“Passive Revolutions” after the Crisis of Globalization: Gramsci and the Current Culture of Populism

Abstract

This article compares the ways in which two scholars, the anthropologist Kate Crehan and the philosopher Diego Fusaro, analyze Gramsci’s thought, verifying its current relevance and effectiveness in interpreting populism. In Crehan’s recent Gramscian studies the categories of senso comune and buon senso become crucial. Crehan utilizes categories such as “culture” and senso comune to explain both the Tea Party experience and Donald Trump’s election. Fusaro, on the contrary, is an Italian public intellectual who declares himself a sovereignist and who often includes, among the theoretical references of Italian contemporary sovereignism, the author of Quaderni del carcere. In the book Antonio Gramsci: la passione di essere nel mondo, Fusaro aims to demonstrate how Gramsci’s reflections arise within the theoretical horizon of philosophical idealism, both as regards his views on politics and the economy and his conception of culture: in Fusaro’s opinion, Gramsci is still relevant today because he is anti-capitalist and because he is not hostile, idealistically, to the family and to the establishment of a popular and national state. However, a limitation of Antonio Gramsci: la passione di essere nel mondo is the reductiveness of Gramsci’s conception of culture. Yuri Brunello, "‘Passive Revolutions’ after the Crisis of Globalization: Gramsci page 2 of 12 and the Current Culture of Populism" CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23.2 (2021): Special Issue: A Return to the Bad Old Times. Ed. Fabio Akcelrud Durão and Fernando Urueta