BOOK REVIEW Gramsci's Common Sense

BOOK REVIEW Claudio Sopranzetti, Oxford University Kate Crehan, Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 222 pp. A nthropological engagements with Antonio Gramsci in the English language have fallen into three main streams. The first—most prominent in Euro American circles—emerged from Raymond Williams’s (1977, 1985) work and was further developed by Jean and John Comaroff (1985, 1991). Rarely engaging with Gramsci’s own writings and interpreting his work through the lens of Bourdieu, this school addresses almost exclusively Gramsci’s conception of hegemony and often stresses its systematic, stable, and naturalized features. The second tradition, at the core of postcolonial studies, is rooted in South Asian historiography, especially the work of Ranajit Guha (1983, 1998) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000). Most interested in Gramsci’s theorizations of subalternity and the relation between civil and political society, this school is prominently represented in the work of Partha Chatterjee. Finally, the third tradition—much less popular and praised—originated in the writings of William Roseberry (1994) and Gavin Smith (1991). Differently from the previous two, this school stresses Gramsci’s role as a political commentator and activist rather than as a social theorist. It also recovers the protean, incomplete, and mercurial nature of Gramsci’s analysis, not just in relation to hegemony but also in his analysis of intellectuals and subalterns. Kate Crehan’s 2002 book, Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology, revived this third tradition and showed her as one of its most authoritative voices. Her new text, Gramsci’s Common Sense, marks its highpoint, mixing erudite and careful theoretical analysis with illuminating application of Gramsci’s concepts to a study of contemporary social movements. Much like the three traditions, however, Crehan strikingly does not engage, or Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 90, No. 4, p. 1277–1282, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2017 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved. 1277 Kate Crehan’s Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives even acknowledge, the long history of Italian anthropological debates with Gramsci and in so doing falls short of her own call for contextual analysis. As a result, the book provides significant insights and tools for Englishspeaking anthropologists, political commentators, and activists, but regrettably does not bridge them with local engagements of Gramscian analysis. Besides these limitations, unfortunately common in English anthropological engagements with Gramsci, the text is first and foremost a remarkable exercise of intellectual prowess, one that reveals the usefulness of careful historical and textual engagement for both academic and political analysis—notwithstanding the fallacious nature of this distinction. Addressing this double audience, Gramsci’s Common Sense is divided in two parts. In the first, the author maps out the landscape of Gramsci’s thought, in particular the concepts of subalternity, intellectuals, and common sense. In the second, she addresses the contemporary relevance of these concepts through an analysis of Adam Smith as a bourgeois organic intellectual and of the American Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in relation to an ongoing struggle over the definition of common sense in the United States. In the first part of the book, Crehan provides one of the most comprehensive and thorough analyses of Gramsci’s thought available in English. As in her previous book, she never forgets—as many others have done— that hegemony and power for Gramsci are always moored to questions of inequality, class, and political–economic relations, as well as to specific and contextual political projects. Her analysis manages to provide an accessible introduction to the Italian theorist while acknowledging and rendering the fragmented and tentative nature of his writings, his voracious curiosity, and his continuous dialogue with other contemporary commentators, thinkers, and political activists. Recovering fragments of these conversations and redeeming Gramsci from the clutches of simplistic readings, Crehan does an enormous service to anthropological theory. In the first three chapters, Crehan analyzes the concepts of subaltern, intellectuals, and common sense, and, in Gramscian tradition, reveals their subtleties by juxtaposing them to other dominant interpretations. In Chapter 1, she opposes Gramsci’s conception of subalternity to Spivak’s and Scott’s readings (Spivak 1988, Scott 1990) and stresses the collective and knowledge-producing nature of the subalterns for the Italian theorist. In Chapter 2, she defends the centrality of Gramsci’s conception of organic intellectuals, themselves the product of class relations and a specific time and place, in contrast with Hobsbawm’s and Said’s analysis of the 1278 CLAUDIO SOPRANZETTI political role of intellectuals beyond their class milieu (Hobsbawm 2011, Said 1996). In Chapter 3, she recovers the given-ness yet inherently unstable and contested nature of common sense for Gramsci, distancing it from Arendt’s engagement with the concept and Bourdieu’s conception of habitus (Arendt 1958, Arendt and Beiner 1989, Bourdieu 1977), so often conflated with Gramsci’s theories. Finally, in Chapter 4, Crehan brings these concepts together and explores the relationship between experiences of inequality and political narratives. Along the road Crehan drops some extremely valuable gems, which can be easily lost in the journey. It is in these imperfect gems that both the strengths and the weaknesses of her analysis are most visible. An example is her discussion of the opposition between the concepts of the organic and the conjectural in Chapter 2. On the one hand, this analysis reveals the depth of Crehan’s engagement with the Italian theorist and stresses the necessity to understand intellectual, subaltern, and common sense in specific configurations in which political-economic as well as knowledgeproducing processes take form. On the other, it provides a relatively thin engagement with the larger historical and political–economic context from which Gramsci emerged as an organic intellectual and ignores, with the exclusion of a short piece by Pierpaolo Pasolini, the long history of Italian commentators and anthropological debates on common sense, inequality, and folklore (Bianchi Bandinelli 1948; Boninelli 2007; Cirese 1976, 1977; Clemente and Angioni 2008; Dei 2007; Franceschini 1989; Fresu 2005; Pizza 2012; Polizzi 2010; Serenellini 1985; Sobrero 1976). This is the main paradox of the first part of Crehan’s book: a detailed celebration of Gramsci’s call for contextual and open-ended analysis coupled with an only marginal engagement with Gramsci’s own local context. While this approach is clearly connected with her laudable attempt to show the general relevance of Gramsci’s thought, the road taken is at times too familiar and ends up weakening her project rather than strengthening it. Fortunately, in Part 2 of Gramsci’s Common Sense, this weakness dissipates as Crehan turns her attention to concrete case studies. Here her intellectual vivacity and accessible prose shines, revealing the theoretical and political present-day usefulness of Gramsci’s concepts. When the author uses the theoretical scaffolding she reconstructed to analyze historical and ethnographic material—even though mostly from secondary sources—the results are remarkable. In Chapter 5, Crehan develops a fascinating analysis of Adam Smith as an organic intellectual of the 1279 Kate Crehan’s Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives emerging capitalist bourgeoisie, the prime example of those specialists in political economy that Gramsci noted were created alongside capitalist entrepreneurs. This chapter is just an introduction to the core of Part 2: an exploration of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as two movements battling over the definition of common sense in the contemporary United States. In Chapter 6, Crehan provides a detailed analysis of the emergence and internal operations of the Tea Party as an organization through which dominant classes—here personified in the Koch brothers— deploy resources, connections, and funding to ensure that their worldview of market liberalism and libertarian opposition to taxes remains taken-forgranted common sense. Applying Gramsci’s analysis of the alignment of knowledge-production and class interest, Crehan reveals how common sense is preserved thought the interplay between intellectuals, who populate think-tanks, radio shows, TV programs, and grassroots activists. This process—as any process in a Gramscian worldview—is never complete, needs constant work to be continuously maintained and reproduced, and remains always opened to challenge. In Chapter 7, Crehan individuates one of these challenges in the Occupy Wall Street’s discourse of “We are the 99%!” as an example of an emerging good sense (buon senso) in the midst of the confused agglomerate of common sense. The two movements, she shows, both respond to a commonsensical perception of the failure of the American dream and the loss of control over their own lives felt by large portion of the US population. While the Tea Party offers as response by confirming the existing neoliberal and libertarian common sense, she argues, Occupy Wall Street proposes a new narrative under a slogan that, whether or not it represent class warfare, […] frames the economic crisis so many are experiencing in their day-to-day lives in terms of a narrative of class […] in the form of a common sense truth—a truth that seems undeniable to those who see the latter of prosperity receding ever farther beyond their reach. (154) Such a Gramscian reading of contemporary US is not just academically exciting. It provides a much-needed interpretative key for the concurrent rise of movements such as Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matters and the election of Donald Trump. Reinvigorating Gramsci’s analysis, Crehan leaves us at the doorstep of a profound realization: in moments of 1280 CLAUDIO SOPRANZETTI crisis—moments which the Italian thinker called interregnum—opposing forces battle over the creation of a new common sense in an open-ended and never complete struggle. This, as any other Gramscian insight, is not just a theoretical and historical analysis but a call to action. Enlivened by this call, Crehan ends the book with a sense of hope for the development of a new common sense out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Once again, her thin engagement with the specific context ends up weakening rather than strengthening her approach. Throughout the book she reiterates—correctly—that we should follow Gramsci’s lead and never romanticizes common sense. Her conclusions, unfortunately, seem to fall into that trap, especially by over-emphasizing the role of intellectuals in Occupy Wall Street and personalizing their political activity. Contravening to Gramsci’s call to center the analysis of collectives and subaltern masses, she ends up silencing and understudying the basis of the movement and, in so doing, she ignores its difficulties to reach beyond the highly educated mostly white middle classes that constituted its basis. While this may be the result of her reliance on secondary sources or of her laudable drive to conclude the book on a positive note, it ends up ignoring the famous Gramscian motto: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Besides its minor shortcomings, or maybe precisely because of them and the productive tensions they generate, Gramsci’s Common Sense is destined to become a very important book. Not because it provides a much-needed, careful engagement with the Gramsci’s thought, but precisely because it never becomes an empty exercise of intellectual exegesis. 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