Refiguring the Subaltern

Author(s): Peter D. Thomas

Source: Political Theory , December 2018, Vol. 46, No. 6 (December 2018), pp. 861-884
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26617620

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762720
research-article2018
PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718762720Political TheoryThomas

Article
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(6) 861­–884
Refiguring the Subaltern © The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718762720
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Peter D. Thomas1

Abstract
The subaltern has frequently been understood as a figure of exclusion ever
since it was first highlighted by the early Subaltern Studies collective’s creative
reading of Antonio Gramsci’s carceral writings. In this article, I argue that
a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the notion
of subaltern classes throughout Gramsci’s full Prison Notebooks reveals
new resources for “refiguring” the subaltern. I propose three alternative
figures to comprehend specific dimensions of Gramsci’s theorizations: the
“irrepressible subaltern,” the “hegemonic subaltern,” and the “citizen-
subaltern.” Far from being exhausted by the eclipse of the conditions it was
initially called upon to theorize in Subaltern Studies, such a refigured notion
of the subaltern has the potential to cast light both on the contradictory
development of political modernity and on contemporary political processes.

Keywords
subalternity, hegemony, Gramsci, civil society, political modernity

The subaltern is usually understood today as a figure of exclusion, represent-

ing the specular opposite of the citizen. If the citizen is defined by participa-
tion in a political community, the subaltern represents a lack of access to
institutions of rights and obligations. While citizens are subject to the hege-
monic logic of modern sovereignty, the subaltern lies before or beyond it, in
some indeterminate zone of affect and habit. Citizenship guarantees inclusion

1Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, United
Kingdom

Corresponding Author:
Peter D. Thomas, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London,
Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom.
Email: PeterD.Thomas@Brunel.ac.uk

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862 Political Theory 46(6)

within structures of representation, in both political and aesthetic senses, at

the limits of which subalternity begins.1 The subaltern can thus be understood
as a variant of those figures of marginality and exclusion that have marked
the borders of modern political thought, from Hobbes’s multitude, Hegel’s
Pöbel and Marx’s Proletariat, to contemporary formulations such as
Rancière’s “part that has no part” or Agamben’s homo sacer. In this sense, the
supposedly unrepresentable subaltern is ultimately represented as the literal
incarnation of the principle of exclusion as the foundation of political moder-
nity, and perhaps even of the political as such.
This understanding of the subaltern emerged from the complicated history
of development and translation of subaltern studies. Under the leadership of
Ranajit Guha, the early Subaltern Studies collective forcefully directed atten-
tion to the novelty of the figure of the subaltern in the Prison Notebooks,
which had previously been neglected in discussions of Gramsci’s thought
outside Italy.2 In particular, the collective’s suggestive if occasional refer-
ences to the partial English translation of Gramsci’s carceral writings empha-
sized the utility of this figure for the analysis of colonial and postcolonial
history in South Asia.3 For Guha, writing in the first volume of Subaltern
Studies, subalternity referred to “the general attribute of subordination in
South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age,
gender and office or in any other way.”4 Conceived as synonymous with “the
people,” the subalterns constituted “an autonomous domain,” signifying “the
demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those
whom we have described as the ‘elite.’”5
While Guha’s approach strongly influenced the early Subaltern Studies
collective’s project, particularly in terms of an effective equation of the sub-
altern with the peasantry, it was arguably Gayatri Spivak’s famous interven-
tion “Can the Subaltern Speak?” that instead became the most decisive
perspective for the figure’s subsequent globalization. Revising a text origi-
nally drafted before her encounter with the Subaltern Studies project, Spivak
argued that the subaltern was not only deprived of the capacity to speak by
the dominant order, but that the subaltern was defined by its exclusion from
representation as such, in both political and aesthetic senses.6 As an unrepre-
sentable remainder or “limit” of forms of cultural, social, and political domi-
nation, “removed from all lines of social mobility,”7 the subaltern thus
appeared to be a category suited to analyze and to problematize the experi-
ences of marginalized, oppressed individuals and groups, particularly in
colonial and postcolonial contexts.
This approach not only gave rise to what has since become effectively an
entire genre of critical writing exploring various dimensions of the subal-
tern’s “incapacity.” It also strongly influenced the translation of subaltern
studies from South Asian historiography into the literary, sociological,

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Thomas 863

anthropological, and theoretical accents that have marked its elaboration in

Latin America, Central and East Asia, the Middle East, the USA, and Ireland.8
Despite its international success, however, key theorists in the development
of the original Subaltern Studies project have questioned the continuing rel-
evance of the figure of the subaltern, or have even suggested its historical
exhaustion (particularly in its “classical” formulation as insurgent peasant).
Spivak, for instance, argues that developments under neoliberalism since the
1990s have involved a transition to a “new” figure of the subaltern, no longer
defined by its removal from social mobility but by the invasive workings of
globalization at social, political and biopolitical levels.9 Chakrabarty, on the
other hand, suggests that the contradictory development of Indian democracy
has fundamentally transformed the conditions originally theorized by Guha,
while Chatterjee proposes that the subalterns excluded by the colonial and
postcolonial order have been superseded by “populations” “governed” in
“political society.”10 In a related but distinct way, Pandey argues that the
“peasant paradigm” of subaltern studies should be recast in term of the
“deliberately paradoxical” figure of the “subaltern citizen,” in order to com-
prehend the traces of subalternity that subsist even within the ongoing expan-
sion of institutions of modern citizenship.11
The development of Subaltern Studies was determined from the outset by
reference to a partial translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. The research
agendas, projects, and critiques produced by the globalization of the figure of
the subaltern now effectively constitute their own distinct research paradigm,
separate from—and increasingly citing less frequently—the formulations by
Gramsci that had initially inspired them. In this article, I aim to suggest that
a return to the integral edition of the full Prison Notebooks provides us with
a very different perspective on the figure of the subaltern.12 In particular, I
will argue that a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the
notion of subaltern classes or social groups throughout the Prison Notebooks
reveals new resources for considering this figure’s both historical and con-
temporary relevance.
The subaltern for Gramsci is not defined by an experience of exclusion.
On the contrary, subaltern social groups are represented in the Prison
Notebooks as integrally and actively “included” or integrated into the hege-
monic relations of what Gramsci characterizes as the bourgeois “integral
state.” This integration, however, should not be thought in terms of an incor-
poration within the modern state-form of elements previously located “out-
side” it. Rather, inclusion here should be understood in terms of something
closer to an active sense of its etymological origins, that is, as an “enclosing.”
It is the enclosure of subaltern classes and social groups within the relations
of the integral state that constitutes them as distinctively modern subaltern
social groups. They are conceived not as sociological entities defined by a

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864 Political Theory 46(6)

prior history, but as constituted solely within and by the novel relationality of
subalternity that characterizes political modernity. Rather than their exclu-
sion or inclusion, therefore, it is more analytically useful to speak of the “con-
stitution” of subaltern social groups. Subalternity in this sense is a function of
the process of material constitution of the modern state itself. Far from being
unrepresentable, subaltern social groups in the Prison Notebooks are depicted
as the product of elaborate representative and self-representative strategies;
instead of being unable to speak, Gramsci’s historical and cultural analyses
emphasize the extent to which the subaltern continually makes its voice heard
and its presence felt in contradictory and complex cultural, social and politi-
cal forms. No exceptional or marginal case, subalternity for Gramsci is all too
quotidian and central; it describes the basic structuring conditions of political
modernity in all of its contradictory forms. This understanding of the subal-
tern does not oppose it to the figure of the citizen. Rather, it conceives the
subaltern as a figure in which the contradictions of modern citizenship are
intensely realized.
The article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I track the
emergence of Gramsci’s distinctive notion of subalternity in the early phases
of the Prison Notebooks. I emphasize the extent to which it was originally
formulated not in order to theorize contexts of failed or compromised state
formation, but, on the contrary, in order to characterize a political relation that
Gramsci regarded as synonymous with the formation of the modern state,
including but not limited to western Europe. In the second section, I then con-
sider the reasons for this novel development in Gramsci’s vocabulary. I argue
that Gramsci’s reflections on subaltern classes or social groups were devel-
oped in close relation to, and in the same period as, his theory of the modern
state as an “integral state.” Within this perspective, the analysis of social and
political relations of subalternity constitute the defining coordinates of
Gramsci’s distinctive inheritance of Hegel’s notion of “civil society.” In the
third section, I argue that this reading allows us to “refigure” the subaltern.
Rather than a figure of exclusion or marginality, I propose three alternative
figures to comprehend specific dimensions of Gramsci’s theorizations: the
“irrepressible subaltern,” the “hegemonic subaltern,” and the “citizen-subal-
tern.” In conclusion, I suggest that far from being exhausted, a refigured
notion of the subaltern has the potential to cast light both on the contradictory
development of political modernity and on contemporary political processes.

Subalternity in the Prison Notebooks

Explicit terms from the semantic field of subalternity can be found in
Gramsci’s pre-prison writings, though their occurrence is relatively rare. In

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Thomas 865

those cases, we mostly encounter a generic usage of the term, derived from
the metaphoric deployment of an originally administrative and military
vocabulary that became current in journalistic writing in Italy during the First
World War and its aftermath.13 Such a generic usage is maintained also in
some passages in the Prison Notebooks, particularly in the initial phases of
their development in 1929 and early 1930.14 “Subaltern classes” or “subaltern
social groups” is not a topic in Gramsci’s initial work plan at the beginning of
his first Notebook or in letters from this period.15 Those plans do, however,
include themes that seem to represent a continuation and deepening of
Gramsci’s theoretical research project immediately prior to imprisonment in
1926, embodied in the unfinished text Some Aspects of the Southern Question
[Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale]. This text does indeed include sig-
nificant themes, such as disaggregation, amorphousness, and a lack of con-
scious self-direction, that Gramsci much later groups together and
systematically develops under the rubric of “subaltern social classes” and
related terms; but both the term and concept of “subaltern social classes” do
not appear in Some Aspects of the Southern Question.16 As Buttigieg has
argued, that fact that “history of subaltern social groups” later constitutes the
subtitle of one of Gramsci’s so-called “special notebooks” (Notebook 25,
from 1934-5) suggests that Gramsci himself only slowly became aware of the
importance of this topic for his overall project.17 If the concept of subalternity
is already at work in texts from Gramsci’s pre-carceral or even early carceral
periods, it does so in a hidden way—“hidden” not only from fascist censors,
but also from Gramsci himself.
It is therefore all the more remarkable both how rapidly the theme of sub-
alternity emerges in Gramsci’s thought, in the space of a few months in the
summer of 1930, and the extent to which these first appearances outline a
perspective that remains consistent throughout the Prison Notebooks. The
term first appears in the title of a brief note written in early June 1930,
“History of the dominant class and history of the subaltern classes” [Storia
della classe dominante e storia delle classi subalterne].18 Gramsci here out-
lines some of the fundamental perspectives that remain determining for all
his research on subalternity. He argues that

the history of the subaltern classes is necessarily disaggregated and episodic:

there is in the activity of these classes a tendency to unification, even if on
provisional levels; but it is the less apparent part that only appears when victory
is achieved. The subaltern classes suffer the initiative of the dominant class,
even when they rebel; they are in a state of alarmed defense. Every trace of
autonomous initiative is thus of inestimable value. At any rate, the monograph
is the most adequate form for this history, which requires a great accumulation
of partial materials.19

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866 Political Theory 46(6)

It is not clear precisely why Gramsci adopted this novel vocabulary at this
moment. He may have been stimulated by the work of the ancient historian,
erstwhile socialist and meridionalista Ettore Ciccotti, which is discussed
extensively in the immediately following notes, though Ciccotti does not
himself use the term.20 In one of these notes, while discussing the limits of
Ciccotti’s method of historical “analogy,” Gramsci formulates a distinction
between “old” and “new” subalterns, or between “pre-modern” and “mod-
ern” subaltern social classes.21 In the ancient and medieval worlds, the
“subaltern classes had a separate life, their own institutions,” and the state
was effectively a “‘federation’ of classes”; but “the modern state,” Gramsci
argues

abolishes many autonomies of the subaltern classes—it abolishes the state as a

federation of classes—but certain forms of the internal life of the subaltern
classes are reborn as parties, trade unions, cultural associations. The modern
dictatorship abolishes these forms of class autonomy as well, and it tries hard
to incorporate them into the activity of the state: in other words, the centralization
of the whole life of the nation in the hands of the dominant class becomes
frenetic and all-consuming.22

Gramsci’s references make clear that he is not thinking in the first instance
of failed or deformed state formation, or limiting this perspective to his
immediate circumstances, as inmate of a Fascist prison cell (“the modern
dictatorship”). Instead, he argues that this reconfiguration of the life of the
subaltern classes constitutes a general process in political modernity, the
dynamic of which he dates back to at least the French Revolution. Rather
than a supposed transformation of “subjects” into “citizens,” or the affirma-
tion of principles of popular sovereignty or autonomy, Gramsci instead
focuses upon the “enclosure” of the life of the subaltern classes in a process
of simultaneous mobilization and domestication. Political modernity is in
this view distinguished by the contradictory forms in which “private” ener-
gies released on the terrain of consolidating capitalist market relations are
immediately overcoded by the extension of “public”‘ administrative power.23
This new form of subalternity, he argues, is qualitatively distinguished from
the status of oppressed, marginalized, or excluded social groups in previous
social formations.
“History of the subaltern classes,” a note from August 1930, is undoubt-
edly Gramsci’s most significant analysis of the variegated and gradated
nature of subalternity.24 He begins by restating his observations regarding the
disaggregation of subaltern classes, but now formulates this condition in rela-
tion to the notion of “civil society.”

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Thomas 867

The historical unification of the ruling classes is in the state and their history is
essentially the history of states and of groups of states. This unity has to be
concrete, and thus the result of relations between the state and civil society. For
the subaltern classes unification does not occur: their history is intertwined
with that of “civil society,” it is a disaggregated fraction of it.

He then proceeds to provide an outline of themes for further study, which has
been understood as both a methodology for research into the history of sub-
altern social groups, and also as the fundamental elements of a political strat-
egy for the emergence from subalternity.25

It is therefore necessary to study: 1) the objective formation of the subaltern

classes through the developments and changes that took place in the economic
sphere, the extent of their diffusion and their descent from other classes that
preceded them; 2) their passive or active adherence to the dominant political
formations; that is, their efforts to influence the programs of these formations
with demands of their own; 3) the birth of new parties of the ruling class to
maintain control of the subaltern classes; 4) the formations of the subaltern
classes themselves, formations of a limited and partial character; 5) the political
formations that assert the autonomy of the subaltern classes, but within the old
framework; 6) the political formations that assert complete autonomy, etc. The
list of these phases can be further specified with internal phases or with
combinations of different phases.26

This note further emphasizes that subalternity should not be regarded as exte-
rior to hegemony, or as its polar opposite. Pointing to the example of the
bourgeoisie’s development from an originally subaltern position by means of
a complicated politics of alliances with other popular and non-aristocratic
classes, Gramsci argues that hegemonic relations also occur within and
between subaltern classes, as increasingly expansive forms of political auton-
omy from the existing social order are unevenly asserted by different subal-
tern groups. It is precisely because hegemony is already at work within
subalternity itself, as a condition and consequence of the subaltern classes’
disaggregation, that a potential transition from the subaltern to the hegemonic
is conceivable.
Having attained to this definition of subaltern classes in the Summer of
1930, Gramsci goes on to discuss themes related to subalternity extensively
in his subsequent notebooks, in more than thirty notes written between the
Summers of 1930 and 1933 (when a serious crisis of Gramsci’s health leads
to a significant decline in his productivity, only partially resumed in 1934).
On the one hand, “history of subaltern classes” becomes a rubric under which
he gathers a wide variety of bibliographical references related primarily to

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868 Political Theory 46(6)

the history of the socialist movement.27 On the other hand, and more signifi-
cantly, Gramsci continues to develop the theme of a dialectic between subal-
tern and hegemonic—or, synonymously, leading [dirigente]—elements of
social classes. Thus, in February–March 1932, he argues that

when the subaltern becomes leading and responsible . . . the mechanistic

conception will sooner or later represent an imminent danger. . . . Why? because
. . . the “subaltern” who . . . yesterday was not responsible because he was
“resisting” an extraneous will . . . is now responsible, no longer a “resister” but
an active agent. But was he ever mere “resistance,” mere “thing,” mere
“nonresponsibility”? Certainly not. That is why the inept futility of mechanical
determinism . . . must be exposed at all times, without waiting for the subaltern
to become leading and responsible.28

This emphasis upon the hegemonic constitution of subalternity is continued in

Notebook 25, entitled “On the Margins of History,” followed by the paren-
thetical subtitle “(History of Subaltern Social Groups).” Composed in late
1934, Notebook 25 is one of the so-called special “Notebooks of Formia,” in
which Gramsci, by now in a condition of rapidly deteriorating health, attempts
to reorganize his previous notes into thematic groupings.29 The notion of sub-
alternity as a form of enclosure of subaltern classes within the political rela-
tions of the modern state has by now become so central to Gramsci’s
perspective that it even overdetermines the revision of notes not originally
formulated in these terms. Thus, Notebook 25 begins with the transcription
and significant revision of a note from early 1930 (i.e., just prior to the emer-
gence of subalternity in Gramsci’s vocabulary) on the curious case of the liter-
ally unarmed prophet Davide Lazzaretti, the leader of “tendentially republican”
movement in Tuscany in post-Risorgimento Italy that was “bizarrely mixed”
with religious and prophetic elements.30 Gramsci is particularly concerned to
emphasize the “modernity” of Lazzaretti’s religious republicanism, drawing
attention to the emergence of this only seemingly “spontaneous” movement in
a period when the Catholic Church’s abstention from official politics in the
post-Risorgimento state, alongside popular delusions in a newly installed gov-
ernment of the left, had released subaltern energies from containment within
established political structures.31 Similarly, in another C text from this period,
the abolition of the “many autonomies of the subaltern classes” of which
Gramsci spoke in 1930 is reformulated and specified in terms of their “subor-
dination to the active hegemony of the leading and dominant group.”32
Subaltern social classes are thus represented not as excluded from the modern
state, nor as merely oppressed or subjugated by it. Rather, they are fundamen-
tally transformed and reconstituted by its expansive logic, mobilized to

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Thomas 869

participate in the projects of the dominant group in contradictory and fre-

quently passive forms.
From the margins of Gramsci’s research plans at the beginning of his
imprisonment, the theme of subalternity thus steadily became one of the most
consistent lines of research both during and beyond the most productive
phase of his carceral writings. What were the reasons for this novel concep-
tual development?

Subalterns in the “Integral State”

My thesis is that the significance of this developing research theme can only
be integrally understood by attending to the context in which it emerges and
is developed, or in other words, its temporal relation to other themes in the
Prison Notebooks project. For Gramsci’s research on subaltern social groups
is initiated in the same period (mid-1930) in which he begins to develop his
central concepts of the “integral state” and “passive revolution.” The three
concepts function as dialectical counterpoints to each other, each comple-
menting and extending the lines of research pursued under the headings of
the others. On the one hand, subalternity is one of the themes by means of
which Gramsci clarifies for himself the political significance of the concepts
of the integral state and passive revolution; that is, subalternity is conceived
as the concrete political relation that is produced by the historical emergence
of the bourgeois integral state. On the other hand, the concept of the modern
state as an “integral” state, particularly when complemented by Gramsci’s
parallel development of the notion of passive revolution as a “logic” of the
integral state’s development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, is one of the ways in which he clarifies the structuring dynamics of
subalternity.33
Against what were effectively the neo-Kantian revisions of Marx’s state
theory by dominant currents in both the Second and Third Internationals, the
Prison Notebooks undertake a critical return to the Hegelian theory of the
state. Like Hegel (and in opposition to the various caricatures of the state
theory of the Philosophy of Right, within and outside the Marxist tradition),
Gramsci insists upon the mutually constitutive relations between “civil soci-
ety” and what he characterizes as “political society” or “state.”34 “The gen-
eral notion of the state,” he argues in mid-1931,

includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society
(in the sense that one might say that the State = political society + civil society,
in other words hegemony armored with coercion).35

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870 Political Theory 46(6)

Civil society and political society here are not conceived as separate geo-
graphical or institutional terrains, or as “autonomous domains” (in Guha’s
sense), but as forms of imbricated socio-political relationality.36 They are
relations of integration that are articulated in varying degrees of extension
and intensity in different contexts, from the organizing and directive instances
summarized in the notion of political society, to the associative, externally
directed practices and only seemingly “non-political” dimensions of social
life comprehended in the notion of civil society. Rather than coming before,
after or alongside the state, civil society is understood by Gramsci as
“enclosed” within it, or more precisely, as a constitutive element of it. Civil
society, that is, is not opposed to the state, in an external relationship that
would make possible the “assimilation” of the former by the latter (or civil
society’s “non-assimilation,” in the case of the “colonial state”).37 It is instead
conceived as a politically overdetermined system for the regulation of needs,
associations and conflicts, or, in Hegelian terms, as an “external state”
[äußeren Staat], the state as the Understanding conceives it [Not- und
Verstandesstaat].38 Civil society is thus not characterized by “consent” and
opposed to the “coercion” of the state, or conceived as a terrain of equality
and formalized rights and responsibilities. More expansively, it includes all
those practices in which the state’s rationality is realized and affirmed, fre-
quently unknowingly and often in associative or communal forms that may
appear to be autonomous from or even opposed to it. In Hegelian terms, “the
entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling
class” manages to secure its dominance includes for Gramsci not merely the
Polizei and the corporations, but also the revolts of the Pöbel and their paci-
fication.39 The type of hegemony characteristic of the passive revolutionary
phase of the integral state’s development is conceived as a synthesis of these
associative and organizing instances, of civil and political society. Each
instance is essential to the relationship, but it is a synthesis that occurs on the
terms of and is directed by only one of those relations, namely, that of the
existing political society.
As Francioni has noted, the central note in the development of this novel
conception, constituting nothing short of a sea-change that redefines
Gramsci’s entire carceral project, dates from October 1930—precisely the
period in which Gramsci is elaborating his reflections on subalternity.40 This
note represents a point of no return: the notion of a dialectical “identity-dis-
tinction between civil society and political society” enables Gramsci to theo-
rize political modernity beyond the exclusionary figures that have dominated
modern political thought since at least Hobbes.41 The decisive feature of this
development for comprehending the specificity of modern subaltern classes
is that they remain entrapped within the relationality proper to civil society

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Thomas 871

conceived in this sense. Their history, as Gramsci argues in 1930, “is inter-
twined with that of ‘civil society,’ it is a disaggregated fraction of it.”42 They
are unable, qua subaltern social groups, to assume the self-directive and
directing capacities embodied in the form of political society. In late 1934,
Gramsci adds in the revised C text that “the subaltern classes, by definition,
are not unified and cannot unify themselves until they become the ‘state.’”43
Civil society, far from being a terrain of freedom before or beyond the state,
is thus depicted as a mode of relationality characteristic of the disaggregated
subalterns; it is a form of the “performance” of subalternity, to use a concept
promoted by Judith Butler.44 The subaltern social groups are continually frac-
tured by the interventions of the political society that constitutes them as the
subaltern “raw material” for its directive operations. Rather than outside of or
opposed to the hegemonic, the subaltern in this sense is integrally and imma-
nently related to it, as simultaneously the presupposition and the product of
its operations. In short, far from repressing and excluding subalterns, political
modernity, according to Gramsci, introduces a new form of relationality that
mobilizes them as integral elements in an expansive system of social and
political power.

Refigurations of the Subaltern

The study of the emergence of the semantic field of subalternity in the Prison
Notebooks suggests that Gramsci’s concepts may have a continuing relevance
beyond the exhaustion of the paradigms associated with “classical” subaltern
studies and its international diffusion. In particular, it suggests that the subal-
tern might be “refigured” in order to represent not a residue of the past or an
exhausted perspective, but a mode of comprehending contemporary and
ongoing political processes. I propose here three such refigurations, each
comprehending specific dimensions of Gramsci’s theorizations: the “irre-
pressible subaltern,” the “hegemonic subaltern,” and the “citizen-subaltern.”

The Irrepressible Subaltern

The conception of subalternity in the Prison Notebooks is radically different
from the widely diffused notion that the subaltern is a figure of undifferenti-
ated destitution, consigned to a zone beyond expressive capacity or purposive
political agency. Spivak’s influential text “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
undoubtedly laid the foundations for this approach. Originally written as
reflection on debates regarding the status of intellectuals’ politics, without
reference to the subaltern in either Subaltern Studies or Gramsci, the later
prominent insertion of this figure in the essay’s title has led to its themes

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872 Political Theory 46(6)

assuming almost paradigmatic status in wider discussion of subalternity.

Spivak’s subsequent interventions have reinforced this general tendency of
defining the subaltern primarily in terms of incapacity. In some of her more
provocative formulations, for instance, the subaltern becomes an almost mys-
tical concept, in a Wittgensteinian sense: the subaltern not only cannot speak,
but is also that figure of whom one should not speak, lest one falls into the
trap of speaking for the subaltern and thus dominating it. In Spivak’s words,
“If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern
any more.”45 Here the subaltern is represented, paradoxically, as that which is
not representable in any given order; the entrance into (self-) representation
is immediately the exit from subalternity.
For Gramsci, on the other hand, subaltern social groups are continually
expressive, albeit in ways which are not easily comprehended within the
existing political or intellectual orders—or even by themselves in the initial
phases of their rebellions. Gramsci’s example of Lazzaretti’s prophetic-
republican movement, for instance, is composed of layer upon layer of sub-
altern expressions and representative containments. On the one hand, this
note is framed by considerations of the way in which Italian social commen-
tators and theorists, including Bulferetti, Verga, Lombroso and Barzellotti,
had represented this and other similar movements in post-Risorgimento Italy
in terms of a “pathological biography,” giving “restrictive, individual, folk-
loric explanations” of movements that called for broader contextual and
political analysis.46 On the other hand, Gramsci argues that representative
dynamics are discernible within Lazzaretti’s movement itself. One of the rea-
sons for Lazzaretti’s popular appeal, he argues, was that Lazzaretti reformu-
lated peasant discontent with previous manifestations of republicanism in
Tuscany, particularly in 1848, in a prophetic direction. Gramsci understands
this not as a negation of subalternity, but as a form of attempted self-represen-
tation in which the movement’s subaltern status was performed, even and
especially in the attempt to overcome it.
The parenthetical subtitle of Notebook 25 is perhaps the most telling indi-
cation of the extent to which a dialectic between expression and representa-
tion is inscribed within Gramsci’s conception of subalternity. Subaltern
classes or social groups are “on the margins of history,” that is, “history”
conceived in the sense of historiography, as a text written almost invariably
by the victors.47 This does not mean, however, that they are “without” or
“outside” history, in the sense of the real historical events that the dominant
forms of historiography seek to narrativize and by so doing to domesticate.
Subalterns are fully present actors on the stage of history, though reduced to
minor and fleeting roles in the official script. Extra- or para-discursive forms
of subaltern expression jostle alongside inchoate and often discordant

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Thomas 873

attempts to develop forms of self-representation.48 It is the role of what

Gramsci calls the “integral historian” to recover and valorize the full range of
these forms of expression within and beyond the dominant narratives.49
Furthermore, rather than an amorphous mass of the indifferently oppressed,
Gramsci’s conception emphasizes the varying degrees of subalternity within
the subaltern social groups. There are many subalterns within the subaltern
relationality of civil society, structured by their relation to the organizing
instances or relations of political society. As Green and Crehan have noted,
Gramsci’s conception of subalternity is not limited to class understood in an
economistic sense, but includes a wider range of relations, including gender,
ethnicity, and regionality.50 Just as significantly, the fact that they are actively
and differentially incorporated in historically specific systems of hegemonic
power, in forms of passive citizenship just as much as by practices of pacifi-
cation, also means that there are different potential stages in the emergence
from subalternity. There is no Rubicon lying between subalternity and hege-
mony, just as civil society and political society are not conceived as spatially
distinct zones. Rather, there are degrees of subalternity, and degrees of emer-
gence from it, ranging from inchoate rebellion, co-optation, partial or merely
asserted autonomy, to complete autonomy. Were there no degrees of subalter-
nity, were civil society a terrain of total domination instead of a continually
renewed hegemonic relation of subordination, hegemony, as the emergence
of capacities for self-direction and leadership of previously subaltern social
groups, would not be a realistic political strategy.

The Hegemonic Subaltern

The emphasis in the early volumes of Subaltern Studies upon the “autono-
mous domain” of the subalterns or the people has frequently been interpreted
to imply an externality of the subaltern to the hegemonic. Guha’s analysis of
the condition of “dominance without hegemony” in South Asia, for instance,
depicted a socio-political formation composed of “subjects,” “vast areas in
the life and consciousness” of whom “were never integrated into [the Indian
bourgeoisie’s] hegemony.” In other words, it was not a society populated by
the “citizens” that Guha held to be the “normal” inhabitants of political
modernity and its hegemonic constitution in Western Europe.51 Chatterjee
has extended this perspective to argue that the failure of the Indian bourgeoi-
sie to stabilize a “normal” hegemonic order had left the majority of the popu-
lation in a perennial hegemonic “outside,” first in the form of the subalternity
of the insurgent peasant in colonial times, and more recently in the form of
the populations subjected to a logic of governmentality in the “political soci-
ety” of the post-colonial state (defined by Chatterjee in an antinomic rather

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874 Political Theory 46(6)

than dialectical relation to civil society, which he conceives as the terrain of

“rights-bearing citizens”).52 Later inheritors of this approach have empha-
sized in more strongly normative terms the opposition of the subaltern and
the hegemonic. In a formulation representative of an important tendency in
Latin American subaltern studies, for example, Alberto Moreiras argues that
the subaltern should be understood as a “perspective from the constitutive
outside of hegemony,” or as “the remainder of the hegemonic relation.”53
In the Prison Notebooks, however, the subaltern is not opposed to the
hegemonic, but constitutes its necessary complement. The type of subalter-
nity that interests Gramsci is already “enclosed” or constituted within the
hegemonic relations of the passive revolutionary processes condensed in the
bourgeois integral state. These subaltern classes or social groups do not sim-
ply exist as such, in a supposedly “natural” or “pre-political” (as opposed to
“historical” or “political”) dimension before or beyond the state, as Guha
rightly insisted. Precisely insofar as they are both fully “modern” and fully
“political,” however, subaltern classes or social groups, whether in the met-
ropolitan “centers” or their colonial “peripheries,” participate in hegemonic
relations in varying forms. Subalternity, that is, constitutes a general dynamic
in political modernity, even and especially within the different conditions
and contexts of its development.54 The preponderance of coercion over per-
suasion does not indicate the absence or diminution of hegemonic relations,
or what Guha characterized as the “dominance without hegemony” of the
“nonhegemonic” South Asian “colonial state.”55 Rather, it points to the dif-
ferential articulation of those hegemonic relations, to the shifting balance
between mobilization and domestication, between private and public initia-
tives of state power, in different concrete contexts. The notion of passive
revolution, in its complex development and implications, registers precisely
this potential for such a form of “hegemony without hegemony,” whether
produced by a crisis of the “normal” exercise of hegemony on the “classic
terrain” of the parliamentary regime in western Europe,56 or the supposed
“failures” of revolutionary or national liberation movements to establish it
elsewhere. The type of modern subalternity on which Gramsci’s analyses
focus is both an index and expression of the efficacy of such passive revolu-
tionary processes.
This understanding of the hegemonic constitution of subalternity also has
implications for understanding the hegemonic constitution of the ruling
classes. Just as the subalterns are not merely the excluded, so too are the rul-
ing classes not simply oppressors or dominators. In late 1934, in Notebook
25, Gramsci transcribes the note from August 1930 in which he had first
linked the fate of subaltern classes to civil society. He introduces some sig-
nificant specifications in his revisions that emphasize that the formation of

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Thomas 875

the ruling classes is also determined by the hegemonic relations within the
integral state. He argues that

the historical unity of the ruling classes occurs in the state and their story is
essentially the history of states and of groups of states. But we shouldn’t think
that such unity is purely juridical and political, even if this form of unity has its
importance, and not merely a formal importance: the fundamental historical
unity, in its concrete nature, is the result of the organic relations between state
or political society and “civil society.”57

Insofar as the historical unity of the ruling classes results from the organic
relations between political society and civil society, such unity presupposes
just as much as it imposes the production of subalternity. Ruling classes in
political modernity need to produce—and to reproduce continually—subal-
tern social groups in order to become and to maintain themselves as ruling
classes. Whether in the extreme forms of fascist dictatorship or colonial
administration, or in the seemingly more benign forms of liberal representa-
tive regimes with their systems of political elites and passive citizenries, the
need for the continual production and reproduction of subaltern social groups
constitutes a fragile and tenuous basis of enduring political power. It remains
always dependent upon the ongoing subjugation of its interpellated antago-
nist, or upon the hegemonic relations of force that constitute it in both a mate-
rial and formal sense. It is precisely here, in the midst of a hegemonic
relationship, constitutively open to contestation, that the potential political
power of the subaltern lies.

The Citizen-Subaltern
One of the fundamental perspectives of early subaltern studies was a distinc-
tion between “subjecthood” and “citizenship.” While the latter was conceived
as hegemonically constituted in the imperial centers, the former was the con-
dition of the subalterns in their colonial peripheries. Such an exclusion from
full participation in the normal or even normative institutions of political
modernity that has been held to continue, in the case of the Indian Republic,
long into the postcolonial period.58 In one of the most innovative attempts to
update or “to sublate” the legacy of Subaltern Studies after the exhaustion of
its classical “peasant paradigm,” Pandey has urged the adoption of the “delib-
erately paradoxical . . . category of the subaltern citizen.”59 These “subaltern
citizens” are those “for whom the promise of freedom, of equal opportunity
and an equal share in the fruits of modernity, has long been constantly
renewed, and constantly deferred,”60 those “who have been granted the status

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876 Political Theory 46(6)

of citizen (rights-holders, inhabitants, subjects of the state) without becoming

quite ‘mainstream.’”61 In a dual move, the “traditional” subaltern is thus
reconceived, on the one hand, as a “potential citizen,”62 a potential now still
only partially fulfilled for some social groups; and on the other, subalternity
comes to be seen as an enduring “trace” or latent threat of exclusion, even and
perhaps especially within the achievement of citizenship. Subalternization,
conceived in terms of “minoritarization,”63 continues to represent a primary
experience of exclusion, oppression, and marginalization. It both precedes
(historically and logically) the affirmation of citizenship, and continuously
threatens to re-emerge within it, frustrating the full realization of citizen-
ship’s promises.
In the Prison Notebooks, however, the type of modern subalternity gener-
ated within the hegemonic dynamics between civil society and political soci-
ety in the integral state does not precede citizenship or subsist within it as
trace or threat. Citizenship is conceived not as a supplement or corrective to
the subaltern’s “otherness” but as one of the forms of the political expression
of subalternity. In other words, citizenship and subalternity in the Prison
Notebooks are in a relationship of simultaneous co-constitution. The two con-
cepts can be regarded as different vocabularies for describing (and in so
doing validating or challenging) the same historical process: on the one hand,
the narrative of political modernity as the consolidation of juridical forms
guaranteeing individual rights and responsibilities within a homogenous
political community; on the other hand, the history of the constitution of
hegemonic relations of subordination between classes and groups, with dom-
inance by one group in political society depriving other groups of the capac-
ity for self-direction and autonomous political initiative in civil society.
Conceived as two sides of the same coin, the two vocabularies can thus be
seen as developing in parallel, reinforcing or subverting each other. Rather
than the “citizen subaltern” or the “subaltern citizen,” in which one of the
terms qualifies the other, I argue that this relation is more adequately charac-
terized by the figure of the coterminous “citizen-subaltern,” or “citizen sive
subaltern.” Gramsci’s theory of subalternity can therefore be regarded as an
attempt to theorize the constitutive relationship between freedom and un-
freedom in political modernity that Balibar has more recently proposed to
comprehend with the figure of the “citizen subject.”64
Thus, just as subaltern classes or social groups are never completely
deprived of expressive or representative capacities, and just as subalternity is
not exterior to hegemony but a product of it, so is subalternity not a relation
of exclusion from citizenship, but rather, one of the forms of its realization.
This does not mean, however, that the relationship between subalternity and
citizenship should be thought in the specular terms of an inclusion of what

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Thomas 877

was originally excluded, or even as the type of “inclusive exclusion” theo-

rized by Agamben under the heading of the “relation of exception.” For
Agamben, “the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of
what is simultaneously pushed outside,” and the “relation of exception” is the
“extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its
exclusion.”65 For Gramsci, on the contrary, it is not such an exclusion
(whether conceived in the benign forms of marginalization or minoritoriza-
tion, or the extreme forms of expulsion) that encloses the subalterns within
the integral state. Rather, it is their active mobilization within hegemonic
relations in civil society, especially in the dynamic of passive revolutionary
processes, from “transformist” integration of them into other social groups’
political organizations, to the constitution of their own economic corporative
associations and even partially autonomous political organizations. This
enclosure is constitutive and productive of subaltern classes and social
groups. “The end” of subalternity is conceived not in terms of an exit from
this condition but as the internal transformation of the hegemonic relations
that structure it.

Conclusion
One of the strongest claims of the early Subaltern Studies project was the
insistence that subaltern classes and social groups should be understood not
as a residue of the past, but as fully modern phenomena. With an emphasis
upon the subaltern as insurgent peasant, this project aimed to recover a tradi-
tion of resistance and rebellion that had hitherto been obscured, not only in
colonial and postcolonial contexts, but globally, insofar as the troubling ques-
tions that the experience of colonialism posed to political modernity’s claims
to universalism had been repressed or ignored. On this basis, the subaltern
appeared as a figure with a relevance potentially much broader than the field
of South Asian history, as evidenced by its development into a transnational
paradigm of historical writing and social scientific and cultural reflection.
Ironically, however, subsequent developments of the field have suggested
that the figure of the subaltern studied in the early volumes of Subaltern
Studies has been progressively eclipsed or outdated by more recent political
processes, particularly the impact of neoliberal economic policies and the rise
of new political rationalities.
In this context, a return to the texts that provided initial inspiration for
Subaltern Studies in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks offers resources for refig-
uring the subaltern as a “perspective” not confined to particular periods in
past history,66 or regarded as relevant only to contexts of supposedly
“deformed” or “non-normative” state formation. Rather, a study of Gramsci’s

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878 Political Theory 46(6)

integral development of this notion reveals a much richer field of reflection

on the contradictions and forms of political modernity than became apparent
during the first season of engagement with his texts. Subalternity for Gramsci
is an experience of marginality, in terms of the subalterns’ relations to the
centers of political power, but it is not a marginal experience, in terms of the
political relations and forms to which the majority of the inhabitants of mod-
ern political communities are subjected, in the West and North just as much
as the East and South. The Prison Notebooks provide a general characteriza-
tion of political modernity as a process of subalternization. It is a process in
which the disaggregation of subaltern classes and social groups in civil soci-
ety, or associative forms, constitutes them as the objects of the directive
instances of political society, or of instances of political organization and
administration.
Far from being exhausted by recent political transformations, this expan-
sive understanding of subalternity seems particularly well placed to compre-
hend significant developments in a wide variety of contemporary political
contexts. For example, Gramsci’s emphasis upon the irrepressibility of the
subaltern, continually engaged in struggle, has been used to rethink the con-
sequences of the extension of biopolitical and governmental logics in con-
temporary India. As Nilsen and Roy argue, rather than the negation of an
“autonomous domain” of subaltern politics, these developments can be pro-
ductively analyzed in terms of transformed “entanglements” between civil
and political societies, which have been both shaped by subaltern resistance,
and have helped to produce new forms of subaltern agency.67 Similarly, the
notion of subalternity as a hegemonic relation, constitutive not only of subal-
tern social classes and groups but also of the ruling classes qua “subalterniz-
ers,” can help to understand both the flood and ebb of the “pink tide” of
“progressive” governments in Latin America in the early twenty-first cen-
tury. As Massimo Modonesi argues, the “pacification” of popular movements
in Latin America in recent years might be understood in terms of a process of
“re-subalternization,” or of the ways in which subaltern rebellions have been
compromised by longer-term transformist and passive revolutionary strate-
gies.68 In another context, Gramsci’s analysis of subalternity and citizenship
as co-constitutive rather than opposed can also provide a critical perspective
on discussions of an “undoing” of democracy by neoliberal rationality that
has been argued to characterize politics in the “Euro-Atlantic world” over the
last three decades.69 Rather than a recent and conjunctural negation of the
promises of inclusion within democratic citizenship, Gramsci’s theorization
suggests that such processes have emerged from longer-term, structural con-
ditions of subalternization inscribed within the general dynamic of political

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Thomas 879

modernity, even and especially when it is realized in the contradictory forms

of citizenship.
Refiguring the subaltern as irrepressible, hegemonic, and synonymous
with the figure of the citizen thus not only constitutes an act of recovery of a
significant critical tradition in the history of twentieth-century social and
political thought. It can also be understood as a critical perspective onto some
of the central debates in contemporary political theory in an international
perspective. Ultimately, it offers to initiate a new phase of subaltern studies
“beyond Subaltern Studies,” a type of subaltern studies that would be both
global and contemporary, capable of inheriting the project of reading archives
of dominant historiography against the grain, and of intervening into the
struggles of the present, in “postcolonial” and “metropolitan” realities alike.

Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this text were presented at seminars and conferences at the
Ghilarza Summer School—Scuola internazionale di studi gramsciani, the University
of Sydney, King’s College London, the University of Tampere, Oxford Brookes
University, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. I am grateful to partici-
pants at those events for their critical engagement with my arguments. I would also
like to thank Sara R. Farris, Marcus Green, Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Cosimo Zene, and
three anonymous readers for this journal for helpful comments and criticisms.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was conducted
while a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton.

ORCID iD
Peter D. Thomas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7906-196X

Notes
  1. For variants of each of these claims, see Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the
Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004); Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political
Theory and Latin America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010);

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880 Political Theory 46(6)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1998).
  2. The key contributions to the Italian discussion of the subaltern in the late 1940s
and early 1950s are collected in Carla Pasquinelli, ed., Antropologia culturale
e questione meridionale. Ernesto De Martino e il dibattito sul mondo popolare
subalterno negli anni 1948-1955 (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1977).
  3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
With the exception of a brief citation in Guha’s “Preface” to Subaltern Studies
I, direct textual references to Gramsci, and particularly to his characterization of
subalternity, are surprisingly rare in the early volumes of Subaltern Studies.
  4. Ranajit Guha, “Preface,” in Subaltern Studies I, Writings on South Asian History
and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), vii.
  5. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in
Subaltern Studies I, 4, 8.
  6. An account of the various iterations of this influential text is provided in Rosalind
Morris, ed., Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
 7. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics
(New York: Routledge, 2012), 207; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered
Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 4
(2005): 475.
  8. Among the numerous attempts to translate subaltern studies into other national,
linguistic, and cultural contexts, see David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish
Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1993); Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation. The Making of Postcolonial
Mexico and Peru (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995); John Beverley,
Subalternity and Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999);
Ileana Rodríguez and María Milagros López, ed., The Latin American Subaltern
Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Touraj Atabaki,
ed., The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and State in Turkey
and Iran (London: Tauris, 2008); Stephanie Cronin, ed., Subalterns and Social
Protest: History from below in the Middle East and North Africa (New York:
Routledge, 2008). For reflections on the original Subaltern Studies collec-
tive’s initiatives, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3–19. For overviews of the field’s inter-
national development, see Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies
and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000); David Ludden, ed., Reading
Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of
South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2001).
  9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Discussion: An Afterword on the New Subaltern,”
in Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender and Violence, ed. Partha Chatterjee
and Pradeep Jeganathan (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000), 305–34. Spivak

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Thomas 881

has subsequently extended this argument, focusing in particular on the “new

forms of subalternization” represented by the figure of a “new gendered sub-
altern”; see “Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” in The Postcolonial
Gramsci, ed. Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (New York: Routledge,
2012), 221–31.
10. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies in Retrospect and Reminiscence,” South
Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (2005): 10–18; Partha Chatterjee,
“After Subaltern Studies,” Economic & Political Weekly XLVII, no. 35 (2012):
44–49.
11. Gyanendra Pandey, “The Subaltern as Subaltern Citizen,” Economic & Political
Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006): 4735–41.
12. References to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks will be given according to the Italian
critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin:
Einaudi, 1975), following the internationally established standard of notebook
number (Q), number of note (§), and page number. The English translation of this
edition by Joseph A. Buttigieg remains a work in progress, currently including
Gramsci’s first eight notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992,
1996, 2007). Dates of individual notes are given according to the chronology
established in Gianni Francioni, L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura
dei “Quaderni del carcere” (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1984) and the revisions con-
tained in the appendix to Giuseppe Cospito, “Verso l’edizione critica e integrale
dei «Quaderni del carcere»,” Studi storici LII: 4 (2011), 896–904. “A texts” refer
to Gramsci’s first drafts; “C texts” to revised notes; while “B texts” exist in a
single version.
13. Guido Liguori, “Subalterno e subalterni nei ‘Quaderni del carcere,’” International
Gramsci Journal 2, no. 1 (2016): 89–125; Guido Liguori, “Conceptions of
Subalternity in Gramsci,” in Antonio Gramsci, ed. Mark McNally (Houndmills,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
14. See, e.g., Q 1, §43, 37; §48, 60; and §54, 67, all written in February–March 1930.
15. See Gianni Francioni and Fabio Frosini, “Nota introduttiva a Quaderno 25,”
Quaderni del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, vol. 18, ed. Gianni
Francioni (Rome-Cagliari: Biblioteca Treccani-L’Unione sarda, 2009).
16. On the basis of this textual evidence, I thus disagree with Spivak’s repeated claim
that Some Aspects of the Southern Question is the most significant texts for under-
standing Gramsci’s conception of subalternity, in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,”
283; and “Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular,” 475.
17. Joseph Buttigieg, “Subalterno, subalterni,” in Dizionario gramsciano 1926-
1937, ed. Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (Rome: Carocci, 2009), 826.
18. Q 3, §14, 299–300. This note is later transcribed in 1934, with significant revi-
sions, under the title “Methodological criteria”: Q 25, §2, 2283–84.
19. Q 3, §14, 299–300.
20. In particular, Gramsci focused on a chapter in Ciccotti’s Confronti storici (1929),
previously published in the Rivista d’Italia as “Elementi di ‘verità’ e di ‘certezza’
nella tradizione storica.”

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882 Political Theory 46(6)

21. Q 3, §18, 302–3 (June 1930); later transcribed in Q 25, § 4, 2287, which also
includes elements of Q 3, §16, 301–2.
22. Q 3, §18, 303. The notion of a “federation of classes” emphasizes the relative
institutional autonomy of popular or subaltern classes before the consolidation
of the modern state. Political modernity for Gramsci, on the other hand, is char-
acterized not simply by the abolition of these autonomies, but by their restructur-
ing into forms of state mobilization and control, or what Gramsci will come to
characterize as the paradigmatic form of bourgeois hegemony.
23. Q 1, §47, 56–58; Q 1, §48, 58–64 (February–March 1930); Q 6, §10, 691
(November–December 1930).
24. Q 3 §90, 372–73, later transcribed in Q 25, §5, 2287–89.
25. Ranajit Guha, “Preface,” vii; Marcus Green, “Gramsci Cannot Speak:
Presentations and Interpretations of Gramsci’s Concept of the Subaltern,”
Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 3 (2002): 1–24.
26. Q 3 §90, 372–73.
27. E.g., Q 4, §59, 505 (November 1930); Q 6, §158, 812–13 (October 1931); Q 7,
§70, 907 (December 1931); Q 8, §66, 980; Q 8, §70, 982; Q 8, §127, 1017–18
(February–April 1932); Q 9, §4, 1099 (April–May 1932); Q 15, §28, 1783 (May
1933). For an analysis of these notes, see Guido Liguori, “Subalterno e subalterni
nei ‘Quaderni del carcere.’”
28. Q 8, §205, 1064. See also Q 8, §153, 1033 (April 1932) and Q 10II, §41xii, 1320
(August–December 1932).
29. On the different phases of Gramsci’s work, see Gianni Francioni, “Come
lavorava Gramsci,” Quaderni del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti,
volume 1, ed. Gianni Francioni (Rome-Cagliari: Biblioteca Treccani-L’Unione
sarda, 2009) and Gianni Francioni, “Un labirinto di carta (Introduzione alla filo-
logia gramsciana),” International Gramsci Journal 2, no. 1 (2016): 7–48.
30. Q 3 §12, 297–99 (May 1930); Q 25, §1, 2279–83 (July–August 1934). Gramsci
refers to him as both “Davide” and “David Lazzaretti.”
31. Q 25, §1, 2280. See Hobsbawn’s very different analysis of this subaltern revolt as
“pre-political” and as a “survival of a medieval millenarian heresy” in Primitive
Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th
Century (New York: Norton, 1959), 65.
32. Q 25, § 4, 2287. See Fabio Frosini, “Reformation, Renaissance and the State:
The Hegemonic Fabric of Modern Sovereignty,” Journal of Romance Language
Studies 12, no. 3 (2012): 71–75.
33. See Pasquale Voza, “Rivoluzione passiva,” in Le parole di Gramsci: per un les-
sico dei “Quaderni del carcere,” ed. Fabio Frosini and Guido Liguori (Rome:
Carocci, 2004).
34. Q 1, §47, 56–58 (February–March 1930); Q 6, §24, 703–4 (December 1930);
Q 8, §187, 1054 (December 1931). On the development of Gramsci’s state the-
ory, see Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and
Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 137–48, 173–89.
35. Q 6, §88, 763–64.

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Thomas 883

36. For an analysis of the specificity of these terms, see Jacques Texier, “Società
civile,” and Guido Liguori, “Società politica,” Dizionario gramsciano 1926-
1937, 769–73.
37. For an example of the latter argument, see Ranajit Guha, Dominance without
Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), xii.
38. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), §183.
39. Q 15, §10, 1765 (March 1933); cf. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des
Rechts, §244.
40. Q 4, §38, 455–65. See Francioni, L’officina gramsciana, 196.
41. Q 8, §142, 1028 (April 1932).
42. Q 3, §90, 372.
43. Q 25, §5, 2288.
44. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1990).
45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,
Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), 158.
46. Q 25, § 1, 2279–80.
47. Q 25, 2277.
48. On extra-discursive forms of subaltern expression, see Kevin Olsen,
“Epistemologies of Rebellion: The Tricolor Cockade and the Problem of
Subaltern Speech,” Political Theory 43, no. 6 (2015): 730–52.
49. Q 25, § 2, 2284.
50. Kate Crehan, Gramsci’s Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016); Marcus Green, “Rethinking the Subaltern and the Question of Censorship
in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks,” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 4 (2011): 387–404.
51. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,”
5–6; Ranajit Guha, The Small Voice of History. Collected Essays (Ranikhet:
Permanent Black, 2009), 368. For a balanced critique of the national-exception-
alist and potentially “historicist” dimensions of this characterization, see Vasant
Kaiwar, The Postcolonial Orient. The Politics of Difference and the Project of
Provincialising Europe (Leiden: Brill, 214), 194–212.
52. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 39, 38. While Chatterjee briefly men-
tions the possible Gramscian inspiration behind his own use of the term “politi-
cal society” (51), he does not explore further the substantially opposed meanings
they ascribe to the same formulation, based upon their very different understand-
ings of the political nature of civil society itself.
53. Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American
Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 53, 296.
54. For an opposed argument regarding the irreducible difference between condi-
tions of subalternity in “colonial and metropolitan theatres,” see Gyan Prakash,
“Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99,
no. 5 (1994): 1480.
55. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, xii.

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884 Political Theory 46(6)

56. Q 1, §48, 59.

57. Q 25, §5, 2287. A text: Q 3 §90, 372–73.
58. Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society. Studies in Postcolonial
Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1–26.
59. Pandey, “The Subaltern as Subaltern Citizen,” 4736.
60. Gyanendra Pandey, A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India
and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 27.
61. Gyanendra Pandey, ed., Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories. Investigations
from India and the USA (New York: Routledge, 2010), 5.
62. Ibid., 6.
63. Pandey, A History of Prejudice, 9.
64. Étienne Balibar, Citoyen sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique
(Paris: PUF, 2011).
65. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998), 18.
66. Veena Das, “Subaltern as Perspective,” in Subaltern Studies VI, Writings on
South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
67. Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, ed., New Subaltern Politics. Reconceptualizing
Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2015).
68. Massimo Modonesi, Revoluciones pasivas en América (Mexico City: ITACA,
2017).
69. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New
York: Zone Books, 2015).

Author Biography
Peter D. Thomas teaches political philosophy and the history of political thought at
Brunel University London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy,
Hegemony and Marxism (Brill, 2009) and coeditor of Encountering Althusser
(Bloomsbury, 2012), In Marx’s Laboratory (Brill, 2013), and The Government of
Time (Brill, 2017). Recent publications include “‘The Modern Prince’: Gramsci’s
Reading of Machiavelli” (History of Political Thought) and “The Plural Temporalities
of Hegemony” (Rethinking Marxism).

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