On Gramsci and the failure(s) of Italian Liberalism
In Edward Said’s (1993) Culture & Imperialism, Gramsci plays an important role in the connection between Marxism and the study of imperialism from a subaltern perspective. (See, p. 341, where this made explicit. My references are to the 1994 Vintage edition.) This theme is introduced in Said’s treatment (pp. 60-3) of Gramsci’s “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” (pp. 60-3; hereafter Southern Question.) The key issue, as Said sees it, is the role of an intellectual (or intellectual movements) to help break the strangle-hold of how a dominant/imperial culture maintain control over their peripheries.
In order to avoid disappointment, my interest here is not to explore Said’s (or Gramsci’s) ideas on the intellectual’s resources to create links between “disparate, apparently autonomous regions of history.” (p. 61) But I was made curious about Gramsci’s views as a way of thinking about unequal development and imperialism inside a region/country, so I picked up a copy of the Cambridge Texts translations of Gramsci’s Pre-Prison Writings (edited by Richard Bellamy and translated by Virginia Cox).
The Southern Question (1926) was written during a precarious moment. Fascism was already in power in Italy, but Gramsci (1891 – 1937) was still a member of parliament protected by immunity (although the Fascist regime ended up dishonoring that). It’s a very rich text, and I will be unable to do justice to it here. And, in fact, the present digression will be on a topic of subsidiary interest to Said (and Gramsci); namely on the failure of or attenuated nature of late nineteenth and early twentieth century liberalism in Italy. Now, as I learned from Richard Bellamy’s Liberalism and Modern Society: A Historical Argument (a book I greatly admire), this is a topic that generated non-trivial intellectual developments within Italian liberalism and that also shaped the rise of the Italian Elite school.
As Gramsci sees it, the Italian liberals — represented here by the “bourgeois thinkers” Sidney Sonnino (1847 – 1922) and Leopoldo Franchetti (1847 – 1917) — had a kind of materialist understanding of the possibility (and stability) of a liberal state. Sonnino and Franchetti are both rather interesting characters, but about that some other time more. Gramsci’s account is based on their (rather famous) report on the conditions in Sicily in 1877.
Gramsci treats them as offering a serious proposal to engage with the Southern problem and offer a “government plan” for it (p. 331). In fact, in certain respects, Sonnino and Franchetti are anticipations of the kind of liberalism more familiar from Ordoliberalism. (I would not be surprised if Röpke and Rüstow, in particular, were familiar with their work.)
To simplify: Gramsci treats them as arguing that for a liberal polity to be viable it requires an “economically independent middle stratum.” The functional role for this stratum was to fortify “public opinion” against the “cruel and arbitrary actions” of the powerful “landowners” in the south. These landowners were undoubtedly seen as remnants of feudalism that had to be overcome. And, in addition, such public opinion could moderate the “rebelliousness of the impoverished peasants.” (p. 331)
That is to say, rather than a liberalism of proper institutional design, Sonnino and Franchetti develop a more Machiavellian liberalism in which society is stabilized by the conflict of social forces. (Again, judging by Gramsci’s interpretation.) In this more Machiavellian liberalism, the state is both restrained by such social forces, and itself an agent for creating the conditions (education, taxes, land-reform) for such an agonistic society.
Now, Gramsci thinks that Sonnino and Franchetti’s approach was doomed from the start in virtue of their own political clumsiness, and also that there were structural economic obstacles that would prevent transition to a middle-class rich South any time soon. I have no way of adjudicating that claim, but the facts favor Gramsci.
As an aside, one reason to be interested in all of this is that the bungled economic policies of Kohl after re-unification have created structural inequalities in Germany that have a superficial similarity between the ones that continue to plague Italy (and increasingly France and Britain). One may well say that the regional patterns of economic and political development provide support for a more materialist, Machiavellian liberalism rather than one focused on institutional design and public reason. Another important similarity worth noting in the spirit of Gramsci is that the firing of East German academics also prevented the local development of a responsible Ossi intellectual elite.* Of course, how to get from here to there in East Germany (and elsewhere) is for another time.
However, as Gramsci notes, and to his credit he discusses it, a new opportunity arose that might have created the right material conditions at the start of the twentieth century in Italy. For due to mass emigration (to the Americas), the South started to receive enormous amount of remittances that might form a “silent revolution” that would create the capital basis of an emerging middle class (p. 332). Gramsci explains what happened next:
But the State intervened and the silent revolution was smothered at birth. The government offered treasury bonds at fixed interest and the emigrants and their families turned from being agents of the silent revolution into agents for financing means the State’s subsidies to the parasitic industries of the North. Francesco Nitti, as a democrat, standing formally outside the Southern agrarian bloc, might have seemed just the man to put Sonnino’s programme into effect. On the contrary, he was the most effective agent of Northern capitalism, raking in the last resources of the savings of the South. The thousands of millions swallowed up by the Banca di Sconto almost all came from the South. The great majority of the 400,000 creditors of the Banca Italiana di Sconto were Southern savers. (pp. 332-333)
So, we can re-state Gramsci’s analysis as follows. The Italian state had been captured by a rent-seeking (Mercantile) capitalist class that failed to act on the long-term interests of Italian liberalism. And rather than creating the conditions for investment in Southern economic development it offered attractive opportunities for Southern capital to be saved and then be invested in the North and to fund the Italian State as such. To what degree Italian colonialism in Eritrea contributes to this mercantile/rentier State is worth exploring, but Gramsci is silent on it.
What’s important about Gramsci’s analysis is that it helps make clear that even liberalism’s apparently natural capitalist allies cannot be counted on to advance liberal interests. (Of course, that’s not Gramsci’s own aims.) This was known since Adam Smith’s attack on the mercantile interests of his own time, but it frequently is forgotten. With a proper art of government, the state may be an ally of the development of a liberal political culture rooted in material conditions and (let’s call it) a liberal program. But to transition to it you first got to win the battle of ideas, and elections.
*I thank Richard Bellamy for discussion on this.