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Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann:

Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the
integral State

Chapter January 2007

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Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept
of the integral State

Bob Jessop

This on-line version is the pre-copyedited, preprint, English version. The published
version can be found here: Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann:
Weiterentwicklung von Gramscis Konzept des integralen Staats, in S. Buckel and A.
Fischer-Lescano, eds, Hegemonie gepanzert mit Zwang. Zivilgesellschaft und Politik
im Staats-verstndnis Antonio Gramscis, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 43-65, 2007.

*****

This chapter explores some ways in which Gramscis analyses of the integral state
and hegemony in the Prison Notebooks (1929-35) were interpreted, critiqued and
developed during the 1960s and 1970s by two French Marxists and a Greek Marxist
based in France: Louis Althusser, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, and Nicos
Poulantzas. Although all three have been read as essentially structural Marxists,
their appropriations of Gramsci were markedly different and, indeed, mutually
antagonistic. There is no space to present Gramscis work as a reference point for
this exercise, even were an innocent reading possible. Thus I begin with Althussers
generally critical reception of Gramscis philosophy of praxis and his alternative
account of ideology and the ideological state apparatuses. I then review three steps
in Poulantzass far more positive reception of Gramsci, notably regarding the
historical specificity of the bourgeois struggle for national-popular hegemony and the
capitalist states role in securing bourgeois class domination. I end with Buci-
Glucksmanns philosophical re-reading of Gramscis notes on hegemony and the
integral State (stato integrale) in terms of her new concept of expanded State (stato
allargato).

From Ideological State Apparatuses to Aleatory Materialism

Althusser returned regularly to the theme of the state and politics from his first book,
Politics and History. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx (1959/1972), and, at various
times, developed his account of the state in dialogue with Machiavelli, Rousseau,

1
Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci. His most distinctive contributions concern contradiction
and overdetermination in revolutionary conjunctures; the states role in the
reproduction of class domination, with special reference to the roles of the repressive
state apparatus and ideological state apparatuses; ideology and subjectivation
(assujetissement); the state as an apparatus, machine, and body of armed men; and
the conditions making for a durable form of government. Although Althusser
occasionally praised Gramscis historical materialist approach to the state in these
contexts, he did not undertake a symptomatic reading of the Sardinians work on this
topic. At best, he cited Gramscis distinction between civil society and political
society and the importance of civil institutions and organizations for the reproduction
of economic, political, and ideological class domination. At worst, Althusser accused
him of absolute historicism and, on one notable occasion, rejected the entire
Gramscian problematic of hegemony and its postwar reception (see below). This
suggests that, rather than reading Althussers arguments about the state as if they
were directly drawn from Gramsci, it might be better to read them as a direct, critical
alternative thereto. For, while there are some superficial and insignificant similarities,
their differences are profound and fundamental.

Althussers most positive comment on Gramsci for our purposes occurs in For Marx,
which claimed that Marxism still lacked an adequate theory of the specificity and
efficacy of the superstructures and that, after Marx and Lenin, only Gramsci had
really worked on this before Althusser himself (1977/1968: 114). He also commented
favorably on Gramscis expanded concept of intellectuals (105n; cf. Althusser and
Balibar 1968/1970: 128) and argued that, to fully understand the overdetermination
of economic factors, it was necessary to develop the theory of the specific effectivity
of the superstructures and other circumstances, based on an elaboration of the
theory of the particular essence of the specific elements of the superstructure
(1977/1968: 113, 114, italics in original). A research note on ideology and ISAs
written in 1969 as part of his longer work on reproduction expands this: Gramsci is,
to our knowledge, the only person who advanced on the route we have taken. He
had had the singular idea that the state was not reducible to the (repressive) state
apparatus, but comprised, as he said, a certain number of institutions of civil
society: the church, schools, unions, etc. Unfortunately Gramsci has not
systematized his intuitions, which have remained in the form of acute, but partial,

2
notes (1970/1995: 281n, my translation; cf. 1976/1990: 257; 1978/2006: 138-9).
Elsewhere Althusser included Gramsci among the few Marxists who, like himself,
recognized that the working class needs philosophy in the class struggle (1974/1976:
37). And, in two later essays on Machiavelli, he noted that Gramsci had correctly
interpreted the Florentines call for a new prince in a new principality to unify Italy
under a republican national state (1972-1986/1999).

Despite such praise for Gramscis contributions on historical materialism and the
class struggle in philosophy, Althusser draw on them only gesturally when
developing his own account of the state apparatuses, ideology, and class struggle.
This is probably because of his dismissal of Gramsci as someone who played a very
important part from the left in the development of revolutionary humanism and
historicism and was therefore a principal antagonist in Althussers claim that Marxism
should be anti-humanist and anti-historicist (Althusser and Balibar 1968/1970: 119-
20). Although careful to distinguish between criticism of Gramscis failings in regard
to dialectical materialism and acknowledgment of his great contributions to historical
materialism (op. cit.: 126), Althusser nonetheless concludes that Gramsci tends to
make the theory of history and dialectical materialism coincide within historical
materialism alone, although they form two distinct disciplines (op cit.: 130). He
therefore confuses the development of philosophy and real history, fails to
distinguish between ideology and science (thereby treating Marxist theory as just
another worldview), treats Marxism as a direct expression of a particular historical
period and hence as part of the superstructure, and dissolves theoretical practice
into practice in general (op. cit. 130-7). This wild, inaccurate charge is typical of
Althussers cavalier rejection of most schools of Marxism that differ from his own
authorized version, whatever it might have been from time to time (cf. Elliott 1987:
41-5, 131; for a spirited rebuttal of the charge of historicism against Gramsci, see
Buci-Glucksmann: 1975/1980: 15-16, 49, and passim). It nonetheless meant that
Althusser needed to locate any theory of the state, ideology, and ideological state
apparatuses in his own dialectical materialist framework rather than risk theoretical
contamination from the absolute historicism he discerned in Gramsci (for an
alternative reading of his historicism, see Morera 1990). Thus, commenting on
apparent similarities between Gramscis account of hegemony and his own analysis
of ISAs, he wrote:

3
 it seemed [sc. to my critics] that what I was suggesting had already been said,
and said much better, by Gramsci (who did indeed raise the question of the
material infrastructure of the ideologies, but provided a rather mechanistic and
economistic answer to it). The general assumption was that I was discussing
the same thing in the same register. It seems to me that Gramscis work does
not, in fact, have the same object in view Gramsci never talks about
Ideological State Apparatuses; his term is hegemonic apparatuses. This
leaves a question hanging in midair: what produces, in Gramscis apparatuses,
Gramscis hegemony-effect? Gramsci, in sum, defines his apparatuses in terms
of their effect or result, hegemony, which is also poorly conceived. I, for my
part, was attempting to define the ISAs in terms of their motor cause:
ideology. Furthermore, Gramsci affirms that the hegemonic apparatuses are
part of civil society (which is nothing but the whole set of them, unlike
traditional civil society, which is all of society minus the state), on the pretext
that they are private (1978/2006: 138-9, italics in original).

Althussers alternative theorization of the state (1970/1977) starts out from

inadequacies of the base-superstructure metaphor. Gramsci had also been strongly
critical of economism, in both its theoretical and political forms; but Althusser
proposed another solution that appropriated structuralism against humanism as well
as economism (cf. Elliott 1987: 60-3). He identified three relatively autonomous
regions of the capitalist mode of production economic, political, and ideological
and argued that their respective roles and asymmetrical interaction were determined
in the last instance by the economic. The political and ideological regions thereby
acquired a distinct effectiveness both in relation to the economic region and the
capitalist social formation as a whole. Indeed, precisely because the economy
cannot determine everything else as a cause without cause, the overall reproduction
of the relations of production in capitalist social formations depends on intervention
from the superstructural ensemble formed by the repressive state apparatus (RSA)
and diverse relatively autonomous ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). The scope
and importance of ISAs indicates that the entire society is saturated by class
relations, submitted to a class power that is exercised through an ensemble of
institutions, including private entities such as the church, parties, unions, the family,
and cultural associations. These play crucial roles in securing bourgeois domination

4
and must therefore be treated as part of the state and not, as with Gramsci, part of
civil society. The latter notion is rejected on the grounds that the distinction between
public and private is internal to bourgeois law and, supplemented by its reflection
in juridico-political ideology, helps to maintain bourgeois class dictatorship (cf.
1968/1970: 162fn; 1970/1977: 142fn, 144; Bidet 1995: 11).

The coherence of this combination of relatively autonomous regions depends on:

a certain political configuration imposed and maintained by means of

material force (that of the State) and of moral power (that of the ideologies)
(Althusser 1968). Accordingly, economic class struggle obeys the logic of the
supplement: the relations of production/exploitation that determine, in the last
instance, the complex unity of the state depend for their survival on the state
that derives from them, that is, on the supplementary political and ideological
relations of domination that ensure their reproduction. Both Sur la
reproduction and Marx in his limits call this the paradox of the capitalist
state. To end exploitation, it is first necessary to dismantle the state which,
engendered by it, presides over it the lynchpin of the dictatorship that
sustains the capitalist economic regime (Goshgarian 2006: xxxvii, italics in
original).

Building on these ideas, Althusser argued that, while Marxism had developed,
through Marx, Lenin, and, perhaps, Gramsci, a valuable descriptive account of the
state as an instrument of class rule, this had remained at an essentially pre-
theoretical stage of development. Althussers self-appointed intellectual task was to
give it theoretical shape. He therefore advanced the following theses: (1) the core of
the state is its repressive apparatus; (2) the state also includes a variety of
ideological state apparatuses; (3) each of these ISAs has its own particular ideology
and apparatus logic; (4) the state plays a vital role in the reproduction of the relations
of production and intervenes in all areas that bear on their reproduction; and (5)
while economic class exploitation is foundational, the state must be changed before
the economic base can be radically reorganized. He develops these basic theses in
various rather formalistic ways (e.g., in terms of the secondary ideological functions
of the RSA, the secondary repressive functions of ISAs, and the possibilities of

5
reversals in the primary functions of specific institutions) but says little about
particular ideologies or the mechanisms of hegemony, let alone about specific
historical situations where hegemony was secured or entered crisis. Instead he
offers a formal, institutionalist analysis with functionalist overtones that gives no
sense of how different political and ideological fields are articulated, let alone unified,
apart from the equally formal claim that one of the ISAs will be dominant (currently
the school system though Debray [1979/1981] and Poulantzas [1978] later claimed
that it is now the mass media).

Althusser says little about ideology in general or particular ideologies and focuses
instead on their realization through the ideological mechanism of interpellation and
on their materialization in ISAs (cf. Ricoeur 1986). Indeed his comments on ideology
remain mostly descriptive, noting that, [i]n a class society, ideology serves not only
to help people their own conditions of existence, to perform their assigned tasks, but
also to bear their condition either the poverty of the exploitation of which they are
the victims, or the exorbitant privilege of the power and wealth of which they are the
beneficiaries (1965/1990: 25). Or, again, that while ideology is situated in the
superstructure and has its own effectivity vis--vis law and the State, it must also be
thought of as sliding into all the parts of the edifice, and considered as a distinctive
kind of cement that assures the adjustment and cohesion of men in their roles, their
functions and their social relations (ibid.). What seems to unify the ISAs is their
common mode of functioning. There is no sense that form may problematize
function, that the ISAs may be riven by class struggle and contradictions, that there
is a specific role for intellectuals, political forces, etc., in class struggle, or, indeed,
that ideology may also be secreted in the organization of production (cf. the critiques
by Buci-Glucksmann, 1975/1980: 64-7; and Poulantzas 1970/1974: 300-1n, 304,
305n). Nor do we get any account of the discursive-material mediation of the
consolidation of particular ideologies as different ideological elements are selected
and retained in specific ideological formations (cf. Jessop 2004; Nonhoff 2006). In a
subsequent post-script to his famous ISAs essay, Althusser tried to correct its
functionalist tenor by insisting on the primacy of class struggle over institutions
(1978/2006: 138, citing 1970/1977: 170-172). But this disavowal is bound to remain
gestural without serious effort to produce the concepts needed to explore the forms
and modalities of class struggle in and across different fields a task that Gramsci

6
set himself and that has since been followed by theorists such as Poulantzas (see
below).

Althussers subsequent critique of the theoretical limits and crisis of Marxism,

especially regarding the state, ideology, and the organization of class struggle offers
important insights into his ambivalent relationship to Gramsci (1978/2006). Arguing
that Marx and Lenin had failed to develop an adequate theory of the capitalist type of
state, he presented a symptomatic reading of their work. He elaborated the character
of the state as a special apparatus of class dictatorship with its own specificity as a
special machine that transforms violence into legal power and disguises its class
nature behind the (illusory) framework of popular rule and public service. In this
context the class struggle is primary and the energy driving the state machine is
force and violence. Moreover, while the states unity is precarious and its
reproduction requires serious political work, Althusser denies that the state is
thoroughly penetrated by class struggle. This comment is a critique of contemporary
interpretations and strategies relying on the intensification of contradictions and
conflicts inside the state to bring about a democratic revolution (cf. the contributions
to Poulantzas 1976). Althusser followed this with a vitriolic attack on Gramscis
analysis of hegemony and, indirectly, on neo-Gramscian Eurocommunist currents,
Poulantzas, and Buci-Glucksmann. In particular, endorsing Perry Andersons critique
of the antinomies of Gramsci (Anderson 1976) and adding his own criticisms, he
argued that Gramsci was blithely self-contradictory in his account of the state and
tried to explain everything about politics in terms of the permutation of just four
concepts: hegemony, force, political society, and civil society. Worse still, hegemony
figured three times in this analysis, namely, as hegemony, as the hegemonic
apparatus, and as the hegemony-effect of political society plus civil society.
Furthermore, Gramsci treated the economic infrastructure and the state as neutral,
reduced ideology to culture, and hid the question of the material nature of the state-
machine behind a hyper-allusive invocation of Hegemony (Althusser 1978/2006:
148). The overall result is a confusing, contradictory analysis that indiscriminately
lumps together the concrete realities of economic, political, and ideological class
struggles and empties hegemony of any theoretical or political leverage (Althusser
1978/2006: 139-150).

7
Such reflections prompted a return to another classical political theorist. Althussers
analysis of Machiavel et nous (1972-86) attempted to theorize the state and politics
without resort to the deterministic base-superstructure schema of historical
materialism developed by Marx and, he alleged, Gramsci. His proposed replacement
is an aleatory materialism that focuses on historical becoming based on the primacy
of events or contingent encounters that excludes in principle the ontological reality of
every structural law or necessary progression in history (Vatter 2004). Althusser
claims that Machiavelli raises the crucial question of how a durable political state
emerges ex nihilo and provides an interpretation of the role of the prince that differs
radically from Gramscis account of the modern prince. He argues that, while the
prince founds the modern state, it can only be stabilized through a shift from a
despotic principality to a republic based on the rule of law as the adequate form of
the modern state. Only this form of political rule can secure the reproduction of
reproduction as a whole. This approach marks a radical epistemological break with
the functionalist analysis of the reproduction of the relations of production in his ISA
texts and grounds such reproduction in the contingent, aleatory historical
development and succession of state forms as opposed to the necessary,
overdetermined, eternal nature of reproduction in the ISA essay (cf. Vatter 2004).
Moreover, while the people were passive subjects to be interpellated and mobilized
by the ISAs in the ISA essay, now the people becomes the prime source of
resistance and refusal vis--vis the reproductive powers of political repression and
ideological subjectivation. Despite these theoretical shifts, however, and putting
aside his one brutal attack, Gramsci still has a limited, walk-on role in Althussers
theorization of the state.

From Historicism to the Centrality of Hegemonic Struggles

Poulantzas came to Gramsci through his more general interest in Italian Marxism
including the epistemology of the Della Volpean School and work on civil society.
This was part of a transition period as he moved from a Sartrean existentialo-
marxiste analysis of law and legal philosophy towards a structural Marxist analysis of
the political region of capitalist social formations a period when Poulantzas wrote
not only on the philosophy of law and the juridico-political aspects of the state but
also on Althussers structuralist Marxism, Gramscis notion of hegemony, and the

8
historicist Marxism of British state theorists such as Anderson and Nairn. During this
transition, Althusser provided him with the philosophical means to break with the
'sur-ontologisme' of Sartrean existentialism and thereby go beyond a humanist and
historicist account of the capitalist state; and Gramsci, in turn, provided the
substantive concepts that enabled Poulantzas to situate his ideas about law and the
state in the wider context of capitalist societies.

Poulantzas was rather hesitant about the merits of Gramscis work when he first
encountered it in 1964-68. For Gramsci was often seen in Italy and France as a
Western Marxist who emphasized political class struggle to the exclusion of material
circumstances and structural constraints. Echoing this opinion (especially as
articulated by Althusser), Poulantzas noted that Gramsci's political analyses are
often tainted by the historicism of Croce and Labriola and must be handled with care
(1968/1973: 39, 138-9, 194, 197, 200-1; cf. 1966/1967: 68). Thus, while praising his
contributions to the analysis of hegemony, Poulantzas tried to distance himself from
historicism by stressing the structural foundations of class power and the different
modalities and possible disjunctions among levels of class struggle (see especially
1968/1973: passim). He continued to maintain a healthy distance from Gramsci
thereafter although his reasons differed as Poulantzas changed his own theoretical
and political positions.

Nonetheless, from his first encounter with Gramscis writings onwards, he was
attracted to their approach to ideology and to hegemony as the exercise of political,
intellectual, and moral leadership. Poulantzas suggested that hegemonic leadership
was the defining feature of class power in advanced capitalist democracies, which he
saw as based economically on possessive individualism and politically on individual
citizenship in a national state. He also highlighted Gramsci's emphasis on the crucial
role of the state (understood in broad terms) in mediating and organizing the
hegemony of a power bloc as well as in disorganizing the subaltern classes. He first
presented these ideas in some Preliminary Remarks on the Concept of Hegemony
(1965). A second step was inaugurated with his integration of these ideas into his
more structural Marxist analysis in Pouvoir politique et classes sociales (1968/1974).
They were still influential theoretically in a third stage of his development, when his

9
work on the capitalist state took a relational turn, but they played an even smaller
role in his ideas about revolutionary political strategy.

Poulantzass preliminary remarks used Gramsci to critique the intrumentalist-

voluntarist approach of orthodox Marxism. He insisted that the state must be treated
as a specific structural ensemble with its own effects on the reproduction of a
society-divided-into-classes and that classes have no abstract, unifying
consciousness but are constituted as political forces through the state itself (1965:
866-9). While capitalist relations of production create the institutional space for a
different kind of state and politics from those characteristic of feudalism, it is the
historically unique role of hegemony as the organizing principle of the capitalist state
that determines its precise form and function. Whereas pre-capitalist social relations
lacked a clear separation between the economic, political, or social spheres,
capitalism rests on an institutional separation between the private sphere of civil
society (the realm of economic exchange) and the public sphere of the political. This
creates an opposition between the particular private interests of individual producers
in the economic sphere and their common political interests in an orderly framework
for exchange relations. The organization of economic life in terms of surplus value
production and market-mediated exchange permits a distinctive, sui generis mode of
political class domination that does not rest on a formal class monopoly of political
power. The 'economic-corporate' states of slave-holding or feudal societies were
based on the monarchical principle or divine right and openly excluded the exploited
classes from full participation in the political sphere. They relied as do bourgeois
states in exceptional periods on force to impose the immediate private economic
interests of the dominant class. In contrast, the normal capitalist state is compatible
with popular sovereignty and can institute the secular responsibility of the state to its
'people'. The 'people' participate in politics as formally free and equal citizens
through universal suffrage rather than in their capacities as producers. The
'hegemonic' bourgeois state must therefore guarantee (at least in a formal and
abstract manner) the universal, general interest of all its citizens as a condition of its
legitimacy. It does so by mediating the competing 'private' interests of its citizens and
linking them to their general, 'public' interest (1965: 870-6). Political struggle is
oriented to control of this universalizing instance and requires the dominant class to
portray its specific interests as those of the nation as a whole. Thus politics is

10
constituted as the field of national-popular hegemony rather than class confrontation
(880-2).

For Poulantzas, following Gramsci, the modern state cannot unequivocally serve the
immediate economic interests of the dominant class(es). While the conflicting class
interests in the pre-modern state were subject at best to marginal, mechanical
compromise and political power was fragmented, the capitalist state must have a
certain apparatus unity and autonomy in order to organize hegemony. Only then can
it impose short-term economic sacrifices on the dominant class(es) to secure their
long-term political domination. Intellectuals and ideological class struggle are crucial
here because all social relations in capitalist societies appear as relations of consent
underpinned as necessary by resort to constitutionalized, legitimate violence (1965:
882-93). This holds not only for political relations between dominant and dominated
classes but also for those among different fractions of the dominant class(es). The
diversity of their interests requires that they become unified into a power bloc (Block
an der Macht) through the hegemony of a specific fraction of capital. The capitalist
type of state has a key role in organizing this power bloc as well as securing the
active consent of subaltern dominated classes (1965: 1061-66).

Poulantzass analysis of ideology is indebted to both Gramsci and Althusser. He

criticized three prevalent views: first, state power is the immediate expression of the
class consciousness of the politically dominant class qua subject of history; second,
the unity of a social formation is an effect of the imposition of the distinctive world
view of a hegemonic class subject; and, third, the ruling ideas of any age are the
ideas of the ruling class, whose unity is taken for granted (1965: 864, 868, 870-1;
1966/1967: 62-4; cf. Althusser 1978/2006: 136-7). Such arguments must be rejected
because they deny any intrinsic autonomy to the political superstructure as a specific
level of the social formation (1968/1973: 42, 199-200). As noted above, Poulantzass
alternative was to highlight the significance of the 'power bloc' as a contradictory
unity of various classes and fractions and to stress the crucial institutional and
organisational mediations that are involved in securing the cohesion and hegemony
of this Block an der Macht. He also emphasises the possibilities of disjunctions
among different forms of class domination (economic, political and ideological)
and/or between the apparent class content of the dominant ideology and its objective

11
role in realising ideological class domination (1966/1967: 65; cf. 1968/1973: 41, 89-
91, 155, 171, 203). Disjunction and correspondence among different levels must
alike be related to their articulation in a complex 'structure in dominance' as analysed
by Althusser and to the role of the dominant ideology in 'cementing' together the
social formation as indicated by Gramsci and, in a different context, Althusser (see
above).

These summaries show that key themes of Poulantzass account of the state stem
directly from Gramsci and pre-date his adoption of certain structural Marxist positions
directly inspired by Althussers symptomatic re-reading of the economic, political,
and philosophical texts of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci. Nonetheless Poulantzass
encounter with Althusser did lead him to reject two themes from his initial Gramscian
problematic. First, in a shift that actually brought him closer to Gramscis own
position, he rejected his earlier distinction between civil society and the state as the
basis for theorizing the distinction between particular and universal interests because
it grounded the former in exchange and circulation rather than production. And,
second, Poulantzas became more ambivalent about Gramsci's concept of hegemony
because of its alleged contamination by historicism and sought to purify it by
grounding its necessity even more firmly in the historical specificity of the capitalist
mode of production and its distinctive state form.

This shift is reflected in the organization of Poulantzass first book-length contribution

to state theory, Pouvoir politique et classes sociales (1968/1973). Inspired by
Althussers structural Marxism, he argued that a scientific study of the capitalist type
of state requires three interrelated theoretical developments: (a) a general theory of
modes of production, class-divided societies, states, and politics all viewed in
isolation from specific modes of production; (b) a particular theory of the capitalist
mode of production that determines the exact place and function of the state and
politics in its overall structural matrix; and, because the state is institutionally distinct
within capitalism, (c) a regional theory of the capitalist state and politics (1968/1973:
12, 16-18, 142). Althusser provided the concepts of dialectical and historical
materialism for the first step and the initial rationale for the relative autonomy of the
capitalist state and politics in the second step. In turn juridico-political theory
(especially Pashukanis) provided key concepts for identifying the distinctive

12
institutional matrix of the capitalist type of state that were needed to complete the
second step and provide a bridge to the third step. Thus Poulantzas defined the
normal form of the capitalist type of state as a sovereign territorial state based on the
rule of law in which the dominant class(es) enjoyed no formal monopoly of class
power. Law and juridico-political ideology thereby duplicate the 'fracturing' of the
'private' economic sphere in constituting the public as mutually isolated, individual
'citizens' and/or political categories. Given this, the states role is to produce a
unifying effect to counteract this isolation effect in economic and political relations.
So the state is presented as the strictly political (i.e., non-economic), public unity of
the people-nation considered as the abstract sum of formally free and equal legal
subjects (1968/1973: 125, 133-4, 188-9, 213-6, 223-4, 276-9, 288, 291, 310, 348-
50).

It is in analyzing the substantive form of this cohesion and unity that Poulantzas
draws once again on Gramsci and indicates how it reproduces class domination. For
the capitalist state performs two contrasting but complementary functions. First, it
must prevent any political organization of the dominated classes that might end their
economic isolation and/or social fracturing and enable them to struggle as a united
force. And, second, it must work on the dominant class fractions and/or classes to
cancel their economic isolation and secure the unity of the power bloc and its
hegemony over the dominated classes (1968/1973: 136-7, 140-1, 188-9, 284-9).
This occurs under the leadership of a specific class (fraction) that manages to
present its global political interests as those of the people-nation as a whole. This
involves a continual, conflictual negotiation of interests in an 'unstable equilibrium of
compromise' (citing Gramsci) and requires real (albeit limited) material concessions
to the 'economic-corporate' interests of subordinate classes (1968/1973: 137, 190-1).
This dual role is possible because the formal separation of the sovereign territorial
state from the capitalist market economy enables short-term economic concessions
and long-term political manoeuvre; and because its form as a democratic
constitutional state encourages the main political forces to link their interests to the
national-popular (or universal) (1968/1973: 190). Concessions to maintain social
cohesion in a class-divided society also help disorganize the dominated classes and
reinforce the appearance that the democratic state promotes the general interest. In
short, state power must be seen in relational terms, i.e., as founded on an unstable

13
equilibrium of compromise among class forces rather than as the monopoly of one
class (fraction) (1968/1973: 191-3).

In arguments strongly reminiscent of Gramscis earlier remarks, Poulantzas

examines how the capitalist type of state functions as the political party of the
dominant classes and helps in the organization-direction of the power bloc in the
face of its internal divisions. A power bloc is a long-term, organic relation that
extends across the economic, political, and ideological fields and its durability
depends on the capacity of one class fraction to transform its economic interests into
a political project that advances the shared interest of all dominant classes and
fractions in continued economic exploitation and political domination (1968/1973:
239). The clearest account of hegemonic class leadership can be found in Fascism
and Dictatorship (1970/1974). This showed how fascist parties and/or states
established the structural preconditions for the hegemony of big capital; and how
fascist ideology helped to secure its political, intellectual, and moral leadership. But
Poulantzas did not explain how specific programmes and policies consolidated
support and neutralized resistance during the various stages of the fascist period.
Nonetheless, this would become a major theme in his work on authoritarian statism
in the 1970s (cf. Poulantzas 1978)

Poulantzas also suggests that national-popular hegemony and hegemony within the
power bloc are generally concentrated in the same class or fraction. However,
whereas hegemony over the power bloc depends on the political place occupied by
the hegemonic class (fraction) in the circuit of capital, popular hegemony depends on
the ideological capacity to define the general interest of the people-nation
(1968/1973: 240). But he also recognizes that these two forms of hegemony can be
dislocated or unevenly developed. But, in all cases, it is the general form of the state
or regime that is crucial. For the specific ties between classes and parties in
particular conjunctures can vary considerably without changing the fundamental
political relations within the power bloc and their determination through the states
general institutional matrix (1968/1973: 314-21). Here and in earlier analyses,
Poulantzas draws heavily on Gramsci as well as Marx, Engels, and Lenin for the
wide range of concepts mobilized in his analysis of concrete political struggles at the
level of the political scene as well as its underlying structural patterns of class

14
domination. Compared to Gramscis own writings, however, little real attention is
paid to the role of intellectuals in this regard.

Poulantzas wrote his first major state-theoretical work before Althusser had
introduced the concept of repressive and ideological state apparatuses. He first
referred to them in his critique of Miliband (Poulantzas 1969) and then integrated
them into his own state theory in his analysis of fascism (1970/1974) and later
theoretical and empirical studies (1974/1975; 1978). Following Althusser, he defines
the ISAs in terms of their principal function - ideological inculcation and transmission
as opposed to repression - and also insists that they are part of the state system.
This is because they help to maintain social cohesion (which is the generic function
of the state) and because their operation depends on the indirect support of the
RSA. He also concedes, with Althusser, that the ISAs have a greater degree of
autonomy from each other and from the RSA than do the different branches of the
RSA. Even so, every important modification of the state affects not only the RSA but
also the relations among the ISAs and between the ISAs and the RSA. Thus a
transition to socialism must not only break the RSA but also transform the ISAs
(1969, 76-9; cf. Althusser 1995: 179-86).

Poulantzas's account of fascism both elaborates and criticizes these views. He

argued that the only ideologies are class ideologies and that the concept of ISA must
be rigorously related to class struggle and, in this context, criticized Althusser's
approach to ISAs as abstract and formal. He argued that Althusser derived the 'unity'
of the ISAs from their alleged permeation with the ruling ideology produced by the
class that holds state power. This is inadequate because it equates the ruling
ideology with 'the mechanism of ideology in general'. Hence it ignores the intense
ideological contradictions within the ISAs that stem from the struggle among
'ideological spokesmen' of different classes and ignores potential dislocations in
state power between the RSA and the ISAs (1970/1974: 300-1n, 304, 305n).
Poulantzas also suggests that Althusser cannot establish the relative autonomy of
the ISAs - either one from another or from the RSA and suggests himself that this
is directly founded in the ideological class struggle that pervades them (1970/1974:
304). Poulantzas also notes that the failure of the working class to conquer the ISAs
as well as the RSA could permit the bourgeoisie to reconstitute itself as the dominant

15
class through bastions among the ISAs. This is supposed to have happened, for
example, in the Soviet Union (1970/1974: 230-3). More generally Poulantzas argues
that ISAs often constitute the favoured 'refuges' and favoured 'spoils' of non-
hegemonic fractions and classes and can provide not only the last ramparts of power
for declining fractions or classes but also the first strongholds for fractions or classes
on the ascendant (1970/1974: 230-1, 308; cf. 1978). Finally he notes that the
struggles of the popular masses are reflected in the ISAs and have a particularly
marked influence upon those - such as trade unions and 'social-democratic type'
parties - concerned with mass integration (1970/1974: 309). In short, once due
account is taken of the class struggle and the resulting 'game' of class power played
out between the RSA and the ISAs, one can neither postulate, as does Althusser, a
mechanism of ideology in general to explain the operation of ISAs nor assume, as
Althusser does, that the state apparatuses operate in a unified manner.

These ideas are further developed in Staatstheorie. This argues that the state has a
key role in constituting social classes because it resorts to organized physical
repression and also intervenes in the organization of ideological relations and the
dominant ideology. Indeed, the ruling ideology is embodied in the state apparatuses
and constitutes an essential power of the ruling class. While the ISAs have a key role
in elaborating, inculcating, and reproducing that ideology, this is also performed by
the RSA and the Economic State Apparatus which, it is now conceded, is distinct
from both the RSA and the ISAs (1978: 28). In elaborating these arguments,
however, Poulantzas concedes that the ISA/RSA couplet is at best descriptive and
nominalist and also misses the importance of ESA in the contemporary state, which
is the site where the power of the hegemonic fraction of the bourgeoisie is essentially
concentrated' (1978: 33).

Poulantzas also extended the idea of the integral state from political and ideological
class analysis to economic relations. For he studied social classes in terms of their
"extended reproduction" rather than from the "narrow" economic perspective of their
place in production, distribution, and consumption. The former encompasses
economic, political, and ideological relations and involves the state and the mental-
manual division as well as the circuit of capital and non-capitalist relations of
production. Indeed, Poulantzas always placed the social relations of production in

16
this expanded, or integral, sense at the heart of his analysis of class struggle. And he
also came to analyze social reproduction in terms of the reproduction of the inter-
related economic, political, and ideological conditions bearing on accumulation
(1968/1973, 1974/1975, and, especially, 1978). This can be seen as a creative and
important extension of Gramscis ideas, reminiscent in part of his reinterpretation of
Ricardos concept of mercato determinato as well as his notes on Americanism and
Fordism and the problems of transferring this new mode of growth and
societalization to Europe (for further discussion, Boothman 1991 and Jessop and
Sum 2006).

Notwithstanding these many borrowings and affinities, Poulantzass state theory

cannot be reduced to its Gramscian moment. From his first encounter onwards, he
criticized Gramsci and sought to remedy his alleged failings by integrating his work
into a more comprehensive theoretical framework. For example, he argued that the
Italian had failed to locate the specificity of the various regions of capitalist society in
terms of its particular institutional matrix. Instead of establishing the distinctive
articulation of the economic, political and ideological regions in capitalism, he
operated with a simple contrast between the hybrid character of politics grafted onto
economics in feudal societies and the separation of 'civil society' and state under
capitalism (1968/1973: 139-40). This criticism is rather brazen because Poulantzas
adopted the same position in his own preliminary comments on hegemony and the
state (1965: see above). More generally, while Poulantzas agreed that the state is
actively involved in helping to constitute and modify the unstable equilibrium of
compromise, he was far more sensitive than Gramsci to how this occurs through the
specific institutional materiality of the capitalist type of state and its different forms at
different stages and in different conjunctures. In contrast, Gramsci was more attuned
to the many and varied modalities through which social forces sought to maintain
class domination and social cohesion from inclusive hegemony through passive
revolution to force-fraud-corruption and direct, open class war.

Thus Poulantzas interpreted state power as a form-determined condensation of the

balance of forces in political and politically-relevant struggle. This requires attention
to two aspects of the state system: (a) the state form as a complex institutional
ensemble characterized by a specific pattern of 'strategic selectivity' that reflects and

17
modifies the balance of class forces; and (b) the constitution of these class forces
and their strategies themselves, including their capacity to reflect on and respond to
the strategic selectivities inscribed within the state apparatus as a whole. Gramsci
had little to say about this in concrete terms, partly perhaps because of the fluidity of
the Italian case and partly because of his more general interest in the social bases of
state power rather than the details of institutional design.

State, Power, Socialism seems to mark a partial retreat from Gramsci under the
influence of his emerging relational approach and Foucauldian ideas. Thus
Poulantzass focus shifts from hegemonic class leadership towards two other topics:
(a) the prodigious incoherence of the micro-policies pursued by the state; and (b) the
states role in strategically codifying these micro-relations. He also argued that there
is typically no rationally formulated, global political strategy and that the general line
of political class domination (or hegemony?) more often emerges post hoc from a
plethora of micro-strategies and tactics mediated through the strategically selective
terrain of the state. This seems to call the concept of hegemonic class leadership
into doubt and to dissolve it in favour of a more Foucauldian than Gramscian
perspective. Poulantzas also argued that Gramsci had failed to appreciate the
importance of representative democracy, pluripartism, and the rule of law for a
transition to democratic socialism. This is supposedly associated with a certain
'panpoliticism' in Gramsci that is reflected in his treatment of the whole of civil society
as intrinsically political and his view of the communist party as the centre through
which all the various 'private' spheres are coordinated and subordinated to a global
political strategy. In contrast Poulantzas sees the state as an institutional ensemble
that crystallises class contradictions and conflicts within itself and can therefore be
undermined from within). The same concern emerges in Poulantzas's claim that
Gramsci's war of position strategy is still Leninist because it treats the state as a
monolithic entity to be encircled. In opposition to these alleged problems in Gramsci,
Poulantzas calls for a Copernican revolution in socialist political thought.

From the Critique of Economism to the Expanded State

Buci-Glucksmanns magnum opus on Gramsci and the State is an original

reconstruction of Gramscis analysis of the state in terms of a novel concept: the

18
expanded state (1975/1980). There is some confusion about the meaning of this new
term both for Gramsci and Buci-Glucksmann. As Guido Liguori notes, Gramsci
himself writes of lo stato integrale, the state in its inclusive sense, rather than of lo
stato allargato (or expanded state) (Liguori 2004: 208). But he adds that Quaderno 4,
which is the crucial first text in this regard, does talk famously of the state as
comprising political society + civil society, of hegemony armoured by coercion,
and so forth in ways that could well justify this new concept (Liguori 2004: 209, 213-
15, 220-221). My own view, however, is that, while it would be wrong to conflate
Gramscis account of lo stato integrale with the idea of lo stato allargato, the latter is
useful in understanding the historical specificity of the state in a particular period. In
other words, while the concept of stato integrale (the state in its inclusive sense) has
a general methodological value in treating the state as an ensemble of social
relations that is always, albeit differentially, embedded within a wider set of social
relations, the concept of stato allargato has a specific historical value linked to
specific stages of capitalist development and/or varieties of capitalism.

Buci-Glucksmann herself seems to indicate this in the preface to the English

translation of Gramsci et ltat (1975/1980). For she notes that, for Gramsci, the
expanded state refers both to a reorientation in the general Marxist theory of the
state and to the expansion of the capitalist state in a particular period of capitalist
development (1980: x-xi; cf. Liguori 209-10). Consistent with this, the main text refers
both to the Gramscian expansion of the state concept as political society + civil
society (68, 70, 72, 91-2, 111, 273) and to the expansion of the hegemonic
apparatus in the era of Americanism and Fordism deep into the organization of
production and consumption relations as well as various fields of the superstructure
(83-6). A possible bridge between these positions is her suggestion that the integral
state is a distinctive form of capitalist state that has superseded the economic-
corporate phase of state building and is able to rule through hegemony protected by
the armour of coercion (90-1, 274-5, 280-1, 283-5). There could be several forms of
such an integral state, however, and not just that typical of Americanism and
Fordism (cf. 280, 310-24). Thus it seems valid to distinguish (a) the state in its
inclusive sense (political society + civil society) as a theoretical concept for the
analysis of the capitalist state that enables Gramsci to contrast the state in its narrow
sense (of government tout court) and its broad or integral sense and, thereby, to

19
identify the theoretical and political limits to instrumentalism and voluntarism as well
as the empirical variabilities and complexities of state intervention during crises (92-
3, 100-110); and (b) the historical concept of the expanded state as a particular
articulation of the state in its inclusive sense. This second meaning is certainly the
one deployed in Buci-Glucksmanns and Therborns later discussion of the social
democratic Keynesian welfare state in the thirty years of postwar economic
expansion (1982; cf. McEarchen 1990). The importance of this distinction is
reinforced by the recent neo-liberal rollback of the expanded state in ways that have
significantly transformed the articulation between political society + civil society and
also produced a new form of capitalist state (cf. Poulantzas 1978, on authoritarian
statism; Hirsch 1995 on the nationale Wettbewerbsstaat; and Jessop 2002 on
Schumpeterian workfare postnational regimes).

None of this should detract from the importance of Buci-Glucksmanns careful

reconstruction and contextualization of Gramscis theoretically and politically
sophisticated analysis of state power. Whereas Althusser regarded him as
irredeemably idealist in a tradition shaped by Hegel, Croce, Gentile, etc., and
Poulantzas attempted to rescue him from his contamination by historicism, Buci-
Glucksmann read Gramsci as a theorist who was seeking a new revolutionary
strategy appropriate to the West in an era of mass politics that was marked by a
crisis of the workers movement in the face of its defeat by fascism and by the
historical turning point of Americanism and Fordism and its emerging state form. We
might describe this as the period when the integral state began to be enlarged,
becoming thereby an expanded state. In any case, from 1924 onwards, Gramsci is
said to have devoted all his political reflections to the concept of hegemony and its
theoretical and political implications. According to Buci-Glucksmann, he argued that
this crisis was also the crisis of a certain form of Marxism, of a false and unilateral
analysis of the state. He was therefore the first Marxist to challenge an
instrumentalist conception of the state based on the mechanistic and economistic
distinction between infra-structure and superstructures (1980: x) and he did so by
developing the idea of the expansion of the state (die Erweiterung des Staates) and
exploring its implications for revolutionary strategy. In particular, he introduced (a)
the interrelated concepts of hegemony, organic intellectuals, organic ideology,
apparatus of hegemony, historical bloc, and expanded state (sic) to address the

20
aporia of the superstructures; and (b) a new revolutionary strategy based on the
maximum development of the superstructural moment of class power in order to
create political, intellectual, and moral leadership before the final military resolution
of class struggle (1975/1980: 260, 263, 268-70).

I will address these two innovations in turn but should first note that this section
cannot possibly summarize the important philological work in and through which
Buci-Glucksmann reconstructs Gramscis intellectual and political development. It is
concerned, instead, with her own use of his ideas (as she reconstructs and interprets
them) about the integral and expanded states. First, then, regarding the nature of
hegemony, Buci-Glucksmann draws, like Poulantzas (1965, 1968/1973), on
Gramscis familiar distinction in Quaderno 3 between the medieval and capitalist
states:

In the ancient and medieval state, both politico-territorial and social

centralization were minimal (the former being a function of the latter). In a
certain sense, the state was a mechanical bloc of social groups, often of
different races. Under the constraint and military-political pressure that bore on
them, and could at certain moments assume an acute form, the subaltern
groups maintained a life of their own, with specific institutions (Q318, cited
274).

Still citing Gramsci, she continues that the modern state replaces this mechanical
bloc of social forces with the subordination of subaltern groups to the active
hegemony of the leading and dominant group. It abolishes certain forms of
autonomy, which are reborn in other forms: parties, trade unions, cultural
organizations. This transition from a mechanical bloc to an organic bloc is precisely
the historic bloc in power. Consequently, the history of states is the history of
leading classes (274). The historic bloc involves more than class alliances or a
fusion of workers and intellectuals into an undifferentiated class front. For it
presupposes a leading class that can exercise hegemony and a social group that
can ensure the homogeneity of the historic bloc (i.e., organic intellectuals) (275-9; cf.
Portelli 1972). It also presupposes a hegemonic apparatus, i.e., a complex set of
institutions, ideologies, practices and agents (including the intellectuals), [which]

21
only finds its unity when the expansion of a class is under analysis (48). In this
respect, it should be noted, a hegemonic apparatus involves far more than ISAs la
Althusser: for it not only encompasses the role of intellectuals but is also used to
analyse different forms of political transformation from Jacobinism to passive
revolution (48-60).

In proposing this new approach and, in particular, the concept of historic bloc,
Gramsci intended to maintain, in the new conditions of the war of position, two
fundamental theses of Marxism and Leninism: (1) Economics is determinant in the
last instance; (2) Politics cannot but have primacy over economics: it is "in
command". But these two theses call for new discoveries, a new investigation of the
state in its relations to the historic bloc' (Buci-Glucksmann 1975/1980: 277; cf.
Althusser 1995: 112, on the relation between economics and politics). In other
words, 'the historical bloc neither escapes the determining role in the last instance of
the economy, nor class antagonisms, nor again the state, which forms part of the
superstructures' (278). In developing this concept, he could also resist economist
and spontaneist arguments that one-sidedly emphasized economic determinism or
political action. In addition, Gramsci emphasized the material reality of ideologies
and their location in a hegemonic apparatus that formed an integral part of the state
(277-9; cf. Althusser 1970/1977). For the Gramscian historic bloc is cultural and
political as much as economic, and requires an organic relationship between people
and intellectuals, governors and governed, leaders and led' (286).

Second, regarding revolutionary strategy, in contrast to Poulantzas, who

appropriated Gramscian concepts primarily to understand the constitution of
bourgeois hegemony in the capitalist type of state and who continued to rely for
some time on a Leninist vanguard conception of proletarian revolutionary strategy,
Buci-Glucksmann not only emphasizes the nature of the integral state for bourgeois
hegemony but also its implications for revolutionary strategy. Thus, whereas neither
Althusser nor Poulantzas utilize the distinction between East and West or that
between war of position and war of manoeuvre, Buci-Glucksmann considers them
essential to a full understanding of the integral state in its guise as the expanded
state and, a fortiori, for revolutionary strategy. Thus, commenting on the New
Economic Policy, she writes that:

22
 the particular insistence that Gramsci placed on a mass hegemonic political
leadership, the place he ascribed to the superstructures in the building of
socialism, and the organic relations he saw as necessary between leaders and
led, suggest that for him, as for Lenin in 1922, what was involved was above all
a political alliance, based on the organization of consent, the struggle for an
"integral" state with a permanent fit between culture and practice. Gramsci's
concept of hegemony in the socialist historic bloc is wider than Bukharin's
economistic conception' (Buci-Glucksmann 1975/1980: 263).

The proletariat had to construct socialism based on an organic rather than

mechanical unity of the workers' movement (270). Thus Gramscis Prison Notebooks
emphasized that the revolutionary process in the West can only be a mass process,
in the course of which the modern Prince, the vanguard party, must struggle to win
the masses and combat the roots of reformism and corporatism, i.e., engage in war
of position before moving to a final politico-military resolution through a war of
manoeuvre. This strategic objective is diametrically opposed to the strategy of
permanent revolution. Indeed, a strategy of frontal attack in the conditions of the
developed capitalist societies would reproduce economism and was bound to lead to
defeat (270-1). In short, Gramsci established close links between the strategy of war
of position and the struggle for a new historic bloc, whereby the revolutionary
movement should aim to win state power in an integral sense rather than just obtain
a share in the exercise of existing government powers. This depended in turn on a
political gnoseology of superstructures (281-2).

Buci-Glucksmann and Therborn developed these ideas about the historical

transformation of the capitalist state in an important analysis of various forms of
socialism and social democracy in Europe and elsewhere in their book Le Dfi
Social-Dmocrate (1981). Following some general remarks on different socialist
traditions, they apply the notion of expanded state to the institutionalized
compromise and state form of post-war Atlantic Fordism. In this regard their analysis
seems to owe much, directly or indirectly, to the analyses of the Parisian regulation
school (see Aglietta 1976/1979; Lipietz 1987; and Demirovi et al., 1992).

23
Specifically, they argue that the Keynesian welfare state that corresponds to the
Fordist accumulation regime enlarges (erweitert) the field of politics and the state
and, a fortiori, also enlarges the field for struggles over hegemony (1981: 118-19).
The state is not situated outside the economy and does not intervene from outside
but has a crucial constitutive role in the expanded reproduction of the economy.
Moreover, in place of a state that secured political class domination through the
atomization of the masses in civil society, the state now organises them by accepting
their presence more or less direct, more or less corporatist, inside the state. In short,
rather than remaining outside the state, the dominated classes are now represented
inside it (128-30). For politics inserts itself directly into the field of economic
development, penetrating into reproduction, medical care, education, family life, etc.
In this context, the crucial site for the enlargement of the state is the welfare state,
which is reorganized along Fordist-Taylorist lines and also generalizes norms of
mass consumption and social welfare from organized labour to the population as a
whole (121-5). This produces a radical shift in relations between the working class
(once anathematized as a "dangerous class") and the state based on Fordism-
Taylorism-Keynesianism, collective bargaining based on responsible unionism, a
tripartite institutionalized political compromise, an expanded welfare state, and
urbanization (120). In this context social democratic parties become more and more
clientelist, corporatist, interclassist, and technocratic (131). The boundaries between
public and private are also modified with the result that the enlarged state becomes a
site of permanent alliances and compromises. As such, the Keynesian welfare state
must be studied not just in terms of state/economy but also in terms of state/mass.
This involves a necessary connection between state/capital and state/mass through
the states role in articulating a model of economic development and a hegemonic
model (130).

In short, the four key features of the enlarged state are: (1) the Fordist wage relation
based on tripartite collective bargaining; (2) a political relation based on concertation
rather than individual citizenship; (3) the superstructural institutions of Keynesian
welfare statism; and (4) resort to rational indicative planning rather than a liberal
market or command economy (130-6). The crisis of this enlarged state emerged
from 1965 onwards, was politically and culturally accelerated in 1968-70, and
became economically acute from 1974, thereby casting doubt on its continued

24
organizational viability and its legitimacy. The authors identify two possible exit
routes from this organic crisis: a turn to liberal corporatism (Sweden) or the growth of
authoritarian statism (Germany) (Buci-Glucksmann and Therborn: 149ff). Needless
to say, the crisis of the enlarged state has intensified since Buci-Glucksmann and
Therborn finished their book and developed events and, while the trend towards
authoritarian statism has certainly intensified (cf. Poulantzas 1978; Jessop 1996),
there have been additional significant transformations in the nature of the capitalist
state that affect its forms of economic and social intervention, its scale and scope of
operations, and its forms of government and governance (cf. Hirsch et al., 2001;
Jessop 2002).

Conclusions

The three authors considered here have interpreted Gramscis work on the state and
hegemony in quite different ways. Althusser rejected Gramscis philosophy of praxis
as historicist but approved of certain historical materialist insights about the
ideological as well as repressive nature of the state apparatus. He then developed
his own distinctive structural and in part functionalist analysis of the state
apparatus as a special machine of class domination. Poulantzas followed Althusser
in discerning some historicist tendencies in the Italians work but attempted to
decontaminate it by integrating some of Gramscis key concepts into a more detailed
regional (later, relational) theory of the capitalist type of state. He was most
interested in this regard in how the bourgeois democratic state both disorganized the
subaltern classes and organized a capitalist power bloc through enabling the
development of national-popular hegemony. He showed little explicit interest in
Gramscis analysis of the importance of wars of position and manoeuvre, adhering
initially to a Marxist-Leninist vanguardist position and later developing his own
revolutionary strategy based on a combination of struggles at a distance from the
state, struggles within the state apparatus, and struggles to transform the state
apparatus. Buci-Glucksmann showed the most detailed interest in, and familiarity
with, Gramscis work and remains closest to it. She made a close philological (or, in
Althusserian terms, symptomatic) reading of his work before and after 1924, which
marked, for her, a decisive turning point in his theoretical and political analyses. She
also applied the arguments that developed after this break in general methodological

25
terms by highlighting the real importance of the state in its inclusive sense (lo stato
integrale) and its links to the ethico-political, to organic intellectuals, and to the
historic bloc. In addition, drawing on some of Gramscis observations, she developed
a distinctive reading of the expanded state (lo stato allargato) as the product of a
specific transformation of the capitalist state that had followed the crisis of liberal
capitalism and the rise of American and Fordism. In their different ways, then, these
texts show that Gramscis work remains classic in the sense that, while the answers
it provides to the theoretical and political problems it had identified in the interwar
period may no longer be regarded as valid, these problems are still pertinent and
provocative and merit continuing serious engagement and elaboration in the search
for better answers.

26
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