Morbid Symptoms: Gramsci and the Crisis of Liberalism

The inventiveness of Gramsci’s thought is owed, in part, to a social and political crisis whose features throughout his career he sought to analyse in order to enable an effective revolutionary intervention. From his early theory of the ‘factory councils’ to the analyses of ‘hegemony’ he undertook in prison, Gramsci was preoccupied with the breakdown and collapse of the liberal order following the First World War. By consequence his writings are often ambivalent about liberalism, both engaging liberal concepts and ideas as a resource for critique as well as looking radically beyond them. This ambivalence, I argue, has enabled his work to be viewed sympathetically by critical liberals as well as by Marxists.