SOURCE: “Gramsci, Gentile and the Theory of the Ethical State in Italy, 1918-1920,” in Italian Quarterly, Vol. XXXI, Nos. 119-120, Winter-Spring, 1990, pp. 43-56.

[In the following essay, Schechter discusses the political philosophies of Gentile and Gramsci, finding that “the desire to unite the state and the civil society” links the two.]

Modern political philosophy has sought to deal with the relation between freedom and authority by invoking a range of concepts to explain how individuals might pursue their extremely diverse interests without at the same time undermining the presuppositions that make living together in society possible. The foundation which allows individuals to pursue heterogeneous aims, yet without permitting this pursuit to degenerate into a war of all against all, is commonly referred to as government or law. In Marxist thought the agency for regulating social conflict is defined as “the state”, which in modern societies, in contrast to feudal or ancient societies, is separate from the sphere of social conflict called “society” or “civil society”. The tradition of Marxist thought represented by Gramsci accepts the idea that the modern state is a separate sphere, which through its various institutions mediates conflicting interests in society. However, Gramsci and others also argue that the real basis of these conflicts—private ownership of the means of production—can be eliminated and with it the rift between state and society. At this point the people are no longer required to confer their power to external political bodies, since a complete harmony of interests makes the state as a separate sphere superfluous. Thus it is only when the state/society rift is healed that true democracy, as the rule of the people, can be fully realized. This exigency to re-unite state and civil society can also be found in the political philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, the theorist of Italian fascism. Thus despite what might at first appear to be irreconcilable political differences, the desire to unite the state and the civil society exists as an important common element in the political ideas of Gramsci and Gentile in the 1918-1920 period. In fact, during these years Gramsci employs an idealist framework which is clearly influenced by Gentile's interpretation of Marx. This separates Gramsci from other currents on the left at this time such as reformist socialism and revolutionary syndicalism, and makes a comparison between Gramsci and Gentile possible. This paper explores the link between Gramsci and Gentile by situating their ideas in the period of Italian history beginning with the Risorgimento and culminating with the rise of fascism. While their views on the relations between state and civil society will serve as a framework of analysis, specific attention will be given to the theory of radical democracy in Gramsci's L'Ordine Nuovo writings of 1919-20. Gramsci developed the theory in conjunction with the factory council movement in Turin during these years. He argues that the factory council represents the model of a highly participatory state which is much more democratic than parliamentary democracy. As we shall see, both Gramsci and Gentile consider parliamentary democracy to be an inadequate institution for the expression of the organic unity that exists between the people and the state in a truly democratic polity.¹

I) THE NEW STATE AND ITS CRITICS

The question of the relation between the masses and the state has had a tremendous importance in Italy since the Risorgimento. From the moment of the de facto establishment of Italy in 1861, the competing conceptions of the proper role of citizen in Italian politics have been represented by moderate liberalism, on the one hand, and Mazzinian radicalism, on the other. The realization of the political unification of Italy and the creation of the new state are certainly the most important events in the history of modern Italy, yet at the time of these events few Italians understood their significance or were satisfied by the result. Very few Italians participated in the formation of the state, which was chiefly the work of a small number of liberals from a narrow social base. The political élite was aware that the great majority of Italians felt estranged from the new democratic institutions of the country, yet they believed that the absence of mass participation in the political life of the new state did not signify any diminution of their authority. For these liberals the Risorgimento represented the establishment of the most appropriate political form for the protection of the interests of that section of the Italian bourgeoisie which had taken the task upon itself to drive the backward peasant masses of the country toward modern civilization. For the greater part of the liberals involved in the Risorgimento, the problem of the relationship between the masses and the state could be effectively reduced to the problem of the defense of the state from the masses. By the time Giolitti effectively assumed direction of the government in 1900, and throughout the period of his leadership, the strategy of trasformismo did not succed in bringing the masses into the ambit of the state, but rather contributed to discrediting liberal democracy even amongst the national bourgeoisie.²

From the standpoint of Mazzini's conception of national politics as secular religion, the new state lacked a sense of spiritual mission. Despite the salient presence of Hegel's political philosophy in various intellectual circles, in practice the state had been founded on a political philosophy championing the natural rights of individuals. The role of the state was that of administering the material needs of an aggregate of individuals, rather than that of shaping the consciousness of the newly formed nation. Closed within the narrow confines of parliamentary and bureaucratic institutions, politics was inevitably going to be the privilege of an oligarchy separated from the bulk of the Italian people. While it was thought by many that the Italians already suffered from a kind of ‘endemic individualism’, which militated against the formation of a national consciousness, social discipline, or a sense of collective solidarity, the politics of the new state seemed to be more concerned with the protection of sectional interests rather than providing leadership or some sense of where the nation as a whole should be moving.³

Mazzinian idealism pervaded the spirit of many of the younger critics of Italy during the Giolitti years. Whether of the political left or right, the generation of young intellectuals which included Antonio Gramsci, Giovanni Gentile, Piero Gobetti, Guido de Ruggiero and others insisted on the need to finish what the Risorgimento had only begun, i.e., the task of “making Italians”. The political project that this entailed contributed to the “myth of the new state”, or the Ordine Nuovo (New Order) as Gramsci would call it in 1919-20, which questioned the basic tenets of liberalism and sought to create a new national political culture by way of an intense labour of political and cultural criticism. The new order would be based on a redrawing of the boundaries of public and private, to add a greater social dimension to the lives of individuals and help combat the problem of “companilismo”—the tendency of many Italians to disregard the state and to concern themselves only with their economic interests. In order to analyse Gramsci and Gentile's understanding of the problems of post-Risorgimento Italy and to see how they arrived at their respective versions of the ethical state, it is first necessary to look at their ideas concerning the relation between Marxism and political theory. Both Gentile's doctrine of Actualism and Gramsci's council communism developed in response to the fragmentation and atomisation they perceived in post-Risorgimento Italy, on the one hand, and the philosophies of Hegel, Marx, and Croce, on the other.⁴

II) CROCE AND LABRIOLA: THE “CRISIS OF MARXISM” AND THE “REBIRTH OF IDEALISM”

In one of the volumes of Gramsci's prison writings of 1928-35, Materialsimo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, he affirms that as of 1917 he was “tendentially Crocean”. He believed that just as Hegelian philosophy constituted the premise for the critique of modern society which culminated in Marxism, Croce's philosophy constituted the premise for the construction of a reinvigorated Marxist philosophy based on the unity of theory and practice.⁵ Gramsci argued that idealist philosophy must go beyond the enumeration of categories of the understanding capable of illuminating the rational in the actual. It had to furnish a critique of existing cultural patterns with a view towards transforming them. He believed that Marxist philosophy should provide both a framework for understanding modern society as well as a strategy for social revolution. Croce hoped that philosophical idealism could provide a basic framework of values and meaning which became exigent with the decline of traditional religion and the inability of other modern philosophies such as materialism and positivism to furnish any normative discourse. In this sense he believed that philosophy could act as the basis of a secular religion, while Gramsci hoped that Marxism could act as a secular political religion, which overcame the distinction between theory and practice Croce posited in his philosophy of spirit. The theoretical studies of the Neapolitan Hegelians Bertrando and Silvio Spaventa indicated that philosophical idealism could be employed in the study of politics. Silvio Spaventa proposed the adoption of Hegelian philosophy for the explicitly normative purpose of aiding Italian unification and cultural rebirth in the 1850's and 1860's.⁶ Croce, however, equated Marxism with materialism and denied that historical materialism was a philosophy. He thus rejected the claim that it could satisfy the religious need of the modern individual for a normative orientation.⁷

Croce's studies of historical materialsim were directly inspired by the teachings of the Neapolitan philosopher Antonio Labriola, who had originally designated Marxism as a philosophy of praxis and an integral and autonomous vision of reality. Croce initially believed that socialism could fulfill the religious search for an orientation in the world, and he admitted that his initial discussions with Labriola about Marxism left him intoxicated with the joy of one who has been initiated in the mysteries of a religious faith for the first time.⁸ However, in a series of debates toward the turn of the century which would be remembered as the “crisis of Marxism”, Croce came to express grave doubts about Marxism as a philosophy and guide to action. By 1911 in an article in the Florentine journal of “Militant Idealism”, La Voce, Croce confidently declared the death of socialism. In Croce's opinion historical materialism, as the philosophy of socialism, fared no better than positivism as a philosophy of human existence. He maintained that Italy would never be united nor spiritually great until it had located its national religion which was at the same time a philosphy superior to all forms of materialism and positivism. Throughout his life Gramsci sought to refute Croce by demonstrating that socialism was the secular religion of the modern world, and that historical materialism was the vigorous science of society Labriola believed it to be in its initial formulations by Marx and Engels.⁹

The debates which took place in connection with the “crisis of Marxism” form an important background for Gramsci and Gentile's project to renew political theory with an idealist philosophical foundation. Gentile and Croce were instrumental in launching the “rebirth of idealism” in Italy, central to which was the critique of the prevailing conception of Marxism as materialism and positive science. This positivist interpretation of Marxism became prevalent in Italy as a result of the theories of Achille Loria and the political practice of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Filippo Turati, the leader of the reformist wing of the Party, championed an evolutionist strategy based on gradualism and parliamentary democracy. Turati and his supporters claimed that Marx had demonstrated that the contradiction between the ever expanding productive forces and the forms of ownership which constrained them would eventually bring the working class to political power. Until this moment came, however, there was little to be done, since objective forces had to take their natural course. This interpretation of Marx gained wide acceptance throughout Europe at the turn of the century as a result of the general intellectual hegemony of doctrines which aspired to be scientific.¹⁰

The “crisis” resulted when it appeared that despite the proclamation of the existence of the iron laws of economic development, successive periods of economic stagnation never produced the “inevitable” revolution. Thus the predictive capacity of Marxism was directly called into question. In Germany Eduard Bernstein attempted to show that contrary to the theses of The Communist Manifesto, society was not dividing into two increasingly homogeneous and implacably opposed groups, one comprised of monopoly capitalists and the other comprised of impoverished proletarians. Intermediate strata continued to exist, especially in countries such as Italy and Russia with a very substantial peasantry. Moreover, it became clear to Croce, Georges Sorel, Franceso Saverino Merlino and others that Marxism's claim to be scientific and materialist undermined its power as a tool of moral criticism. Together, capitalism and parliamentary democracy were more than just an economic system and a method for adjudicating conflicting interests. They constituted the foundation of a system of values and an entire way of looking at the world, in short, a culture. If socialism was to contain the seeds of a new culture in this wider sense, it would have to inspire a sense of duty and passion that would not necessarily be generated by the expansion of the productive forces. The socialist revolution would thus have to be a political, philosophical, aesthetic, and moral revolution, not simply the public ownership of the means of production or PSI control of parliament, as Turati and most of the Second International suggested. But the theory of historical materialism, even in the highly sophisticated variant outlined by Antonio Labriola, did not provide the normative criteria for the bases of a new culture. Thus Croce declared that no specific form of moral conduct could be derived from the theory, and Sorel asserted that Marx had neglected to focus on the highly important subjective and psychological factors in the revolution.¹¹

Yet if Mazzini understood the task of creating a new culture as the imperative for all citizens to participate in the political institutions of the new state, Croce's separation between theory and practice, based on his theoretical distinctions between the true, good, useful, and beautiful, seemed to offer little basis for the philosophical justification of Italian unity. Croce's dialectic of distincts appeared inadequate to the new generation of militant idealists united around La Voce and other journals who sought to recapture Mazzini's stress on the unity of theory and practice. The Giolitti years seemed to epitomize the problem of generating some notion of the collective good when too much liberty is given to the pursuit of particular and varying interests in civil society. The task of the new generation of militants who emerged from the First World War with ever greater hopes of completing the task of “making Italians” was to formulate an aggressively participatory version of Hegelianism, capable of educating the Italian people in the requirements of civic virtue. Eugenio Garin notes that if the common philosophical reference point between La Voce and its predecessor Il Leonardo was Croce's idealism, from the time of La Voce onwards this hegemony passed over to the sway of Gentile's philosophy of Actualism, which posited the unit of theory and practice.¹²

Gentile's ideas took shape in response to Labriola's comments about Marx's Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy and Theses on Feuerbach, which Gentile translated into Italian for the first time. The eleventh thesis was interpreted in idealist terms to demonstrate that thought creates reality. Gentile argues that the Marxian dictum that the philosphers have only interpreted the world while the point is to change it, reveals that to know the world is to make it. As in the third thesis, the unity of thought and action had to be conceived in terms of revolutionary practice. This meant that Croce's distinctions would have to be modified to accomodate Marx's important insight that we know the world only to the extent that we transform it through labouring and other practical activities. Hence theory could not be neatly separated from practice.¹³

Gentile praises Marx for moving away from naturalistic or mechanistic materialism to historical materialism (despite arguing that Marx's argument is ultimately contradictory and unsuccessful).¹⁴ Naturalism sought to explain the individual as part of the species abstracted from the real process of historical development. Naturalistic explanation attempted to trace the origin of society to a fictitious social contract or mythical emerging of individuals from the “state of nature”, when in fact such an individual conceived a-historically was a pure abstraction based on atomistic premises. Gentile argues that the origin of society and the origin of the individual are intimately intertwined, since only the individual in society is not a purely abstract concept. For Gentile it was Hegel who first attempted to overcome every abstract distinction between thought and reality, by attributing a dialectical structure to reality itself which reconciled the opposing tensions of essence and existence, and internal and external, thus identifying the rational and the actual and thought and being. It is in his insistence on the concept of the unity of thought and being in praxis that Marx moved beyond Feuerbach's materialism, and returned to his idealist roots in Hegel.¹⁵

Gramsci seized upon Gentile's notion that matter can have no history, while humans create themselves and the world around them in the midst of the historical process. In an article in the Turin newspaper Il Grido del popolo in February 1918 entitled, “Il Socialismo e la filosofia attuale”, Gramsci hails Gentile as:

the Italian philosopher who has in the last few years produced the most in his field of philosophical thought. His philosophical system is the final development of German idealism which culminated with George Hegel, teacher of Karl Marx, and is the negation of all transcendentalism, marking the identification of philosophy and history, and the act with thought, in which the actual and the true are united in a dialectical progression which is never completed.¹⁶

Gramsci credits Gentile for making use of explicitly Marxist concepts in his reformulation of idealist philosophy. Gentile's Actualism seemed to offer the perfect harmony of philosophical rigour and scope for concrete action which Croce appeared to have renounced in favour of disinterested philosophical inquiry. To intellectuals with an activist bent such as Gramsci and Gobetti, Gentile's combination of passion and intellect made him more appealing than Croce, whose philosophy seemed to encourage the passivity proper to a spectator in an historical period which demanded concrete programmes.¹⁷

Thus in the immediate post World War I years Gramsci and Gentile shared a faith in the ability of idealist philosophy to give new life to political theory, which had suffered during the reign of positivism. This was translated in their common rejection of liberal individualism, reformist socialism, revolutionary syndicalism, and the politics of transformismo. As a political practice, each of these were based on atomist and contractualist premises about the relation between the individual and the state they both rejected. For Gramsci, both reformist and syndicalist wings of the PSI made the mistake of accepting utilitarian criteria of political obligation: individual members would receive material benefits for their adhesion to the Party and trade union. By claiming the necessity to smash the state, the syndicalists were acting like militant liberals who posited an individual interest against the collective interest. However, this utilitarian individual was not a timeless creature, as the social contract theorists and their socialist progeny supposed, but a creation of history. The historical process would not stop evolving with the individuals of liberal capitalist society. The fundamental principles of this society, individualism and competition, would be replaced by a higher principle, that of collectivism. This would produce an organic relation between individual and state by uniting state and civil society in a higher synthesis, thus making genuine democracy a real possibility. While the state created in the Risorgimento was dominated by élites and alienated from the daily life of the Italian working class, this new state would be based on the self-government of the associated producers predicted by Marx. Both reformist socialists and revolutionary syndicalists lacked the Marxist conceptual framework necessary to grasp the dialectical movement of the historical process culminating in the reconciliation of the individual with the collectivity. Thus in “Individualismo e collettivismo” of March 1918, Gramsci writes:

The proletariat substitutes the principle of organization for that of individualism, absorbing what is eternal and rational in the latter. … Bourgeois individualism necessarily produces proletarian collectivism. The associated-individual replaces the capitalist-individual, the cooperative replaces the workshop: the union becomes a collective individual.¹⁸

In this article Gramsci begins to outline his ideas about the respective relations between individual and state under capitalism and socialism. These ideas are further developed in 1919-20 in the pages of L'Ordine Nuovo. Yet even prior to the factory council movement it becomes clear that Gramsci was seeking a comprehensive social theory which overcame the limits imposed by the existing currents in the PSI. He attempted to develop this theory in connection with his insistence that “Socialism is an integral conception of the world, with its own philosophy, mysticism and morality.”¹⁹ Such an all-embracing conception of politics could only be realized with new institutions, a new culture, and a new state with a truly popular basis. The notion of politics as a comprehensive view of the world was shared by Gentile, though for Gentile it was necessary to restore the unity of vision that inspired Mazzini and bonded the protagonists of the Risorgimento. For both Gramsci and Gentile during 1918-20, however, it is the state which creates this fundamental unity. Moreover, both argue that parliamentary democracy is no longer an adequate vehicle for a truly democratic policy, i.e., one in which there is no separation between the people and the state. It is thus necessary to unite state and civil society in a higher form of democracy which heals the rift between citizens and the state which resulted in the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.²⁰

III) TOWARD THE ETHICAL STATE, 1918-20

Gramsci's ideas about the possibility of substituting the democratic parliamentary state with a new form of radical democracy began to take shape in response to the Russian Revolution. His initial observations about the Revolution stress what he calls its “anti-Jacobin” nature. In his early formulations, Jacobinism is ridiculed as “a purely bourgeois phenomenon” connoting the overthrow of a minority of rulers by another élite, with no substantial transfer of power to the mass of the people. In this sense Gramsci considers the Risorgimento a non-violent Jacobin revolution.²¹ The fundamental difference between the French and the Russian Revolution consists in the fact that while the former championed the political liberty of equal citizens (compatible with class inequality), the latter promised the total liberation of the species in all spheres. Thus the Russian Revolution upholds an ideal which “cannot be that of only a few,” and which is rooted in the “conscience of everyone.” Civil society is transformed from a Hobbesian war of all against all into a moral sphere regulated by custom and habit, so that there is no conflict between liberty and law. In such a situation order does not have to be imposed by an aloof and authoritarian state. New forms of social organization produce consent and engender widespread political participation. Gramsci interprets the Revolution as the substitution of a society based on individualism, competition, and the division between civil and political spheres, on the one hand, with a highly organized and spontaneously disciplined society, on the other. Socialist society replaces the anarchy of the market and cultural relativism with a planned economy and cultural unity.²²

The source of this new organization is the soviet which he regards as a fundamentally new political institution in the history of relations between governors and governed. The soviet is the basis of a new form of state which ends class inequality in a way that parliamentary democracy cannot. Parliamentary democracy only represents individuals in their public reality in the institutions of the state, as citizens, separated from their material reality as producers in civil society. The polity in a class riven society must respect private property, since it is the institution best suited to the representation of private interests and the maintenance of the division between public and private spheres. The soviet form of democracy eliminates private interests and the inequalities attendant to them, and gives expression to the interests of the “people as a whole.” Just as Marx praised the Paris Commune for instituting the political rule of the producers, in January 1918 Gramsci writes that the Russian Revolution had shown the rest of Europe the forms of representation through which the sovereignty of the proletariat is exercised—the soviet.²³ Gramsci's writings prior to the factory council movement in Italy celebrate the new state in terms reminiscent of Sorel's concept of myth. The soviet is the institution through which the chaos of the competing individuals in bourgeois society is reduced to a single social will and a single spiritual authority. The Revolution symbolizes the ability of human beings to create history, rather than being subject to its laws. To this extent Gramsci hails the event as “la rivoluzione contro il Capitale”, which frees historical materialism of “positivist and naturalist incrustations” by returning Marxism to its original source in German idealist philosophy.²⁴

The First World War had created the requisite conditions for the emergence of a collective will in Russia. The great merit of the Bolsheviks was to have given order and discipline to these collective spiritual energies in a new form of state realizing a new form of democracy. Gramsci believed that the war had produced a similar rejection of the old order in Italy, and that the same bases of a new collective will were present and seeking to be incarnated in a new state. This gave the Italian proletariat an ideal opportunity to weld together politics, economics, and culture, and thus establish a new producers' civilization. The most important task for Gramsci became that of locating an institution indigenous to Italy which realized the principle of self-government as in the Russian soviet. Like many socialists Gramsci looked to the highy-skilled working class of Turin, with its long tradition of political militancy. It was here that Gramsci directed his search for the Italian equivalent of the Russian soviet. He believed he had found it in the factory council, which had originally been a grievance committee during World War I. During the factory council movement in 1919-20, he argued that the factory council was the basis of a new kind of state which overcame all of the problems left over by the Risorgimento which had only been exacerbated by successive Giolitti governments: fragmentation, political corruption, and transformismo. There could be no return to the old order, especially not after the profound changes brought on by the war. Thus in October 1919 Gramsci writes:

The factory Council is the model of the proletarian State. All of the problems inherent in the organization of the proletarian State are inherent in the organisation of the Council … The solidarity which develops against capitalism in the trade union, in suffering and sacrifice, is permanent in the Council. It is incarnated in even the most trivial moments of industrial production, in the joyous sentiment of being part of an organic whole.²⁵

Gentile was also convinced that the phenomena of trasformismo and “giolittismo” were signs that the state was not fulfilling the spiritual mission which Mazzini had bequeathed to future Italian generations. However, for Gentile the war revealed that the country was ready to reestablish the identification of the people and the state that had been lost after the Risorgimento. In its first number in May 1919 L'Ordine Nuovo reviewed Gentile's Guerra e fede(1919), praising Gentile's conception of the state. It is in this book that Gentile argues that the Italian state must once again become the ethical substance it was in the political thought and action of Mazzini. He insists that it is the duty of each individual to continually create the ethical state in daily political participation. Only in this way could the distinctions between individual and state and thought and action be overcome.²⁶Guerra e fede and Dopo la vittoria (1920) thus mark Gentile's initial ideas on the relation between state and civil society which would eventually culminate in the doctrine of the ethical state in Genesi e struttura della società (1943). There is not sufficient space here for a detailed examination of Gentile's social philosophy, but it is central for us to to observe how Gramsci's conception of the factory council as the basis of an organic state suggests a comparison between his theory of state in 1919-20 with that of the theorist of Italian fascism.²⁷

Like the L'Ordine Nuovo writings, Guerra e fede and Dopo la vittoria are collections of articles. In these writings primarily taken from the Bologna daily newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, Gentile concentrates on the theoretical and practical significance of Italy's participation in World War I.²⁸ In “Morale e politica” of 19 April 1918 Gentile asserts that the distinction between the individual and the state is completely “illusory” and untenable. This corresponds to his view that man's most important ideal is self-realization. The state as a political community is the precondition of man's rational and moral development. The individual who pursues a profession, and decides what kind of life is best for him must adhere to the social rules, norms, and codes of conduct that comprise ethical life. Since the state is the ultimate basis of the ethical life which makes self-realization possible, the state and the individual personality cannot be separated. In this way the individual accepts obligation to the state as his obligation to himself, which he should not attempt to avoid.²⁹ In another article of the same period entitled, “Fra Hegel e Lenin,” Gentile criticizes Lenin's insistence on the necessity to smash the state as a futile attempt to eliminate the “common substance” of a people which the state incarnates. The state can be reformed, and indeed education is a vital component in this project. But the foundations of the state are historical, based on institutions, norms, and customs, which cannot be smashed as such.³⁰

Gramsci's call for the identification of society with the state is most clearly ehoed in Gentile's “Due democrazie” of January 1919, in Dopo la vittoria. Here Gentile writes that The people of a democracy are one with the Sate, such that the interest of the State is protected as the precious life of the people. Without this interior and sincere adhesion of the consciousness of the people to political life in all its dynamism, there can be no democracy of the popular forces … the political organization of social life consists in overcoming the dualism between the will of the individual and the will of the collectivity.³¹

Both Gramsci and Gentile seek to overcome the problem of reconciling competing particular interests in civil society by fusing the particular and the general in the ethical state, thus denying the validity of Croce's distinctions. For Croce it is important to assert that civil society is never transcended in the life of the state except as an ideal. The state must perform the role of regulative agency rather than that of an ethical substance which has become actualized. Hence economic, political and moral action could never be completely absorbed into one another, as humans will always be divided between egoistic practical self pursuing utilitarian aims, on the one hand, and a transcendent moral consciousness which is aware of the good, on the other. Since there can be no complete transcendence within the state of the practical individual, the ethical state could only exist in totalitarian form as the total subordination of the practical and intellectual interests of the individual to the general good, which in practice would be represented by the state.³²

During 1918-20 Gentile began to make a definitive departure from his earlier adherence to liberalism. The war and the instability of Italian society which followed led him to believe that the parliamentary democracy was an inadequate institution for the expression of the profound unity of a nation embodied in a truly democratic state. This reasoning would eventually culminate in his doctrine of the ethical state as the society “in interiore homine,” which was to find its most detailed elaboration in Genesi e struttura della società. Similarly, in his vision of the council state Gramsci began outlining a conception of a society in which the distinctions between state/civil society and public/private interests are abolished. The manifold activities in civil society are reduced to production, which becomes regulated by a central plan. The Hegelian proviso that the voluntary institutions cannot form the basis of the state becomes the regulative principle of all of society—to acknowledge voluntary associations would be tantamount to sanctioning the existence of a private realm which would preclude any immediate identification between individual and state. Thus in August 1920 Gramsci writes that:

The factory Council is a public institution, while the party and the trade union are private associations. The worker takes part in the factory council in his capacity as a producer, that is, by virtue of the universal character of production, in the same way that the citizen takes part in the parliamentary democratic State. The worker enters the Party and the trade union on a voluntary basis, by signing a contract he can cancel at any moment: the Party and the union thus cannot, as voluntary and contractual institutions be confused with the Council.³³

Gramsci explains that the council forms the basis of an organic state which cannot be compared with a federation. Producers belong to the council state in the same compulsory manner that citizens are part of the parliamentary state, though with the important difference that in the council state there is also comprehensive and obligatory participation. This corresponds to Gramsci's notion that the state is the protagonist of all revolutions, whether bourgeois or proletarian.³⁴ The proletarian revolution is unlike all past revolutions, however, in that it involves all of society and not just political élites. Indeed, that is what distinguishes the proletarian revolution from the revolution led by the Jacobins. Thus in June 1919 Gramsci declares that:

The proletarian revolution is the maximum revolution: since it seeks to abolish all national and private property and all classes, it involves all men, not just a fraction of them. It obliges all men to move, to intervene in the struggle, and to become unequivocally partisan. The revolution fundamentally transforms society from a unicellular organism of individual citizens, to a pluricellular organism based on its existing organic nuclei. It compels all of society to identify itself with the State, and it requires that all men are spiritually and historically conscious.³⁵

Initiatives to form intermediary bodies between the individual and the state, through voluntary and contractual institutions such as the political party and trade union, are significant but limited steps toward the “maximum revolution.” Membership in these voluntary associations can be annulled as soon as the individual believes that it no longer corresponds to his individual self-interest. Thus they cannot forge the organic unity between individual and state which Gramsci and Gentile argue is indispensible to the higher form of democracy they envisage. In The Philosophy of Right (1821) Hegel also rejected voluntary associations as the basis of the state. But Hegel regarded the corporations and other intermediary bodies as indispensable stages in the movement of Geist that culminates in the state. Such associations flourished in the civil sphere of private interests which was a salient feature of modern societies. In contrast to Hegel, who argued that the close identification between individual and state characteristic of the Greek polis was no longer possible, Italian theorists such as Gramsci and Gentile who adopted a modified Hegelian framework believed that the actual workings of their own society proved that the civil sphere had to be absorbed within the state. The educative task of “making Italians” could be achieved only if the anarchic element in the civil sphere was brought under the strict control of the ethical state. If particularity was allowed to triumph over the interests of the community, no national-popular will would emerge. Partial wills based on clerical, regional or group interests would then subvert the universal elements in the state, and prevent it from playing its role as ‘the protagonist of history’.³⁶

IV) CONCLUSION

In practice neither the fascist revolution in Italy nor subsequent communist revolutions have succeeded in producing the true harmony of interests predicated by the theorists of the ethical state. Why has this been the case? An appropriate starting point might be the desire to abolish the state/civil society distinction, since this is the common element uniting ethical state theorists of both the political left and right. This conception of a more perfect form of democracy can be traced back to Marx's On the Jewish Question, where he equates the separation between state and civil society with the monopoly of political life by the state and the reign of private property and inequality in civil society. But the emergence of civil society, in addition to the pernicious forms of inequality which flourished there, has also marked the appearance of new forms of voluntary association which cannot be reduced to manifestations of capitalism. Where the abolition of the civil/state distinction has been attempted, the impetus for democratic change has come from the re-assertion of civil society against the state. This is clearly illustrated by the case of Poland, where the Solidarity movement developed as a diverse network of interests seeking autonomy from the state. At the same time, this reconstitution of civil society was not a demand for extensive privatisation or liberal individualism. In Poland the importance of individual rights against the state was articulated as a necessary precondition of collective rights, rather than as a demand for private property. Polish intellectuals, workers, clergy and other groups have aimed at providing the bases of a civil society founded on the coexistence of a multiplicity of interests and political viewpoints. The Polish opposition was thus free from Gramsci and Gentile's prejudices against voluntary institutions and associations which mediate between individual and state. The attempt to constitute a public sphere for normative political discourse outside the jurisdiction of the state thus marks the most original contribution of the Solidarity movement to political theory, and enhances our understanding of the major weaknesses in the theory of the ethical state. As the leading member of the new government, Solidarity now faces the challenge of respecting the autonomy of the plurality of interests which are currently flourishing in Polish society.³⁷

Notes

1. The references to Gramsci's factory council writings in this paper are taken from the sixth edition of the volume L'Ordine Nuovo, 1919-20, published in Turin by Einaudi in 1975. Subsequent references will be denoted by the abbreviation ON.

2. Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo: dell'antigiolittismo al fascismo. Bari: Laterza 1982, pp. 3-4. For problems concerning popular estrangement from the post-Risorgimento state, see Sidney Sonnino in his speech to the Camera dated 30/3/1881, quoted in Federico Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiano del 1870 al 1896. Volume I. Bari: Laterza, 1965, p. 589. Richard Bellamy, in Modern Italian Social Theory, defines transformismo as “transforming an erstwhile opponent into a supporter by bribery and corruption”. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, p. 5.

3. Emilio Gentile, 1982, op. cit., pp. 5-9; Emilio Gentile, La Voce e l'età giolittiana. Milan: Pan Editore, 1972, pp. 7-9; David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979, pp. 26-28. As Roberts shows, social fragmentation and distrust of the state amongst Italians were important concerns of Francesco de Sanctis, Giustino Fortunato, and Guido de Ruggiero. De Sanctis had an important influence on Gramsci during Gramsci's university studies in Turin immediately preceeding the L'Ordine Nuovo period. See Gramsci, Scritti Giovanili, 1914-1918 (hereafter SG). Turin: Einaudi, 1973, pp. 376-377.

4. SG, pp. 345-6; Paolo Spriano, Gramsci e Gobetti. Turin: Einaudi, 1977, pp. 10-12; Emilio Gentile, 1982, op. cit., p. 6; David D. Roberts, 1979, op. cit., p. 26. Roberts observes that several studies of Italian society in the post-World War II period underline the same problems faced by Gramsci and his contemporaries. See Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

5. Gramsci, Materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce. Turin: Einaudi, 1963, p. 199. Emilio Agazzi, “Filosofia della prassi e filosofia dello spirito” in La città futura, 1959, op. cit., p. 256.

6. Paul Piccone, Italian Marxism. Berkley: University of California Press, 1983, pp. 14-15; Richard Bellamy, 1987 op. cit., pp. 7-8.

7. Benedetto Croce, “Per la a rinascita dell'idealismo” (1908), in Cultura e vita morale. Bari: Laterza, 1926, pp. 35-36.

8. Benedetto Croce, “La morte del socialismo” (1911) in Cultura e vita morale, 1926, op. cit., p. 155.

9. Gramsci, Sotto la Mole, 1916-1920. Turin: Einaudi, 1975, p. 148; Benedetto Croce, “Per la rinascita dell'idealismo”, 1908, op. cit., p. 40; “La morte del socialismo”, 1911, op. cit., pp. 156-9.

10. SG, pp. 162-163; Leo Valiani, Gli sviluppi ideologici del socialismo in Italia. Rome: Editore Opere Nuove, 1956, pp. 10-20; Gaetano Arfe, Storia del socialismo italiano, 1892-1926. Turin: Einaudi, 1965, pp. 9-11.

11. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought. New York: Vintage Books, 1977, pp. 67-104; Michel Charzat, George Sorel et la Revolution au XXiéme Siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1977, pp. 50-56.

12. Eugenio Garin, Cronache di filosofia italiana, 1900-1943. Bari: Laterza, 1955, pp. 366-371.

13. Richard Bellamy, 1987, op. cit., p. 103; Marx and Engels Selected Works in One Volume (MESW). London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980, pp. 29-30; Emilio Agazzi, Il giovane Croce e il marxismo. Turin: Einaudi, 1962, pp. 235-7.

14. Giovanni Gentile, La filosofia di Marx. Florence: Sansoni, 1899, p. 44; see also I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto. Florence: Sansoni, (1916), 1924, p. 192; Sergio Romano, Giovanni Gentile: la filosofia al potere. Milan: Bompiani, 1984, pp. 53-54; Giuseppe Calandra, Gentile e il fascismo. Bari: Laterza, 1987, pp. 49-50; Richard Bellamy, 1987, op. cit., pp. 103-104.

15. Giovanni Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, 1899, op. cit., pp. 115-118.

16. Gramsci, “Il socialismo e la filosofia attuale” (1918), in La città futura. Turin: Einaudi 1982, p. 650; Augusto del Noce, “Gentile e Gramsci” in Enciclopedia 76-77: Il pensiero di Giovanni Gentile, Volume I. Florence: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1977, pp. 284-286.

17. On the problems presented by Croce's separation of theory and practice see Eugenio Garin, Intellettuali italiani del XX secolo. Rome: Riuniti Editore, 1974, pp. 53-65. For Gentile's influence on Gramsci and Gobetti during the period directly preceding the factory council movement, see Giancarlo Bergami, Il giovane Gramsci e il marxismo, 1911-1918. Milan: Feltrinelli Economica, 1977, pp. 100-116; and Bergami, “Pietro Gobetti” in Belfagor, Volume XXIX, 1974, pp. 660-663; Lelio Basso and Luigi Anderlini, La rivista di Piero Gobetti. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961, Introduction by Basso, pp. XX-XXI; Gioele Solari, Aldo Mautino nella tradizione torinese da Gobetti alla resistenza. Bari: Laterza, 1953, pp. 75-76; Giuseppe Prezzolini, La Voce, 1908-1913, Milan: Rusconi Editore, 1974, pp. 943-946; SG, p. 127.

18. SG, pp. 188-189; see also SG, pp. 173-174, 205-206, 327-328, and Silvio Suppa, Il primo Gramsci. Naples: Jovene editore, 1976, p. 67.

19. SG, p. 144 (December, 1917).

20. Aldo Lo Schiavo, La filosofia politica di Giovani Gentile. Rome: Armando Editore, 1971, pp. 61-62; Vincenzo Pirro, “Filosofia e politica in Gentile,” in the Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, Volume IV. Florence: Sansoni, 1970, pp. 477-479; Rinalto Cirell Czerna, “Riflessioni sul concetto di società, e di stato nell'ultima fase del pensiero gentiliano,” in Scritti di sociologia e politica in onore di Luigi Sturzo. Bologna: Zanichelli Editore, 1953, pp. 355-359.

21. SG, p. 106. It is interesting to note the far more favourable assessment of Jacobinism that appears in Gramsci's prison writings.

22. SG, pp. 131, 315, 339, 349-350, 355.

23. SG, pp. 160-161.

24. SG, pp. 150-155.

25. ON, p. 37; Paolo Spriano, Storia di Torino operaia e socialista da De Amicis a Gramsci. Turin: Einaudi, 1958, pp. 468-470; Aldo Garosci, Pensiero politico e storiagrafia moderna: saggi di storia contemporanea. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi Editori, 1954, pp. 200-202.

26. Palmiro Togliatti, “La battaglia delle idee: la politica d'un filosofo,” in L'Ordine Nuovo, Anno I, Number I, 1 May 1919, pp. 5-8.

27. Manilo di Lalla, Vita di Giovani Gentile. Florence: Sansoni, 1975, pp. 245-271, and Aldo lo Schiavo, 1971, op. cit., pp. 196-198.

28. See especially “L'ideale politico d'un nazionalista” in Guerra e fede. Rome: De Alberti Editore (second edition), 1927, pp. 59-60. See also Gioele Solari, 1953, op. cit., pp. 75-77.

29. Giovani Gentile, “Morale e politica” in Guerra e fede, 1927, op. cit., pp. 205-206; A. James Gregor, “Giovani Gentile, Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, and the Concept of Political Obligation,” in the Enciclopedia 76-77, 1977, op. cit., pp. 451-453.

30. Giovani Gentile, “Tra Hegel e Lenin” (1918), in Guerra e fede, 1927, op. cit., pp. 209-213.

31. Giovani Gentile, “Due democrazie,” in Dopo la vittoria. Rome: Edizioni “La voce,” 1920. pp. 111-112.

32. Richard Bellamy, “Liberalism and Historicism: History and Politics in the thought of Benedetto Croce,” Ph. D. thesis in the Department of History, University of Cambridge, 1983, pp. 288-289; Modern Italian Social Theory, 1987, op. cit., pp. 75-76; Giuseppe Agostino Roggerone, Benedetto Croce e la fondazione del concetto di libertà. Milan: Mazorati Editore, 1966, pp. 55-60; Benedetto Croce, Filosofia della pratica: economia ed etica (sixth edition). Bari: Laterza e Figli, 1950, pp. 294-296.

33. ON, p. 150.

34. ON, p. 14.

35. ON, p. 6.

36. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Knox edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, Paragraph 258, pp. 155-156; Noberto Bobbio, Studi hegeliani: diritto, società civile, stato. Turin: Einaudi, 1981,p pp. 148-157; ON, p. 4.

37. Z.A. Pelcycynski, “Solidarity and the Rebirth of Civil Society in Poland, 1976-1981” in John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives. London: Verso, 1988, pp. 375-377; Andrew Arato, “Civil Society against the State: Poland 1980-81 in Telos, Number 47 Spring 1981, p. 23, and “Empire vs. Civil Society: Poland 1981-1982” in Telos, Winter 1981-1982, pp. 23-24; David Mason, “Solidarity as a New Social Movement,” Political Science Quarterly, Volume 104, Number1, Spring 1989, pp. 48-58; Jean L. Cohen, Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982, pp. 20-24, 76-77, 226.