Gramsci and Neo-Gramscianism: To What Purpose?

Abstract

The rise of neo-Gramscianism in the field of international political economy (IPE) has been one of the few recent success stories for the political left in academic research and teaching in the social sciences. Across the broader field of politics and international relations (IR), there has been a steady flow of Gramscian scholarship, with the publication and translation of more of Antonio Gramsci’s own work and the adoption (and contestation) of his ideas by contemporary researchers.2 But in the case of IPE, the trend has been particularly notable for two main reasons: First, IPE only really emerged as a result of the changes in the political economy of global capitalism since the end of the postwar boom, especially the rise of neoliberal policies and the phenomena that came to be summarized as “globalization.” The available liberal and realist IR traditions struggled to make sense of these changes, which created space for experimentation with alternative approaches. Second, those changes also challenged the dominant approach to world economy in the Marxist tradition, namely the theory of imperialism laid down in the early twentieth century: while Marxist economists were first in the field with analyses of the internationalization of capital,3 the increasing imbrication of the national and the global, and the rise of intergovernmental institutions, required greater attention to the political dimension.