Few phrases in political theory carry as much concealed disagreement as civil society. A development minister, a charity director, and a reader of Marx can use the same two words in a single afternoon and mean three different things by them, each confident that the meaning is obvious. For Hegel, and after him for Marx, civil society named the sphere of economic relations and private interest: the world of work, exchange, need, and property that sits between the family and the state. In the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, written between 1929 and 1935 under a fascist sentence, the same phrase names something else entirely: the ensemble of institutions, schools, churches, newspapers, associations, trade unions, through which consent to a social order is organised and renewed. The words survived the journey from one theory to the other. The thing they point to did not.

That gap between a shared name and divergent meanings is the subject of this article, and separating the meanings is the whole of its service. Gramsci did not refine Marx’s concept of civil society; he relocated it, moving the term from the base of the social structure to the superstructure and converting it from the sphere of production and exchange into the terrain on which leadership is won or lost. Every later confusion about the concept, including its career as a liberal slogan after 1989, follows from the fact that incompatible definitions travel under one label. The pages that follow track the term through Hegel and Marx, set out Gramsci’s usage in its canonical form, present the strongest scholarly objection to that usage at full strength, and treat the liberal appropriation of the phrase with the fairness a serious body of theory deserves.

A word that changed its address

Three misreadings dominate the way Gramsci’s civil society is discussed, and each deserves a precise correction rather than a dismissal, because each error is a truth about one of the term’s other usages misapplied to Gramsci. The first misreading identifies civil society with charities, non-governmental organisations, and voluntary associations, so that Gramsci is recruited as an early theorist of the voluntary sector. The second identifies civil society with the economy, with markets and private enterprise standing outside the state. The third, looser still, treats civil society as everything that is not the state, a residual category defined by exclusion. A reader who holds any of the three will misunderstand the notebooks in a systematic way, because each error destroys a distinction Gramsci was careful to build.

Against the first misreading, the evidence is the contents list of Gramsci’s own usage. The institutions he names when he describes civil society include schools and universities, the Catholic Church and its orders, the press and publishing houses, professional associations, cultural societies, and trade unions. Some of those are voluntary associations, and Gramsci’s net does catch the associational sector that the liberal usage prizes. But the net also catches institutions nobody would call charities: a confessional school system, a national press owned by industrial groups, a party’s network of clubs and newspapers, a union federation bargaining inside a legal order. What unifies the list is not voluntariness or benevolence. It is function. Each institution on it organises consent: each forms the conceptions, habits, and loyalties through which a population comes to accept a given order as natural, desirable, or at least unchangeable. A charity that merely relieves distress without forming anybody’s conception of the world sits at the edge of Gramsci’s category; a newspaper that forms such conceptions daily sits at its centre.

Against the second misreading, the evidence is Gramsci’s architecture. In his scheme the economy belongs to the structure, the base of relations of production on which the superstructures rise. Civil society is placed firmly among the superstructures, which is exactly the relocation this article names. A theorist who meant civil society to denote the economy would have had no reason to move the term, and Gramsci’s notebooks return to the placement too often, in too many notebooks, for the move to be accidental. The market, the factory, and the wage relation belong to the anatomy Marx assigned to political economy; Gramsci’s civil society begins where that anatomy ends, with the institutions that interpret the economic world to the people who live in it.

The third misreading fails for a subtler reason. Gramsci’s civil society is not the simple remainder left when the state is subtracted, because in his extended usage much of civil society sits inside the state. The integral state, the formula examined in detail below, comprises political society and civil society together: the government, courts, police, and army on one side, and the consent-organising institutions on the other, forming a single object of analysis. A category that can be inside the state and outside it, depending on which of Gramsci’s two conceptions of the state is in play, cannot be defined as the state’s outside. The confusion is understandable, since the notebooks use the restricted sense of the state, government alone, as often as the extended sense. But the distinction between those two senses is one of the things a careful reader has to hold steady, and holding it steady dissolves the third misreading entirely.

What Gramsci means by civil society

The canonical definition can be stated in one sentence, and the rest of this article is commentary on it. In Gramsci, civil society is the ensemble of institutions conventionally regarded as private, including schools, churches, media, associations, and trade unions, through which hegemony is organised, located in the superstructure and forming with political society the integral state. Each clause of that sentence carries weight. The institutions are conventionally regarded as private: Gramsci’s own phrase for them, in a much discussed note, is private organisms, and the adjective records how they appear to liberal legal thought, as bodies standing outside the state, rather than how they function in his analysis. Hegemony is organised through them: they are the machinery by which a class or alliance of classes secures the active or passive consent of the governed, a process the companion article on hegemony examines as a concept in its own right. The location in the superstructure is the relocation itself. And the closing clause fixes civil society’s constitutional position: not a zone beyond the state, but one half of the state in its integral sense.

What belongs inside Gramsci’s civil society?

The institutions through which a population’s consent is organised and its common sense formed. Gramsci’s examples include schools and universities, churches and religious orders, newspapers and publishing houses, professional and cultural associations, trade unions, and the clubs, circles, and presses of political parties, all conventionally counted as private bodies.

Two boundaries follow from the definition, and drawing them prevents most of the errors catalogued above. On one side, civil society excludes the structure: the relations of production, the factory regime, the market, the property order. Those things condition everything that happens inside civil society, and Gramsci never suggests otherwise, but they are not part of it, because they do not organise consent by persuasion and formation; they compel by necessity. On the other side, civil society excludes political society in the strict sense: the governmental apparatus of coercion, the ministries, courts, police, and armed forces through which a ruling group dominates those who refuse consent. Between compulsion by hunger and compulsion by the policeman stands the vast middle territory of formation, persuasion, education, and habit, and that territory is Gramsci’s civil society. Its inhabitants are the institutions that teach a population what to want, what to expect, what to revere, and what to treat as beyond argument.

The definition also explains why the concept matters to Gramsci’s larger project. A revolutionary politics that analysed only the structure and the coercive apparatus would face a puzzle it could not solve: why orders that rest on minority ownership and visible coercion persist for generations without permanent revolt. Civil society is Gramsci’s answer to the puzzle of persistence. Orders endure because consent is manufactured continuously, in classrooms and pulpits and editorial offices, long before any policeman is needed. Whoever wishes to change an order must therefore contest the territory where its consent is made, and whoever wishes to understand an order must map that territory first. The concept is diagnostic before it is strategic, and the strategic consequences, which belong to the companion article on the war of position, follow from the diagnosis rather than preceding it.

The same word in Marx

The single most clarifying comparison in this whole area is the one between Gramsci’s usage and Marx’s, because the two thinkers stand in a direct line of descent and yet use the term for different strata of society. Marx inherited civil society from Hegel as the sphere of economic relations, and his early writings treat it as the real stage on which history moves, with the state as its political expression. Gramsci, formed in the same tradition and writing with Marx’s vocabulary in his hands, takes the word and points it at the superstructure instead. The snippet question that searchers ask about this pair of usages has a short answer, and it is worth giving the short answer before the long commentary.

How does Gramsci’s civil society differ from Marx’s?

Marx used the term for the sphere of economic relations and private interest, located in the base. Gramsci uses it for the institutions through which consent is organised, including schools, churches, media, and associations, located in the superstructure and forming part of the integral state.

The commentary begins with a warning about descent. Because Gramsci revered Marx and wrote as a Marxist, readers assume his terms must carry Marx’s meanings, and on most concepts the assumption is roughly safe. On civil society it fails completely, and the failure is instructive about how concepts migrate. Gramsci did not announce a redefinition; the notebooks rarely pause to flag terminological departures, and the prisoner’s circumstances, writing for himself under censorship with an eye to future elaboration, discouraged systematic housekeeping. The relocation happened in use, across hundreds of notes, as Gramsci found that the phenomena he needed to analyse, the consent machinery of a modern order, had no adequate name in the inherited vocabulary, and pressed the nearest available term into new service. Readers who approach the notebooks with Marx’s definition in hand will therefore misread page after page, taking references to the superstructure as references to the economy, and the error compounds because nothing on the page signals that the word has changed its address.

There is a second warning, about the phrase in German. The term both thinkers inherited, bürgerliche Gesellschaft, carries a double sense that English splits apart: it can mean civil society, the sphere of citizens and their associations, and it can mean bourgeois society, the social order of private property and class. Marx exploits the double sense deliberately, since his claim is precisely that the sphere of private interest is the bourgeois order in its everyday form. Gramsci, writing in Italian as società civile, inherits a phrase in which the bourgeois echo is fainter, and his usage drifts free of the economic meaning altogether. Translation is not a neutral pipe here. Part of the relocation was made possible, perhaps even made invisible, by the move between languages, and the Italian phrase’s career in the notebooks is a case study in how a concept can be transformed by the vocabulary available to a thinker working in exile from his own bookshelf.

Hegel and the sphere of particularity

The genealogy starts with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in 1821, because Hegel gave the term its systematic place in modern philosophy. In Hegel’s architecture of ethical life, three moments succeed one another: the family, bound by love and immediate feeling; civil society, the sphere of particularity, where individuals pursue their own needs and interests as private persons; and the state, where particular interests are reconciled in a universal order. Civil society, the middle moment, is Hegel’s great discovery as a theorist of modernity: a zone that is neither household nor government, in which strangers are bound together by the division of labour and the market, each pursuing private ends and each dependent on all the others.

Inside that zone Hegel places the system of needs, his account of production, exchange, and the classes or estates that economic life generates; the administration of justice, which gives private interest the protection of law; and the police and corporations, bodies that supervise welfare and organise trades. The placement matters for everything that follows. Hegel’s civil society already contains quasi public institutions: courts, regulatory bodies, and the corporations that mediate between the individual and the state. It is a sphere of private interest, but of private interest organised, educated, and partially disciplined by institutions that prepare its members for citizenship. Hegel calls it, in an addition to his text, the battlefield of private interest, and the metaphor is exact: within civil society, everyone’s interest contends with everyone else’s, and the state’s task is to stand above the battlefield as its resolution.

Where does Hegel place civil society in his system?

Between the family and the state, as the middle moment of ethical life. Civil society is the sphere of particularity, where private persons pursue needs and interests through work, exchange, law, and the corporations, and where the division of labour binds strangers into mutual dependence before the state reconciles them.

Two features of Hegel’s construction survived into both Marx and Gramsci, and noticing them sharpens the later contrast. The first is the tripartite frame itself: family, civil society, state. Marx compresses the frame by treating the state as the political form of civil society’s dominant interests, and Gramsci reworks it by splitting the state into political and civil society and reuniting them in the integral state. The second surviving feature is the insight that the middle sphere is institutional, not merely economic. Hegel’s corporations and courts are organs of formation as much as of exchange; they school their members. When Gramsci relocates civil society to the superstructure and fills it with schools and churches, he is in one respect recovering a Hegelian emphasis that Marx’s usage had thinned: the middle sphere as the place where individuals are made into members of an order. Genealogy is not identity, and Gramsci’s concept is not Hegel’s. But the line from the Philosophy of Right to the prison notebooks is real, and it runs through the institutional density of the middle term.

Marx and the anatomy of political economy

Marx took the term from Hegel and turned it against its maker. In the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right that Marx wrote in 1843 and left unpublished, the relation between state and civil society is reversed: where Hegel made the state the truth of civil society, Marx argues that civil society, the world of property, family, and material interest, is the real foundation, and the political state its derivative expression. The famous methodological sentence of the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy gathers the whole position into a line: the anatomy of civil society, Marx writes in substance, is to be sought in political economy. Anatomy is a dissector’s metaphor. Civil society is the body; political economy is the science that lays it open; and the body in question is made of production relations, property forms, and the classes they generate.

The German Ideology, written with Engels in 1845 and 1846, gives the usage its historical sweep: civil society there embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of production, and the state appears as the form in which a dominant class asserts its common interests. Across both texts the location of the term is constant. Civil society sits at the level of the material base. It is the sphere where needs are met and interests collide, where men and women appear as proprietors, workers, buyers, and sellers, and its study is economics because its substance is economic. Whatever organises belief, loyalty, and consent belongs, in the vocabulary Marx bequeaths, to the superstructure of political and ideological forms that rise on that base, and the phrase civil society does none of that work for him.

What did Marx take over from Hegel’s account of civil society?

The sphere itself, and its position between family and state, along with the analysis of needs, labour, and estates that filled it. What Marx changed was the direction of explanation: for Hegel the state resolves civil society, while for Marx civil society, as material and economic life, explains the state that rises from it.

One nuance protects the comparison from caricature. Marx’s civil society is not a bare market stripped of institutions. It includes the family arrangements, legal forms, and class organisations of a mode of production, and Marx’s historical writings, above all his journalism on France, observe parties, newspapers, and clubs with unmatched precision. The point is one of classification, not of attention. When Marx analyses a newspaper or a parliamentary faction, he analyses it as a political or ideological form whose roots lie in civil society’s interests; he does not place the newspaper inside civil society itself. Gramsci’s relocation is therefore not a correction of Marx’s eyesight. It is a reclassification of the same observed phenomena, performed because Gramsci’s theoretical problem, the organisation of consent in a developed order, required the consent machinery to be gathered under one concept and set in one location. Whether the reclassification is consistent is the question the critical literature takes up, and it is a harder question than whether Gramsci noticed newspapers.

The relocation

The move at the centre of this article deserves its name in plain view. The relocation is this article’s namable claim: Gramsci moves civil society from the base to the superstructure, which converts it from the sphere of economic relations into the terrain of consent, and every subsequent confusion about the term follows from the fact that two incompatible definitions share one name. Stated as a before and after, the claim is stark. Before Gramsci, in the tradition he inherited, civil society answers the question: where does material life happen, and what class relations does it generate? After Gramsci, civil society answers a different question: through what institutions does an order secure the consent of those it governs, and where would a challenge to that order have to be fought? The questions are both legitimate. They are not the same question, and a term that answers the second cannot be read as though it were answering the first.

Why did Gramsci need the move? The notebooks’ circumstances supply part of the answer, and Italian history supplies the rest. He wrote as the prisoner of a regime that had come to power in a country where the liberal state had always rested on a narrow social base, and where the largest single organisation of consent, the Catholic Church, commanded schools, parishes, newspapers, and associations in every town. The Risorgimento, Italy’s unification, had been made by a minority without winning the active consent of the peasant majority, a failure Gramsci analysed as a revolution that remained passive. A theory whose civil society meant the economy could describe Italy’s factories and landholdings; it could not describe the Church’s formative power, the school system’s role in making Italians, or the press’s manufacture of national feeling, except by scattering them across an underdeveloped superstructure. The relocation gathers them into one mapped territory. What looks from the tradition’s viewpoint like a terminological irregularity looks from the prison cell like the naming of the ground on which Italian history had actually been decided.

The relocation also explains the concept’s fertility. Once civil society is the terrain of consent, a series of further Gramscian constructions fall into place around it. Hegemony becomes something with an address: it is organised in civil society’s institutions. The war of position becomes thinkable: a struggle conducted across that terrain, institution by institution. The integral state becomes formulable: a state that includes the terrain within itself is a different object from a government with bayonets. And the analysis of intellectuals, the organisers who staff the terrain, acquires its setting. A single reclassification reorganised an entire research programme, which is why the concept, whatever its inconsistencies, has never been short of users. The critics who charge the relocation with incoherence are therefore obliged to explain the programme’s productivity as well as its tensions, and the strongest of them, as the section on Perry Anderson shows, does exactly that.

The institutions, one by one

Abstract definitions persuade less than inventories, and Gramsci’s civil society becomes concrete when its institutions are walked through slowly, each examined for the consent work it performs. Begin with the school. A school system does far more than transmit skills: it selects the language in which a nation speaks to itself, fixes the canon of its history, sorts children into the tracks a social order requires, and stamps the sorting as merit. Gramsci, who wrote some of his most sustained notes on education, treated the school as the state’s most positive creative instrument, the place where each generation is formed into the citizen an order needs. The pupil does not experience formation as domination, and that is the point. Consent organised through a curriculum arrives as knowledge, and knowledge is hard to refuse.

The church occupies a different scale. In the Italy Gramsci analysed, the Catholic Church was the largest single organisation of civil society, with a parish in every settlement, orders and confraternities threading through lay life, its own press, its own schools, and a doctrine elaborated over centuries into a complete conception of the world. Gramsci’s notes on religion treat the Church as the model of a hegemonic apparatus: it had solved, as he put it in paraphrase, the problem of keeping its intellectuals and its simplest faithful in one world, preventing the split between an educated faith and a popular one that weakened other movements. A political party hoping to organise consent could study the Church’s parish structure the way an engineer studies a bridge.

Is the Catholic Church part of civil society in the notebooks?

Yes, and it is the largest single inhabitant of the terrain in the Italy Gramsci analysed. Parishes, orders, schools, confraternities, and the Catholic press formed a complete organisation of consent, which is why the notebooks study the Church’s structure as the model any hegemonic apparatus must learn from or reckon with.

The press and publishing form the third great institution. A newspaper does not merely report a world; it selects the events that count as real, supplies the vocabulary in which they are judged, and repeats the selection daily until it hardens into common sense. Gramsci had edited newspapers before his arrest and knew the trade from inside. His notes on journalism classify papers by the interests they serve and the publics they form, treating the editorial office as a workshop of consent whose product is a reader’s settled outlook. Publishing houses, encyclopaedias, and popular libraries extend the same work across longer timescales, fixing the reference knowledge through which a society understands itself.

Associations complete the inventory, and their variety is the argument. Professional orders organise the standing and self image of doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Cultural societies, academies, and clubs cultivate the tastes and loyalties of the educated strata. Veterans’ leagues, sports federations, charitable confraternities, and mutual aid societies bind smaller loyalties into larger ones. Trade unions organise workers, and in doing so they school their members in a conception of their place, whether that conception accepts the existing order’s terms or contests them; a union is an institution of civil society even when, especially when, it becomes a school of opposition. Political parties, finally, gather the whole field: a party maintains newspapers, clubs, youth organisations, women’s organisations, and educational circles, and Gramsci’s analysis treats the party as the institution that organises a class’s presence across the entire terrain. The inventory has no natural stopping point short of organised social life itself, which is why one of the objections considered later charges that the concept swallows everything. For now the inventory’s lesson is simpler: consent in a developed order is not a mood. It is an infrastructure, maintained daily by identifiable institutions with addresses, budgets, and staffs.

Private organisms

A phrase in the notebooks unlocks the analysis, and it repays slow reading. Gramsci writes of the superstructures of civil society as the ensemble of organisms commonly called private, and the adverb commonly is the hinge. In liberal legal doctrine, a school run by a religious order, a newspaper owned by a bank, and a cultural association are private bodies, distinct from the public apparatus of the state, protected from it, and in principle none of its business. Gramsci records that appearance and then sets it aside as a description of function. The organisms are private in form. In function they belong to the organisation of the political, because through them a social order secures the consent that makes its coercive apparatus rarely necessary. The distinction between the appearance and the function is the entire critical edge of the concept.

Why does Gramsci describe these institutions as private organisms?

Because that is how liberal law and common usage classify them: bodies outside the state, freely formed, and formally independent of government. Gramsci keeps the label and reverses its implication, arguing that the organisms perform a public and political function, organising the consent on which the order rests.

The reversal has a polemical target. Liberal theory draws a line between state and society and treats everything on the society side as the realm of freedom, so that power is located only where coercion is visible. Gramsci’s analysis replies that the line conceals where most power in a stable order is exercised. The schoolmistress, the editor, the parish priest, and the association secretary do not coerce; they form. Formation is a gentler word than domination and a more effective one, since the formed person experiences the result as his own judgement. By calling the organisms private while analysing them as part of the integral state, Gramsci performs in a single phrase the article’s whole argument: the state, understood functionally, extends far beyond the buildings with flags on them, and a political science that stops at the flag misses the machinery by which orders actually rule. The phrase also carries a warning for any opposition. Institutions that appear private and neutral, a beloved school, a trusted newspaper, are not outside the contest over consent. They are among its principal sites, and treating them as neutral ground mistakes the terrain for a refuge from it.

Political society

Civil society has a twin in the notebooks, and the pair must be defined together because each borrows its meaning from the contrast. Political society is Gramsci’s name for the state in the restricted and familiar sense: the governmental apparatus through which a dominant group exercises coercion, the ministries and bureaucracies that administer, the courts and legal codes that command, the police and prisons and armed forces that punish refusal. Where civil society organises consent, political society enforces conformity from those who do not consent, actively or passively, and the two together exhaust the ways an order secures itself. Gramsci sometimes marks the contrast with a pair of older terms: hegemony for the consensual function, domination or dictatorship for the coercive one, and the mature formula holds that a class exercises both, leading its allies through civil society and dominating its opponents through political society.

What is political society, and how does it differ from civil society?

Political society is the state in the restricted sense: government, courts, police, prisons, and armed forces, the apparatus of direct coercion. Civil society is the ensemble of formative institutions through which consent is organised. One commands under threat of sanction; the other persuades, educates, and forms the outlook that makes command seldom necessary.

The contrast is functional, not architectural, and several complications in the notebooks follow from that. Institutions can straddle the line. A state school system is an arm of government by ownership and an organ of formation by function, and Gramsci’s analysis slides it toward civil society because the work it does there is the work that matters for his question. Parliament presents the reverse difficulty: elected by society, seated in the state, it belongs to both registers at once, a point the critical literature presses hard. And the two functions continually serve one another. Coercion held in reserve makes persuasion more persuasive, since the persuaded know the cost of refusal; consent widely organised makes coercion cheaper, since fewer refusals must be punished. Gramsci’s celebrated shorthand for the combination, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion, is a definition of the integral state in miniature, and it explains why the pair of concepts must be read as a system rather than as two separate spheres competing for territory on a map.

It is worth pausing on the coercive side’s own texture, because political society in Gramsci is not a cartoon of truncheons. Law belongs to it, and law in the notebooks is also an educative and formative instrument, rewarding and punishing in ways that school conduct across the whole population. The state’s repressive apparatus includes the courtroom and the tax code alongside the prison. Even at its most governmental, then, the state in Gramsci reaches toward formation, just as civil society’s formation reaches toward the state. The boundary between the twins is real, since a fine and a sermon are different instruments, but it is a boundary between functions that interpenetrate, and the critics who find the notebooks inconsistent on the boundary have at least located a genuine difficulty in the material.

The integral state

The formula that gathers the whole construction is the integral state, sometimes rendered as the extended state, and it is the concept for which the civil society analysis exists. Gramsci’s reasoning can be reconstructed in steps. A ruling group secures itself by coercion through political society and by consent through civil society. Any adequate concept of the state must therefore cover both machineries, since a definition that names only the coercive apparatus will mistake the smaller half of rule for the whole. The integral state is the name for the whole: state, in the integral sense, equals political society plus civil society. The equation is Gramsci’s own, written in those terms in a note of the sixth notebook, and its algebraic bluntness is deliberate. He is not decorating a metaphor. He is redrawing the boundary of a concept.

The redrawn boundary changes what counts as a political fact. Under the restricted definition, the state acts when a ministry decrees or a court sentences; under the integral definition, the state also acts when a curriculum forms a generation, when a church reconciles peasants to their lot, when a press fixes the limits of respectable opinion. Nothing in the wider definition denies that ministries and courts exist and matter. It denies that they are the state entire. Gramsci is explicit that the distinction between political society and civil society, and their union in the integral state, is methodological: in concrete historical life the two are woven into one fabric, and the separation is an analyst’s device for seeing the weave. That single remark, methodological and not organic, becomes central when the critics arrive, because it offers a defence against the charge of contradiction: the formulas that look incompatible may be instruments for different analytical cuts rather than rival maps of the same object.

A further construction rests on the integral state and shows its reach. Gramsci projects a regulated society, a condition in which the coercive element of the state withers as civil society’s self organisation becomes general, so that political society is progressively absorbed into civil society and government by consent replaces government by command. The projection is often misread as a prediction or a programme; in the notebooks it functions as a limiting concept, the far end of the scale along which actual states are placed. Its analytical use is to remind the reader that the ratio between consent and coercion is a variable, different in different orders and epochs, and that the integral state names the field on which that ratio is set. A state resting almost entirely on coercion, with a thin and gelatinous civil society, and a state resting broadly on organised consent are the same kind of object at different settings, and the comparison between them is the East and West problem, taken up below.

Two models of the state in the notebooks

Running beneath the formulas is a quieter distinction that readers must hold or lose the thread: Gramsci works with two conceptions of the state, and the notebooks pass between them as the argument requires. In the first, the state means the government and its coercive legal apparatus alone, the state of the night watchman in the liberal image, standing guard over a society it does not enter. Call this the restricted state. In the second, the state means the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities by which a ruling class maintains its position, government plus the consent machinery, the integral state of the formula. The restricted conception is not an error Gramsci commits; it is the conception embedded in ordinary usage and in the liberal theory he is criticising, and he adopts it whenever the argument is about that theory or about coercion specifically. The integral conception is his own instrument, deployed whenever the argument is about how orders actually persist.

Confusion between the two conceptions manufactures most of the apparent contradictions in the text. A note saying the state will wither into civil society uses the restricted sense: government, the coercive element, is what withers, absorbed into a self governing society. A note saying the state includes civil society uses the integral sense: the wider complex is what the formula defines. Read each note with the wrong conception in hand and Gramsci contradicts himself every few pages; read each with the right one and a large part of the famous inconsistency dissolves into a distinction the author maintained but did not always signpost. The critics considered below know this perfectly well, and the strongest of them argues that the dissolution is only partial, that real slides remain after every allowance is made. That argument gets its own sections. What the two models establish here is the minimum discipline for following the debate: before charging or acquitting any single passage, a reader must ask which state is on the page.

There is a reason the notebooks leave the signposting incomplete, and it is not carelessness alone. Gramsci wrote in a cell, in a private shorthand, revisiting notes across years, drafting and redrafting passages for a work he never assembled. The prison writings are a laboratory, not a treatise, and their two state conceptions stand in the relation of a working distinction under development. Treating the laboratory as a finished system flattens it; treating it as chaos wastes it. The productive reading, the one the best scholarship attempts, takes the distinction as real and developing, and asks at each passage which analytical cut the argument needs. On that reading the integral state is the destination of the concept’s development, the restricted state its inherited starting point, and civil society the discovery that forced the journey between them.

The party and the army: the notebooks’ analogies for the state

Gramsci often thinks about the state by analogy, and two of his analogies carry so much of the argument that a reader of the civil society notes needs them explicit. The first is the analogy of the political party. In a celebrated line of reasoning in the notebooks, a party performs within civil society the same function that the state performs, on a larger scale, within political society: it selects and trains leading personnel, fuses a scattered constituency into a collective will, elaborates a conception of the world into a programme, and disciplines its own ranks by consent internally generated rather than by external force. The party is, in that phrase’s spirit, a state in embryo inside civil society, and the analogy runs in both directions. Studying how a party leads without commanding illuminates how a state rules when its rule is healthy; studying how a state degenerates into pure command warns a party what it must not become.

The analogy is analytical, not decorative, and it disciplines the concept of civil society in a specific way. If a party can rehearse the state’s functions on the terrain of consent, then the terrain is not a passive space waiting to be filled. It is a field of competing proto states, each organising its own schools, presses, and associations, each building the consent on which a future order would rest. Gramsci’s Italy displayed exactly that competition: a liberal state with a thin organisational presence in much of the peninsula, a Catholic movement with a complete counter society of parishes and associations, and socialist and then fascist movements constructing rival machineries of formation. The party analogy converts civil society from a backdrop into a battlefield of organisations, which is the picture the strategic writings presuppose.

The second analogy is military, and it governs the East and West passage examined below. Gramsci, who had watched an empire collapse in 1917 and a revolutionary wave break against the states of the West in the years after, reasons about orders the way a staff officer reasons about a defended position. A government, in the analogy, is only the forward trench of a defensive system. Behind it stand further lines: the institutions of civil society as earthworks and fortresses, the reserves of consent an order can draw on when its government is shaken. An attacker who storms the forward trench and finds the fortress system intact has won a position, not the war, and will be expelled from the trench in due course. The army analogy extends inward as well: Gramsci treats a modern army itself as an institution that schools and unifies, a state organisation that forms peasants from a hundred provinces into a single national body, and the observation feeds back into civil society, since it shows a formally coercive apparatus doing formative work. Both analogies do the same service. They force the reader to ask, of any order, where its strength is actually posted: in the trench of government, or in the fortress system behind it. That question, asked of Russia in 1917 and of the liberal West in the same years, produces the most famous strategic passage in the notebooks.

The three civil societies

The whole argument of this article can be compressed into the artifact below, which sets the three usages of the term side by side. The three civil societies table is the article’s findable reference: a reader who masters its rows can diagnose most confusions in the literature unaided, because nearly every dispute about civil society is a dispute between people reading from different rows.

Usage	What the term denotes	Where it sits in the social structure	What it is a site of	What political conclusion follows
The Hegelian and Marxian usage	The sphere of needs, work, exchange, and private interest between family and state	In Marx, the base: the material relations whose anatomy political economy studies	The collision of private interests and the generation of classes	Understand the economy and its classes, and the state that expresses them becomes intelligible
The Gramscian usage	The ensemble of so called private institutions through which consent is organised	The superstructure, and one half of the integral state	The organisation and contestation of hegemony	Orders persist through formed consent, so the terrain of formation is where their strength must be measured
The liberal usage that developed after 1989	The associational sector between state and market: voluntary bodies, charities, and civic groups	Outside and against the state, as society’s self organisation	Civic virtue, trust, and democratic participation	A dense associational life is itself a democratic good and a check on state power

Three lessons fall out of the comparison. The first is that the rows disagree about location before they disagree about anything else: the same term is placed in the base, in the superstructure, and outside the state altogether, so any argument that does not fix its row first will pass its opponents by. The second lesson concerns value. In the Marxian row the sphere is neither celebrated nor mourned; it is dissected. In the liberal row the sector is celebrated as intrinsically democratic. In the Gramscian row the terrain is neutral as ground and contested as to who holds it: civil society is where an existing order’s consent is manufactured, and equally where a rival consent could be built, so its valence depends entirely on the balance of organisation upon it. The third lesson is about the state. Only the Gramscian row redraws the state’s boundary, and it redraws it precisely because of the relocation: once the consent machinery is gathered into one concept, the question of whether that machinery stands inside or outside the state becomes unavoidable, and the integral state is Gramsci’s answer.

A student meeting the term in three literatures at once, in a political science syllabus, a Marxist seminar, and a development report, is not facing three shades of one idea. The student is facing three ideas that share a label by historical accident of transmission, each internally coherent, each generating its own research programme. The discipline this article recommends is unglamorous and complete: name the row before using the word. Most published confusion about civil society evaporates under that single discipline, and what remains is genuine disagreement, which can then be argued on its merits.

East and West: a claim about where power sits

The passage in which the whole analysis turns strategic occurs in the notes on the state and civil society that Gramsci drafted and redrafted in the early nineteen thirties, and it must be read as what it is: a claim about the location of power in different state forms. In the East, Gramsci writes, the state was everything and civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the West, between state and civil society there stood a proper relation, and when the state trembled, the sturdy structure of civil society was revealed at once: the state was only an outer ditch, behind which stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. The contrast is drawn from the experience of 1917 and its aftermath. In Russia, a state that was everything could be felled as a whole, because behind the Tsarist government there was no dense fabric of consent organising institutions to absorb the shock. In the parliamentary West, revolutionary crises shook governments and the order survived, because the fortress system of parties, presses, churches, schools, and associations held the population’s consent while the trench of government was repaired or relieved.

What does the East and West passage claim about the density of civil society?

It claims that civil society’s density is a variable on which the strength of an order depends. Where the fabric of consent organising institutions is thin and gelatinous, the state carries the whole order and falls with it; where the fabric is dense, the order survives the fall of governments.

Read slowly, the passage is making a measurement claim before it is making a strategic one. It says that two states with similar governments can differ enormously in real strength, because the variable that decides their fate, the density and organisation of civil society, does not appear in any constitutional description. A census of ministries, armies, and parties in parliament would rate the Russia of 1917 and the France of the same year as comparable orders. Gramsci’s passage rates them as opposites: one a state balanced on a single point, the other a state distributed through a thousand institutions. The passage thereby converts civil society from a classificatory label into an explanatory variable, the thing whose variation explains why similar crises end in collapse in one country and in restoration in another. That conversion is the concept’s deepest claim on a reader’s attention, and it survives even the criticisms of the concept’s consistency, since a variable can be real and measurable in its effects while its definition remains contested at the margins.

The passage also disciplines the party and army analogies into a single instrument. The party analogy identified the competing machineries on the terrain; the military analogy supplies the geometry, trench and fortress system; the East and West contrast supplies the comparative finding, that the geometry differs by country and epoch. Together they form Gramsci’s answer to the puzzle that had defeated the revolutionary movements of his generation in the West: the orders there did not lack crises, armies, or determined opponents. They possessed reserves of consent, organised in advance by institutions the movements had not mapped, and the reserves decided the outcome when the crises came. Whether one shares Gramsci’s politics or not, the passage poses a question any analyst of any order must answer: if this government fell tomorrow, what exactly would hold the society together, and whose institutions would do the holding? Civil society is Gramsci’s name for the answer’s location.

Trenches, fortresses, and the work of reconnaissance

The military vocabulary is sometimes treated as ornament, a prisoner’s flourish, and that treatment wastes the analysis. The fortress system metaphor performs a specific task: it explains why the conquest of government, in a dense civil society, does not transfer the order’s real strength to the conqueror. A government can be seized in a night. A school system, a church, a press network, and the habits of deference they sustain cannot be seized at all; they can only be displaced gradually, by rival institutions doing the same formative work better, or be slowly reformed from within. The temporal structure of politics changes with the metaphor. Trench warfare is slow, positional, a matter of sapping and counter sapping, and Gramsci’s strategic category of the war of position, whose full treatment belongs to the companion article on the two wars, is the political translation of that temporality: the long contest for the institutions of civil society.

Reconnaissance is the metaphor’s quieter gift. A staff officer approaching a fortress system first maps it: which institutions command the approaches, which are strongly held, which are neglected outworks ripe for investment. Gramsci’s method in the notebooks is reconnaissance of exactly that kind, repeated across dozens of studies: the Catholic Church’s organisational depth, the school system’s tracking, the press’s ownership and readership, the Southern intellectuals who mediate between peasant and state, the rotary clubs and freemasons and professional orders of the bourgeois world. Each study asks the same questions of an institution. Whose consent does it organise? How deeply does it reach into the population? What conception of the world does it deposit? An analyst who has answered those questions for the major institutions of a society possesses something no list of ministries can give: a map of where the order’s strength actually sits, and of the points where it is thinnest. The concept of civil society earns its place in political analysis by making that map drawable.

There is a reciprocal warning in the metaphor, aimed at defenders of an order rather than its challengers. A fortress system neglected becomes a liability: institutions that once organised consent for an order can organise it against the order, or cease to organise it at all, leaving the trench of government exposed. Gramsci’s notes on crises of authority describe precisely that condition, in which the ruling class has lost its consensus and retains only its coercive apparatus, so that the state stands revealed as an outer ditch with nothing behind it. The diagnosis cuts across allegiances. Any analyst, of any persuasion, who watches a government’s commands lose their echo in the schools, pulpits, and editorial offices of its society is watching the fortress system change hands or fall into ruin, and Gramsci’s vocabulary names the process with an economy few rivals match.

Base and superstructure after the relocation

The relocation rearranges Gramsci’s inheritance from Marx, and this section states the rearrangement exactly, since it is the hinge on which the critics’ case turns. The model Gramsci received, set out in the companion article on the base and superstructure model, distinguishes the economic structure of society, the relations of production, from the legal, political, and ideological superstructures that rise upon it and within which men become conscious of their conflicts. Marx placed civil society in the structure, as the material intercourse the superstructures express. Gramsci places civil society among the superstructures, as one of the levels on which hegemony is exercised, and the notebooks offer the architectural image directly: the superstructures appear as two great floors, civil society below and political society above, with the structure as the foundation beneath both. The image is worth dwelling on, because it shows the relocation is not a slip of the pen. A thinker does not assign a term a floor in a considered architectural sketch by accident.

Why is the superstructure not a passive reflection in this account?

Because Gramsci treats the superstructures as the terrain on which social groups become conscious of their position and fight their conflicts out. Ideas, institutions, and conceptions of the world have their own density and effects there; they organise the consent and the resistance through which structural pressures are lived and answered.

The floors image carries a second teaching. Levels in Gramsci interact; the traffic between them runs in both directions, and the concept he uses for a structure and its superstructures in working combination is the historical bloc. Within a historical bloc, the economic structure sets the limits and the pressures, while the superstructures organise how those pressures are understood, endorsed, or resisted. Relocating civil society to the superstructure therefore does not free it from the economy. It specifies the mediation: between production and politics stands the organised formation of consent, and that formation has its own institutions, personnel, and inertia. A change in the structure that finds no echo in civil society’s institutions remains inarticulate; a formation of consent detached from structural support decays into mere rhetoric. The relocation, on the most sympathetic reading, is Gramsci’s device for making mediation analysable, giving the middle term of historical materialism a name, an address, and a staff list.

That sympathetic reading must now face its rivals, because the same textual facts support a harsher verdict. If civil society sits in the superstructure, and the superstructure organises the consent that holds orders together, has the base been quietly demoted to a background condition while politics and ideology take over the explanation of history? The Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio argued in substance that it had, and that Gramsci thereby inverted Marx. Perry Anderson argued that the textual basis for any single answer is unstable, because the notebooks oscillate. Their cases follow in the next sections, stated as strongly as their authors stated them, because a concept pillar that cannot survive its critics at full strength is worth nothing.

Determination without a puppet theatre

Before the critics speak, one distinction needs a section of its own, since both the defence and the prosecution appeal to it: the distinction between determination and mechanical causation. Gramsci inherited from Marx the proposition that the economic structure conditions social life, and he also inherited, and sharpened, Marx’s contempt for the vulgar version of that proposition in which politics and ideas are puppets jerked by economic strings. His notebooks insist that superstructural phenomena have their own histories, that ideologies organise masses and constitute the terrain on which men move and acquire consciousness, and that a mechanical determinism which treats them as reflections is a primitive and childish degeneration of the theory. On this point the relocation of civil society is of a piece with his general method: consent organised through institutions is a real causal power in history, and naming its location in the superstructure registers that power rather than apologising for it.

The question the critics press is not whether Gramsci grants the superstructure efficacy; everyone agrees he does. The question is what remains of the base’s primacy once the grant is made, and whether the notebooks keep the two commitments, structural primacy and superstructural efficacy, in a stable relation. Gramsci’s own answer, where he gives one, runs through the concept of relations of force: an analysis begins from the objective relations of production, which set what is possible, and proceeds through the political and military relations that decide what actually occurs. Structure on that account determines the field and the stakes; organisation, the work of civil society and political society, determines the result within the field. Defenders of the notebooks rest the case for coherence there. Prosecutors reply that the metaphor of a field whose results are decided elsewhere concedes the substance: a primacy that never decides an outcome is a primacy in name only. The dispute is genuine, it is unresolved in the scholarship, and the sections on Bobbio and Anderson give each side its strongest form. A reader who can state both sides owns the concept more honestly than a reader who has been spared either.

Anderson’s antinomies

The most important critical essay written about Gramsci is Perry Anderson’s study of the notebooks’ inconsistencies, published in New Left Review in 1976 under the title The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. Anderson’s method is immanent and textual: he takes the notebooks’ own formulations of the state and civil society, arrays them, and shows that they do not sit still. Across the notebooks, he argues, at least three incompatible models of the relation between state and civil society succeed and displace one another, and Gramsci never resolves the oscillation. The charge matters beyond pedantry. On the model a reader extracts depends whether hegemony is exercised inside or outside the state, whether civil society is the state’s opposite or its component, and therefore what the whole theory of politics built on the concepts can mean.

The first model in Anderson’s array sets state and civil society in contrast. On this model, the two terms divide the functions of rule between them: the state coerces, civil society consents; the state is the apparatus of domination, civil society the sphere of hegemony; and the boundary between them is the boundary between force and agreement. Many of the notebooks’ most quoted formulations belong to this model, and it is the one popular usage has absorbed. The second model reverses the geometry by inclusion: the state expands to encompass civil society within itself, which is the integral state of the formula, so that civil society is no longer the state’s opposite but its inner chamber, and hegemony becomes a function the state performs through institutions it contains. The third model, which Anderson treats as the most destabilising, identifies state and civil society with one another in formulations where the distinction collapses altogether, as when the state is said to be destined to absorb civil society in the regulated society, or where governmental and private initiatives interpenetrate so thoroughly that assigning any institution to one side becomes arbitrary. Anderson’s point is that these are not three camera angles on one object. They assign incompatible boundaries, and a theory of the state cannot hold all three without equivocation.

What does Anderson mean by Gramsci’s three models of the state?

He means that the notebooks successively contrast the state with civil society, enlarge the state to encompass civil society, and at points identify the two, without settling which relation holds. Since each model draws the state’s boundary differently, the theory’s central terms shift meaning as the models rotate.

Anderson is no debunker, and the essay’s force comes from its sympathy. He explains the oscillation historically, as the scar tissue of two pressures. One pressure was the prison itself: censorship forced Gramsci into coded and displaced formulations, and a writer who must call his own doctrine the philosophy of praxis and his party’s founder by circumlocution cannot be expected to stabilise a terminology of the state. The other pressure was strategic and real: Gramsci was trying to think the difference between the Russian experience and the Western one with concepts inherited from a tradition that had never faced the Western problem, and the oscillation between models registers a mind testing which construction bears the weight. Anderson’s verdict, however, is that registering the difficulty is not solving it. The antinomies stand in the text, later interpreters choose among the models while presenting their choice as Gramsci’s own, and the concept of civil society in particular carries the instability into every subsequent use. Anyone who cites Gramsci’s civil society as a settled instrument, Anderson’s essay implies, has not read the notebooks closely enough.

For this article’s purposes, the essay sets the examination standard. The relocation claim survives Anderson intact: whatever the state and civil society’s boundary does, the notebooks consistently place civil society among the superstructures and consistently fill it with consent organising institutions, and neither Bobbio nor Anderson disputes that placement. What Anderson destabilises is the relational geometry, the account of how the relocated civil society stands to the state. A concept pillar owes its readers that distinction plainly: the address of civil society in Gramsci’s system is settled, the floor of the building, as the architectural image shows; the property lines between the floors’ occupants are where the fighting is.

Aspects or contradictions: the replies to Anderson

The defence of the notebooks against the antinomies charge proceeds on three lines, and each concedes something, which is the mark of its seriousness. The first line is Gramsci’s own remark, quoted earlier, that the distinction between political society and civil society is methodological and not organic: a distinction drawn for analysis, as a chemist distinguishes an element that in nature exists only in compounds. On this line, the models Anderson arrays are not rival maps but successive analytical cuts, each isolating a relation the argument of the moment requires. The contrast model isolates function, consent against coercion. The inclusion model isolates scope, the whole machinery of rule. The identification passages register the empirical interpenetration that the methodological distinction itself predicts. A chemist is not inconsistent for speaking of hydrogen and then of water.

The second line of defence is developmental. The notebooks are drafts written over six years, and their author revised as he went, copying earlier notes into later thematic notebooks and adjusting them as he copied. What Anderson reads as simultaneous contradiction, the defence reads as a sequence: early formulations retain the inherited contrast between state and society, later ones work toward the integral state as the distinction’s destination, and the identification passages are exploratory overshoots on the way. The critical edition of the notebooks, published in 1975 under Valentino Gerratana’s editorship, made such developmental readings possible by restoring the order and dating of the notes, and Anderson, whose essay appeared the following year with the critical edition in hand, knew the sequence argument and declined to let it dissolve the problem, since Gramsci recopied old formulations into late notebooks without correction.

The third line is functional: the sliding Anderson documents, particularly around institutions like parliament and the state school that sit on the boundary, reflects a real sliding in the object itself. Modern states do place formation inside government and coercion inside nominally private relations; a terminology that assigned every institution a fixed side would be false to the material, and Gramsci’s functional criterion, classify by the work done in the case at hand, generates boundary mobility as a feature. The defence does not claim the text is tidy. It claims the untidiness is a mixture of analytical method, unfinished development, and fidelity to a slippery object, and that the residue of true equivocation, while real, is smaller than the antinomies essay suggests. The honest summary for a student is this: the objection has not been answered away, the replies reduce its scope, and anyone who works with the concept should know which model of the three is in play in any passage they cite, including passages of this article.

Bobbio and the primacy of the superstructures

A decade before Anderson, the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio had stated a different and in some ways deeper objection, in the essay on Gramsci and the conception of civil society that he delivered at the Cagliari conference on Gramsci in 1967 and published in the conference proceedings in 1969. Bobbio’s argument is architectural. In Marx, he observes, civil society belongs to the structure: it is the realm of material needs and economic relations, and its position explains why Marxism grants primacy to the economic. In Gramsci, civil society belongs to the superstructure, and not to a subordinate corner of it: it is the level at which ideology is organised and hegemony exercised, the active and positive moment of historical development. The relocation, Bobbio concludes, is not a detail. It reverses the polarity of the system: where Marx’s civil society is the negative realm of egoistic need that politics must discipline, Gramsci’s is the creative realm where collective wills are formed, and the primacy in Gramsci’s theory belongs in consequence to the superstructures and to the ideological moment within them.

Bobbio’s essay matters for this article because it confirms the relocation from the side of the prosecution. Bobbio and the present article agree on the fact: Gramsci moved civil society from base to superstructure, and the move is the key to his system. They differ on the evaluation. For Bobbio, writing as a liberal socialist philosopher with his own long engagement with Marxism, the move marks Gramsci’s decisive departure from Marx, a departure he anatomises with respect but does not retract: a theory in which the decisive level is ideological has changed its answer to the question of what moves history. Readers who present Gramsci as simply continuing Marx must answer Bobbio, and the answers on record are instructive. One answer holds that primacy in Gramsci is a matter of emphasis within a reciprocal system, since the historical bloc binds structure and superstructure into one analysed whole. Another holds that Bobbio overstated the tidiness of Marx’s own placement, since Marx’s civil society was never purely economic in the historical writings. A third concedes Bobbio’s point and embraces it, treating Gramsci as a theorist who corrected an economistic inheritance from within the tradition.

Bobbio himself refined the position in later years, acknowledging the notebooks’ counter passages and the complexity of the historical bloc, and his essay’s standing in the scholarship is that of a classic statement rather than a settled verdict. Its permanent service is to have fixed the relocation as the unavoidable question. After Bobbio, no account of Gramsci’s civil society can proceed as though the term’s address were a detail, and no account of Gramsci’s Marxism can avoid saying what the new address does to the old architecture. This article’s namable claim, the relocation, is in that sense Bobbio’s discovery formulated as a teaching instrument, and the claim’s critical edge, that two incompatible definitions share one name, is the form the discovery takes when it is carried out of the journals and into the hands of readers who meet the term in the wild.

The liberal usage that followed the Cold War

The third row of the table requires a section of its own, written with deliberate care, because the neutrality this article owes its readers includes presenting the liberal usage of civil society as what it is: a serious body of political theory with its own evidence and its own problems, not a corruption of Gramsci to be sneered at. The usage developed after 1989, although its roots run back into the dissident movements of Eastern Europe in the preceding decades, where writers and activists associated with movements such as Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia made civil society the name for society’s self organisation outside and against a party state that claimed to embody it. In that setting the term did precise work: it marked out the space of independent associations, samizdat publications, flying universities, and parallel institutions through which a society could recover a public life the state had monopolised.

After the revolutions of 1989 the usage generalised. Political scientists such as John Keane theorised civil society as the sphere of social institutions and associations standing between the individual and the state; Ernest Gellner placed it at the centre of his account of the conditions of liberty, defining it by the presence of institutions strong enough to counterbalance the state yet not so strong as to smother the individual; Robert Putnam’s studies of Italian regional government and of American associational decline gave the usage an empirical programme, measuring stocks of civic engagement and connecting them to the performance of democratic institutions. Development agencies then carried the term worldwide, funding non-governmental organisations as builders of civil society in states whose own institutions were weak. In each variant, the core meaning holds steady: civil society is the associational sector between state and market, its density is a democratic good, and its relation to the state is one of external check and balance.

Two observations keep the comparison honest. First, the liberal usage is closer to Hegel than to either Marx or Gramsci: Hegel’s middle sphere of organised particularity, educated toward the universal by its corporations, is the ancestor the liberal theorists are, sometimes knowingly, recovering. Second, the liberal usage and Gramsci’s usage share one conviction against the purely economic reading of society: both insist that the institutions between the individual and the state are politically decisive, that what happens in associations and schools and media determines what states can do. They divide on the diagnosis of the terrain’s occupancy. For the liberal usage, the sector stands outside power and checks it. For Gramsci, the sector is saturated with power, is one of the places power chiefly lives, and checks the state only when a rival organisation of consent has been built within it. A Gramscian reading a development report and a liberal reading the notebooks are not disagreeing about whether associations matter. They are disagreeing about what associations are, and the disagreement is exactly the one the table exists to display.

The voluntary sector misreading

With the liberal usage fairly stated, the misreading it generates when imported into Gramsci can be corrected without disparagement. The misreading says: Gramsci’s civil society is the voluntary sector, the world of charities and non-governmental organisations, and Gramsci is therefore a theorist of the third sector avant la lettre. The error is a scope error in both directions. It is too narrow, because Gramsci’s terrain includes institutions that are neither voluntary nor charitable nor non-governmental in any useful sense: a state school system, a confessional press empire, a party’s disciplined apparatus, a professional order with statutory powers. And it is too innocent, because the voluntary framing imports the liberal row’s valuation, associations as a democratic good in themselves, into a theory for which associations are instruments whose valence depends on the consent they organise. A fascist veterans’ league and a mutual aid society are equally inhabitants of Gramsci’s civil society; the concept classifies them together by function and leaves their evaluation to the analysis of what each forms in its members.

The correction has practical value for readers who meet Gramsci in policy contexts, where the importation happens constantly. When a policy document praises civil society and means funded non-governmental organisations, it is speaking the liberal row’s language, and no Gramscian conclusion follows from it. When a commentator calls Gramsci the theorist of civil society against the state, the importation has run in the other direction, dressing the liberal row’s external check in the Gramscian row’s vocabulary. Both usages are legitimate in their own rows. The misreading consists in crossing the rows without noticing, and it is the commonest single error in the popular literature on Gramsci, repeated in textbooks and journalism alike. The discipline of naming the row, unglamorous as it is, prevents the whole class of errors at a stroke, which is why this article has made the three civil societies its artifact and its refrain.

Unions and parties on the terrain

Two classes of institution test the definition’s edges, and working through them shows the functional criterion in action. Trade unions first. A union is an economic organisation by origin: it bargains over wages and conditions inside the structure’s own territory. Yet Gramsci places unions within civil society’s field of action, and the placement follows his criterion exactly. A union does not merely sell labour at a better price; it forms its members’ conception of their situation, educates them in solidarity or in sectional caution, produces leaders and newspapers and habits of association, and thereby organises consent or its withdrawal on a mass scale. By function it is a formative institution with an economic instrument in its hands, and Gramsci’s notes treat union organisation as one of the decisive schools in which a class learns to think of itself as a collective actor. The same note explains his criticism of syndicalism: a union movement that refuses to move beyond the economic corporate stage remains, in his vocabulary, inside the first moment of class formation, however militant its strikes.

Are trade unions part of civil society for Gramsci?

Yes, by function rather than by legal form. A union bargains in the economy, but it also forms its members’ conceptions, educates leaders, publishes newspapers, and organises loyalty or dissent, and it is that formative work which places union organisation on the terrain of civil society in the notebooks.

Political parties present the harder case, because a party in government plainly belongs to political society while the same party in its branches, clubs, and press plainly works in civil society. Gramsci’s treatment dissolves the puzzle by refusing to classify the institution once and for all. A party is an organisation of civil society that aims at the state, rehearses the state’s functions within the terrain of consent, and, on taking power, fuses with political society while continuing, if it is healthy in Gramsci’s demanding sense, to organise consent rather than merely command obedience. The party analogy for the state, set out earlier, is the same thought viewed from the other end. For the reader’s discipline, the parties case teaches the general rule of the notebooks’ classification: ask what work the institution is doing in the passage under discussion, formative or coercive, and classify by the answer, expecting large organisations to appear on both sides of the line in different operations. The rule is untidy and the object is untidy, and Anderson’s critique can be reread at this point as the price of the untidiness, charged to the theory’s account.

Do political parties sit inside civil society or inside the state?

In the notebooks, both, according to the work being done. As organisations of branches, presses, clubs, and schools, parties operate within civil society and rehearse there the unifying functions of a state; in government they belong to political society, and a ruling party commonly works on both terrains at once.

Consent, and coercion behind it

The pair of functions that civil society and political society divide between them, consent and coercion, deserves a section on the mechanics of consent itself, because the word is easy to nod at and hard to specify. Consent in Gramsci is not applause. It is the population’s settled acceptance of an order’s framework as the horizon within which life is lived: the acceptance that shows itself when people pursue their private projects without questioning the arrangements those projects presuppose, when they describe the order’s categories as simple descriptions of reality, when opposition itself borrows the order’s vocabulary. Such acceptance is manufactured, although manufacture is too industrial a word for processes as dispersed as a school curriculum, a sermon cycle, a newspaper’s habits of selection, and a profession’s standards of respectability. Gramsci’s term for the deposited result is common sense: the disjointed, often contradictory philosophy of the person in the street, absorbed from the institutions of civil society the way a language is absorbed, without a decision ever being taken.

What work does the notion of consent perform in the argument?

It explains persistence. Coercion can crush a revolt, but it cannot by itself explain why revolt is rare and why millions comply daily with arrangements that do not serve them. Consent names the manufactured acceptance, organised through institutions, that carries the everyday burden of an order’s stability.

Coercion stands behind consent in a double sense. It stands behind it in reserve, as the sanction that awaits the withdrawal of consent, so that persuasion is never as innocent as it feels; the persuaded know, at some level, what refusal costs. And it stands behind it in formation, because the coercive apparatus itself, law above all, educates: legal codes teach a population what may be owned, said, and assembled, and the lessons are absorbed as morality long after the sanctions are forgotten. Gramsci’s formula of hegemony protected by the armour of coercion is often quoted as a slogan of the contrast model, consent here and force there. Read through the mechanics, it is better understood as a claim about layering: consent is the outer, everyday layer of rule, coercion the inner layer that guarantees it, and civil society and political society are the respective addresses of the two layers. The layers are distinguishable in analysis and inseparable in operation, which is the methodological distinction doing its work once more.

One consequence follows for any attempt to use the concept. If consent is manufactured through institutions, then consent can be counter manufactured, and the terrain of civil society is a terrain of possible contest rather than a machinery with a fixed owner. Gramsci’s theory is sometimes read as a counsel of despair, the discovery that domination is total because it is everywhere. The notebooks read differently in full: the institutions of civil society are contradictory, their messages compete, common sense contains a healthy nucleus Gramsci calls good sense, and the very density that protects an order gives its challengers a thousand points of engagement. The terrain’s owner is whoever organises it best, and organisation is a practice, not a fate.

The ethical state and the regulated society

Two further constructions complete the architecture and repay attention because they show Gramsci’s state concepts at their most ambitious. The first is the ethical state. Against the liberal night watchman ideal, in which the state guards contracts and leaves the formation of citizens to private life, Gramsci observes that every state is ethical in function: every state tends to raise the population to the cultural and moral level its order requires, through schools, law, and the sponsorship of some institutions over others. A state that professes neutrality among conceptions of the world is on this account misdescribing itself, since its school system and legal code form citizens for one conception in practice. The ethical state is not a proposal for more state tutelage; it is an unmasking of the tutelage every state already performs, and it belongs to the civil society analysis because the instruments of that formation are civil society’s institutions, whether publicly owned or privately badged.

What does the ethical state add to the picture?

It adds the observation that formation is a function no state escapes. Every state educates its population toward the level its order requires, through schools and law, so professed neutrality among conceptions of the world is a self misdescription; the ethical state names the formative work states do in any case.

The second construction is the regulated society, introduced earlier as the integral state’s far horizon. Gramsci projects a condition in which the distinction between rulers and ruled withers: political society, the coercive apparatus, is progressively reabsorbed into civil society as self organisation becomes universal, and the state’s governmental shell thins toward a night watchman, this time in earnest, because the formative work it monopolised has been socialised. The projection completes the conceptual circle of the notebooks in a way that also explains some of Anderson’s third model, the identification passages: if the destination of the process is the absorption of political society into civil society, then formulations in which the two interpenetrate are anticipations of the destination rather than confusions of the map. The defence is elegant, and the prosecution’s reply is on record: a destination asserted in scattered notes cannot stabilise a terminology used inconsistently across six years of drafting. The reader is left, as so often with the notebooks, holding a construction of genuine power and unfinished joints, which is the honest condition of the material.

The strongest objection, stated fairly

This article has presented the relocation as a discovery and the apparatus built on it as a research programme of proven fertility. The objection that stands against the whole construction must now be stated at its full strength, in a form its ablest proponents would recognise. The objection has three layers, and they compound.

The first layer is textual, and it is Anderson’s. A theory’s central terms must hold their meanings steady across its arguments, and the notebooks’ two central terms do not: the state is contrasted with civil society, enlarged to contain it, and intermittently identified with it, while civil society itself oscillates between the superstructure’s lower floor and a zone that includes economic organisation. An instrument whose calibrations change between measurements is not an instrument, and the vast secondary literature’s habit of each school canonising one model and footnoting the others is evidence that the instability is in the text and not in its readers.

The second layer is Bobbio’s, pressed to its limit. Relocating civil society to the superstructure and making it the decisive level of history inverts the explanatory direction of historical materialism while retaining its vocabulary. If what decides the fate of orders is the organisation of consent in ideological institutions, then the economic structure has been retained as a ceremonial foundation, acknowledged in prefaces and bypassed in analyses. Gramsci’s Marxism, on this charge, is a halfway house: it has abandoned determination in substance while declining to admit the abandonment, and its celebrated concepts are the architecture of that equivocation.

The third layer is methodological, and it is the deepest. A concept that can absorb every institution, classify by function case by case, and slide its boundaries as the argument requires risks explaining everything and therefore nothing. If a school is civil society when it forms and the state when it compels, if a party is on both terrains, if parliament straddles, then no observation could ever count against the scheme, and a scheme nothing could falsify is a vocabulary, not a theory. The critics who press this layer are not hostile to Gramsci’s insights; they are asking whether the insights need the apparatus, or whether the apparatus survives on the insights’ credit.

The objection answered, and the residue conceded

The defence begins where the article began, with the record of use. Vocabularies that merely redescribe do not generate findings, and the civil society apparatus has generated them across a century of scholarship: the analysis of consent’s institutional manufacture, the comparative measure of orders by their civil density, the explanation of Western orders’ survival of their crises, the mapping of parties and churches as proto states. A scheme that repeatedly tells researchers where to look and what will be found there is doing theoretical work, whatever its joints. The methodological defence adds that functional classification is the normal condition of social concepts: class, the state itself, and ideology all require case by case judgement at their edges, and a demand for mechanical boundaries would abolish social theory rather than purify it. Falsifiability, applied to a mapping instrument, takes the form of failed maps, and Gramsci’s map has been corrected in detail by historians often enough to prove it can fail, which is what a working instrument does.

To Bobbio’s layer, the defence answers with the historical bloc and the relations of force: structure in Gramsci is neither ceremonial nor bypassed, but figures in every serious analysis as the relations of production whose development sets the agenda the superstructures answer. The relocation changes where consent is organised; it does not change what consent must ultimately be organised around, which is a population’s material life. Whether that answer restores determination or merely renames its absence is, as the earlier section conceded, a live dispute, and the defence’s honest form is to say that Gramsci transformed the base and superstructure relation from a one way derivation into a reciprocal analysis, and that readers must decide whether the transformation is the theory’s maturation or its dissolution.

The residue, then, is this. Anderson’s textual point stands in reduced form: the notebooks do not stabilise the state and civil society relation, and citation of Gramsci on the point must always name its model. Bobbio’s question stands as a question: the primacy of the ideological in Gramsci is real, and its compatibility with historical materialism is a matter of judgement, not demonstration. The methodological worry stands as a discipline: the concept must be used to map, with the risk of being wrong about particular institutions, and never as an incantation that dissolves particulars into functions. A concept that survives its objections in this chastened form is worth more than a concept protected from them, and the chastening is the condition on which this article commends Gramsci’s civil society to its readers.

A parallel account: Althusser’s apparatuses

No account of Gramsci’s civil society is complete without the parallel construction that Louis Althusser built a generation later, because the two theories divide the same territory and are constantly confused. Althusser’s essay on ideology and ideological state apparatuses distinguishes the repressive state apparatus, government, police, courts, army, from a plurality of ideological state apparatuses: churches, schools, families, law, parties, unions, media, and culture. The overlap with Gramsci’s inventory is nearly total, and it is not accidental: the French philosopher was working the same seam, asking how an order reproduces the submission of its population to its rules. The school, both theorists agree, is the dominant formative institution of the modern order, and both refuse the liberal classification of these bodies as private in any sense that removes them from the analysis of power.

The differences are as instructive as the overlap, and the full comparison belongs to this series’ dedicated studies of Gramsci against Althusser on ideology and of Althusser’s ideology and the state apparatuses; three contrasts mark the boundary here. First, location: Althusser places his ideological apparatuses unambiguously inside the state, as its apparatuses, while Gramsci’s civil society stands in the contested relation to the state that Anderson anatomised, inside the integral state and outside the restricted one. Second, function: Althusser’s apparatuses reproduce the relations of production, a single systemic task, while Gramsci’s institutions organise hegemony, a task whose outcome is contestable and historically variable. Third, atmosphere: Althusser’s account is famously airless, its subjects interpellated by a machinery without a strategist, while Gramsci’s terrain is crowded with strategists, parties, churches, and intellectuals fighting over the machinery’s settings. A reader deciding between the two theories is deciding, in large part, whether the organisation of consent is a contest or a function, and the civil society concept is Gramsci’s name for the contest version.

The integral state among theories of the state

The integral state also needs placing within the wider Marxist theory of the state, whose map the companion guide to the Marxist theory of the state lays out in full. The classical positions in that theory distribute themselves along a question: how does the state serve the order’s dominant class? Instrumentalist answers point to personnel and pressure, the social composition of governments and the lobbying of the powerful. Structuralist answers point to the state’s form, arguing that the institutions of a capitalist state secure the order whoever staffs them. Gramsci’s integral state predates the famous versions of that debate and cuts across it, because its central claim is not about the government’s wiring but about the state’s extent. By enlarging the state to include the consent machinery, Gramsci relocates the question itself: the service a state renders an order is performed mostly outside the buildings where instrumentalists look for it, in schools and presses and parishes, and a theory of the state that maps only the government has mapped the smaller part of its object.

The enlargement also explains a feature of Gramsci’s reception among political scientists who are not Marxists at all. Students of state formation, of education systems, of established churches and of media ownership repeatedly find the integral state useful because it licenses attention to the formative state, the state as teacher and curator of common sense, which research programmes organised around coercion and extraction tend to miss. The concept travels because the phenomenon is real: modern states are in the formation business up to their necks, whatever their constitutions profess. Gramsci’s contribution was to make that business part of the definition of the state rather than an activity adjacent to it, and the integral state is the name of the redefinition.

Democracy read through the terrain

The political consequences of the relocation run through the question of democracy, and they are drawn out in the companion article on Marxism and the critique of democracy; the civil society angle can be stated here in its sharpest form. Parliamentary democracy, read through Gramsci’s categories, is a regime in which the contest for hegemony is institutionalised on the terrain of civil society: parties compete to organise consent through presses, associations, and programmes, and the state’s coercive apparatus stands behind the contest as its guarantor rather than its participant. The reading explains both the strength and the recurring disappointment of democratic orders in Gramscian analysis. Their strength is the depth of consent a genuine contest manufactures. Their disappointment, for those who expected elections to transfer social power, is that the fortress system of civil society, the schools and presses and professional orders whose formation long predates any parliament, is not on the ballot, and changes hands, if at all, on a timescale elections do not measure.

Parliament itself sits in Gramsci’s scheme at the most interesting coordinate of the whole map: it is the institution where civil society and political society interlock, chosen by the one and seated in the other, and Anderson made much of its ambiguous placement as evidence for the antinomies. The functional reading offered in this article treats the ambiguity as information. A parliament is the conversion point between consent and command, the chamber where organised opinion becomes binding law, and a theory that assigns it wholly to either side would falsify its operation. Democracies differ, among other ways, in how that conversion point is insulated from or exposed to the terrain behind it, and the categories of civil and political society give the analyst the coordinates to describe the difference. That is the concept earning its keep on the most familiar institution of modern politics.

Why hegemony needs an address

Civil society and hegemony are the twin concepts of the Gramsci cluster, and although the full exposition of hegemony belongs to the companion article on hegemony as Gramsci’s complete guide to the concept, the civil society side of the relation needs one section here, because it answers a question the definition raises: why must consent have institutions at all? Could an order’s worldview not float freely, as the climate of an age, absorbed from the air? Gramsci’s answer is built into his materialism. Ideas become a material force when they are organised, and organisation means institutions with personnel, routines, and budgets. A conception of the world that nobody teaches, prints, preaches, or examines is a private opinion; the same conception installed in a curriculum, a catechism, and a leader page is hegemony in working order. Civil society is the name for the installation.

The point distinguishes Gramsci from every theory of ideology as mere falsehood in the air. A falsehood can be refuted; an institution must be rivalled. This is why the notebooks spend so little time unmasking beliefs and so much time mapping the bodies that carry them: the church with its seminaries and orders, the school system with its tracks, the party with its press and circles, the professional orders with their journals and codes. Each body selects the intellectuals who elaborate the conception, trains them, gives them authority, and delivers their product to a defined public in a daily rhythm. Consent organised at that level of concreteness is not vulnerable to a better argument arriving from outside. It is vulnerable only to a better organisation, which is why the strategic writings treat the construction of alternative institutions, not the winning of arguments, as the serious work of opposition. The reader who grasps why hegemony needs an address has grasped the motive of the relocation from the other side: Gramsci moved civil society into the superstructure because that is where hegemony lives, and hegemony was the phenomenon his whole theory existed to explain.

The strategic premise, stated once

The strategic consequence of everything argued so far can be stated briefly, because its full treatment belongs to the companion article on the war of position and the war of manoeuvre, and because a concept pillar should state its premises without annexing its neighbours. If the strength of a Western order lies in the fortress system of civil society behind its governmental trench, then a challenge to that order addressed to the trench alone is addressed to the wrong target. The contest must be positional: a long engagement across the institutions where consent is made, building rival formation before and alongside any contest for government. The premise is entirely contained in the East and West passage, and it is the reason that passage is famous. What this article adds to the premise is only the analytical discipline the passage presupposes: the density of civil society is a variable to be measured country by country and institution by institution, and the strategy follows the measurement, not the other way round. Where the measurement finds a gelatinous civil society and a state that is everything, the geometry differs, and Gramsci’s categories, honestly used, say so.

A school, a newspaper, a parish: the concept at work

Concepts earn trust in application, and this section applies the finished apparatus to three institutions of a single imagined but typical European town of Gramsci’s period, reading each one through the categories in sequence. The method is the one the notebooks model: identify the formative work, locate the institution on the map, and ask whose consent it organises and how deeply.

Take the town’s secondary school, state founded and state inspected, its teachers salaried by the ministry. By ownership it belongs to political society; by function it is among the purest organs of civil society in the town. Its curriculum narrates the nation’s history as the biography of its ruling house and its wars as the nation’s coming of age; its language lessons correct the children’s dialect into the national tongue, deciding in the process which speakers sound educated and which sound backward; its examinations sort the cohort into those destined for offices and those destined for trades, and teach the sorted to experience the sorting as the measure of their worth. No coercion beyond compulsory attendance is involved, and the attendance itself is enforced by a truant officer who belongs to the other twin. Read through Gramsci, the school is the integral state at work in its formative register: the state in its restricted sense owns the building, the state in its integral sense is the building’s real product, a generation formed to find the existing order natural. A reformer who changes the government and leaves the curriculum has, on this analysis, changed the trench and left the fortress.

Take the town’s newspaper, privately owned by a family with banking interests, edited by a professional journalist of liberal convictions. By ownership it is a private organism in the most literal sense, and by the liberal row of the table it belongs to society against the state. By Gramsci’s criterion it is a workshop of the integral state in its daily shift. Its selection of news decides which events the town knows as facts; its vocabulary decides in what terms the facts are judged; its silences protect the arrangements its owners’ world requires; its leader page instructs the respectable reader in the opinions respectability holds. The editor’s sincerity is irrelevant to the analysis, since the function is performed by the institution’s structure: its ownership, its advertisers, its sources in the prefecture and the bank, its need to be found on the breakfast tables of the propertied. None of this requires conspiracy, and Gramsci’s analysis does not allege it. It requires only that institutions form outlooks in the direction of the interests that sustain them, which the newspaper does the way a school does, by routine.

Take the parish, finally, where the analysis finds its richest case. The parish church is an institution of civil society by every criterion: voluntary in attendance, ancient in form, privately governed by a hierarchy in another country. Its formative reach exceeds the school and the newspaper together, since it addresses the whole population across the whole of life, baptising, marrying, burying, confessing, and interpreting suffering and fortune within a complete conception of the world. Its priest is the town’s most consequential intellectual, an organic intellectual of the order the Church sustains, formed in its seminaries and deployed by its strategy. And the parish displays the feature of civil society that the strategic writings prize: it is contestable terrain. The same building that reconciles the peasant to his lot can host the confraternity that organises his dignity, the sermon that dignifies his grievance, the network through which a rival conception travels. Gramsci, who studied the Church as the supreme hegemonic apparatus of his country, never mistook its strength for a supernatural fact. It was built, parish by parish, school by school, order by order, and what was built on the terrain of civil society could in principle be matched on the same terrain. The three readings together are the concept’s demonstration: one apparatus of categories, applied to a school, a newspaper, and a parish, yields a map of where a town’s order actually lives.

The Southern question written into the concept

The concept of civil society was not formed in the abstract, and its Italian birthplace is legible in its design. Gramsci’s unfinished essay of 1926 on the Southern question, written months before his arrest, analysed the Italian South as a social bloc held together by a specific arrangement of intellectuals: the great landowners and their agents at the top, the mass of peasants at the bottom, and between them a stratum of rural intellectuals, priests, lawyers, teachers, officials, who mediated the peasants’ relation to the state and the market and delivered their consent to the bloc that exploited them. The essay predates the notebooks’ terminology and already performs its analysis. What the prison writings add is the general concept under which the Southern arrangement falls: the mediating stratum is civil society’s personnel, the bloc is a historical bloc, and the consent it manufactures is hegemony observed at the level of a region.

The Southern material explains two features of the finished concept that puzzle readers who meet it in abstraction. The first is its attention to intellectuals as a distinct object: Gramsci’s civil society is populated, staffed by identifiable strata whose formation and allegiance can be studied, because the Southern question had taught him that orders are held together by mediating personnel and collapse when the mediation fails. The second is its sensitivity to unevenness. Civil society in Gramsci is never a uniform national fabric; its density varies between Turin and a Calabrian village as dramatically as between West and East, and the variation is politically decisive, since a national order can rest on a dense civil society in its industrial heartland and on coercion and mediation in its countryside at the same time. Analysts who borrow the concept for other countries inherit this sensitivity as its most valuable feature: the instruction to map the terrain region by region, class by class, institution by institution, and never to mistake the capital’s associational density for the country’s.

Common sense as the sediment of civil society

One more concept locks the system together, and it is the one through which civil society touches everyday life. Gramsci calls the outlook of ordinary people common sense: the incoherent, contradictory deposit of every conception of the world that has ever been preached at a population, folklore and religion and fragments of science and the wisdom of proverbs, held not as a system but as the obvious. Common sense is the sediment of civil society. It is what the schools, churches, newspapers, and associations leave behind in the minds they form, layer upon layer, and it is the material on which any hegemony works and against which any counter hegemony struggles. The concept explains why consent survives the refutation of any particular doctrine preached from above: doctrines can be argued with, sediment cannot, since it is not held as an argument but as the world’s self evident shape.

Gramsci’s treatment of common sense is double, and the doubleness is characteristic. As it stands, common sense is the order’s deepest fortification, the stratum in which existing arrangements appear as nature. Yet within it Gramsci locates good sense, the practical kernel by which people who work and suffer understand their real situation accurately in flashes, the healthy nucleus that a critical conception of the world can elaborate into coherence. The institutions of civil society are therefore not merely fortifications to be stormed or matched; they are also the channels through which good sense already circulates, in union branches and confraternities and reading circles, and a counter hegemony begins as the elaboration of what the terrain’s inhabitants already half know. This is the notebooks’ most humane analytical move, and it depends entirely on the civil society concept: without a terrain where sediment settles and circulates, good sense would have no address either.

How to read a notebook passage on civil society

The critical literature surveyed in this article converges on a practical discipline for readers, and a concept pillar is the right place to codify it. Four habits suffice. The first habit is to ask, of any passage, which model of the state is in play: the contrast model, in which civil society stands against the state as consent against coercion, or the integral model, in which civil society is a chamber of the extended state. The passage’s argument usually declares its model within a sentence or two, and half the famous contradictions dissolve under the question. The second habit is to ask what work the passage is doing: Gramsci writes about civil society in analytical, historical, and strategic registers, and a formulation that functions as a strategic slogan should not be audited as an analytical definition. The third habit is to check the passage against the floors image and the relocation: whatever the local geometry, the placement of civil society in the superstructure and its staffing by consent organising institutions hold constant across the notebooks, and a reading that contradicts the constants has probably imported Marx’s row of the table by mistake. The fourth habit is to prefer the critical edition’s dating where an argument turns on development, since the notebooks’ six years of drafting separate early inheritances from late constructions, and several apparent antinomies are the strata of a thinker revising himself under conditions that prevented him from tidying the record.

These habits will not make the notebooks easy. They will make the notebooks legible in the way their best readers read them: as a laboratory in which a powerful concept was forged under pressure, with the marks of the forging left in. The reader who wants a single settled definition to carry away should take the canonical one given in this article’s second section, which states the concept’s centre accurately. The reader who wants to use the concept should take the habits as well, since the centre holds only for those who can navigate the variations around it.

The shared name across this series

This article belongs to a family within the series, the shared name pattern, in which one term carries incompatible definitions across traditions and separating the definitions is the entire analytical service. The series met the pattern in the three middle classes, where one label covered strata with opposed functions, and in the pairing of overproduction against underconsumption, where rival crisis theories sheltered under a single word for a glut. The pattern’s largest instance is civil society: three literatures, three locations in the social structure, three political conclusions, one name. The pattern recurs because political vocabulary is inherited rather than designed, and every generation presses old coins into new purchases. The series’ thesis, that precision is a form of respect for both the reader and the subject, finds in the three civil societies its clearest case, since here the imprecision is not a pedant’s worry but the documented source of a half century of cross purposes in scholarship and policy alike.

What the relocation leaves the reader holding

Gather the yield. Gramsci’s civil society is not Marx’s: Marx used the term for the economic sphere in the base, Gramsci for the consent organising institutions in the superstructure, and the relocation between those addresses is the concept’s founding event and the source of its confusions. The relocated concept builds the integral state, political society plus civil society, and redraws the boundary of what counts as the state in action. It converts the density of civil society into an explanatory variable, the thing whose variation accounts for the different fates of orders in crisis, and it gives hegemony an address, the institutions where consent is manufactured and where alone it can be contested. Its critics have established that the notebooks never stabilise the concept’s relation to the state, and that its relocation raises an unanswered question about the primacy of the economic; its defenders have established that the instabilities are partly method, partly development, and partly fidelity to a slippery object. The liberal usage that shares the name is a different and respectable theory, closer to Hegel than to Gramsci, and the discipline of naming which of the three civil societies is in play dissolves most disputes before they start. A reader holding all of that holds the concept as its best scholarship holds it: powerful, contested at its joints, and indispensable for the question it was built to answer, which is why orders that rest on so little visible force can stand for so long.

The factory gate: where the terrain touches the structure

Every concept has a stress point, a place where its classifications are forced to work hardest, and for Gramsci’s civil society the stress point is the factory. The factory belongs to the structure without argument: it is where production happens and where the wage relation is lived. Yet Gramsci’s political formation occurred in the Turin factory council movement of 1919 and 1920, and the council, in the writings of L’Ordine Nuovo, the newspaper he edited, was theorised as something more than an economic organ: a formative institution in which producers educated themselves in collective self government, elaborated a new conception of their role, and rehearsed the administration of a different order. The council stood at the factory gate with one foot in the structure and the other in civil society, and Gramsci’s mature categories carry the mark of that origin. His civil society is a superstructural terrain analysed by a man whose formative experience was of formation happening inside production itself.

The stress is productive rather than fatal, and it teaches the concept’s correct handling. The factory as a site of production belongs to the structure; the factory as a site of organisation, education, and the elaboration of a class’s self understanding performs civil society’s work; and the same building hosts both, at different hours of the same day. Classification by function, the notebooks’ standing rule, resolves what classification by architecture cannot. The case also explains the company town and the paternalist employer in Gramsci’s terms: the employer who builds schools, churches, housing, and clubs around his factory is conducting a deliberate occupation of civil society from a base in the structure, manufacturing consent at the point where economic dependence makes the manufacture cheapest. Ford’s America fascinated Gramsci for exactly this reason, and his notes on Americanism and Fordism study a regime that had understood, without any theory, that the worker’s whole life, his housing, his habits, his family arrangements, was the raw material of a new industrial order’s consent.

Passive revolution: hegemony in its incomplete form

The Risorgimento returns to this article a final time, because it supplies Gramsci’s analysis with its most distinctive historical category and civil society with its most instructive failure case. Italy was unified in the nineteenth century by diplomacy and dynastic war, under Piedmontese leadership, without a popular agrarian revolution and without the mass mobilisation that had made France’s transformation irreversible. Gramsci calls such a process a passive revolution: a transformation of the state and the economy accomplished from above, in molecular doses, with the population as spectator rather than protagonist. The category is the negative image of hegemony. The Piedmontese moderates dominated Italian unification; they did not lead it in Gramsci’s full sense, because leadership requires the organised consent of allied classes, the peasants above all, and the moderates neither sought that consent nor built the institutions that could have formed it, fearing the agrarian demands a mobilised peasantry would present.

The civil society of the new Italian state was therefore built lopsided: dense in the northern cities, where parties, presses, and associations multiplied; thin and mediated in the South, where the rural intellectuals described earlier held the countryside for the bloc; and everywhere overshadowed by the Church, whose civil society dwarfed the state’s own. Trasformismo, the absorption of opposition leaders into the governing bloc one by one, was the political technique of this incompleteness: where consent cannot be organised wholesale, its potential organisers are bought retail. Gramsci’s anatomy of the Risorgimento is the relocation’s finest historical application, since it explains a state’s chronic weakness by the condition of its civil society, the very explanation the Marxian row of the table, with its attention fixed on the economy, is not shaped to give. A reader who wants to test the concept should test it there, on the case that formed it, before carrying it to cases of their own.

Organic crisis: when the fortresses empty

The fortress system metaphor has a dark corollary, and Gramsci’s notes on crisis supply it. An organic crisis, in his usage, is not a recession or a scandal but a crisis of authority: the moment when a ruling class has lost its consensus, when the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they previously believed, when the institutions of civil society cease to transmit the old consent and have not yet organised a new one. The trench of government still stands, the coercive apparatus still functions, but the fortress system behind it has emptied, and the state is revealed in the restricted sense, as force and administration without the penumbra of manufactured agreement. Gramsci’s famous sentence for the interregnum of such a crisis says that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, and in the interval a variety of morbid symptoms appear.

The crisis category completes the civil society analysis by giving it a dynamics. In stable times, civil society is the order’s strength, the distributed consent that makes coercion a reserve. In organic crisis, the same institutions become the order’s vulnerability, because they are the channels through which detachment spreads: the church whose sermons no longer persuade, the press whose framing no longer frames, the school whose narrative the pupils repeat without belief. Gramsci distinguishes such crises from conjunctural movements, the ordinary weather of politics, precisely by their location: a conjunctural crisis shakes a government, an organic crisis shakes the whole integral state, both twins at once. The distinction disciplines political judgement in any century. It instructs the analyst to stop counting ministerial resignations and start auditing the institutions of formation, asking of each whether it still manufactures the consent it was built to manufacture. That audit is the civil society concept in its most practical form, and it is available to analysts of every persuasion, which is one reason the concept outlived the movement that produced it.

The staff of the terrain: intellectuals

A terrain of institutions implies a personnel, and the notebooks supply it in the theory of intellectuals, treated at length in the companion article on organic intellectuals and the function test. The connection to civil society is structural. Every institution surveyed in this article is worked by people whose function is organisation and elaboration: teachers, priests, journalists, officials, organisers, the strata Gramsci calls intellectuals in his extended sense. A class’s presence in civil society is exactly as strong as the intellectuals it has formed to staff the terrain, and a class that must borrow its organisers from a rival’s formation fights the battle for consent with rented weapons. This is why Gramsci’s party, his modern Prince, is conceived above all as a collective intellectual, a machine for producing the personnel of a new civil society before it is a machine for winning office.

The staff question also explains the concept’s treatment of traditional intellectuals, the strata, clergy, academics, literati, who experience themselves as autonomous of every class and above the contest. In the civil society analysis their autonomy is itself a position on the terrain: the university that professes neutrality performs, by that profession, the office of certifying the existing order’s knowledge as knowledge pure and simple. Gramsci does not sneer at the profession; he maps it. The traditional intellectuals are a fortress of a particular design, held by a garrison that believes itself a free city, and the belief is part of the fortification. A reader who pairs the two articles, this one for the terrain and the companion for its staff, holds the Gramsci cluster’s core in both hands, since hegemony is the name of what the staff does on the terrain, and the war of position is the name of the campaign fought across it.

The household at the boundary

An honest account must register a boundary the notebooks inherit from Hegel and examine less searchingly than their others: the family. In Hegel’s architecture the family is the first moment of ethical life, prior to civil society, the sphere of love and immediate unity from which individuals emerge into the sphere of particularity. Marx’s usage leaves the family inside the material relations of civil society’s broad sweep. Gramsci, whose architecture begins where Hegel’s middle term opens, rarely theorises the household as a formative institution in its own right, although his notes on women, on the sexual question, and on Americanism’s regulation of family life show him aware of its disciplinary weight. The gap matters because the household is, by the concept’s own functional criterion, an institution of formation of the first rank: it is where language, deference, gender, and the sense of the possible are first installed, before any school receives the child.

Later scholarship, feminist scholarship in particular, has pressed the point as an amendment rather than a refutation: apply Gramsci’s criterion consistently and the family belongs inside civil society, its unpaid formative labour recognised as consent’s earliest manufacture. The amendment is faithful to the method and corrective of the text, and a concept pillar should record it as such. It also illustrates the defence offered earlier against the unfalsifiability charge. The concept could be, and was, turned against its author’s own blind spot, generating a finding the notebooks themselves missed; an incantation cannot be used against its priest, but an instrument can be turned in the hand. The household stands in this article as the mapped terrain’s one acknowledged blank, marked on the chart in the cartographer’s own convention: here the survey was not completed.

Measuring density: the concept as a variable

If the density of civil society explains the different fates of orders, a reader is entitled to ask how density could ever be assessed, and the question separates Gramsci’s concept from a mere suggestive metaphor. The notebooks themselves supply indicators, scattered through their historical studies, and assembling them gives the concept an empirical programme. Count the associations: the parties with their memberships and local sections, the unions with their densities trade by trade, the cooperatives, mutual societies, cultural circles, and sports federations, and register not only their numbers but their independence, since a dense fabric of state licensed associations is a different variable from a dense fabric of self governing ones. Count the readers: the circulation of newspapers and periodicals per head, the number of publishing houses and their lists, the reach of a party’s press against a church’s. Count the formed: school enrolment and literacy, the seminaries and universities and the strata they graduate. And weigh the churches: parishes, orders, confraternities, the ratio of clergy to population, the confessional school system’s share of the nation’s children.

Two cautions belong to the programme, both of them Gramscian in spirit. The first is that density is not a single national number. The concept’s own history, forged on the contrast between Turin and the Mezzogiorno, warns that a society can be dense in its cities and gelatinous in its countryside, dense for one class and absent for another, and that the politically decisive figure is often the density available to a specific class in a specific region. The second caution is that organisation is not consent counted but consent qualified: an association can transmit an order’s conceptions, contest them, or merely entertain its members, and the census must ask which. What the programme yields, used with those cautions, is a comparative instrument of real power. Two orders facing similar economic crises can be compared in advance for the reserves each commands: the depth of the party systems, the authority of the churches, the standing of the press, the school system’s grip on the national story. The comparison will not predict a date. It will distinguish the order that can lose a government from the order that can only lose everything, which is the distinction the East and West passage was written to draw.

The concept travels: uses Gramsci did not foresee

A concept’s biography continues after its author’s death, and civil society’s travels after 1945 test the relocation in settings Gramsci never analysed. Three journeys deserve record, because each takes the concept somewhere its maker did not point it and each reveals a property of the instrument. The first journey is into the study of postcolonial societies, where historians of the Subaltern Studies collective, and most systematically the political theorist Partha Chatterjee, took up Gramsci’s vocabulary for the analysis of India. Chatterjee’s influential distinction reserves civil society, in something close to Gramsci’s sense, for the restricted sphere of elite institutions, modern associations, and legally secured citizenship, and sets against it a political society through which the governed majority, whose claims rarely enjoy full legal form, negotiates with the state. The distinction is a creative misprision in the honourable sense: it uses Gramsci’s terrain concept to map a society in which the terrain of formal association covers only a fraction of the population, and it demonstrates that the concept can register its own absence, marking the zones where civil society does not reach as precisely as the zones where it rules.

The second journey is into the theory of democratisation, where Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s large study of civil society and political theory rebuilt the concept for the age of the Eastern European transitions, explicitly combining the liberal row’s valuation with a Gramscian attention to institutions and power. Their three part model of economy, state, and civil society carried the term into the mainstream of democratic theory, and the Gramscian inheritance shows in their insistence that civil society is a sphere of interaction and association with its own media and solidarities, not a residual category. The third journey is the concept’s return, in the transitions literature, to the dissident usage from which the liberal row grew: the study of how parallel institutions under party states, independent unions, underground publishing, churches sheltering opposition, prefigured the orders that replaced them. A Gramscian reading that history is almost literal: parallel civil societies were built inside the old integral states, consent was withdrawn institution by institution, and when the crises came the fortress systems changed hands before the trenches fell. The concept’s author, who died in a fascist prison in 1937, would have recognised the mechanism at once, which is the surest sign that the instrument, whatever its textual joints, describes something real about how orders stand and fall.

Religion and folklore: the philosophy of the people

Gramsci’s civil society has a depth dimension that purely organisational accounts miss, and it appears in his treatment of religion. For Gramsci, religion is not an ornament on the social order but the conception of the world of the popular masses in its most complete historical form: a unity of faith, morality, and cosmology that answers the questions philosophy answers for intellectuals, and that is carried not by treatises but by the Church’s institutions, its calendar, its sacraments, its art, and its clergy. This is why the Church dominates his inventory of civil society. It is the one institution that supplies the whole population with a philosophy, and its organisation, from the parish to the Vatican, is the machinery by which that philosophy is maintained against erosion and schism. A movement that aspires to organise consent must reckon with the fact that the place philosophy occupies in popular life is already taken, and taken by an apparatus with two millennia of institutional experience.

Folklore extends the analysis downward. Gramsci uses the term for the sedimented worldview of the subaltern strata: proverbs, superstitions, popular science, fragments of older religions and of official doctrines decayed into habit. Folklore is common sense in its rawest stratum, and his notes treat it with a respect that surprised readers who expected a revolutionary’s contempt. It is to be studied, not mocked, because it records how the world has actually been understood by those who live at the bottom of it, and because any new conception of the world that cannot connect with the strata folklore represents will remain a doctrine of the educated. The civil society concept holds these materials in place: religion and folklore are the content, the Church and the institutions of formation are the carriers, and common sense is the deposit in each mind. Content, carrier, and deposit are three faces of one analysis, and separating them, as rival theories do, is what produces accounts of ideology that float free of institutions or accounts of institutions that never ask what they transmit.

The total state: the adversary that sharpened the concept

The integral state was formulated within sight of its adversary, and the encounter explains some of its urgency. The fascist regime under which Gramsci wrote proclaimed a doctrine of the total state, summarised in the formula that everything stands within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, and it pursued the proclamation organisationally: independent unions abolished and replaced by state corporations, parties dissolved into the single party, youth organisations absorbing the child’s free hours, the press licensed and directed. Giovanni Gentile, the regime’s philosopher, supplied the doctrine with its own version of the ethical state, in which the state is the very personality of the nation and absorption into it is freedom. Gramsci’s notes contend with this adversary at close quarters, sometimes in code, and the integral state can be read as the counter analysis: where fascism proclaimed the state’s absorption of society as an achievement, Gramsci’s categories describe the absorption as a condition to be analysed, present in degree in every order, and they preserve, inside the analysis, the distinction fascism abolished on paper, between the consent organised in civil society and the coercion exercised by political society.

The distinction carries the normative weight of the whole construction, although Gramsci rarely states it as a norm. An order in which civil society’s institutions retain their relative autonomy is an order in which consent is genuinely, if unequally, organised: rival conceptions can be elaborated, associations can change their allegiances, and the terrain can change hands by the slow work of organisation. An order that destroys that autonomy, fusing every institution into the governmental apparatus, has not abolished hegemony’s problem; it has answered it with command, and its civil society becomes a transmission belt whose outputs are inputs decided elsewhere. Gramsci’s regulated society, the projected absorption of political society into civil society, is the exact mirror of the fascist absorption of civil society into political society, and the mirror’s symmetry is the point: the direction of the absorption is everything. The concept of civil society, born in a cell of the total state, carries that discrimination in its structure, which is one more reason it cannot be reduced to the liberal row’s celebration or the Marxian row’s anatomy. It is a concept about who organises the middle sphere of social life, and about what happens when the organising is monopolised.

The press in depth: a workshop visited slowly

One institution deserves a second, slower visit, because Gramsci knew it from inside and his notes on it are the most concrete in the civil society corpus: the newspaper. Before his arrest he had worked as a journalist and editor in Turin, and the notebooks return to journalism with a practitioner’s classification of papers by type: the paper of pure information that pretends to no doctrine and thereby teaches the doctrine of its selection; the party paper that instructs its readers as a collective intellectual instructs, serialising novels, explaining events, answering letters; the commercial paper that sells its readers to advertisers and trims its world to the purchasers’ comfort; the confessional paper that carries a church’s conception into daily politics. Each type is an institution of civil society with a defined consent function, and the classification is an instrument any reader can apply to the media of another century, asking of each outlet not whether it is biased, a question without content, but what conception of the world its routines install in its habitual reader.

The deeper note concerns time. A newspaper’s formative power lies in repetition: the same framings, the same vocabulary of praise and blame, the same selection of what counts as an event, delivered daily until the framing is no longer noticed as framing. Gramsci observed that parties understood this before theorists did, investing in dailies they could not afford because a daily is a daily plebiscite, an organisation of consent renewed every morning. The observation generalises across media technologies he never saw, and it does so because it is not about print. It is about the rhythm by which institutions deposit common sense: whoever commands a population’s recurring sources of interpretation commands the tempo of its consent. The press section of the notebooks is therefore the civil society concept at its most operational, and students who want Gramsci’s method in miniature should begin there, with an editor’s knowledge that the state, in its integral sense, is partly printed.

The dual perspective: the centaur behind the twins

The pairing of civil society and political society has an emblem in the notebooks, borrowed from Machiavelli, and recovering it restores the pairing’s original logic. Machiavelli’s Prince advises the ruler to learn from the centaur Chiron, half man and half beast, the use of both natures: the man’s law and the beast’s force. Gramsci generalises the emblem into what he calls the dual perspective in political action and historical interpretation: every political order, and every political act, can be read at the level of force and at the level of consent, at the level of domination and at the level of hegemony, and the two levels correspond, in his architecture, to political society and civil society as the two floors of the superstructure. The centaur is the integral state drawn as a creature: one body, two natures, and a theory that insists on seeing both in every gesture of rule.

The emblem disciplines interpretation in a way the architectural image cannot. A law, read at the beast’s level, is a command backed by sanction; read at the man’s level, it is a lesson taught to the population about the order’s values, absorbed long after the sanction is forgotten. A party congress, a coronation, a curriculum reform, a military parade: each is simultaneously an exercise of one nature and a performance of the other, and the proportions vary. Gramsci’s complaint against crude materialism is that it sees only the beast, and against idealism that it sees only the man. The dual perspective is his methodological vow to see the centaur whole. Civil society is the name he gives the man’s nature organised: the institutions through which the human half of rule, persuasion, formation, consent, does its work. Readers who keep the emblem in mind find the notebooks’ oscillations less mysterious, since a theory of a two natured creature will naturally emphasise now one nature, now the other, as the creature turns.

Written in a cell: censorship and the coded vocabulary

The conditions of composition belong in a concept pillar, because in this case they are evidence about the concept itself. Gramsci wrote the notebooks between 1929 and 1935 in prison and in clinics, under a regime that censored his reading and his correspondence, in notebooks that could be inspected, without a research library, dictating nothing and revising across years. The vocabulary of the notebooks bears the conditions’ marks: Marxism appears as the philosophy of praxis, its founders are indicated by periphrasis, and a whole set of terms, hegemony among them, does double duty as analysis and as cover. Anderson’s explanation of the antinomies leans on these conditions, and the conditions genuinely explain some of the text’s indirection. A man who cannot write the word communism freely will build his theory in a vocabulary of displacement, and displacement blurs boundaries that a free study would have kept sharp.

But the censorship explanation must be weighed and not merely waved, and the notebooks’ defenders weigh it with an observation: the civil society relocation is not one of the blurred places. Across six years and thirty three notebooks, through first drafts and recopied revisions, the placement of civil society in the superstructure and its staffing by consent organising institutions never wavers, although almost everything else in the terminology shifts at some point. The concept at this article’s centre was not a censor’s accident. It was the prisoner’s most considered construction, revised more carefully than any other in the notebooks, precisely because the question it answered, why the orders of the West had survived their crises while he sat in a cell for opposing one of them, was the question of his life. Scholarship that treats the inconsistencies as the whole story mistakes the laboratory for the result. The result is the relocation, and it is as stable as anything in the prison writings.

The school in depth: formation’s first workshop

The worked example of the school deserves expansion into a section, because education is where Gramsci’s civil society analysis achieves its greatest concreteness and where his positions most surprise readers who arrive with slogans. Italy’s schools had been reformed in 1923 under the ministry of Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher whose actual idealism the regime adopted, and the reform tracked children early: a classical secondary school for the future ruling stratum, technical and vocational schools for the rest, with the classical school’s curriculum, Latin and philosophy at its centre, reserved in practice for the children of the propertied. Gramsci’s notes on education attack the tracking from an unexpected direction. He defends the old classical school, its Latin grammar and its disinterested discipline, against the vocational alternative, on the ground that the classical curriculum, for all its class history, taught the peasant’s or worker’s child the transferable instruments of thought: abstraction, grammar, the patience of difficult form. Vocational schooling, offered in the name of relevance, would fix the subaltern child in the subaltern’s place with a training exactly fitted to it, while the rulers’ children kept the instruments of rule.

The position is a perfect miniature of the civil society method. An institution is judged not by its badge, state or private, reformist or traditional, but by the formation it performs and the class capacities it builds. The common school Gramsci argues toward, a single formative school for all children up to a serious age, with specialisation postponed, is a proposal about civil society’s deepest layer: the stratum where a class’s future intellectuals are either produced in numbers or strangled at the source. His own biography stands behind the notes, a scholarship boy from a poor Sardinian family carried by the old school’s ladders into the university at Turin, and the notebooks know what the ladders cost and what they made possible. Education policy in any decade can be audited with his questions. Who receives the disinterested instruments of thought, and who receives training fitted to a station? Which class’s children does the system elaborate into intellectuals, and which class’s does it process into hands? The questions are the civil society concept with its sleeves rolled up.

Lodges, clubs, and salons: the minor institutions

The great institutions dominate the analysis, but the notebooks’ method shows its quality on the minor ones, the bodies too small to command a ministry’s attention and too pervasive to be politically weightless. Gramsci’s Italy was threaded with freemasonry, and his notes return to the lodges repeatedly, not from conspiratorial interest but from organisational respect: masonry was the bourgeoisie’s party before parties, a network that selected personnel, circulated a conception of the world, and bound the state’s functionaries to a common outlook across the formal divisions of politics. His interest in the Rotary clubs arriving from America is of the same kind: a luncheon club as an instrument by which a rising industrial stratum organises its own coherence and advertises its model of life. Salons, academies, literary circles, and the great newspapers’ cultural pages perform the same function at the level of taste, deciding which writers are serious, which questions are intelligent, which accents are cultivated.

The minor institutions matter analytically for two reasons. First, they are where the boundaries of the respectable are policed, and the policing of respectability is a consent function of the first order, since it decides which challenges to an order will be heard as arguments and which will be dismissed as noise before argument begins. Second, they are the terrain’s capillaries: the channels through which a conception of the world travels from the great institutions into daily intercourse, and through which, in a crisis of authority, detachment also travels. An analyst mapping a society’s civil society who counts only churches, schools, and presses holds the map’s trunk roads and misses its footpaths. Gramsci’s reconnaissance habit, his attention to the lodge and the luncheon club, is the method’s completeness at work, and it sets the standard for any application of the concept: the survey is finished only when the minor institutions have been asked the same questions as the great ones. Whose consent do you organise? How deeply do you reach? What conception of the world do you deposit in those you touch?

The charge of statism: a third criticism

Anderson anatomised the concept’s inconsistency and Bobbio its reversal of Marx; a third line of criticism, pressed by a different set of readers, charges the concept with its political consequence. If civil society is inside the integral state, the charge runs, then Gramsci’s theory dissolves the standpoint from which a state can be opposed: every association is already an organ of rule, every school an arm of power, and the theory becomes a sophisticated apology for the total state it was written against, teaching that there is nowhere outside power from which to resist it. The charge gained colour from the century’s history, since regimes that claimed Gramscian descent built states that absorbed their civil societies in fact, and their dissidents reached for the liberal row’s civil society, the sphere outside the state, as the vocabulary of resistance. A theory indicted by its own vocabulary’s refugees must answer carefully.

The answer begins with the direction of the argument. The integral state is a diagnostic enlargement, not a programme: it tells the analyst where rule is exercised so that rule can be contested at its real addresses, and it no more endorses the absorption of society by the state than a map of fortifications endorses the fortress. The regulated society, the construction in which political society is reabsorbed into a self governing civil society, states the theory’s own horizon, and it is the opposite pole from the total state: the coercive apparatus withers as society’s self organisation becomes general. The critics’ strongest residual point is about emphasis rather than logic. Gramsci’s theory is a theory of organisation, written by an organiser, and it attends more lovingly to the building of counter institutions than to the rights that protect individuals against institutions of every kind, including counter ones. The liberal tradition’s insistence on a protected private sphere names a good the notebooks assume more often than they defend. Recording that asymmetry is the fair residue of the statism charge: it does not convict the concept, but it tells the concept’s users which neighbouring theory must be kept on the desk beside it.

One life through the institutions

The analysis has moved among structures long enough; it can be grounded, finally, in the scale at which civil society is actually experienced, a single life moving through the institutions in sequence. Consider the child of a Calabrian village in the years of Gramsci’s formation. Her first institution is the household, where the map of the possible is drawn in proverbs and in her grandmother’s religion. The parish receives her next: catechism, confraternity, the priest’s counsel consulted on marriages and disputes, a complete philosophy delivered in the rhythm of the feasts. The elementary school adds the state’s formation, brief in her case, in a language not quite her own, teaching her the nation’s heroes and her region’s backwardness in the same lesson book. If she migrates, as millions did, the institutions change their density around her: the Turin factory’s discipline, the union branch and its newspaper, the party circle and the mutual aid society, a new common sense competing with the old in the same mind. At every stage the forces acting on her are the ones this article has mapped, and none of them is the policeman.

The biographical scale shows what the structural scale conceals: that civil society is not an abstraction hovering over lives but the accumulated pressure of every formative institution a life passes through, and that its effects are therefore uneven, intimate, and revisable. The same woman can be formed by the parish and reformed by the union school; the sediment can be disturbed; the fortresses can lose a single inhabitant at a time, which is how they are lost in fact. Gramsci’s theory, for all its architecture, is built to explain this scale as much as the scale of states, since hegemony is only ever the sum of formations like hers, repeated across a population and organised into a collective will or left as private resignation. The concept’s journey from the Philosophy of Right to the prison notebooks ends, fittingly, in the village classroom and the migrant’s lodging, where consent is actually made.

Suppressed, published, recovered: the concept’s fortunes

The concept’s own history after its author’s death replays its themes. The notebooks survived the regime because the manuscripts were preserved and carried abroad through the efforts of Gramsci’s family and friends, reaching Moscow and returning to Italy after the war. The posthumous edition published between 1948 and 1951 arranged the notes thematically, in volumes organised by subject, an editorial choice that served the party’s presentation of Gramsci as a systematic founder and, as Anderson’s generation discovered, obscured the notes’ order, dating, and development. For two decades the thematic edition was the Gramsci the world read, and the civil society it presented was correspondingly smoother than the laboratory record. The critical edition of 1975, edited by Valentino Gerratana, restored the notebooks’ sequence and made the serious scholarship possible: Bobbio’s question could be refined, Anderson’s antinomies could be documented note by note, and the concept’s joints became visible to any reader willing to look.

The Anglophone recovery ran through the 1971 selection of the prison writings edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, which carried the state and civil society notes into English at the moment when Western Marxism was searching for a politics adequate to stable democracies. From that selection the concept passed into political science, sociology, education theory, and eventually into the development vocabulary whose liberal row this article has separated from it. The recovery’s irony is structural. A concept forged to explain why consent’s organisation decides the fate of orders was itself carried, delayed, and reshaped by the institutions of civil society: by publishers and parties, by editors’ choices of arrangement, by universities’ syllabi, by the slow formation of a readership. The concept’s biography is an instance of its own claim, that ideas become forces when institutions take them up, and its confusions in transit are instances of the companion claim, that a term’s meaning is fixed by the terrain it travels. A reader who has followed the three civil societies to this point possesses the instruments to read that biography without surprise.

Law: the juridical middle

Law is the institution that most resists the map’s two colours, and Gramsci’s treatment of it refines the whole scheme. In the architectural image, law belongs with political society: codes are enacted by governments, courts are staffed by the state, sanctions are coercion in uniform. Yet the notebooks insist on law’s formative and educative character, assigning it a positive function beyond repression: law rewards as well as punishes, establishes the conventions within which enterprise and association proceed, and teaches the population, by a thousand small enforcements and permissions, the shape of the life its order considers normal. A population internalises its property regime, its family forms, its rules of speech and assembly, not primarily from sermons or textbooks but from the daily operation of the legal order, which is why Gramsci counts the juridical apparatus among the state’s great instruments of formation and why his notes on law read like notes on education continued by other means.

The placement bears directly on the antinomies debate, because law is Anderson’s kind of case: an institution whose address changes with the question asked. Asked where law is made and enforced, the answer is political society. Asked what law does to the mental world of the governed, the answer places its deepest work in civil society’s register, the organisation of the taken for granted. The functional criterion does not resolve the case by splitting the difference; it resolves it by refusing the architectural question. Institutions have addresses for postal purposes and functions for analytical ones, and the notebooks’ map is a map of functions. Critics experience the refusal as evasion when they want a boundary treaty; defenders experience it as the whole discovery, that power’s geography is functional and therefore mobile. The law’s case is the fairest single exhibit for both experiences, and a student who can argue it in both directions has understood the debate rather than memorised it.

Reading Marx backwards through the relocation

The relocation invites a rereading of Marx himself, and the rereading finds a seam in the master’s text that the relocation can claim as its warrant. In the 1859 preface, Marx writes that mankind becomes conscious of the conflicts rooted in the economic structure and fights them out in the legal, political, religious, artistic, and philosophic forms he calls ideological. The sentence locates consciousness of conflict in the superstructural forms, which is precisely where Gramsci stations civil society, and Gramsci’s defenders have long pointed to the seam: the relocation gathers Marx’s scattered ideological forms into one mapped terrain and gives the fighting out of conflicts an institutional address. On this reading Gramsci did not import a foreign body into Marxism. He developed the part of the inheritance that the tradition’s economistic custodians had left as a gesture, the superstructure as the arena where history is consciously contested, and his civil society is the arena surveyed and staffed.

The prosecution’s counter reading is equally textual. Marx’s sentence assigns the ideological forms a dependent status: the conflicts are rooted in the structure and merely become conscious above it, as a fever becomes conscious in the patient’s dreams without the dreams directing the disease. To convert the arena of consciousness into the decisive terrain, the counter reading argues, is to promote the dreams. Bobbio’s essay is the classic statement of the suspicion, and the debate between the two readings is unlikely to close, because it turns on how a metaphor of levels should be weighted, and texts underdetermine their own metaphors. What a concept pillar can do, and this article has attempted, is to keep both readings in view and to mark which claims depend on which. The relocation as a fact of Gramsci’s usage depends on neither: the notebooks place civil society in the superstructure whatever Marx meant. The relocation as a legitimate development or an illegitimate departure depends on the reading chosen, and the choice is the reader’s first real decision in Gramsci studies.

The regiment: the army as a school of the nation

The military analogy received a section of strategy earlier; it deserves a second look as sociology, because Gramsci’s generation learned the formative power of the state in uniform. The mass armies of the Great War conscripted peasants from every province of Italy, mixed them in regiments, taught many of them the national language in the trenches’ rough school, and subjected them to an organisation that planned their days, fed their minds with proclamations and newspapers, and returned the survivors to their villages as men whose horizons had been forcibly widened. Gramsci, who followed the war’s politics as a journalist in Turin, drew the conclusion the civil society analysis predicts: the army, a formally coercive apparatus of political society, had functioned as one of the nation’s greatest formative institutions, a school of Italianness for a population the civilian schools had never reached. The regiment is the boundary case that proves the functional rule, since no architectural classification can say what the army of 1915 to 1918 was doing to Italian consciousness, while the functional question answers at once.

The observation radiates outward into the analysis of every conscript institution: the bureaucracy that trains its clerks into a caste with a worldview, the police whose academies form a corporate spirit, the great state enterprises whose internal cultures organise the outlook of whole towns. Each is political society by charter and civil society by work, and the notebooks’ willingness to follow the work rather than the charter is what the statism critics miss when they read the integral state as a celebration of absorption. Gramsci is not praising the state’s reach. He is measuring it, in the regiments and ministries and schools where it actually touches minds, so that the measurement can inform the only question he finally cares about: what organisation of consent, built where and by whom, could measure up to it.

Croce: the friendly adversary

No account of the relocation’s sources is complete without Benedetto Croce, the Neapolitan philosopher whose liberal idealism dominated Italian culture in Gramsci’s youth and whose work the notebooks engage more continuously than any other modern thinker’s. Croce had distinguished, within his philosophy of spirit, between the economic and the ethical political forms of activity, and his histories practised an ethico political method that treated ideas, institutions, and moral energies as history’s real protagonists. Gramsci’s projected Anti-Croce, modelled on Engels’s Anti-Dühring, was to do for his generation what that book had done for an earlier one, and the civil society concept bears the encounter’s marks. The relocation’s confidence that the superstructural level, the level of organised conceptions and institutions, is where history becomes legible and contestable is unthinkable without the Crocean schooling Gramsci absorbed before he surpassed it.

The adversary was friendly in a precise sense. Croce defended a liberal civil society of culture and law against both fascist absorption and revolutionary levelling, and his own prestige was one of the Italian liberal order’s hegemonic assets, a fact Gramsci’s analysis registers without rancour: the philosopher functioned as the organic intellectual of a class and a state form, and the notebooks study his functioning as evidence for their own theory. The engagement teaches a lesson about the concept’s reach. Civil society in Gramsci is not a weapon that works only against enemies; it analyses the analyst’s own teachers, the analyst’s own formation, the very culture in which the prisoner’s mind was made. A concept that can be turned on its author’s intellectual father without breaking is a concept with a claim to generality, and the Anti-Croce that Gramsci never finished would have been, among other things, the relocation applied to the man who helped make it thinkable.

The national popular: what the terrain produces

Civil society’s institutions do not only organise consent in the abstract; they produce the culture a population actually consumes, and Gramsci’s notes on literature and popular taste survey that production with a critic’s eye trained in his youth as a theatre reviewer. His finding was diagnostic: Italy lacked a national popular literature, a body of novels and dramas in which the nation’s people recognised their own lives elaborated by their own writers, of the kind France possessed in its serial novelists and Russia in its great novelists. Italian men of letters wrote for a caste, in a language the people did not speak, about worlds the people did not inhabit, while the people read translated French feuilletons and dreamed with Dumas. The absence was a civil society datum of the first importance: the formative institution of imaginative literature was staffed by a traditional intelligentsia detached from the national life, and the consent the terrain produced was correspondingly thin, a national culture that had never become national popular.

The category of the national popular generalises the finding into an instrument. Ask of any society’s culture whether its educated strata produce the stories, songs, and spectacles its people actually live by, or whether the people’s imaginative diet is imported, condescended to, or left to commercial routine, and the answer measures a dimension of hegemony no institutional census captures: the intimacy or estrangement between a class’s intellectuals and the population they claim to lead. Gramsci’s examples are literary, but the instrument applies wherever formation takes narrative form, which is nearly everywhere. The popular novel, the parish theatre, the party’s songbook, the serial melodrama: each is civil society manufacturing the emotional common sense in which political consent later swims. Critics of the concept who find it too architectural, too much a matter of trenches and fortresses, should be directed to these notes, where the terrain turns out to be made of stories, and its fortresses are the tales a people tells itself about who it is.

For students and exam candidates

Your examination risk on this topic is a single confusion, and it is avoidable: the confusion of Gramsci’s civil society with Marx’s. Fix the relocation and the rest of the answer builds itself. Marx places civil society in the base as the sphere of economic relations; Gramsci places it in the superstructure as the institutions that organise consent, and builds it into the integral state. Prepare the three civil societies table until you can reproduce its rows from memory, since the table converts directly into essay structure: define the Gramscian usage, contrast the Marxian usage it displaced, treat the liberal usage as a separate theory, and close with the critics, Bobbio on the reversal of primacy and Anderson on the three unstable models. The dedicated Gramsci and hegemony exam answers in this series work the marking schemes in detail. Keep the three definitions, the integral state formula, and one worked institution, school, church, or press, on a single revision card; the Marxism study notes on VaultBook companion holds the card format this series recommends, and a card you can reproduce from memory is worth a shelf of highlighted textbooks.

For teachers and seminar leaders

Teach this article immediately after the base and superstructure model, because the relocation is the most instructive disturbance that model ever receives, and students who meet the disturbance early stop treating the model as a diagram to be memorised. The companion exposition of the base and superstructure model and its discontents supplies the undisturbed version your seminar can then unsettle. A productive session runs in three movements. Open with the term’s three usages and make the class assign passages to rows of the table before revealing the answers. Move to Anderson’s antinomies and require the strongest formulation of the charge before any defence is permitted, since the defence is worthless against a diluted prosecution. Close with the density exercise: groups map the civil society of a society they know, institution by institution, and defend their judgements of depth and allegiance. The exercise reliably produces the seminar’s best hour, because it converts a definition into an instrument in the students’ own hands.

For researchers, historians, and journalists

Your professional hazard with this term is importation: the liberal usage saturates policy language and wire copy, and it crosses into Gramscian contexts unmarked, so that reports attribute to Gramsci a celebration of the voluntary sector he never wrote and miss the analysis he actually made, of consent manufactured through institutions that include the state itself. The discipline this article recommends is documentary. When a source says civil society, establish which of the three usages the source inhabits before quoting it further; when you cite Gramsci, name the model of the state the passage presupposes, contrast or integral, since Anderson’s essay made unnamed citation indefensible in print. Historians will find the density programme the concept’s most exportable product: the notebooks model a way of auditing an order’s reserves of consent before its crises, institution by institution, that archives sustain unusually well. The companion article on Gramsci’s concepts at work in modern political analysis follows the term into the settings where your two vocabularies collide, and is the natural next read for practitioners who must use the word in public without surrendering its precision.

Consent’s limits: orders that rule without the terrain

A concept is clarified by its failure cases, and civil society’s failure cases are the orders that rule with the terrain thin, hostile, or absent. Colonial orders are Gramsci’s implicit example: a foreign state confronting a society whose churches, schools, presses, and associations it does not command, and whose population’s consent it never organises. Such an order is, in the notebooks’ geometry, nearly all trench: a coercive apparatus balanced on a society it must watch, impressive in its armaments and brittle in its reserves, since every crisis finds no fortress system behind the government and the whole structure must be held by the force that a dense civil society would have made largely unnecessary. The diagnosis explains the peculiar combination colonial regimes display, of arrogance and anxiety, and it generalises to occupation regimes and to domestic orders that have let their formative institutions decay into pure transmission belts whose outputs nobody believes.

Terror is the limiting case, and the concept handles it by inversion. A regime that substitutes terror for consent wholesale has confessed, in Gramsci’s terms, that its civil society has failed or been destroyed: it governs a population whose formation it no longer attempts because it no longer expects success. Such rule is not the integral state’s strength but its ruin, since terror is consumed in the using, each application raising the cost of the next, while consent organised through institutions renews itself daily at the price of salaries and newsprint. The notebooks’ comparative judgement is built into the East and West passage: the order with the gelatinous civil society fell in a week when its hour came, and the orders armoured in consent survived crises that dwarfed it. A concept that can rank the durability of terrors against the durability of school systems, and be right about the ranking across a century of evidence, has earned its place in the analyst’s kit whatever its textual joints.

The concept and the archive: evidence for consent

Researchers who take the concept into the archive face a fair question: consent is an interior condition, so what would count as evidence of its organisation? The notebooks’ own practice supplies the answer, and it is more documentary than sceptics expect. Consent’s organisation leaves paper. School inspection reports record what curricula prescribed and what inspectors found taught; textbook adoptions fix the national story in print runs that can be counted. Sermons, catechisms, and parish bulletins survive in diocesan archives, and a church’s publishing output can be catalogued like a party’s. Newspaper circulation audits, advertising ledgers, and ownership registers map the press’s reach and its dependencies. Association statutes, membership rolls, and congress proceedings document the associational fabric in its own hand. Even the state’s suspicion is evidence: police files on associations, censors’ reports on publications, and prefects’ surveys of clergy and teachers are an occupying power’s reconnaissance of the very terrain this article maps, drawn up by professionals who could not afford to mistake where consent was made.

The methodological lesson generalises the point. Hegemony is often accused of being unobservable, a spirit invoked to explain whatever happened, but the civil society concept is the accusation’s refutation in Gramsci’s own work, because it converts hegemony from a spirit into a staff list and a paper trail. What can be archived can be argued about with evidence, dated, compared across regions, and revised when the documents say otherwise, and the scholarship on Gramsci’s own country has done exactly that for two generations, correcting his judgements on the Church’s reach, the schools’ effects, and the South’s mediation with documents he never saw. A concept that invites its own correction by the archive is a research programme, not a faith, and the invitation is the final answer this article offers to the methodological objection stated earlier: the scheme can be wrong, institution by institution and province by province, and finding out whether it is wrong is called history.

From Turin to the cell: the lesson of the occupied factories

The concept of civil society has a birthplace more specific than a library: the occupied factories of Turin in September 1920. For a month, half a million Italian workers held the factories of the industrial north, ran production under their councils, organised defence, and waited for the local seizure to become a general transformation. It did not. The government of Giovanni Giolitti declined to storm the factories, preferring to let the occupation exhaust itself against the workers’ isolation; the union federation and the Socialist Party’s leadership declined to extend the struggle into a contest for the state; the employers conceded a paper scheme of workers’ control and recovered their property intact. Gramsci, who had theorised the councils and lived the month at close quarters, drew the lesson his mature work systematised. The workers had seized the point of production and discovered that production was not where the order’s strength was posted. The banks withheld credit, the state withheld recognition, the press organised the respectable public’s alarm, the parties of order held their parliamentary trench, and the occupation, master of the factory floor, starved in a society whose other institutions remained in the enemy’s hands.

That September is the East and West passage written in advance and in Italian. The order survived its gravest crisis of the decade without firing its coercive reserves at full strength, because its civil society did the work: finance, press, parties, and the state’s own patience absorbed the shock while the fortress system stood. The revolutionary movement, for its part, had built magnificent institutions of its own inside the factory and almost none across the wider terrain; it had no answer to the Church’s countryside, no press to rival the great dailies’ reach into the provinces, no organisation of the peasants whose sons filled the regiments that might have been ordered against it. Gramsci’s subsequent career, the founding of a party conceived as a collective intellectual, the Southern question essay’s search for the peasant alliance, the prison notebooks’ mapping of the terrain, reads as a decade long audit of that month’s accounts. Civil society names the ledger in which the audit was kept.

The biographical root also guards the concept against a misreading this article has not yet named: the suspicion that the theory of consent’s organisation is a consolation invented after defeat, a way of calling retreat profound. The notebooks’ categories were paid for by a man whom the order he analysed imprisoned for eleven years and whose health it destroyed, and they are conspicuously free of consolation. The analysis says the defeat was deserved by the side that misunderstood where power sits, and it says the misunderstanding can be corrected by study. Whatever a reader concludes about the correction, the categories’ origin in an audited catastrophe, rather than in a seminar, is part of their evidence, and the concept of civil society carries September 1920 in its foundations the way a building carries its bedrock.

The vocabulary in one place: società civile and its neighbours

A concept pillar should leave its reader with the working vocabulary gathered in one place, and Gramsci’s terms repay gathering because their relations are the theory. The Italian original is società civile, and the phrase’s neutrality in Italian, where it echoes neither bourgeois nor voluntary as strongly as its translations do, partly explains the relocation’s invisibility to its author. Beside it stands società politica, political society, the governmental apparatus of coercion, and the pair is always to be thought together, as the two floors of the superstructure and the two natures of the centaur. The stato integrale, the integral state, names their union, the whole machinery of rule, and its occasional rendering as the extended state is acceptable wherever the reader keeps the equation in view: political society plus civil society, hegemony armoured by coercion. Stato etico, the ethical state, names the formative function every state performs, and società regolata, the regulated society, names the horizon at which the coercive floor is reabsorbed into the consensual one.

Three further terms complete the kit. Senso comune, common sense, is the deposit the terrain leaves in each mind, the sedimented philosophy of the ordinary person, and buon senso, good sense, is the healthy nucleus within it that a critical elaboration can build on. Egemonia is hegemony itself, leadership secured through the terrain this article maps, and blocco storico, the historical bloc, is the name for a structure and its superstructures in their working unity, the formation within which a class’s civil society and its economic base sustain one another. A reader equipped with these terms, and warned that each of them has been mistranslated by being read in Marx’s row of the table or the liberal row, can enter the notebooks and the scholarship without a guide. The vocabulary is small. The discipline lies in holding its relations steady: society civil and political as functions, the integral state as their sum, common sense as their product, and the historical bloc as the whole in motion.

The Vatican settlement: the terrain’s largest institution at the negotiating table

Gramsci’s prison years contained one great public transaction between political society and civil society’s largest institution, and his notes on it show the categories working on a live event. In February 1929, weeks after he began the notebooks, Mussolini’s government and the Holy See signed the Lateran Pacts, ending the sixty year Roman question: the Vatican became a sovereign enclave, the Church received a financial settlement and a concordat governing marriage, religious instruction in state schools, and the standing of Catholic organisations, and the regime received the consecration of its legitimacy before the Catholic population. Pius XI is reported to have called Mussolini the man of Providence, and the phrase, whatever its exact occasion, captures the transaction’s meaning for the regime: the Church’s unmatched machinery of consent had been rented, at a price in sovereignty and cash, to an order that had seized the trench of government seven years earlier and had been shopping for fortresses ever since.

Gramsci’s notes treat the settlement as a hegemonic event of the first rank, and their analysis is a model of the method. The regime’s problem was never coercion; its squads and police sufficed for that. Its problem was the depth of consent in a Catholic country whose parishes answered to another sovereign, and the pacts were the purchase of depth at the going rate. The Church’s side of the bargain displays the terrain’s autonomy from the other direction: an institution of civil society, negotiating with a state as a power, trading its consent organising capacity for guarantees of its own organisational freedom, its schools, its associations, its youth movements. The sequel vindicated the categories again, since the friction between the regime and Catholic Action in 1931, when the state moved against the Church’s youth organisations, showed both parties defending the same proposition this article has argued throughout: that the institutions between the individual and the government are where rule is actually decided, worth a diplomatic crisis to control and worth a schism to keep. A reader who can narrate the Lateran settlement through the two societies possesses the concept in its working form, because the event has no adequate description in the vocabulary of the restricted state at all.

When the terrain stops mattering: the concept’s scope

Every instrument has a range, and honesty about the range strengthens rather than weakens the claim within it. The civil society analysis presupposes an order sufficiently consolidated for consent to be its everyday currency: institutions standing, a population formed by them, coercion held in reserve. At the extremes of collapse, the presupposition fails, and the concept itself tells the analyst what has happened. In a society whose institutions have been physically destroyed, by invasion, civil war, or the state’s own disintegration, the density variable falls toward the gelatinous pole and stays there; politics reverts to the war of manoeuvre’s raw geometry, and the prizes are barracks, arsenals, and broadcasting stations rather than curricula and pulpits. Gramsci’s framework does not go silent at that point, since the East and West passage was written about a collapse, but its analyses change tense: the question stops being whose consent the institutions organise and becomes which organisations can rebuild a terrain at all, out of what remnants, staffed by which surviving intellectuals.

The scope condition has a second edge, facing the opposite extreme. In an order where the formative institutions have been wholly fused into the governmental apparatus, where no association meets that the ministry has not convened and no page is printed that an office has not passed, the distinction between the two societies loses its analytical purchase for the opposite reason: there is no terrain distinct enough to map. Total fusion is rarer in fact than in proclamation, since even the most ambitious total state of Gramsci’s century left households, friendships, and jokes outside its wiring, and the notebooks’ own analysis of fascism found civil society’s remnants and resistances in the interstices. But the limiting case disciplines the concept’s users. Where the map shows one colour, the analyst should suspect the map’s resolution before celebrating the finding, and ask whether the terrain has been abolished or merely driven into forms the survey’s categories were not designed to catch: the kitchen table, the whispered joke, the samizdat page. Gramsci’s instrument, handled at its proper resolution, usually finds the terrain again, which is the final testimony to the relocation’s soundness. The terrain of consent survives its own suppression, because human beings form one another’s worlds in whatever space is left to them, and a theory that named that space once and for all gave its successors the means to find it under any regime.

The concept’s urban grain

One property of the terrain deserves record before the questions begin, because it conditions every application: civil society in Gramsci is an urban formation in its density, and its map fades as the traveller leaves the cities. The institutions that compose it, presses with daily circulations, universities, party federations, professional orders, publishing houses, are creatures of urban concentration, fed by literacy, surplus, and the crowding of strangers into shared routines. Turin, the city of Gramsci’s formation, displayed the terrain at maximum density for its region and period: factory councils and union chambers, a socialist press of real reach, Catholic organisations contesting the same streets, a university forming the nation’s administrators. The Calabrian village of his childhood displayed the opposite pole: a parish, a part time school, the lawyer and the notary, and beyond them the state experienced mainly as the tax demand and the carabinieri. Gramsci’s concept was calibrated between those poles, and its variable, density, is in large part a measure of the urban organisation of social life.

The calibration carries a warning for exporters of the concept. Societies whose populations are mostly rural, or whose formative institutions are kinship and customary authority rather than association and print, will show a civil society map that looks empty to a survey designed on Italian lines, and the emptiness may be the survey’s artifact rather than the society’s condition. Gramsci’s own treatment of the South guards against the error in principle, since he found the countryside’s formation proceeding through mediating strata rather than through associations, but the instruments of his inventory, circulation figures, enrolments, memberships, remain urban instruments. The researcher who carries the concept to an agrarian society must first translate the inventory, asking what performs the school’s work, the press’s work, the parish’s work, where no school, press, or parish of the Italian kind exists. Handled with that translation, the concept travels; handled without it, the concept mistakes its birthplace for the world. The caution completes this article’s account of the instrument: powerful within its range, honest about its range’s edges, and most dangerous, as all strong instruments are, in the hands of a user who has not read the calibration plate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does Gramsci mean by civil society?

He means the whole ensemble of bodies that common usage calls private and through which a social order wins and keeps the agreement of the governed: schools and universities, churches and religious orders, newspapers and publishers, cultural and professional associations, trade unions, and the clubs and presses that parties maintain. These bodies do not rule by command or by punishment. They form outlooks, habits, and loyalties, teaching a population what to expect from life and what to treat as natural or unchangeable. Gramsci locates this ensemble in the superstructure, pairs it with political society, the governmental apparatus of coercion, and holds that the two together make up the state in its integral sense. The definition is functional throughout: a body belongs to civil society because of the formative work it performs, whatever its legal badge says. Two implications follow. The concept directs attention away from ministries and toward classrooms, pulpits, and editorial offices; and it treats a population’s agreement as something manufactured by identifiable bodies, not as a natural atmosphere.

Q: How does Gramsci’s civil society differ from Marx’s?

The two usages point at different floors of society. In Marx the phrase covers the material intercourse of human beings, the world of production, exchange, property, and need, and it sits in the economic base whose anatomy the science of political economy dissects. In Gramsci the phrase covers the machinery that manufactures agreement: the institutions where loyalty, deference, and aspiration are taught and renewed. One term therefore names where life is materially produced, while the other names where the meaning of that life is settled. The difference is not a nuance of emphasis but a change of address, from base to superstructure, and it explains why readers who import Marx’s definition into the prison notebooks misread page after page, taking references to schools and churches as references to factories and markets. A reliable classroom test follows from the contrast: wherever a passage’s argument turns on persuasion, formation, or allegiance, Gramsci’s sense is in play; wherever it turns on production and exchange, the older sense is.

Q: What is the integral state?

The integral state is Gramsci’s name for the state taken whole, at the full extent of its real activity. His formula equates it with political society plus civil society: on one side the ministries, courts, police, prisons, and armed forces through which a dominant group coerces those who refuse its rule, and on the other side the schools, churches, media, and associations through which it secures the agreement of everyone else. The formula’s point is corrective. A definition of the state that stops at the governmental apparatus mistakes the smaller and noisier half of rule for the whole of it, and cannot explain why orders persist for generations with their coercive machinery mostly idle. Gramsci adds that the two halves are distinguished methodologically, for analysis, since in concrete life they interpenetrate at every point. The concept answers a standing puzzle of political analysis: how a minority order secures the daily, unforced compliance of the majority, and where an observer should look to watch that compliance being produced.

Q: Is civil society part of the base or the superstructure?

For Gramsci it belongs to the superstructure, and the placement is one of his signature decisions. His architectural image arranges society in floors: the economic structure as foundation, and above it two great superstructural levels, civil society and political society. This article calls the placement the relocation, because the tradition Gramsci inherited had put the same term in the foundation itself. Marx’s civil society was the material sphere of production and exchange; Gramsci’s is the storey where consent is organised, above the economy and answerable to it without being reducible to it. The placement does not declare the superstructure independent. It declares that between production and politics there stands an organised mediation, the institutions that form the population’s outlook, and that this mediation has its own personnel, inertia, and effects on what history can do next. Examination answers that place the term in the base while discussing Gramsci reproduce Marx’s usage under Gramsci’s name, and markers treat the slip as this topic’s characteristic error.

Q: Is civil society the same as the voluntary sector?

No, and the difference runs in both directions. Gramsci’s terrain is wider than the voluntary sector, since it takes in bodies that are neither voluntary nor charitable nor independent of government in any simple sense: a state school system, a confessional publishing empire, a party’s disciplined network of clubs and newspapers, a professional order armed with statutory powers. It is also differently valued. The voluntary sector label carries a suggestion of civic virtue, of associations as a democratic good in themselves, whereas Gramsci classifies by function and leaves virtue out of it: a mutual aid society and a fascist veterans’ league occupy his civil society alike, because both organise the outlooks and loyalties of their members. What makes a body part of his civil society is the formative work it does, not the goodness of its aims or the source of its funds.

Q: What did Perry Anderson criticise about Gramsci?

In his 1976 New Left Review essay, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, Anderson charged that the notebooks never stabilise the relation between their two central terms. He arrays the passages and finds three models rotating without resolution: passages that contrast the state with civil society, dividing coercion from consent; passages that enlarge the state until it encompasses civil society, as in the formula of the integral state; and passages where the two are effectively identified with one another. Since each model draws the boundary of the state at a different place, the theory’s meaning shifts as the models turn, and later interpreters, Anderson argues, canonise whichever model suits them while footnoting the rest. He explains the instability by the censorship of the prison and by the genuine difficulty of the Western problem Gramsci was thinking through, but he does not withdraw the charge. The essay remains the obligatory starting point for serious work on the concept, because every later defence of the notebooks defines itself against its array of the three models.

Q: Why did civil society become a liberal idea?

Because the phrase was taken up, in the decades around the end of the Cold War, by movements and then by theorists who needed a name for society’s self organisation against a monopolising state. Dissidents in Eastern Europe, in the orbit of Solidarity and Charter 77, used it for the parallel institutions, independent unions, underground publications, and free associations through which a public life could survive outside the party state’s control. After 1989 the usage was generalised by political science: writers such as John Keane theorised the sphere between individual and state, Ernest Gellner made it central to the conditions of liberty, and Robert Putnam measured its density as the stock of civic engagement on which democratic performance depends. Development agencies then funded associations worldwide under the same banner. In this lineage the term denotes a sector outside and against the state, valued as a democratic good.

Q: Is civil society a site of struggle or of consensus?

In Gramsci’s construction it is both at once, and refusing the choice is the point of the concept. The terrain is where the ruling order’s consensus is manufactured daily, through schools, churches, presses, and associations that form the population’s common sense. Precisely because consensus is manufactured there, the same terrain is where it can be contested: rival institutions, rival intellectuals, and rival conceptions of the world compete for the same population’s allegiance, and an opposition that builds no presence on the terrain abandons the manufacture of agreement to its opponents. Civil society is therefore less a possession than a front, stable only for as long as its balance holds. An existing order treats it as its fortress system; a challenger treats it as the ground on which the fortresses can be sapped, won, or rebuilt. The concept describes the ground, not the winner.

Q: Does Gramsci abandon the base and superstructure model?

He transforms it rather than abandoning it, although critics dispute whether the transformation leaves the model’s substance intact. The architecture remains in place throughout the notebooks: an economic structure of production relations, and superstructures in which human beings become conscious of their conflicts and fight them out. What Gramsci changes is the weighting and the internal map. He divides the superstructure into civil and political society, grants the superstructural level its own density, personnel, and causal weight, and binds the levels together in the historical bloc, where structural pressures are lived through organised conceptions. Defenders call this the model matured, determination without puppetry. Prosecutors, following Bobbio, call it determination retained as ceremony while the explanation migrates upstairs. The text supports the transformation’s fact completely and its interpretation only partly, which is why the question stays open in the scholarship. Students should learn to state the transformation precisely, since examiners reward the distinction between abandoning a model and rebuilding it far more than either verdict alone.

Q: What did Bobbio argue about Gramsci and civil society?

Norberto Bobbio, in the essay he presented at the Cagliari Gramsci conference in 1967 and published in the proceedings of 1969, argued that the term’s placement is the key to Gramsci’s whole system and the measure of his distance from Marx. In Marx, civil society sits in the structure, the realm of material need, which is why the economic holds primacy in the theory. In Gramsci, the same term sits in the superstructure, as the level where ideology is elaborated and hegemony exercised, the active and creative moment of the historical process. Bobbio concluded that the relocation reverses the polarity of historical materialism: primacy passes to the superstructures and to the ideological moment within them, and Gramsci’s civil society, creative and positive, is almost the inverse of Marx’s sphere of egoistic need. Later exchanges refined the claim without removing its force.

Q: How does the relocation move the state inside civil society?

Strictly speaking, the relocation moves civil society inside the state, and the effect runs in both directions. Once the institutions that organise consent are gathered into one concept and placed in the superstructure, a choice becomes unavoidable: either those institutions stand outside the state, in which case most of rule happens off the state’s premises, or the concept of the state must expand to contain them. Gramsci’s mature formula chooses the expansion, so the state, integrally understood, is found inside the schoolroom, the editorial office, and the parish hall as surely as in the ministry. The state is thereby moved inside civil society’s territory, acting through bodies that liberal doctrine classifies as private. What looks like a verbal adjustment transforms political analysis, since the search for state action must now extend to curricula, sermons, and leader pages, and the boundary of the political moves with it.

Q: What should a student separate between the three civil societies?

Three things, in a fixed order: the definition, the location, and the conclusion. By definition, the Hegelian and Marxian usage names the sphere of needs and private interest, the Gramscian usage names the institutions organising consent, and the liberal usage names the associational sector between state and market. By location, the first sits in the base for Marx, the second in the superstructure as half of the integral state, and the third outside the state as its counterweight. By conclusion, the first directs study to political economy, the second to the measurement of an order’s reserves of consent, and the third to the density of associations as a democratic good in itself. A student who runs the three separations before using the term, in an essay or an examination, will avoid the single commonest error in the literature, which is arguing across the rows of the table without noticing. The table in this article is designed to be reproduced from memory for exactly this purpose, and its rows, rehearsed in order, carry a candidate through most set questions.

Q: Why does hegemony need institutions rather than only ideas?

Because in Gramsci’s materialism an idea that nobody organises remains a private possession, while an idea installed in institutions becomes a social force. A conception of the world becomes hegemonic when it is taught in schools, preached in churches, printed in newspapers, embodied in professional standards, and repeated in the routines of associations until it settles as common sense. Institutions supply what free floating doctrines cannot: personnel trained to elaborate and defend the conception, rhythms of repetition that deposit it in habit, and authority that presents it as knowledge rather than opinion. This is why the notebooks spend their energy mapping bodies rather than refuting beliefs. A belief can be answered by an argument; a curriculum can be answered only by another institution doing the same formative work, and the whole strategic outlook of the prison writings follows from that simple asymmetry.

Q: How does the extended state change the war of position?

The war of position is the strategy the extended state makes necessary. If a Western order’s strength sat in its government alone, then seizing the government would settle the matter, and the direct assault, the war of manoeuvre, would be the rational strategy. The East and West passage denies the premise: behind the governmental trench stands the fortress system of civil society, so a force that takes the trench finds the order’s reserves intact and itself besieged in turn. Once the state is understood integrally, strategy must be readdressed to the terrain where consent is manufactured, and the contest becomes positional, a long engagement across schools, presses, associations, and parties, in which rival formation is built before and alongside any bid for office. The extended state does not merely accompany the war of position; it is the finding from which that strategy is deduced.

Q: What separates consent organised in civil society from propaganda?

Depth, duration, and the direction of fit. Propaganda addresses opinions on particular questions, is issued by an identifiable source, and lapses when the campaign ends; its audience usually knows it is being persuaded. Consent organised through institutions works at the level beneath opinion, forming the conceptions, categories, and expectations with which questions are judged before any campaign begins. It is deposited slowly, by curricula, rituals, professional standards, and editorial habits, and it survives the failure of any single message because it lives in arrangements rather than in arguments. The sharpest test is counterfactual: withdraw a propaganda campaign and its effects decay within a season, while withdrawing a school system or a church would leave a population’s outlook substantially where it stood for a generation. Propaganda speaks to common sense; civil society is the machinery that made common sense what it is.