. When people accept the existing order as natural, fair, or simply “common sense,” the ruling class no longer needs to point a gun. This is why Gramsci treated the state in a broad sense as a combination of both. He sometimes described the result as an integral state, in which coercion and consent reinforce each other.

The influence of Benedetto Croce 🔗

Gramsci did not develop these ideas in isolation. He worked through the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, the dominant Italian intellectual of the era, whom Gramsci had read since his school days. Croce, a neo-idealist influenced by Hegel, stressed the role of the human spirit, culture, and ethics in shaping history, in contrast to purely materialist readings of Marx.

The key borrowing was Croce’s notion of ethico-political history. Gramsci acknowledged that Croce had powerfully drawn attention to the importance of cultural and intellectual factors and to the role of hegemony and consent, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. From this, Gramsci concluded that economic conditions do not produce politics directly; they set the stage on which political and ideological struggles are fought. Yet he also turned Croce against himself. He charged that Croce’s history quietly erased class conflict, dwelling only on calm periods of liberal consensus while ignoring the violence that brought bourgeois society into being. Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis kept Croce’s attention to culture but restored the class struggle that Croce had smoothed away. As the scholar Walter Adamson notes, Gramsci’s pairing of the ethical with civil society and of force with the state was, in part, a transposition from Croce, though Gramsci treated these as aspects of one public life rather than a split between public and private.

Hegemony: leadership by consent 🔗

All of this leads to Gramsci’s signature concept: hegemony. In everyday usage, hegemony just means dominance. Gramsci gave it a sharper meaning. Hegemony is the way a dominant class secures its rule not mainly through force but through intellectual and moral leadership, persuading subordinate classes to accept its worldview as their own. Hegemony, in his framework, corresponds to civil society, while direct domination corresponds to political society.

This is why civil society matters so much in his theory. It is the terrain on which hegemony is won and lost. The dominant group reproduces its leadership through the media, universities, churches, and schools, in what later readers described as the manufacture of consent. The genius of a stable order, in Gramsci’s eyes, is that it converts an objective situation of domination into a subjective feeling of freedom.

The role of intellectuals 🔗

If power is built through ideas, then the people who produce and circulate ideas become central political actors. Gramsci therefore argued that power for any class rested not only on the economy or on seizing the state apparatus, but on the legitimacy it earned from subordinate classes through ideological struggle within civil society. He distinguished traditional intellectuals, who imagine themselves above class interests, from organic intellectuals, who emerge from a particular class and give it self-awareness and direction. For Gramsci, the working class needed to grow its own organic intellectuals to challenge the prevailing common sense.

Why the West needed a different revolution 🔗

Gramsci’s framework was not abstract theory; it was an attempt to answer an urgent strategic puzzle. The Russian Revolution had toppled the Tsarist state through a swift, frontal assault. Across Western and Central Europe, similar attempts collapsed, and fascism rose instead. Why?

His answer turned on the strength of civil society. In Russia, he argued, the state was everything and civil society was thin and undeveloped, so a direct blow against the state was enough to bring down the whole structure. In the West, the state sat behind a dense network of civil institutions that acted, in his famous image, like trenches and fortifications protecting the social order, a contrast laid out clearly in this analysis from the journal Socialism and Democracy. When the state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed behind it.

War of maneuver versus war of position 🔗

From this came Gramsci’s military metaphor. A war of maneuver is a direct, rapid, frontal assault on state power, the model of 1917. A war of position is a slow, patient siege, a long campaign to win influence across the institutions of civil society before any decisive confrontation. Because Western civil society was so robust, Gramsci argued that a war of maneuver would fail there, and that revolutionaries had to wage a war of position instead, building counter-hegemony from below.

It is worth noting that careful readers caution against treating these as two fixed stages. As the same journal discusses elsewhere, Gramsci himself often treated the two strategies as dialectical moments within a single revolutionary process rather than rigid historical phases, even though later Eurocommunist parties tended to read the war of position as a purely gradual, electoral path.

Civil society, collective will, and revolutionary change 🔗

The practical payoff of all this is the idea of collective will. If consent is manufactured in civil society, then a new order cannot simply be imposed; it must be prepared in advance by changing how people think. Counter-hegemony means building alternative institutions, spreading a new worldview, and forging a shared collective will among ordinary people, so that when a moment of crisis arrives, there is already a movement ready to lead.

This optimistic strand of Gramsci’s thought reframes even the old Marxist phrase about the “withering away of the state.” For Gramsci this did not mean the end of organisation, but a society in which the coercive functions of political society shrink while civil society expands and learns to regulate itself. Civil society, in this view, becomes the workshop of a new social order.

The reach of these ideas extends well beyond Europe. In India, Gramscian concepts have been widely used to analyse how dominant groups sustain power through cultural and ideological narratives, including in debates over caste, religion, and communal politics. The notion that the prevailing “common sense” of a society is itself a site of struggle has proved useful far from the prison cell where it was first written down. That portability is the surest sign of a seminal contribution: a theory built to explain interwar Italy that keeps illuminating how power works almost everywhere.

What do you think? If hegemony is reproduced through schools, media, and religious institutions, which of these do you think shapes “common sense” most powerfully in society today? And in an age of social media, do you believe a “war of position” looks different from the slow institutional siege Gramsci imagined?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
2. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/20/hegemony-in-gramsci/
3. https://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/gramsci-and-hegemony/
4. https://monoskop.org/images/9/9e/Adamson_Walter_L_1987_Gramsci_and_the_Politics_of_Civil_Society.pdf
5. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/tr-gramsci.htm
6. https://sdonline.org/issue/67/insurrection-and-gramsci%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cwar-position%E2%80%9D
7. https://sdonline.org/issue/75/dialectic-position-and-maneuver-understanding-gramsci%E2%80%99s-military-metaphor