Two names dominate every serious account of how Marxist theory explains belief, obedience and the quiet reproduction of a social order. Antonio Gramsci, writing in a fascist prison between 1929 and 1935, built his answer around hegemony and consent. Louis Althusser, writing in Paris four decades later, built his around ideological state apparatuses and interpellation. The two men never met, belonged to different generations of the same movement, and are usually taught in sequence, one chapter after the other, as though the second simply continued the first. That classroom habit conceals the most instructive fact about them: Althusser both honoured Gramsci as his one real predecessor on this terrain and attacked him by name, in print, as the exponent of the deviation he most wanted to expel from Marxist theory. This article treats the pair as what they are, two rival answers to a single question, and it resolves the comparison by finding the one disagreement from which all the others follow.

The single question can be stated plainly. Capitalist relations do not persist by force alone, and neither thinker believed they did. Factories are staffed, laws are obeyed, taxes are paid, wars are volunteered for, and elections ratify outcomes that leave the underlying distribution of property untouched, mostly without soldiers in the street. Something secures the active or passive agreement of the governed, and that something works through institutions that are not, on their face, instruments of repression: schools, churches, newspapers, parties, trade unions, families, courts in their everyday rather than their punitive aspect. Gramsci and Althusser agree that the explanation of social order lies substantially in these institutions. They agree that ideology is not a decorative set of ideas floating above real life but a practical force embedded in organisations and routines. They even agree, against a cruder Marxism, that the economy does not mechanically stamp beliefs onto passive minds. The agreement is real, and it is what makes the disagreement worth having. Where they divide is over what happens inside those institutions to the people who pass through them, and over whether those people can, in principle, take their agreement back.

The instrument this article uses to decide the comparison is named the withdrawal test, and it will be applied to both frameworks with the same pressure. Ask of each theory a single question: does it leave the subject of ideology a standpoint from which consent, once given, can be withdrawn? Gramsci’s framework not only permits the question, it is built to answer it, because a hegemony that could not be lost would not need to be organised, defended and renewed at cost. Althusser’s framework is built so that the question cannot arise in that form, because the subject who might withdraw consent is itself a product of the ideology in question, and there is no position outside ideology from which a refusal could be launched. Everything else in the famous contrast, the vocabulary of apparatuses against the vocabulary of trenches, the quarrel over humanism, the dispute about history, is downstream of this difference. A comparison that starts anywhere else produces a list. A comparison that starts here produces a verdict about what each theory can do: only one of them can generate an account of political change, while the other is the stronger explanation of why change is so rare.

Two thinkers, one set of institutions

The resemblance between the two projects is close enough that a careless summary can merge them. Both men rejected the picture of ideology as a mere illusion dispelled by correct information. Both relocated the mechanism of domination from the ministry and the barracks to the ordinary institutions of civil life. Both insisted that the ruling ideas of an order are carried by organisations with staffs, budgets, buildings and timetables, not by disembodied prejudice. And both wrote against members of their own camp: Gramsci against the economism that expected crisis to do the work of politics automatically, Althusser against the humanist Marxism that, in his judgement, had dissolved the science of history into a philosophy of man. Two internal critics of the same tradition, separated by a generation and a war, converged on the same list of institutions. A reader meeting the famous inventories side by side could be forgiven for thinking them a single doctrine in two dialects: the school, the church, the press, the party, the union, the family, the law.

The dialects, however, encode opposite grammars. In Gramsci’s notebook vocabulary, the institutions of civil society are positions in a struggle, trenches and fortifications that can be occupied, contested, lost and retaken. Their allegiance is a variable, not a constant, and the whole art of politics consists in shifting it. In Althusser’s vocabulary of 1970, the same institutions are apparatuses, a term chosen precisely because it suggests a machine with a function: whatever their internal variety, they operate, in the last instance, to reproduce the relations of production that define the social order. A trench can change sides. An apparatus, in the strict letter of the essay, performs its function. That difference in metaphor is not decoration. It registers a disagreement about whether the institutions have a built-in direction or an open one, and therefore about whether the people formed inside them are contestants with a possible exit or products without one.

A second resemblance is worth registering before the contrast hardens, because it will matter when the combination question arrives. Neither thinker treats ideology as the property of a single class stamped onto the rest. Gramsci’s hegemonic class must universalise its interests, speak in the name of the nation, and make real sacrifices of its narrow corporate advantage, or its leadership fails. Althusser’s apparatuses are explicitly described, in a qualification his critics often skip, as not only the stake but also the site of class struggle, which means the machine’s output is contested from inside. Both theories, that is, contain an internal account of friction. The comparison is not between a theory of freedom and a theory of iron necessity. It is between two theories that each contain a mechanism of reproduction and a mechanism of disturbance, weighted in opposite proportions, and the work of this article is to weigh them honestly rather than to caricature either.

The difference stated in a single paragraph

Summaries of this pair usually begin with a table of contrasting terms and end in a blur, because the terms are allowed to define each other in a circle. The discipline used here is different. One question is put first, in its sharpest form, and the contrast is allowed to organise itself around the answer each thinker is forced to give.

What is the difference between Gramsci and Althusser on ideology?

Both analyse institutions beyond the coercive state. Gramsci treats them as a contested terrain where consent is negotiated, costly, and revocable. Althusser treats them as apparatuses that constitute subjects, leaving no position outside ideology from which consent could be withdrawn.

Unpack the sentence and the whole comparison falls out of it. Negotiated means that consent in Gramsci has two parties and terms; it is an achievement renewed daily, like a treaty, and treaties lapse. Costly means that the leading group pays for its leadership in concessions, compromises and the discipline of presenting its interest as everyone’s, so hegemony can be audited by what it gives up. Revocable means that the led can defect, and Gramsci has a technical vocabulary for the moments when they do: the crisis of authority, the organic crisis, the detachment of masses from their traditional parties and beliefs. On the other side, constituted means that for Althusser the individual becomes a subject, a self who recognises itself and acts, only inside an ideology that was there before it; the recognition feels like freedom and is, structurally, the mechanism of subjection itself. No position outside means exactly that: the theory forbids the Archimedean point, the place a critic might stand to withdraw an agreement, because the critic is also a subject, also constituted, also inside.

It follows that the two theories are not two descriptions of one process at different zoom levels, a misunderstanding this article will return to, because the descriptions contradict each other at the decisive point. If consent can be withdrawn, then the subject has a margin that ideology does not exhaust, and politics can be the organised enlargement of that margin. If it cannot, then talk of withdrawal is a category error, and whatever change occurs must be explained by something other than subjects changing their minds. Both cannot be true of the same act at the same moment. The rest of the comparison, conducted across seven points and summarised in the table below, is the patient unfolding of that single contradiction through institutions, mechanisms, subjects, resistance, parties, history and explanatory range.

The acknowledgement: a predecessor named in the essay itself

The comparison does not have to be assembled by later scholars from scattered hints, because Althusser states his debt himself, in the most famous text he ever wrote on the subject. In the essay on ideological state apparatuses, published in 1970 and destined to become one of the most reprinted pieces of Marxist theory of its century, he pauses over the question of who had seen, before him, that the state could not be confined to its repressive apparatus. His answer names one man. Gramsci, he writes, stands alone as the predecessor who had travelled some way down the road the essay is taking, the one earlier thinker who had grasped that the state includes institutions belonging, in the usual vocabulary, to civil society, and that domination is exercised through them. The fragment of acknowledgement is short enough to quote exactly: Gramsci was, on this point, “the only one who went any distance in the road I am taking”. Twelve words, and they settle the relationship’s first half. Whatever Althusser later says against Gramsci, he says as a debtor, and he knew it.

Consider what the acknowledgement concedes. It concedes priority: the widening of the state beyond police, army, courts and prisons was Gramsci’s move, made in a prison cell decades before the Paris essay. It concedes scope: the institutions Gramsci listed under civil society and the institutions Althusser lists as apparatuses overlap almost completely, so the later theory is a reconstruction of a terrain the earlier one had already surveyed. And it concedes the problem: if domination runs through schools and churches and newspapers, then a Marxism that thinks only about seizing the repressive core has misunderstood its object. That was Gramsci’s founding complaint against the strategy of frontal assault in the West, and Althusser repeats it as the premise of his own construction. The essay’s list of apparatuses, religious, educational, family, legal, political, trade union, communications, cultural, is the notebooks’ civil society transcribed into a structural register.

Why, then, does the debt matter for the comparison rather than merely for the history of ideas? Because it rules out the laziest reading of the pair, the reading in which Althusser simply supersedes a primitive Gramsci. A successor who announces that his predecessor went some distance down the same road is telling his readers that the road is shared and the distance is the variable. The question the essay silently poses is what Gramsci failed to reach at the end of that distance, and the essay’s machinery is built to supply it: a rigorous account of reproduction, a theory of the subject, a demarcation between science and ideology. Althusser presents himself not as refuting the notebooks but as completing them, giving their insights the theoretical form he believed they lacked. Whether the completion preserves or betrays the original is the real subject of the comparison, and it cannot be posed at all unless the acknowledgement is kept in view.

Why did Althusser call Gramsci the one predecessor on his road?

Because Gramsci alone, among earlier Marxists, had refused to reduce the state to its repressive machinery and had located domination in the institutions of civil society. Althusser’s essay begins from that widening of the state, acknowledges the debt in plain terms, and then rebuilds the widened terrain on structural rather than historical foundations.

The rebuilding metaphor is exact, and a later section examines the demolition work it required. For now the acknowledgement itself deserves one more moment of attention, because it is double sided in a way readers often miss. Althusser praises Gramsci for an idea and withholds praise for everything Gramsci built on it. The notebooks’ concepts, consent, hegemony, the national popular, the organic intellectual, are not taken over; they are left behind as the essay proceeds to its own machinery of apparatuses and interpellation. The praise is therefore also a boundary. Gramsci saw the terrain, the essay implies, but saw it historically, politically, in terms of will and organisation, where it needed to be seen structurally, in terms of function and effect. A reader who registers only the homage will be puzzled by the attack that the next section describes. A reader who registers the boundary inside the homage will recognise the attack as the same gesture, performed in another text and at greater length.

The attack: historicism named as the deviation

The second text is Reading Capital, the collective volume of 1965 in which Althusser and his students announced a new way of reading Marx, and in its pages the courtesy of the later essay is absent. Here Gramsci is named as the leading exponent of historicism, the deviation Althusser holds responsible for dissolving Marxist science into a philosophy of history. The charge has a precise content. Gramsci had described Marxism, his philosophy of praxis, as an absolute historicism: a doctrine that understands itself as the product and the self consciousness of a determinate historical process, and that treats every truth, including its own, as historically situated. For Gramsci this was a strength, a refusal to set his theory above the world it analysed. For Althusser it was the original sin of Western Marxism. A theory that makes itself the expression of an epoch cannot claim to know that epoch, since an expression is an effect, not an explanation. Historicism, on his account, confuses the real object with the object of knowledge, guarantees in advance that history will vindicate the theory, and converts the open, uneven, overdetermined real into a single expressive totality unfolding toward its meaning.

The attack should not be softened into a misunderstanding. Althusser knew exactly which formulations he was striking: Gramsci’s insistence that philosophy and history are identical, that the philosophy of praxis is the historicisation of philosophy itself, that truth is what becomes and proves itself in practice. Each of these, in the structural reading, sacrifices the specificity of theory to the movement of history, and each therefore had to be refused if Marxism was to be a science with an object of its own rather than the world view of a class at a moment. Nor was Gramsci an accidental target. He was, by the 1960s, the authoritative alternative within the European communist movement to the doctrines Althusser opposed, the thinker to whom every humanist and historicist reading appealed. To dislodge the reading, the authority had to be contested. The attack on historicism is Gramsci’s name mentioned in the indictment because Gramsci is the indictment’s most distinguished exhibit.

Placed beside the acknowledgement, the attack creates the apparent contradiction with which this article began, and the contradiction dissolves once the division of labour between the texts is seen. The essay of 1970 takes Gramsci’s terrain and praises the taking. The volume of 1965 refuses Gramsci’s method and attacks the refusal into print. Althusser’s Gramsci is therefore two figures at once: the surveyor of the institutions, unmatched; and the philosopher of absolute historicism, to be corrected on every point of theory. This is not inconsistency. It is the classic shape of a takeover, in which the successor keeps the asset and replaces the management. What the replacement costs, whether the structural management can run the terrain as well as the historical one did, is precisely what the seven point comparison and the withdrawal test are designed to measure. Readers who know only the attack repeat the error of readers who know only the praise: both miss that Althusser’s relation to Gramsci is one of inheritance administered as a dispute.

One further document belongs in this section, because it complicates the quarrel honourably on Althusser’s side. In a letter and in later self critical writings he conceded that his reading of Gramsci had been partial, conducted through the thematic editions then available in French and Italian, and that his theoretical campaign had led him into a deviation of his own, a theoreticism that subordinated class struggle to the defence of science. The concession does not withdraw the charge of historicism. It does acknowledge that the polemicist’s Gramsci was a selection, assembled for a fight, and that the notebooks contain more than the fight required. A fair comparison, which is what this article attempts, holds both facts together: the attack was deliberate and argued, and its author later admitted its angle was narrower than its target.

Gramsci’s machinery: consent as organised work

Gramsci’s side of the comparison begins with a distinction between two modes of class rule. Domination is rule by coercion, exercised through the state in its narrow sense, government, police, courts, prisons, army. Leadership, his rendering of hegemony in its active sense, is rule by consent, exercised through civil society: the vast complex of institutions that stand between the individual and the state, and in which ways of seeing the world are formed, tested and made habitual. A class that only dominates has a garrison. A class that leads has a culture, an educational system, a press, a clergy, a body of common sense, and its rule presents itself to the ruled not as force but as the order of things, as leadership they have been persuaded to follow and help reproduce. The famous consequence follows at once: in the developed states of the West, the second mode is the load bearing one, and a politics that plans only against the first mode will break against defences it never reconnoitred.

Consent, in this machinery, is not a mood. It is organised work, performed by identifiable specialists in identifiable institutions. Gramsci’s name for the specialists is intellectuals, a term he deliberately widened until it covered every stratum whose function is to organise, elaborate and diffuse a conception of the world: teachers, journalists, priests, technicians, party organisers, civil servants, the writers of textbooks and the composers of popular songs. Every rising class creates its own such stratum, its organic intellectuals, and wins its hegemony by their labour. Nor is the labour one directional flattery. The leading class must genuinely lead, which in Gramsci’s analysis means it must take account of the interests of the groups it leads, make sacrifices of its own immediate economic corporate interest, and construct a national popular collective will in which subordinate groups recognise something of themselves. Consent extracted without concession is not hegemony but its counterfeit, and the theory contains the instruments to detect the difference, as the next sections show.

Because consent is work, it can fail, and because it is renewed through institutions, its failure has an anatomy. Gramsci’s notebooks analyse the crisis of authority in which the ruling class loses its consensus, the great masses detach themselves from their traditional ideologies and parties, and the old order survives for a time by force alone, in the interregnum where a variety of morbid symptoms appear. Nothing in this analysis is metaphorical decoration. It is the theoretical registration of a fact that Althusser’s machinery, as we shall see, struggles to register at all: that the agreement of the governed is a historical variable, rising and collapsing under specifiable conditions, and that a theory of ideology must be able to describe its withdrawal as readily as its operation. The full guide to the concept on its own terms is the companion study of hegemony: the complete guide, which reconstructs the machinery piece by piece; the present article needs from it only this load bearing property, that Gramscian consent is a relation between parties, maintained at cost, and terminable.

A final element of the machinery must be in place before the contrast can be drawn fairly, and it is the element Althusser’s defenders least often quote. Gramsci does not imagine the citizen of civil society as a blank recipient of hegemonic messages. The subordinate person, in the notebooks’ account, carries two theoretical consciousnesses, and the tension between them is the engine of the whole politics. That divided interior, treated next, is Gramsci’s answer, prepared decades in advance, to the strongest objection his rival would ever raise against him.

Common sense, good sense and the divided mind

Gramsci’s theory of the subject begins from a refusal to take the subordinate person’s beliefs at face value, in either direction. The worker or peasant who repeats the slogans of the ruling order is not, for Gramsci, simply indoctrinated, and the same person in revolt is not simply awakened. What the notebooks describe instead is contradictory consciousness: a single mind holding two conceptions of the world that do not agree. One conception is verbal, inherited, absorbed without criticism from the surrounding culture, from religion, folklore, school and press, and it is this conception that is professed on Sundays and in conversation. The other is implicit in activity itself, in the practical knowledge by which the worker handles materials, cooperates with others, and knows, in the hands rather than in words, that the world is transformable and that he transforms it. The two coexist in the same head. The first belongs to a past that is dissolving; the second belongs to a future that has not yet found its language. Hegemony governs through the first. Politics, in Gramsci’s sense, is the organised work of giving the second a voice, a discipline and institutions of its own.

The name he gives the healthy kernel inside the inherited conception is good sense, and the distinction between common sense and good sense does more work in his theory than any slogan about false consciousness. Common sense is the whole sedimented deposit: incoherent, contradictory in itself, containing Stone Age survivals beside fragments of advanced science, the property of no one class and the battlefield of all. Good sense is the part of that deposit that deserves to survive criticism, the practical realism by which ordinary people, in their work and their experience, already know more than the philosophy they profess. The importance for this comparison cannot be overstated. Althusser’s objection, stated at full strength later in this article, is that Gramsci presupposes a subject standing outside ideology who can judge it. The doctrine of contradictory consciousness is Gramsci’s reply in advance: there is no outside, and none is needed, because the inside is divided. The standpoint from which consent can be questioned is not a position beyond the subject’s formation; it is a fault line within that formation, between the world the subject recites and the world the subject’s own practice discloses.

What is contradictory consciousness, and why does it matter here?

It is Gramsci’s name for the divided awareness of the subordinate worker, who holds one conception of the world absorbed from the ruling order and another implicit in his own practical activity. It matters because it supplies, inside Gramsci’s theory, the raw material of a standpoint from which consent can be reconsidered and withdrawn.

Honesty requires the concession the brief for any fair treatment must register, and this article registers it without being forced. Contradictory consciousness is a suggestion of extraordinary fertility, scattered through notes on folklore, language, religion and education, rather than a developed theory with its mechanisms spelled out. Gramsci does not give a systematic account of how the practical conception wins against the professed one, of what proportion of a population must be reached, of how the critical elaboration he assigns to intellectuals and the party actually transforms a private dissonance into a collective will. The notebooks gesture; they do not complete. Althusserians are entitled to press the point, and they have. What they are not entitled to claim is that the gap leaves the theory without an answer to the question of the standpoint. The answer exists, in outline: the standpoint is practice itself, theorised by intellectuals organically connected to the class whose practice it is. Whether the outline can bear the weight the theory of hegemony places on it is a genuine scholarly dispute, and it is one of the two or three points on which this comparison, fairly conducted, must declare the contest open rather than decided.

The price of consent: concessions and the historic bloc

A theory in which consent can be withdrawn must explain what consent is purchased with, since withdrawal is rational only where the terms can be judged and found wanting. Gramsci’s explanation is material, and it is the second feature that separates his account from any theory of indoctrination. A class leads, rather than merely rules, when it succeeds in presenting its own corporate interest as the motor of a universal expansion, and the presentation is not a trick of rhetoric. The leading group must make sacrifices of an economic corporate kind, must take account of the interests and tendencies of the groups over which it exercises hegemony, must compromise on secondary points while holding the decisive nucleus of its position. The resulting equilibrium, unstable and continuously renegotiated, is what Gramsci calls a historic bloc when it hardens into a durable unity of structure and superstructure, of economy and culture, in which a social order coheres as a lived whole rather than as a command backed by police.

The analytical yield of this machinery is a set of tests. Hegemony can be measured by its concessions: an order that gives nothing and demands everything is not hegemonic but merely dominant, whatever its cultural apparatus claims. It can be dated by its compromises: the catalogue of what a leading class has been forced to grant, land reform, suffrage, welfare, recognition of unions, maps the moving frontier of its consent. And it can fail its own test in a distinctive way Gramsci calls passive revolution, the molecular transformation of a society from above, modernisation without the popular participation that genuine hegemony would require, in which the old order absorbs demands in homeopathic doses precisely in order to prevent the formation of an alternative collective will. Passive revolution is the theory’s recognition that the adversary also strategises, that consent can be managed defensively, and that the trenches of civil society are garrisoned by an enemy who has read the same map.

Set beside the rival machinery, the point of this section is the direction of explanation. Gramsci explains the stability of an order by what its rulers do and give, under pressure, over time; stability is an outcome of politics, renewed or lost. The explanation is therefore reversible: whatever has the conditions stability has, can lose them. The reader should hold that reversibility in mind, because the next sections describe a machinery in which stability is explained by what structures do to persons, before persons act at all, and in which the equivalent of failure, the breakdown of reproduction, is the hardest phenomenon for the theory to house.

Althusser’s question: how a social order reproduces itself

Althusser begins from a different door. His founding question is not how consent is won but how a social formation reproduces itself: how the relations of production, the pattern of ownership, command and subordination that defines a mode of production, are renewed day after day and generation after generation, given that nothing about them is natural and no one signs a contract renewing them each morning. Every social formation, the argument runs, must reproduce the conditions of its production or perish. It must reproduce the productive forces, the tools, materials and skills; and it must reproduce the relations within which those forces work, which means reproducing workers who are competent, disciplined, punctual, literate in the required degree, and, above all, submitted to the rules of the established order, able to recognise their place in it as the place of a subject who works, obeys and, in the ruling ideology’s phrase, walks by himself.

The question is a powerful one, and its power explains much of the essay’s influence. It converts the mystery of obedience into a problem of logistics. If submission must be manufactured daily, at scale, across a whole population, then there must be machinery for manufacturing it, and the machinery must be findable: buildings, rituals, timetables, examinations, sermons, broadcasts. Gramsci had in effect asked where consent is organised; Althusser asks what social reproduction requires, and derives the institutions from the requirement. The derivation gives his account a systematic tightness the notebooks never attempted, and it relocates ideology’s centre of gravity from persuasion to production: ideology is whatever the machinery of reproduction needs in order to turn out subjects who fit their places. The full working out of the apparatus concept belongs to the dedicated study of the ISA essay and the state apparatuses, and is only summarised here, since the present task is the comparison; but one feature of the question itself belongs to the comparison directly. A theory that asks how order reproduces itself has already decided that order is the norm and disruption the anomaly requiring explanation. A theory that asks how consent is organised has decided the opposite: struggle is the norm, and order is the anomaly, a temporary equilibrium of forces. The founding questions of the two men are mirror images, and each theory’s celebrated strengths and notorious blind spots can be predicted from which question it asked first.

There is a historical edge to the question as well, which the French sections below develop. Althusser wrote for a movement that had expected, for decades, that the contradictions of capitalism would mature into its supersession, and had instead watched the most developed capitalist societies stabilise, integrate their working classes and reproduce themselves with an efficiency that embarrassed the old predictions. Reproduction was the scandal to be explained: not why the order fell, but why it stood. Gramsci, writing after a defeat, had the opposite scandal before him: an order that stood in Russia had fallen, and the orders that stood in the West had withstood assault. Each man theorised the surprise his generation had actually met, and the comparison that forgets this will mistake two answers to two historical riddles for two answers to one examination question, even though, at the level of the institutions analysed, the questions converge.

Apparatuses: the state widened and then redivided

The machinery Althusser builds on his founding question starts by redrawing the map of the state. Marxist theory, he argues, had long possessed a concept of the repressive state apparatus: the government, administration, army, police, courts and prisons, unified under a single command and functioning, in the last instance, by violence. To this he adds a second, plural order of institutions, the ideological state apparatuses, which function predominantly by ideology and only secondarily by repression, and which are mostly housed, confusingly for any simple map of public power, in what liberal vocabulary calls the private sphere. The churches are an apparatus. The schools are an apparatus, and in mature capitalism the dominant one, since no other institution holds the entire population captive for so many years at so impressionable an age. The family, the legal system in its everyday operation, political parties, trade unions, the press, radio and the arts complete the standard list. Their unity is not administrative but functional: beneath their diversity, they operate toward a single result, the reproduction of the relations of production, clothed in the ideology of the ruling class.

Two features of this redrawing decide its contrast with Gramsci, and both are subtler than the shared list suggests. The first is the criterion of membership. Gramsci’s civil society is defined historically, as the sphere of institutions that organise consent in a given formation, and its boundary with political society, the state proper, is fluid: he speaks of the integral state as political society plus civil society, hegemony armoured by coercion, and he lets institutions migrate across the boundary as formations change. Althusser’s apparatuses are defined by function and by their relation to state power: an institution is an ideological state apparatus not because consent is organised in it but because it contributes, whatever its legal ownership, to the reproduction the state secures. The private public distinction is declared indifferent, a point with no equivalent in Gramsci, for whom the distinction between the voluntary association and the state organ is a real variable of political life.

The second feature is direction of fit. In the notebooks, the institutions of civil society have no inherent allegiance; a church can harbour a liberation theology, a school can be staffed by cadres of the counter hegemony, a union can be the school of a rival collective will, and Gramsci’s strategic writings are manuals for exactly such captures. In the essay, the apparatuses have a built in function that their personnel cannot simply vote away, because the function is secured by the ruling ideology that unifies them and by the repressive apparatus that stands behind them as guarantor. Althusser does add, in the essay’s closing pages and more strongly in later statements, that the apparatuses are not only the stake of class struggle but also its site, and that the resistance of the exploited classes can find expression and a distant echo in them. The qualification matters and is discussed in full below. But it remains a qualification appended to a machine whose default setting is reproduction, whereas contestation is the default setting of Gramsci’s trenches. The map is shared; the physics drawn on it are not.

Ideology has a material existence

The most original stratum of the essay, and the stratum with no counterpart in the notebooks, is its pair of theses on what ideology is. The first thesis holds that ideology has a material existence: an ideology always exists in an apparatus and in the practices the apparatus organises. The believer’s ideas are not free floating thoughts which then, incidentally, get expressed in action. They are inserted into practices governed by rituals, and the rituals are defined by the material apparatus on which they depend. The person who believes in justice attends the court and behaves as its liturgy requires; the person who believes in the faith kneels, prays, confesses, and, as the essay remarks with Pascal at its shoulder, the kneeling itself generates the belief it is supposed to express. Reverse the spiritualist order, Althusser directs: it is not that ideas produce practices, but that the subject’s ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices. Ideology, on this account, is not in the head at all. It is in the timetable, the posture, the examination hall, the enrolment form.

What does it mean to say that ideology has a material existence?

It means that an ideology does not exist as a set of thoughts in a mind but in the practices governed by an apparatus: the rituals, routines and acts into which individuals are inserted. A belief is material when it is enacted, kneeling, reciting, attending, examining, so that the practice carries the idea rather than merely expressing it.

The comparison sharpens if the Gramscian counterpart is stated exactly. Gramsci too refuses the picture of ideology as disembodied ideas; his conceptions of the world exist in language, in folklore, in religion as practised, in the organisation of schools, and he insists that a philosophy becomes historical only when it becomes mass practice and creates institutions. The distance between the two is therefore not materialism against idealism, whatever the polemics of the period suggested; both are theorists of ideology’s embodiment. The distance is in what the embodiment does to the embodied. For Gramsci, practice is the medium in which a conception can be criticised as well as carried, because practice talks back: the experience of work contradicts the professed world view and deposits good sense as its residue. For Althusser, the practice of the apparatus constitutes the very subject who might do the criticising, so the contradiction, if it is to arise, must arise between apparatuses, rituals and functions, not inside a subject who stands at the point of contradiction with a foot outside. Materiality in Gramsci is the ground of a possible refusal. Materiality in Althusser is the reason refusal cannot locate its agent. The same thesis, that ideology lives in practices, supports opposite conclusions about the subject, which is why this section of the comparison repays slow reading: it shows the divergence happening inside the agreement, before the famous terms consent and interpellation are even introduced.

Interpellation: the hail and the turn

The second thesis is the celebrated one. Ideology, Althusser writes, interpellates individuals as subjects: it recruits them, transforms them, by a precise operation he illustrates with a small theatre of the street. A voice calls out, a policeman’s hail to a passer by, and the one who hears it turns around. In that turn, that mere rotation of the body toward the call, the individual becomes a subject: he recognises that the hail was addressed to him, that it was really him who was meant, and he accepts the identity the call assigns. The scene is deliberately banal, and its banality is the argument. Subjecthood is not conferred in ceremonies of induction; it is the everyday effect of being named, summoned, recognised, in the family that awaits the child before birth with a name and a place prepared, in the school that calls the register, in the ritual by which the believer answers to the voice that has always already addressed him. Ideology represents, in Althusser’s formula, the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, and interpellation is the mechanism by which that representation populates itself with subjects who live it as their own identity.

Interpellation must be defended against the misreading that has attached to it in survey courses, because the misreading collapses the whole comparison. Interpellation is not persuasion. Persuasion addresses an existing subject with arguments and invites a decision; it can fail because the subject weighs the plea and declines. Interpellation precedes the subject it produces: the turn toward the voice is not a decision the subject makes about ideology but the act by which there comes to be a subject at all, one who can thereafter deliberate, consent, refuse, in the grammar the ideology supplies. That is why the theory can absorb the fact of apparent refusal without damage. A subject who rebels against the order in the name of its own values, the prodigal, the heretic, the bad conscience, is still performing inside the recognition scene, still answering a hail, still a subject of the ideology he contests. Whether this absorptive power is the theory’s depth or its evasion is the question the withdrawal test poses below; here it is enough to fix the concept in its own strongest form, since a comparison conducted against a softened Althusser would be worthless.

Gramsci, it should be noted, has no equivalent mechanism, and the absence is instructive in both directions. The notebooks describe how conceptions of the world are diffused, how prestige attaches to the leading group’s culture, how the school and the church discipline the intellect, but they nowhere theorise the constitution of the subject as such; the person in Gramsci is the historically formed ensemble of relations, an effect of history certainly, but an effect that acts, deliberates and can be organised into a collective subject that changes its conditions. Where Althusser digs below the subject to its production, Gramsci digs behind the subject to its history. Both moves are materialist. They locate the lever of change in different strata, the one in the structure of recognition, the other in the organisation of a will, and the entire subsequent history of the debate, in cultural studies, in political theory, in the theory of discourse that later tried to fuse them, is the history of attempts to decide, or to dodge, which stratum is real.

Always already: a subject without a before

The temporal signature of Althusser’s theory is the formula that individuals are always already subjects. There is no first moment at which a pre ideological human material presents itself to ideology for processing; the child is expected, named, positioned within the familial ideological configuration before it is born, and its subsequent life is a deepening of recognitions that were prepared in advance. Ideology, correspondingly, has no history in the strong sense: particular ideologies rise and fall with the classes whose imaginary they articulate, but ideology in general, the structure of interpellation itself, is eternal, omni present in every social formation, as permanent, in the essay’s deliberately provocative comparison, as the unconscious in Freud’s account, which is also without time and without an outside. Even a communist society, the theory insists, would have ideology, since individuals would still need an imaginary relation to their conditions; what would change is whose ideology, and in what apparatuses, not whether.

Where does the subject come from in Althusser’s account?

From ideology itself, which recruits individuals and transforms them into subjects by hailing them, as a call in the street makes a passer by turn around. The subject is therefore an effect of the process that subjects it, not a pre existing author of beliefs who encounters ideology from outside and judges its claims.

Against this, Gramsci’s temporal signature is the opposite: everything in his account has a date. Common sense is a historical product, the sediment of past philosophies and past hegemonies, and it is in perpetual transformation under the pressure of practice and of the intellectual work done upon it. Consent is given to a specific leadership with a specific programme at a specific stage of an alliance; it expires as conditions change; its crisis can be periodised, its renewal assigned to agents. Even the subject of history, the collective will, is explicitly a construction to be achieved, not a structure to be presumed. Where Althusser’s theory is a theory of an eternal present tense, the constitution that always has happened, Gramsci’s is a theory of narrative time, of hegemonies that are born, reign and die. This is the deepest level of the quarrel over historicism reported earlier: the attack on absolute historicism and the doctrine of ideology in general are one gesture, the replacement of a history with a structure. The seven points that follow are, every one of them, translations of that single replacement into the vocabulary of institutions and politics.

Same list, different logic: civil society against the apparatuses

The question whether ideological state apparatuses and civil society describe the same thing is the comparison’s most natural question, since the inventories coincide so closely, and it deserves a more exact answer than the lazy affirmation it usually receives. The extensions coincide: school, church, press, party, union, family, law and letters appear on both lists, and any concrete study of, say, a national education system can be written in either vocabulary with the facts unchanged. The intensions diverge, and intension is what a concept is. Civil society, for Gramsci, names a relation: the sphere in which leadership is exercised through consent, distinguished analytically from political society, the sphere of direct domination, with the integral state defined as the two together, dictatorship plus hegemony. An institution belongs to civil society insofar as consent is organised in it, and the same institution, a court, a ministry school, can function in both registers at different moments. The concept therefore classifies by activity, and its boundary moves with the struggle it describes.

The apparatus concept classifies by destination. An ideological state apparatus is an institution that functions, whatever its ownership, its personnel believe, or its internal conflicts, toward the reproduction of the relations of production; the state’s name attaches to it because state power guarantees the conditions under which that function is performed, with the repressive apparatus as the final underwriter. The classification is therefore indifferent to the institution’s legal status and to the consciousness of its staff, in a way Gramsci’s is not. A parish school resisting the ministry’s curriculum is, for Gramsci, a trench whose garrison has defected, evidence about the state of the hegemonic war. For the structural account it remains an apparatus of the religious and educational systems, its resistance registered as friction within a function it continues, by existing, to perform: it still gathers children, still teaches them to be subjects of some recognised identity. Both descriptions can be defended. They cannot both be the primary one, and a researcher must choose which question is being asked, whether the institution’s allegiance is in play or whether its function persists through every change of allegiance. The dedicated treatment of the terrain itself, Gramsci on civil society, develops the first question; the apparatus essay develops the second; this comparison exists because the syllabus so often pretends the two are one.

A useful stress case is the trade union, which both men list and neither treats as simple. For Gramsci the union is a classic institution of civil society with a dual character: it organises the working class and can educate it toward hegemony, yet in its corporate form it also integrates that class into the existing order, bargaining within the rules the order sets, and his writings on the factory councils are an attempt to find the organisational form that escapes the integration. For Althusser the union figures among the political apparatuses, and its integrative function is the primary fact, the channel by which the worker’s practice is inserted into rituals of negotiation whose very form rehearses subjection to the rules of the game. Same union, same observable behaviour, two opposed emphases: the one asks what the union could become under a different leadership, the other asks what the union reliably does regardless of leadership. Anyone who has watched a real union will recognise both questions as genuine. The comparison does not dissolve into a draw, however, because the theories make different predictions about the exceptional case, the moment of crisis, and the withdrawal test below is designed to force exactly that prediction into the open.

Mechanism against mechanism: negotiation and constitution

Reduce each theory to its moving part and the contrast becomes mechanical. Gramsci’s moving part is negotiation between parties who exist before the bargain: a leading group with interests to universalise, subordinate groups with interests to defend, intellectuals who draft the terms, institutions in which the bargaining is conducted, and an equilibrium that holds only while the terms are honoured. The mechanism explains both order and disorder with one tool, since a bargain can be struck, strained, denounced or allowed to lapse, and each state of the bargain has a political name in the notebooks, hegemony, crisis of authority, passive revolution, Caesarism. Althusser’s moving part is constitution: an operation that produces the parties themselves. Interpellation has no before, since the individual is always already a subject, and therefore no bargaining table at which terms could be presented to someone who stood outside them. The mechanism explains order with unmatched economy and explains disorder, when it must, by relocating the disturbance: not subjects withdrawing, but apparatuses failing to mesh, functions misfiring, class struggle echoing inside the machine.

Why is persuasion the wrong model for interpellation?

Because persuasion presupposes a subject already formed, who hears an argument and decides, whereas interpellation is the operation that forms the subject in the first place. The hail does not plead a case; it assigns an identity, and the recognition with which the hailed person answers is the constitution of the self who might later deliberate.

The mechanical contrast can be made vivid with the ordinary experience both theories claim to explain, the schoolchild’s morning. Gramsci’s account directs attention to the terms: what the school offers the subordinate child, literacy, a credential, a route out of the parental condition, and what it exacts, punctuality, deference, the national story, the suppression of the home dialect; the child’s family consents, on the whole, because the offer is real, and the consent is withdrawn, in strikes over closures or battles over curriculum, when the terms visibly rot. Althusser’s account directs attention beneath the terms, to the production of the child as a subject who experiences the school’s disciplines as the very medium of being someone, whose rebellion, when it comes, will be staged in identities the surrounding ideologies have already prepared, the dropout, the militant, the delinquent. Neither description is a fantasy; they are rival cross sections of one process. The seven point table that follows exists to keep the cross sections separate, so that the reader can see, point by point, which theory is holding the knife at each layer of the specimen.

The subject: protagonist against effect

No point in the comparison has generated more heat, or less light, than the standing of the human subject, because it is the point at which the comparison touches the humanism dispute that divided Marxist philosophy in the 1960s. Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis places human practice at the centre of its world: man is to be conceived, in the notebooks’ recurrent formulation, as a process, precisely the process of his actions, a historically determined ensemble of relations that he nevertheless actively transforms. The subject of Gramscian politics, the collective will organised through the party, is a protagonist in a strict sense: not an uncaused cause, since it is formed by history, but the formed thing that forms in return, the point at which the analysis turns into its own object. Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism denies the subject that standing at the level of theory. History, in his notorious formula, is a process without a subject; individuals figure as the supports, the bearers, of relations they did not author; and the subject form itself, far from being the origin of ideology, is ideology’s elementary effect, the form in which the structure secures the lived recognition of its agents.

The comparison must observe the discipline this article set itself and not adjudicate the underlying dispute, which has its own dedicated treatment in the study of humanist against structuralist Marxism, where the philosophical stakes are examined at the length they require. What belongs here is only the consequence for the theory of ideology, and it is severe in both directions. If the subject is an effect, then consent is a misleading name for what apparatuses do, since effects do not consent to their causes; the vocabulary of agreement, leadership and betrayal, which is the living language of politics, must be translated into a vocabulary of functions and misrecognitions before theory can begin, and something real is lost in the translation, the phenomenon of a population experiencing its allegiance as a choice it could revisit. If the subject is a protagonist, conversely, the theory owes an account of how protagonists are manufactured so reliably in the image of the order they inhabit, an account of the depth of formation, and Gramsci’s scattered pages on education, religion and language, rich as they are, do not add up to the systematic theory of subjection that Althusser, whatever else he did, actually supplied. Each framework is strongest exactly where the other is thinnest, which is the honest reason the pair has survived as a pair: the syllabus keeps both because each exposes the other’s lacuna.

History: absolute historicism against an ideology without history

The treatment of history divides the two as cleanly as any point in the comparison, and it is the point on which Althusser chose to fight, since his indictment named Gramsci’s historicism before it named anything else. Gramsci’s absolute historicism holds that all conceptions of the world, including the philosophy of praxis itself, are historical products, intelligible only within the processes that generated them, and that this situatedness is not a disgrace but the condition of truth for a doctrine whose object is history. There is no view from eternity available to Marxism on this account; there is the self consciousness of an epoch become critical of itself, and the proof of a conception is its capacity to become historical force, to organise the present it interprets. Althusser’s counter position has two storeys. At the level of particular ideologies, history is real enough: ideologies are born with classes, serve them, and die with them. At the level of ideology in general, there is no history to tell, because the structure that produces subjects is a condition of any society whatsoever; it does not develop, it operates. Between the storeys sits the science of history, historical materialism, whose object, modes of production and their succession, is knowable precisely because the science is not one more ideology expressing its age.

Why does Althusser insist that ideology has no history?

Because he distinguishes ideology in general, the structure of interpellation that every society needs in order to produce subjects, from particular ideologies, which do rise and fall with classes. Only the particular ones have histories; the structure is as permanent, in his comparison, as the unconscious, and treating it as an epoch’s product was historicism’s error.

The political consequences of the two storeys deserve a paragraph, because they are the form in which most readers actually meet the dispute. A historicist theory of ideology can always narrate the weakening of an ideology: born in one alliance, it thins as the alliance dissolves, loses its intellectuals, survives as folklore, and the narrative doubles as a strategy, since each stage of the decay suggests the intervention that accelerates it. A structural theory cannot narrate decay at the level that matters; the interpellative structure of a dying ideology is replaced by another interpellation, subject for subject, and from the standpoint of ideology in general nothing has happened at all. Change becomes real only at the level of the science’s object, the transformation of the mode of production, which the theory of ideology itself cannot describe. This is why readers formed by Gramsci find the structural account politically paralysing despite its brilliance, and why readers formed by Althusser find the historicist account theoretically weightless despite its fertility. Each is correctly perceiving the price of the other’s founding choice.

Science and ideology: the break and its shadow

One more preliminary is required before the table, because it governs the row on history and silently governs several others. Althusser’s whole construction rests on a demarcation between science and ideology, inherited from his reading of Marx’s development as an epistemological break: before the break, the young Marx thinks in the ideological problematic of human essence and alienation; after it, the mature Marx founds a science whose concepts, mode of production, forces and relations of production, have no need of the subject at all. Ideology, in this scheme, is not falsehood but a different mode of cognition altogether, the lived, imaginary register in which societies represent their conditions to the subjects who must inhabit them, indispensable and, from the standpoint of knowledge, opaque. The theory of ideology is therefore a branch of the science, written from outside its object, in concepts the object cannot supply.

Gramsci’s scheme has no such outside, and the absence is principled rather than negligent. The philosophy of praxis does not claim a scientific exemption from the historicity it asserts of every other conception; it claims, instead, to be the first conception that understands its own historical genesis and makes that understanding part of its method, the self consciousness of a process rather than a report filed from beyond it. Where Althusser’s theorist occupies the position of the science, Gramsci’s organic intellectual occupies a position inside the class whose world view he elaborates, and his warrant is not exemption but connection. The contrast explains a curiosity of the literature: Althusserian writing on ideology tends toward the treatise, systematic, demarcating, confident of its metalanguage, while Gramscian writing tends toward the analysis of situations, conjunctural, tactical, its concepts kept deliberately close to the political work they must do. It also explains why the two bodies of writing so often fail to engage even when they cite each other. They are not written from the same chair, and the quarrel over historicism is, at bottom, a quarrel over whether the chair outside history exists.

The seven-point comparison

The table below is the article’s findable artifact, the seven-point comparison, and it should be used as the prose around it uses it: not as a scorecard that abolishes the argument, but as a map that keeps the argument’s seven fronts distinct. Read each row across, and then read the two columns down, since the columns are the theories and the rows are only the places where they collide.

Point of comparison	Gramsci	Althusser
Institutions analysed	Civil society’s associations, where leadership is organised and can be contested trench by trench	A differentiated set of state apparatuses, unified by the function of reproducing production relations
Mechanism of reproduction	Consent secured through leadership, concession and intellectual elaboration, renewed or lost in struggle	Interpellation of individuals as subjects within material rituals governed by each apparatus
Status of the subject	A historically formed process, capable of collective organisation into a will that acts back on its conditions	An effect of ideological recognition, the support of relations it did not author
Possibility of resistance	Counter hegemony built inside the same institutions, using the good sense already present in subordinate practice	Class struggle echoed within and between apparatuses, whose friction can jam reproduction without any outside position
Role of the party	The collective intellectual, organiser of a new hegemony and of the class that will exercise it	Bearer of scientific knowledge and of the class standpoint, uniting theory with the workers’ movement
Treatment of history	Absolute historicism: every conception, this one included, belongs to the process it interprets	Ideology in general stands outside history; particular ideologies alone have births and deaths
Range of explanation	Strongest on change, alliance and the anatomy of crises of authority	Strongest on stability, subjection and the depth at which order reproduces itself

The first row records the shared terrain and the difference in its surveying, which the earlier sections established: identical inventories, rival principles of classification. The second row is the mechanical heart. Negotiation presupposes parties; interpellation produces them. The third row states the anthropological divide from which the polemics about humanism grew, and the fourth row shows why the divide is not scholastic: each theory must find resistance somewhere, and they find it in different ontological places, Gramsci in a will that can be organised, Althusser in a friction that can be exploited. The fifth row, on the party, is the row where the two theories come closest in vocabulary and diverge in function, a party that organises consent against a party that imports knowledge. The sixth row carries the quarrel Althusser himself chose, and the seventh row is the comparison’s verdict in embryo: the frameworks are not symmetric rivals across the whole field, since each dominates the explanatory territory the other cannot enter, and their rivalry is total only at the single point the withdrawal test isolates.

Two warnings govern the table’s use in essays, and teachers report that both are violated constantly. The first is that the columns are not personality sketches, the voluntarist Italian against the determinist Frenchman; both men explicitly refused the positions the caricature assigns, Gramsci insisting that hegemony is structured and conditioned, Althusser insisting that his apparatuses were sites of struggle, and a comparison that relies on the caricature will be dismantled by any examiner who has read the qualifications. The second warning is that the rows are not independent. A student who copies the resistance row while reversing the subject row has not produced a synthesis but an incoherence, since in each theory the possibility of resistance is derived from the status of the subject, and the derivation is the theory. The table is a device for keeping derivations visible. Used that way, it earns its place; used as a substitute for them, it becomes the kind of aid that produces fluent, empty scripts.

The withdrawal test stated

The comparison has so far been conducted as an exposition, each theory in its own strongest register. The withdrawal test converts exposition into decision, and it is the claim this article exists to name. State the test precisely. Take a subject formed inside an ideology, a believer, a citizen, a worker who accepts the order’s account of the world. Ask whether the theory gives that subject, or the collectivity of such subjects, a describable route by which the acceptance can be revoked: a standpoint from which the ideology’s terms can be inspected, a procedure by which the inspection can become collective, and an agent capable of organising the revocation into an alternative. A theory passes the test if all three elements, standpoint, procedure and agent, exist inside it. A theory fails, or rather declines the test, if any element is ruled out in principle. The test is not neutral between the frameworks, and it does not pretend to be: it is drawn from the phenomenon both theories were built to explain, the fact that orders do lose the allegiance of their subjects, sometimes catastrophically, and a theory of ideology that cannot describe its own object’s disappearance has a hole at the centre of it.

Equal pressure means the test must also be run against the framework it favours, in the form of the hardest question available. For Gramsci the hardest question is the one Althusser’s whole philosophy poses: whence the standpoint? If the subject’s consciousness is formed by the hegemonic order, saturated with its common sense, educated in its schools and addressed in its language, then the inspection the test requires seems to demand a vantage the theory has already distributed to the enemy. Gramsci’s answer, prepared in the sections above, is contradictory consciousness: the standpoint is not a place but a split, between the conception professed and the conception enacted, and practice, theorised by organic intellectuals, widens the split into a position. The procedure is the war of position itself, the construction of counter institutions in which the widened split can stabilise into a rival common sense. The agent is the collective intellectual, the party understood as the organiser of that construction. The test is passed, on paper, by a theory that names all three elements. Whether the elements are more than names, whether contradictory consciousness can bear the load, was conceded earlier to be the theory’s open question, and the concession stands as the price of the pass.

For Althusser the test must be run without the cruelty of caricature. His framework does not merely happen to lack a standpoint; it argues, with force, that the demand for one is ideology’s own demand, the subject’s flattering belief that it could step outside its constitution and inspect it, a belief the theory diagnoses as the elementary ideological effect itself. On this view the withdrawal test is rigged, a humanist examination set for a structural candidate. The reply available within his system is that change does not require withdrawal by subjects: relations of production enter into contradiction, apparatuses jam against each other and against the economy’s requirements, class struggle reverberates inside the institutions, and new interpellations succeed old ones as the structure transforms. The test’s answer, from inside the system, is that history moves without anybody resigning from it. The next two sections give each framework its hearing under the test, in turn, with the pressure kept equal.

The withdrawal test applied to Gramsci

Run the test slowly over the Gramscian machinery and each element clicks into place with a textual address. The standpoint is contradictory consciousness, located in the notebooks’ notes on the philosophy of the non philosophers, where the subordinate person’s active participation in transforming the world contradicts the conception he has passively absorbed, and where Gramsci insists that this contradiction, not any imported doctrine, is the first cell of critical self consciousness. The procedure is elaborated across the whole strategic corpus: the analysis of relations of force, grading each situation’s readiness; the construction of alliances on national popular lines; the long labour of organic intellectuals in press, school and association; the formation of a historic bloc in which a rival conception ceases to be a critique and becomes an order in embryo. The agent is specified with a precision rare in Marxist writing on the subject: the Modern Prince, the party as collective intellectual, whose function is defined exactly as the welding of the split consciousness of a class into an operative collective will. No other theorist in the tradition equips the revocation of consent with so complete a staff list.

The application must also register what the test exposes in the passing framework, since a test that only crowns is a coronation, not a test. Gramsci’s machinery describes withdrawal as a possibility permanently in preparation, but its descriptions of withdrawal achieved are strikingly thin. The notebooks anatomise the crisis of the old hegemony with clinical richness and say far less about the inner life of the new consent: how the rival common sense handles doubt, how the counter institutions avoid reproducing the disciplines they oppose, how a collective will audits its own dogmas once it governs the schools. The theory of withdrawal is a theory of opposition that has not fully imagined power. There is also the conceded thinness of the standpoint itself: contradictory consciousness is an observation of genius about the doubleness of subordinate minds, but Gramsci never builds from it the psychology or the sociology that would let a researcher measure the split, predict its widening, or distinguish it from the ordinary incoherence of all belief. The verdict of this section is therefore a qualified pass, the qualification being that the theory passes with a research programme attached, work its author, writing in a cell with a censor reading over his shoulder, left programmatic. Later Gramscian scholarship has spent fifty years executing that programme, which is a kind of evidence for the pass: dead frameworks do not generate half a century of work on their open questions.

The withdrawal test applied to Althusser

Run the same test over the structural machinery and the machinery does not break; it declines, politely and completely, in the manner its design predicts. The standpoint is refused in principle: there is no position outside ideology in general from which a subject could inspect the ideology that constitutes it, and the feeling that there might be is itself a recognition effect, the subject misrecognising its constitution as its freedom. The procedure is refused with it: since no subject can resign, there can be no procedure of resignation, only the replacement of one subjectivation by another as the balance of apparatuses shifts. The agent is refused most explicitly of all: history is a process without a subject, and the collective agents that politics talks about, classes, parties, movements, are themselves, for the theory, ideological forms in which real relations are lived by their bearers, not levers standing outside the machine. Three refusals, each principled, each argued, and together they constitute the theory’s answer: the withdrawal test describes something that does not occur.

The strength the refusal buys should be given its full weight before the cost is counted. By denying the outside, the theory explains the phenomenon that embarrasses every consent based account: the rarity of withdrawal, its lateness, its tendency, when it comes, to reproduce the forms it rose against. If subjects are constituted by what they would withdraw from, then of course allegiance outlives its material justifications; of course revolutions install new apparatuses whose rituals feel, to their subjects, like liberation; of course the most lucid critic wakes inside the thing criticised. The theory of interpellation is the best explanation ever produced within Marxism of why orders do not fall when they are refuted, and teachers who present it as a mere obstacle to a politics of change have not taken its measure. Its hearing under the test ends in admiration for the accounting of stability, and the admiration is part of this article’s verdict: the framework that fails the withdrawal test is the stronger theory of the test’s usual non occurrence.

What does each theory predict when consent fails?

Gramsci predicts a crisis of authority with a describable anatomy: masses detach from traditional beliefs, the ruling class falls back on coercion, and the opening is contested between restoration, Caesarist arbitration and a rival hegemony. Althusser’s framework predicts replacement rather than vacancy, one interpellation succeeding another, with failure described as malfunction between apparatuses.

The cost is counted where the phenomenon will not wait for the theory’s permission. Orders do lose their subjects, in collapses that the historical record documents in detail: churches emptying within a generation, parties of millions dissolving between one election and the next, armies whose soldiers simply cease to recognise the hail. The structural vocabulary can redescribe each case, after the fact, as a dislocation of apparatuses, and the redescription is never empty. But it is always after the fact, because the theory contains no internal account of the event of detachment, no way to think the interval in which subjects are between interpellations, no longer answering the old call and not yet constituted by a new one. Gramsci’s vocabulary lives precisely in that interval; it is what his crisis of authority names. A theory of ideology that must borrow its rival’s concepts at the exact moment its object changes state has failed the test in the only sense that finally matters: not logical refutation, but explanatory surrender at the critical point.

Resistance: counter hegemony against friction in the machine

Every theory of ideology is eventually asked the same rude question: if the machinery works as described, how does anything ever change, and the two frameworks give their most characteristic answers here. Gramsci’s answer is construction. Resistance is not a reflex the theory must apologise for; it is the theory’s main activity, the building of a counter hegemony inside the same civil society the ruling order occupies: rival newspapers and schools, unions under new leadership, a stratum of organic intellectuals elaborating the good sense of the subordinate into a coherent rival conception, alliances assembled under the discipline of the national popular until the trenches, one by one, change their allegiance. Resistance, in this register, has an address list and a timetable. It is slow because the terrain is fortified, and it is possible because the terrain is terrain, ground that can be taken, rather than a medium the subject is dissolved in.

Althusser’s answer is friction. The essay’s own text is less closed than its reputation: the apparatuses, he writes in the closing movement, are at once what class struggle is fought over and one of the grounds it is fought on, and the exploited can find means and occasions to express their resistance there, using the contradictions that exist or winning positions of combat within the machine. The concession is real, and this article insists on it against the deterministic caricature, because the man wrote it and his defenders are entitled to it. But attend to the grammar. Resistance expresses itself in the apparatuses; it is not organised by a subject the theory can name, and its occasions are furnished by contradictions the theory locates in the structure, not by a will the theory can educate. Where Gramsci’s resistance is a project with a general staff, Althusser’s is a turbulence with a physics. The difference shows in the literature each generated: the Gramscian tradition produced manuals of alliance, pedagogy and cultural strategy; the Althusserian tradition produced analyses of conjunctures, of the unevenness and overdetermination of crises, in which change arrives when many contradictions condense into a ruptural unity, a formula whose brilliance as description is matched only by its silence as instruction.

The historical behaviour of the two men’s own movements illustrates the difference more plainly than any exegesis. The Italian party that guarded Gramsci’s legacy made the conquest of civil society its long strategy, contesting municipalities, cultural institutions and eventually the terms of national common sense, for better and for worse exactly as the theory prescribes. The French intellectual world that received Althusser produced, in the years of his influence, a generation of theorists of the structure and a celebrated difficulty in saying what anyone should do on Monday: the theory’s practical organ was the demarcation of science from ideology inside philosophy itself, an intramural labour whose dignity its author defended and whose limits he later conceded. A theory of resistance can be judged, fairly, by the practice it equips. One of these equipped a practice. The other equipped a vigilance, the refusal of illusions, which is a real equipment but a defensive one, and the withdrawal test’s verdict begins to assemble itself from exactly such asymmetries.

The party in the two frameworks

The party row of the table conceals the widest practical gulf in the comparison, because both men were communists writing for communists and the same word names opposite machines. Gramsci’s party is the Modern Prince, and the choice of Machiavelli’s figure is the theory in miniature: as the Prince condensed a scattered Italy into a political will, the party condenses a scattered class into a collective intellectual, an organism that thinks. Its cognitive function is primary. The party is where contradictory consciousness is worked on, where the class’s practical good sense is elaborated into a conception of the world, where intellectuals of the old order are won or replaced, and where the strategy of the war of position is surveyed and directed. The party, on this account, is itself the most important trench of civil society, and its internal life, its education of its members, its press, its schools, is hegemony being manufactured in vitro before it is attempted on the nation.

What room does each theory leave for the party?

Gramsci leaves the party the central room in the house: as collective intellectual it organises a class’s divided consciousness into a collective will and builds the rival hegemony. Althusser’s party is a bearer of knowledge and an apparatus among others, charged with uniting scientific theory to the workers’ movement without itself standing outside ideology.

Althusser’s party has a different dignity and a different danger. In his scheme the party is the organisation that can unite the two terms his philosophy keeps separate, the science of history and the mass movement, importing into the workers’ struggle a knowledge the struggle does not spontaneously generate, since spontaneity, left to itself, generates ideology in its trade unionist and economist forms. The party is therefore an epistemic organ before it is a strategic one: it carries a truth produced elsewhere, in theoretical practice, and its cardinal sins are the corruptions of that cargo, opportunism, empiricism, the subordination of the science to the moods of the movement. The distance from Gramsci is exact. For Gramsci the party learns the truth from the class’s practice and elaborates it; knowledge flows upward through organic connection and is tested in the hegemony it builds. For Althusser knowledge flows downward from the science to a movement that cannot produce it unaided, and is tested by the rigour of its demarcation from ideology. The first model risks dissolving theory into the movement’s common sense. The second risks the philosopher’s tutelage over the movement, a risk its author’s later self criticism, examined below, names in his own case with unusual candour. The party row of the table is thus not a detail of organisational preference. It is the withdrawal test restated in institutional form: who, in each theory, is authorised to begin the revocation of consent, the Prince who organises it from within the class, or the bearer who announces, from the standpoint of science, that the consent was never knowledge at all.

Intellectuals: organisers of consent against functionaries of belief

A comparison of the two theories’ personnel completes the institutional picture. Gramsci’s intellectuals are defined by function rather than by diploma: anyone who organises, administers, teaches, persuades or elaborates performs the intellectual function, and every class creates its own stratum of such performers, organically bound to it by origin and loyalty, while inheriting from the past a second stratum of traditional intellectuals, clergy, scholars, literati, who experience themselves as autonomous and above the struggle and whose allegiance is therefore a prize to be won. The category does decisive work in the theory of consent, because it gives consent a workforce. Hegemony is not broadcast by a class in the abstract; it is taught, preached, printed, examined and sung by identifiable people whose defection or conversion is a measurable political event, and the history of a crisis can be written as the history of a stratum changing sides.

Althusser’s personnel are the same human beings seen through the other end of the telescope. The teacher, the priest, the journalist and the official appear in his pages as the agents of apparatuses, a term that deliberately demotes them: what matters is the function the apparatus performs through them, the know how the school instils wrapped in the ideology that teaches submission as its content. An individual teacher’s convictions are, for the structural analysis, a surface variable; the apparatus delivers its quota of qualified, subjected labour power through saints and cynics alike. The demotion is analytically bracing and it catches something Gramsci’s warmer vocabulary can miss, the way institutions reproduce themselves through personnel who privately dissent from everything they transmit. Any honest observer of a school system has met the teacher who despises the curriculum and teaches it impeccably. Gramsci’s framework must treat that teacher as a failed organiser or a hypocrite; Althusser’s explains him in a sentence, since the apparatus never needed his belief, only his practice. The point is scored, and it should be recorded as one of the structural theory’s genuine victories in the comparison, a victory about the depth of reproduction. It does not overturn the withdrawal test, because the same teacher, in a conjuncture the structural account cannot narrate, may become the organiser of a staffroom, a union, a movement; but it marks the territory, the everyday reproduction of order through unbelieving hands, where the apparatus theory is simply the better instrument.

The school as the shared test case

Both theories converge on one institution with a confidence that invites a controlled experiment of the mind, and the school is the comparison’s natural laboratory. Gramsci wrote on education obsessively and concretely: the classical curriculum against the vocational track, the defence of disinterested study for the children of the subordinate classes, Latin and grammar as disciplines that give the peasant’s child access to the culture in which power speaks, the unitary school as the institutional form of a hegemony that intends to abolish the division between rulers and ruled by universalising the capacity to rule. His school is an instrument being fought over, its syllabus a front line, its teachers a stratum to be formed and won, and the fight is intelligible only on the premise that the school’s allegiance is variable. Althusser’s school is the dominant ideological state apparatus of mature capitalism, the institution that has taken over from the church the system’s central reproductive task, holding every child for years of compulsory attendance and delivering, beneath the know how it genuinely teaches, the rules of respect for the established order, differentiated by destination: submission for those headed to labour, the ideology of command for those headed to management. His school does not have an allegiance in play; it has a function on assignment.

How do the two accounts treat the school differently?

Both make the school the decisive institution, but Gramsci treats it as contested ground whose curriculum, language and discipline a rising class can fight to reshape from within. Althusser treats it as the dominant apparatus of mature capitalism, the one machine whose output, qualified and submitted labour power, the whole system presupposes.

A real school, observed over a real decade, supplies evidence for both cross sections, and the wise reader of this comparison will refuse to discard either. Curricula do change under political pressure, languages of instruction are won and lost, teachers do organise and sometimes prevail; the Gramscian variables move. And through every reform the deeper output persists, the sorting of children by destination, the rehearsed punctualities and submissions, the credentialled exits into a labour market whose structure the reform never touched; the Althusserian constant holds. The experiment’s lesson is the comparison in miniature. Where the question is what can be fought for inside the institution, Gramsci is the guide. Where the question is why the institution survives its defeats unchanged in function, Althusser is. A theory of ideology adequate to the school would need both cross sections and a rule for their articulation, and the attempts to supply that rule, from the sociology of education onward, form one of the most productive literatures either man ever fathered, usually by trying to keep the trench and the apparatus in a single description.

The economic root both men kept

A durable misreading must be corrected here, because it inverts the actual geography of the comparison: the notion that Gramsci’s is a cultural theory and Althusser’s an economic one, the Italian lost in superstructures while the Frenchman kept hold of the base. Both halves are false. Gramsci’s notebooks contain an extended analysis of Americanism and Fordism, of the new methods of production remaking the worker’s body, family, sexuality and psyche, and his concept of the historic bloc exists precisely to theorise the unity of economic structure and cultural form as a single object. Hegemony in his usage is anchored in what he calls the decisive nucleus of economic activity; a class that does not hold that nucleus cannot lead, whatever its cultural prestige, and the concessions that purchase consent are economic sacrifices before they are rhetorical ones. Althusser, conversely, locates his mechanism almost entirely in the superstructural institutions and gives the economy a famously spectral mode of presence: determinant in the last instance, in his phrase, while the lonely hour of that last instance never arrives, since every conjuncture is overdetermined by the instances it supposedly determines. The thinker accused of culturalism theorised the factory; the thinker credited with economic rigour theorised the schoolroom and deferred the factory to an instance that never strikes its hour.

The correction matters because it relocates the real difference. The two men do not divide over whether the economy matters; they divide over how its determination is conceived. For Gramsci, determination runs through history and organisation: economic position sets the problems, classes answer them through politics, and the answers are contingent, which is why the same capitalism produces fascism in one country and a durable reformist hegemony in another. For Althusser, determination is structural and displaced: the economy assigns each instance its degree of effectivity within a structure in dominance, and the apparent autonomy of politics and ideology is itself an effect of that assignment. Consent and interpellation sit on top of this deeper divergence and inherit it. Consent can be withdrawn because, in the historical conception, the link between economy and allegiance is mediated by organisation and can be reorganised. Interpellation cannot be withdrawn because, in the structural conception, the link between economy and subjection is a function, and functions are not resigned from; they are transformed only when the structure that assigns them is itself transformed, by a process the theory of ideology does not pretend to conduct.

Two national settings: Turin and Paris, prison and seminar

Ideas in this comparison have addresses, and the addresses explain the quarrel’s temperature. Gramsci wrote as a political leader in defeat: co founder of a party, deputy, arrested in 1926 in defiance of his parliamentary immunity, tried by a special tribunal whose prosecutor demanded that his brain be stopped from functioning for twenty years, and dead in 1937 within days of his sentence’s expiry, having filled thirty three notebooks in a hand the censors read first. The notebooks are a prisoner’s continuation of politics by other means, an audit of a defeat and a bequest to a movement he could no longer address directly, and their fragmentary, coded, exploratory form is the form of that situation, not a stylistic preference. The party that inherited them, Togliatti’s Italian Communist Party, published them after the war in thematic volumes and built its national strategy, in part, upon them, so that Gramsci became, uniquely among Marxist theorists, the house philosopher of a mass party’s road to power, read by cadres as instructions from a martyred founder.

Althusser wrote from the opposite situation: not prison but the summit of the academic apparatus, a philosophy tutor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the training ground of the French intellectual elite, and a member of the French Communist Party whose leading philosophers officially professed the humanist Marxism he was determined to displace. His battlefield was the seminar and the party’s theoretical journals; his weapons were the reading course and the collective volume; his Gramsci problem was institutional as much as intellectual, since the historicist and humanist readings he attacked drew their authority in France, as in Italy, from the notebooks’ prestige. To defeat the humanist Marxism of his own party’s establishment, he had to defeat its most distinguished ancestor, and the attack on historicism is that institutional necessity wearing theoretical dress. None of this diminishes the argument, which stands or falls on its merits; but it explains why the argument names Gramsci where a purely philosophical quarrel might have proceeded without names, and why the essay’s warmer acknowledgement, published five years after the attack, reads like the settling of an account once the battle’s need had passed.

How did the French and Italian contexts shape the quarrel?

Gramsci wrote as the defeated leader of an Italian movement, in prison, for a party that would publish him as its martyr theorist. Althusser wrote as a philosopher inside the French party’s leading school, fighting a humanist orthodoxy on his own side; his Gramsci was therefore both an ancestor to claim and a rival authority to displace.

The 1970s, the decade in which the two men’s reputations fused into the syllabus pairing this article examines, added a further layer that belongs to the historical record. In Italy, the years of Eurocommunism made Gramsci the theorist of a democratic road, quoted by party leaders in parliament; in France, the same decade made Althusser’s structural Marxism the idiom of the universities and then, with startling speed, the object of a reaction, as former disciples turned the anti-humanist weapons against their maker and the intellectual fashion moved on. The comparison the reader inherits was assembled in that decade’s crossfire, which is why it so often arrives as a team sport, Gramscians against Althusserians, with the texts as banners. This article has tried to refuse the teams. The record shows two thinkers in two institutions solving two crises of the same movement; the comparison is legitimate because the crises converged on one set of institutions, and it is decidable because, on the single point of withdrawal, the solutions contradict.

Editions and translations: the quarrel over a mediated Gramsci

A material fact about texts sits underneath the whole dispute and is too rarely entered as evidence. Althusser did not read the Prison Notebooks as a modern scholar reads them. The notebooks reached the postwar world in the thematic edition prepared under Togliatti’s direction between 1948 and 1951, which dismembered the prison manuscripts and reassembled their fragments under topical headings, historical materialism, the intellectuals, the Risorgimento, Machiavelli, so that the reader encountered not a mind working in time but a system arranged by subject. The critical edition, Gerratana’s, which restored the notebooks’ sequence, dated the fragments and distinguished first drafts from recopied versions, appeared only in 1975, a decade after Reading Capital and five years after the apparatus essay. The French translations available to Althusser were partial and derived from the thematic arrangement. His historicist Gramsci, the philosopher of an absolute historicism serenely expounding a finished doctrine, is in significant part the thematic edition’s Gramsci: a thinker whose hesitations, reformulations and prison circumstances had been edited into invisibility, leaving the systematic propositions exposed like theorems.

What does the comparison owe to the order in which the texts appeared?

Nearly everything about its asymmetry: Althusser met Gramsci in the postwar thematic editions, arranged by topic, which made the notebooks look like a finished philosophy of history. The critical edition, restoring the prison chronology and the drafts, appeared only in the middle of the quarrel, so the attack was aimed at an edited Gramsci in part.

The asymmetry runs in the other direction as well, and fairness requires noting it. Gramsci, dead in 1937, could not answer, qualify or concede; the comparison is a dialogue in which one party is a monument and the other a living controversialist who revised his positions across three decades, so that the Althusser of the self criticism is not quite the Althusser of the attack, a complication the next sections use rather than hide. There is also the asymmetry of genre. The notebooks are exploratory by design, a laboratory in which concepts are tried against cases and left at different stages of finish; the essays are polemical machines, built to demarcate. Comparing them point by point, as this article does, inevitably flatters the machine’s precision and taxes the laboratory’s openness, and the reader should apply the discount consciously: where Gramsci appears suggestive rather than developed, the cell and the censor are part of the explanation, and where Althusser appears closed rather than exploratory, the seminar’s wars are part of his. The seven points survive the discount, because they concern what the texts argue, not how finished they look; but the discount belongs in the record of any honest comparison, and examiners reward the candidate who registers it.

The Althusserian objection, stated at full strength

Part Six of this series requires that a framework’s strongest objection to its rival be stated as its own author would state it, without softening, before any answer is attempted, and the objection in this case is formidable enough to deserve the courtesy. It runs as follows. Gramsci’s entire politics rests on a capacity his theory never earns: the capacity of the subject to withdraw consent. For withdrawal to be possible, there must be someone who withdraws, a subject who stands, at least partially, outside the ideology he inspects, who can weigh its terms against his interests and find them wanting. But where does this inspector live? His language is the order’s language, his schooling the order’s schooling, his very sense of his interests formed within the common sense the hegemonic culture supplies. To presuppose a subject prior to ideology, equipped to evaluate ideology, is to presuppose exactly what a materialist theory of ideology exists to explain. It is the humanist assumption in its most seductive form: man as the author of his meanings, temporarily deceived, awaiting the critique that restores him to himself. Gramsci’s contradictory consciousness, the objection continues, is the name of this difficulty, not its solution; to say the subject is divided is to redescribe the problem, since the division must still be adjudicated by something, and whatever adjudicates is either inside ideology, in which case it is not a standpoint, or outside it, in which case the theory has smuggled in the transcendence it disowns. Consent, on this showing, is a liberal category wearing Marxist dress, contract theory for people who have read the notebooks, and the withdrawal test merely examines whether a theory has committed the liberal error gracefully.

The answer this article has assembled piecemeal can now be stated in one place, with its concession attached. Gramsci does not presuppose a subject outside ideology; he presupposes a practice outside the professed conception, which is a different thing entirely. The worker’s hands are not formed by the school’s curriculum in the same way his recitations are; the experience of cooperation, of the transformability of materials, of the gap between the wage and the product, deposits a knowledge that the ruling common sense did not author and cannot fully narrate, and it is this enacted knowledge, not a transcendental inspector, that supplies the standpoint’s raw material. The adjudicator the objection demands is thus neither inside nor outside in the objection’s sense: it is the friction between the two registers of one divided consciousness, a friction generated by the order’s own functioning, since the order needs the worker’s practical competence as much as it needs his verbal submission. The standpoint is real but inarticulate, which is why the theory requires intellectuals and a party to elaborate it; a standpoint that arrived already articulate would need neither. The concession, registered earlier and repeated here so the verdict is honest, is that Gramsci elaborates this answer in fragments, across notes on folklore, language and the Southern Question, and never assembles it into the systematic rebuttal the objection deserves. The objection is answered in the notebooks the way a position is answered in a laboratory notebook, by experiments noted in passing, and the scholars who have since assembled the rebuttal, in the literature on contradictory consciousness and popular practice, are completing a construction the author left scaffolded. A completed system that forbids the phenomenon, set against a scaffolded one that houses it: that is the choice the objection, at full strength, finally offers, and this article chooses the scaffold, knowingly.

The counter objection: a theory that describes a cage

Symmetry requires the Gramscian objection to the structural framework to be stated with the same force, and it too has a classic textual form, given its most famous expression by the historian E. P. Thompson in a book length polemic against Althusserian Marxism, and echoed by Italian critics who had Gramsci’s legacy to defend. The objection runs as follows. A theory in which subjects are effects, history has no subject, and ideology has no outside is a theory that has abolished the phenomenon it was built to serve: human beings making their history under conditions they did not choose. In the structural account, people appear as puppets of functions, their struggles demoted to echoes, their victories and defeats alike redescried as the structure reproducing or transforming itself through them, and the moral and political vocabulary in which actual movements deliberate, betrayal, courage, error, responsibility, is struck from the record as ideology. Worse, the theory is unfalsifiable in the precise place where it claims rigour: since every apparent refusal can be reclassified as a further interpellation, no conceivable event could count against it, and a machine that explains everything that could happen explains the difference between nothing that does. The cage the theory describes is, the objection concludes, the theory itself, a Parisian seminar’s image of a world without exits, projected onto societies that were, at the moment of writing, visibly convulsed by subjects withdrawing consent in streets the theorist could have visited.

The answer available to the structural side must also be given, since this article’s discipline is steelman before verdict in both directions. Althusser’s defenders reply, first, that anti-humanism is a thesis about explanation, not a denial of experience: to say the subject is an effect is to refuse it as a starting point of theory, not to deny that people deliberate, suffer and revolt, and the same essay that constitutes subjects also insists the apparatuses are sites of class struggle, which is not the vocabulary of a puppet theatre. They reply, second, that the charge of unfalsifiability mistakes a theory of a structure for a prediction machine; the theory of interpellation claims that subjecthood as such is ideological in form, a claim tested not by hunting for a subject outside ideology, which begs the question, but by its explanatory yield in concrete analyses, of education, of the family, of the party form itself. And they reply, third, that the convulsions of the streets were never denied but redescribed, as condensations of contradictions in a conjuncture, and that a redescription which locates a revolt’s conditions in the whole structure is more materialist, not less, than a voluntarism that treats revolt as the will’s self assertion. The replies have force, and the honest Gramscian must absorb the second especially: a theory of ideology in general is not refuted by an event. What survives the exchange, on the Gramscian side, is narrower and harder than Thompson’s rhetoric: not that the structural theory is false, but that it is structurally late, condemned to redescribe changes of allegiance in a vocabulary that contains no term for allegiance changing, and therefore dependent, at every historical crisis, on importing the rival vocabulary it had excommunicated. Dependence at the critical point is the counter objection’s residue, and it is enough.

Self criticism: the author’s own second edition

No other major Marxist theorist of the century revised himself in public as Althusser did, and the revisions belong inside this comparison because they move its terms. In the writings of self criticism gathered in the middle 1970s, he identified the deviation of his earlier work by name: theoreticism, the subordination of class struggle to the defence of theoretical practice, the treatment of philosophy as a fortress of science besieged by ideology rather than as itself a form, in the last instance, of political practice. The correction was not decorative. It reordered his system: class struggle, which the apparatus essay had admitted at its margins, in a closing paragraph and a postscript, was promoted to the motor position, and the science ideology demarcation was softened into a relation internal to struggle, philosophy redefined as class struggle in theory. The man who had attacked Gramsci for dissolving theory into history now accused himself of the mirror error, dissolving politics into theory, and the accusation is the closest the quarrel ever came to a reconciliation performed by one of its parties alone in his study.

What did Althusser later concede about his own formulation?

He conceded, in the writings gathered as his self criticism, that the campaign for science against ideology had itself become a deviation, a theoreticism that subordinated class struggle to philosophy’s internal demarcations. The concession narrows the quarrel: the later Althusser grants struggle a primacy the essay’s machinery had struggled to house.

The late work pushed further in a direction this comparison must register to stay honest about its own verdict. In fragments published after his death, Althusser developed what he called a materialism of the encounter, an aleatory materialism in which atoms rain parallel through the void and a clinamen, a swerve, occasionally makes them meet and hold, founding orders that no structure guaranteed and no necessity will preserve. The relevance to the withdrawal test is startling enough to state carefully. The thinker of the eternal structure ended by theorising contingency at the root of things: formations take hold or fail to take hold, and what has taken hold can, by the same contingency, let go. Nothing in the late fragments supplies a subject who withdraws consent; the swerve is not a will. But the ontology of the late work is nearer to Gramsci’s narrative time, of orders that are born and can die, than to the essay’s eternal present, and a comparison that freezes Althusser in 1970 commits against him the same injustice the thematic edition committed against Gramsci. The verdict of this article is therefore addressed to the frameworks in their canonical forms, the forms that met on the syllabus and in the movements, with the record noted that one of the two authors spent his last decades walking, unsteadily and without announcement, toward the other’s side of the river.

Overdetermination: the quarrel inside a shared refusal

Both men defined themselves against the same enemy, a Marxism of the single cause, in which the economy speaks and everything else repeats it, and each built a celebrated concept to house the complexity he put in its place. Althusser’s concept is overdetermination, borrowed from Freud and from Mao’s treatise on contradiction: every contradiction in a social formation reflects, in itself, the whole uneven structure, is shaped by all the other instances, and can therefore become, in a condensed conjuncture, ruptural in a way no timetable of economic maturity predicts. The target of the concept, in its original essay, is explicitly the model he attributes to historicism: the expressive totality, in which each part of a society expresses one essence, one epochal spirit, so that to know the essence is to know every part in advance. Gramsci, he argues, remains inside that model even while complicating it, since the historic bloc’s unity is still the unity of an expression. Gramsci’s own instrument for the same complexity is the analysis of the relations of force, which grades a situation in three moments, the objective relation of social forces rooted in production, the relation of political forces measuring the homogeneity and organisation of classes, and the relation of military forces that decides, in the last instance, the outcome of an open clash, and which treats every level as having its own rhythm, its own lag and acceleration, its own relative autonomy from the level beneath it.

Set side by side, the two instruments are closer than the polemic admits, and the closeness is diagnostic. Both refuse the escalator model in which consciousness climbs automatically behind production. Both insist a conjuncture must be analysed, not deduced. The difference is the difference already met at every other level: Gramsci’s three moments are degrees of organisation of subjects, things that parties build, measure and alter, an instrument for a general staff; Althusser’s overdetermination is a property of a structure, an instrument for a science, telling the analyst that the structure’s effects will be uneven and displaced, without handing any staff a lever marked with its name. The same comparison, at this altitude, reveals itself as one comparison repeated fractally at every scale: a theory of levers against a theory of loads. It is worth pausing on the fact that Althusser’s essay on contradiction, the founding text of overdetermination, treats the Russian Revolution as its exemplary case, a revolution in the weakest link where all contradictions fused; Gramsci’s notebooks treat the same event as the exemplary case of a war of manoeuvre succeeding where the state stood alone. Both theories are, among other things, retroactive explanations of the same October, and their rivalry is a rivalry between two heirs over one inheritance.

Lenin in both mirrors

Each theorist legitimised his construction by an appeal to the same ancestor, and the double appeal is a compact way to see what each construction is for. Gramsci’s Lenin is the practitioner of hegemony before the term: the theorist of the worker peasant alliance, of the national democratic tasks assumed by the proletariat, of the united front as the political form of leadership, a Lenin whose genius was organisational and conjunctural, the founder as Modern Prince of a class learning to lead a nation. Althusser’s Lenin is the philosopher in spite of himself: the practitioner whose work embodies, unspoken, a new practice of philosophy, the thinker of the conjuncture whose theses on the current moment model the science’s intervention, a Lenin whose genius was epistemological, the founder as the break’s executor in politics. Neither portrait is a fabrication; the historical Lenin, who wrote both the alliance politics of the smychka and the philosophical notebooks on Hegel, sustains both exposures, which is precisely the point. An ancestor in this tradition functions as a mirror with authority: each successor finds in Lenin the warrant for the operation he intends to perform on Marxism, Gramsci finding the warrant for a politics of consent, Althusser for a science of structures.

The mirrors matter to the comparison because they expose each theory’s centre of gravity without polemic. A framework is known by the founder it needs. Gramsci needs the Lenin of alliances because his theory must authorise a practice of leadership, compromise and cultural construction that the sterner readings of the tradition suspected of softness; the appeal says, in effect, that the hardest revolutionary of all was a hegemonist. Althusser needs the Lenin of the current moment and the philosophical notebooks because his theory must authorise an intervention of theory into the movement’s self image; the appeal says that the same revolutionary practised, without naming it, the demarcation of science from ideology. When the two mirrors are held facing each other, the reader sees the comparison’s whole geometry in one image: the same inheritance, claimed once for the organiser and once for the scientist, and the quarrel over ideology is the surface on which that deeper claim is fought.

The Southern Question: consent studied in a laboratory

Abstract comparisons float; this one can be anchored in the text where Gramsci’s theory of consent was first assembled as a concrete analysis, the unfinished essay on the Southern Question written in the weeks before his arrest. Its problem is exact: why the Turin workers’ movement, the most advanced in Italy, could not become hegemonic, and its answer runs through the Southern peasant, the Southern intellectual, and the great landowners’ bloc that ruled the Mezzogiorno by a combination of coercion in the countryside and cultural mediation in the towns. The Southern intellectual, the priest, the lawyer, the teacher, the petty bourgeois of the rural borough, is analysed as the peasantry’s jailer and interpreter at once, the stratum that connects the peasant to the landlord’s state and monopolises the forms in which the peasant’s grievances can be thought. The proletariat becomes hegemonic, the essay concludes, only by making the Southern peasant’s demands its own and breaking that stratum’s mediation, an alliance politics deduced from a map of who interprets whom. Here, years before the notebooks, are all the elements: consent as a relation with a workforce, intellectuals as the medium of rule, withdrawal as an organised possibility, the peasantry’s consent to be detached from the landlords and reattached to a rival leadership.

Nothing in Althusser answers to this text, and the absence is the point of raising it. The apparatus essay’s illustrations are functions and scenes, the school, the church, the hail in the street; it contains no regional sociology, no stratum whose defection is plotted, no analysis of one concrete alliance succeeding or failing. This is not an oversight but a consequence of the theory’s design: conjunctural analysis in the structural mode exists, in the work on contradiction and in the famous reading of Lenin’s current moment, yet it analyses the condensation of a structure’s contradictions, not the manufacture of an allegiance. A reader who wants to know how a hegemonic bloc is actually assembled, stratum by stratum and concession by concession, must go to Turin and the Mezzogiorno; there is no structuralist Southern Question. The comparison’s asymmetry of texture, the laboratory against the machine, should be entered into the verdict alongside the asymmetry of principle, because theories are used by readers with problems, and the problems of alliance, defection and organisation arrive in the Gramscian shape whether or not the theory of interpellation can cut them to its pattern.

Language: where the two accounts nearly meet

One territory shows the pair at their closest, close enough to reveal by contrast how far apart the rest lies, and it is language. Gramsci, trained in linguistics at Turin, treats language as a central political fact: every language contains a conception of the world, the national language question is a question of hegemony, the imposition of a standard grammar is an act of leadership, and the famous notes on grammar, normative against spontaneous, model the whole relation between direction and consent in miniature, since a grammar imposed without the speakers’ active acquisition remains a dead rule while a grammar that becomes national popular lives in the mouths of millions. The subaltern’s dialect, in this treatment, is not an error to be corrected but a conception to be engaged, and the intellectual who cannot speak it cannot organise those who think in it. Althusser’s theory, by contrast, has remarkably little to say about language as a lived medium, even though interpellation is figured as a voice, a hail, a call; the linguistic turn of French theory flows around his work rather than through it, and his followers who took up discourse had to import their instruments from elsewhere, from the linguistics of the signifier and the analysis of discursive formations.

The near meeting is instructive. On Gramsci’s side, language supplies the theory’s most intimate evidence for the withdrawal possibility: a population’s idiom is the least policeable of its possessions, the place where the ruling conception is daily bent, ironised, and answered in kind, and the study of folklore and dialect as counter conceptions gives contradictory consciousness a documentary archive. On Althusser’s side, the hail’s reduction of language to a single performative shout, stripped of semantics, is the theory’s honesty about its own priorities: what matters is not what is said but that the subject turns. The later synthesisers, above all the theorists of discourse who built on both inheritances, began exactly at this seam, taking Gramsci’s insistence that meanings are fought over and Althusser’s insistence that subjects are positioned by the fighting, and the resulting theory of hegemony as articulation, in which elements without fixed belonging are sutured into discourses that constitute their subjects, is the most ambitious attempt to have the seam hold. Its success and its costs occupy the combination sections below; here the seam itself is the finding, that the two theories divide even over what a sentence is, an act of leadership between speakers, or a hail that makes a subject by being answered.

Attempts at combination, and why they transform what they join

The misreading most flattering to both men holds that their frameworks are complementary layers, Althusser for the depths of subjection, Gramsci for the surface of struggle, to be applied together like geological strata. Generations of students have written the essay; it has the defect that the layers contradict at the bedding plane. If the subject is wholly constituted by interpellation, the negotiator of Gramscian consent is a fiction; if consent is genuinely negotiated, interpellation is at most a tendency within a contested process. The serious combinations in the literature are therefore not layers but transformations, in which one framework is used to rebuild the other from inside, and they repay study as the comparison’s living continuation. Stuart Hall’s work is the exemplary case: formed by both inheritances, he took from Althusser the refusal of the guaranteed subject, the insistence that classes have no necessary ideological belonging, and from Gramsci the terrain of struggle over common sense, and fused them in analyses of the authoritarian populism of his own conjuncture, in which consent is real, manufactured, contested and never the simple property of a structure. The fusion works because Hall lets each theory discipline the other’s excess: interpellation warns the Gramscian that the people who must withdraw consent arrive already spoken for; hegemony warns the Althusserian that spoken for is not the same as settled, since the speaking must be done, daily, by identifiable institutions that can lose their audience.

The theory of discourse carried the transformation furthest. In the work of Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is generalised into the logic of the social itself: elements without fixed class belonging are articulated into discourses, subjects are positions within those discourses, and the Althusserian constitution of the subject is preserved while the Gramscian struggle for leadership becomes the very medium in which subjects are constituted. The cost, which critics on both sides noted, is the dissolution of the economic anchor that both originals, in their different ways, kept: Gramsci’s decisive nucleus and Althusser’s determination in the last instance both fade when articulation becomes the universal solvent. Nicos Poulantzas, from the other shore, attempted the complementary transformation, rebuilding the theory of the state with Althusserian instruments while insisting, against the apparatus essay’s functionalism, that the state is a relation, the condensation of a balance of forces, a formula in which Gramsci’s struggle re-enters the structural edifice through the front door. The lesson of all three attempts is uniform and worth stating as the combination section’s finding: the frameworks can be combined only by being changed, and the change always consists in yielding, on one side or the other, at exactly the point the withdrawal test marks. Combination is possible. Innocent combination is not.

Media studies: the field where the pair met the public

Of all the applied fields, media studies is where the two frameworks encountered each other before the largest audience, and its history is a fair proxy for their comparative fortunes. The Althusserian moment came first in film theory, where the apparatus concept was literalised with brilliant perversity: the cinema itself analysed as an ideological apparatus, its machinery of projection constituting the spectator as a transcendental subject, sutured into the film’s discourse by the editing that hides its own work. The analyses were dazzling and airless, and the field’s Gramscian turn, through the cultural studies of Hall and his school, was precisely a turn toward the audience as a party to negotiation: encoding and decoding, the model in which producers encode a preferred meaning within a hegemonic code and audiences decode it from dominant, negotiated or oppositional positions, is the withdrawal test translated into a research instrument for television. The oppositional decoding is revocable consent with a methods section. Teachers of the subject will recognise the pedagogical consequence: students grasp interpellation in a lecture and hegemony in their own viewing, since each can point to the streaming screen and find, in the same evening, the series that interpellates them into a genre’s subject and the scene whose preferred meaning they refuse in the act of watching. The applied field’s fuller treatment is the companion study of Marxist media theory explained, which follows both frameworks through the media industries in detail; the comparison needs only the moral, that when the theories left the seminar for the screening room, it was the framework with a withdrawing subject that generated the empirical research programme, while the framework without one generated a metaphysics of the apparatus that its own field eventually set aside.

Influence: two afterlives in different faculties

Measured by citation, translation and curricular presence, both men conquered, but they conquered different provinces of the university, and the map of their conquests corroborates the comparison’s verdict about their respective powers. Gramsci’s afterlife is in the social sciences and the humanities of practice: political science, where hegemony became a term of art in the study of international order; sociology, where the analysis of intellectuals and of civil society feeds research on movements and professions; history, where the Southern Question founded a way of writing about regions and subalterns that the Subaltern Studies collective carried from Italy to India and beyond; and education, where his school writings remain a living reference. Althusser’s afterlife is in the theoretical humanities: literary studies, where the symptomatic reading changed how texts are interrogated; philosophy, where the break and the process without a subject set terms that even his opponents must use; film and visual studies in their theoretical decades; and the lineage of post structuralism itself, several of whose founders passed through his seminar and defined themselves by leaving it. The pattern is too consistent to be accident. The theory of the withdrawing subject travels to the disciplines that study action; the theory of the constituted subject migrates to the disciplines concerned with representation. A student choosing between them is therefore also, whether she knows it or not, choosing a faculty, and the choice is better made with the map in view, as an informed enlistment rather than an inherited accent.

Strategy: what each framework permits its holder to think

The brief for this comparison required that strategy be treated as the theories’ consequence rather than their occasion, and the treatment can now be brief, because the preceding sections have done the work. A holder of Gramsci’s framework is permitted, indeed required, to think in terms of alliance, concession, pedagogy and timing: to survey the relations of force, identify the strata whose consent is detachable, price the concessions a rival hegemony must offer, build the institutions in which a new common sense can be rehearsed, and wait, working, for the crisis of the old order’s authority which the framework teaches him to recognise when it comes. The framework’s characteristic vice is the opposite of paralysis: an optimism of the will that can mistake activity for accumulation, trenches dug in sand, consent celebrated in rooms the unconvinced never enter. A holder of Althusser’s framework is permitted to think in terms of structure, conjuncture and vigilance: to refuse the flattering belief that good arguments dissolve apparatuses, to locate the points where contradictions condense, to distrust every subject’s report of its own freedom, including his own, and to treat the party’s knowledge as a fragile import that spontaneity perpetually corrupts. Its characteristic vice is the one its author confessed: a theoreticism in which the demarcation of correct positions becomes the whole of politics, and the withdrawing of consent by actual people is indefinitely postponed behind the next clarification of concepts. Two permissions, two vices, and the movements of the period suffered from both, sometimes in the same organisation in the same year.

What each framework cannot explain

A comparison conducted in good faith owes each side its limit stated plainly, and the limits are not symmetrical blemishes but the shadows of the founding choices. Gramsci cannot explain, from his own resources, the sheer depth of subjection: why consent survives the visible bankruptcy of its terms, why the subordinate defend the common sense that injures them with a tenacity that looks, to the organiser, like love of the cage. His vocabulary reaches for explanations, religion’s millennial sediment, the prestige of the old intellectuals, the fear of the unknown in a crisis, and each is a gesture toward the problem Althusser solved by design: that the subject does not merely hold its beliefs but is held by them, constituted in the holding. The Gramscian tradition has quietly imported the insight ever since, in its studies of affect, ritual and the body, usually without acknowledgement, which is the sincerest form of theoretical concession. Althusser cannot explain, from his own resources, the event of emancipation: not change in general, which his conjunctures redescribe, but the specific, documented occasions on which masses of subjects cease, within months or weeks, to recognise a hail they had answered for lifetimes, and begin the bewildering labour of constituting themselves otherwise. His vocabulary reaches for explanations too, the condensation of contradictions, the ruptural unity, and each is a redescription of the timing rather than an account of the mechanism, since the mechanism would require a subject in the interval between interpellations, and the theory has abolished the interval. The Gramscian name for the interval is the crisis of authority, and the structural tradition has quietly imported that too, in its literature on dislocation, whenever an order’s failure must be thought and not merely dated. Two theories, each caught smuggling the other’s central concept across the border at the point of its own greatest need: there are worse verdicts on a rivalry, and few more illuminating.

A protocol for reading them together

The reader who has come this far deserves instructions for use, since the pair will be met again, in the syllabus, in the literature, in every serious discussion of how orders hold. The protocol this article recommends has three clauses, each derived from a section above. Read the apparatus essay first for the problem of reproduction, and let it cure, permanently, any belief that orders persist by inertia or by the stupidity of the governed; then read the notebooks for the problem of change, and let them cure, permanently, any belief that a structure’s account of its own persistence has explained why this order, here, will fall or hold. Second, never allow either vocabulary to be used in the other’s jurisdiction without a passport: consent, leadership and betrayal belong to a theory with subjects who can defect, apparatus, function and interpellation to a theory with structures that constitute, and the mixed metaphor, in which apparatuses persuade and subjects are administered, is the signature of an essay that has not decided what it thinks. Third, keep the wider vocabulary map open beside the pair, since ideology, hegemony and discourse form a triangle in which each term corrects the others’ excesses, and the companion mapping of ideology, hegemony and discourse compared supplies the third point wherever this two body treatment, by its design, cannot. Under this protocol the rivalry becomes what it should have been in the classroom all along: not a choice of ancestors but a pair of instruments, each with its jurisdiction marked, and the withdrawal test as the border post between them.

A fourth clause governs writing rather than reading, since most encounters with the pair happen in essays and briefs of one’s own. Declare the jurisdiction before deploying the term: a sentence that uses hegemony should be able to say who is leading whom, at what price, and with what prospect of defection, and a sentence that uses interpellation should be able to say which apparatus is speaking and what subject its ritual delivers. A use that cannot answer its own jurisdiction question is decoration, and decoration is how the two vocabularies decayed, in weaker hands, into synonyms for influence. The discipline sounds austere and is in practice liberating, since a writer who knows which instrument is in hand discovers that the other instrument’s questions begin to ask themselves, and the comparison starts to conduct itself inside the work instead of waiting for a literature review to perform it.

The comparison restated

The article set out to decide a comparison by finding the disagreement from which the others follow, and the finding can now be stated without remainder. Gramsci and Althusser survey the same institutions and divide over the subject who inhabits them. For the first, the subject is divided against itself, carries in its practice the material of a standpoint, and can, through organisation, withdraw a consent that was always a revocable relation. For the second, the subject is the effect of the ideology that would be withdrawn from, and the very idea of withdrawal mistakes the grammar of subjection. Every other point in the seven point table, the institutions and their classification, the mechanisms, the resistance each can house, the parties they authorise, the histories they permit, is this division surfacing under successive headings. The verdict the test returns is deliberately two edged. Only the framework with the withdrawing subject can generate a theory of political change, of how orders lose their people and how rivals are built to receive them; and only the framework without one can explain, at full depth, why orders so rarely lose their people at all, why the hail is answered by subjects who experience their subjection as their selfhood. A reader forced to keep one book would keep the notebooks, since the questions of change are the questions politics cannot postpone; but the reader would keep it honestly, knowing which of its questions the other book answers better, and hearing, in the prisoner’s confidence that consent can be revoked, the structuralist’s warning that the revoking subject arrives at the barricade already formed by everything it came to refuse. The comparison ends there, not in a synthesis, but in a tension that has organised half a century of theory and shows no sign of resigning its post.

Religion: the oldest apparatus and the first common sense

Religion offers the longest running experiment in the reproduction of belief that either theory can inspect, and both men inspected it with a seriousness their secular readers sometimes find embarrassing. Gramsci’s notebooks on Catholicism are among his most sustained: the Church appears as the supreme historical example of a hegemonic apparatus in his sense, an organisation that held together, for a millennium, the intellectuals and the simple in a single faith, refusing the split between a religion of the learned and a folklore of the masses that he diagnosed in post Reformation Protestantism and in the Italian Church’s own failures with the peasantry. Its strength, in his analysis, is exactly the strength his theory predicts: a machinery of consent with its own organic intellectuals in every village, its own schools, its own calendar of rituals, its own capacity to absorb heresy by concession and to discipline its cadres, a war of position conducted across centuries by an institution that understood trenches before the metaphor existed. His strategic interest follows: a rival hegemony must do for the subordinate classes what the Church did for the old order, and must reckon with the Church not as a set of propositions to be refuted but as a civilisation to be succeeded.

Althusser lists the religious apparatus first among the ideological state apparatuses, and his account of it supplies the essay’s most quoted illustration of ideology’s materiality: the believer who kneels, moves his lips in prayer, and thereby generates the belief the prayer expresses, the Pascalian wager inverted into a theory of ritual. Where Gramsci sees in religion the paradigm of an organisation that wins and holds consent, and therefore a rival to be studied as a strategist studies a successful predecessor, Althusser sees the paradigm of subjectivation itself, the case where the hail, the response and the guaranteed identity of the one who answers are most perfectly legible, since the religious subject hears in the voice of the absolute Subject the warrant of his own subjecthood. The two readings of the same institution converge on its durability and diverge on its vulnerability with textbook clarity. For Gramsci, the Church can lose: it lost the intellectuals of the Renaissance in part, it lost the workers of the industrial cities, it can lose the peasantry, and each loss is a hegemonic event with causes a strategist can enumerate. For the structural reading, the emptying of the churches is not a loss of subjects but a migration of subjectivation to other apparatuses, the school and the media inheriting the function, and religion’s decline changes everything about the content of belief while changing nothing about the form of subjection. A historian of secularisation can use both sentences; they answer different questions, and the comparison’s discipline consists in not allowing either to impersonate the other.

The family: the apparatus nobody applies to join

The family is the one institution on both lists that no subject chooses, and its position in the two theories measures their distance from the standpoint of lived beginnings. In the apparatus essay the family is named among the ideological state apparatuses and given a specific reproductive charge: it is where labour power’s submission is first installed and where the child, awaited, named and placed before birth, undergoes the primary interpellations that all later ones presuppose. The familial ideological configuration, in the theory’s terms, surrounds the unborn with its expectations, so that subjectivation precedes any possible autobiography, and the adult who later interrogates his formation is interrogating it with instruments the formation supplied. This is the structural theory at its most claustrophobic and its most convincing in a single paragraph, since the facts it organises, the given name, the prepared place, the rituals of recognition, are facts no one disputes; the dispute is only over whether being formed so early and so totally forecloses the later possibility of judging the formation.

Gramsci’s family is a quieter presence in the notebooks but a strategically legible one: it figures within civil society as the first school of common sense, the transmitter of folklore, religion and the morality of the subaltern world, and therefore as one of the sites where a rival hegemony must eventually work, through the education of women, through the transformation of sexual and domestic customs that his notes on Americanism and Fordism treat as material politics and not private decoration. The contrast in emphasis is characteristic. For Gramsci the family is a position: held by the old order’s common sense, contestable by new practices, new laws, new organisations of domestic life, its allegiance historically variable across regions and classes in ways his own Southern analysis exploits. For Althusser the family is a function with a guaranteed output, the first subject, on which every subsequent apparatus builds. The comparison’s recurring question returns in domestic dress: can the adult formed in the family withdraw the consent the child never gave? Gramsci’s theory, which distinguishes the conception absorbed in childhood from the conception enacted in adult practice, answers that the withdrawal is the normal biography of the militant, whose life story is precisely the record of a formation judged and partly refused. The structural theory answers that the refusal is staged in the family’s own grammar, rebellion as one of its prepared roles. Both answers describe real childhoods; the reader will know families that fit each, and the theories’ rivalry survives the evidence because each explains the other’s families as its own special case.

Law: between the prison and the conscience

The legal order is the institution where the two spheres both theories distinguish, coercion and consent, are most thoroughly interwoven, and each framework’s handling of it exposes a characteristic strength. Althusser places the legal apparatus in a deliberately ambiguous position: the courts belong to the repressive apparatus in their punitive capacity, yet the law also functions ideologically, since legal ideology, the universe of rights, duties, contracts and legal subjects, is the form in which the relations of production are lived as free and equal by the very subjects they bind. The legal subject, the bearer of rights who owns his labour power and alienates it by contract, is for the structural analysis the elementary cell of bourgeois ideology, the subject form the economy itself requires, produced not by argument but by the daily ritual of buying, selling, signing and suing. Gramsci, for his part, assigns the law to the state’s educative function: the state is an educator, he argues, and its law does not merely punish transgression but forms the citizen, raising the population to the cultural and moral level the dominant group’s development requires, so that much of what calls itself neutral legality is hegemony wearing the robe of universality, and customs become crimes, or cease to be crimes, as the hegemonic project advances.

The two treatments agree that legality is a teacher and disagree, predictably, over whether its pupils can graduate into its critics. The Gramscian history of law is a history of contested reforms, suffrage, labour law, the legal recognition of unions and parties, each a trench gained or lost, each altering the common sense of what a citizen is; the withdrawing subject appears in legal dress as the movement lawyer, the test case, the campaign that turns a courtroom into a seminar of the rival hegemony. The structural treatment predicts, and explains, the resilience beneath the reforms: the legal subject form survives every change of statute, since reform redistributes rights among subjects whose subjecthood is the constant, and the most radical legal victories leave intact the elementary interpellation by which individuals recognise themselves as owners, contractors and citizens. Both predictions have their confirming decades. What the comparison adds is the criterion for choosing between them in a given case: ask whether the legal change in question redistributed capacities among existing subjects or altered the inventory of subjects itself, and expect the Gramscian instrument to excel at the first question and the structural at the second.

False consciousness: the phrase neither framework can use

It is worth recording a negative agreement, because it disciplines the caricatures on both sides. The crude notion of false consciousness, beliefs as lies injected into passive minds by interested deceivers, is unusable within either theory, for reasons internal to each. Gramsci’s common sense is not false in the simple sense: it is a real, effective conception of the world, sedimented from real history, containing good sense beside superstition, and its holders are not dupes but people whose practical knowledge exceeds their professed philosophy. To call it false is to miss that it works, that it organises a life, and that its replacement must be built, not announced. Althusser’s ideology is equally not a lie: it is an imaginary relation to real conditions, imaginary not in the sense of nonexistent but in the sense of a lived image, as real in its effects as the conditions it figures, and its holders are not deceived about a truth someone else possesses, since no subject, the theorist included, stands in the unfigured real. The two refusals converge from opposite directions on the same discipline: never explain a belief’s hold by the foolishness of its holder. They diverge on the remedy each permits. For Gramsci the holder’s own practice supplies the lever, good sense elaborated into critique. For Althusser there is no lever inside the lived relation at all; there is the science that knows the mechanism, standing in a relation of exteriority to every ideology including, rigorously, the ideologies of the movement that wields the science. The slogan that ideology is false consciousness should therefore be struck from essays on this pair altogether: it belongs to a theory neither man held, and its presence in an answer signals that the candidate has compared two reputations rather than two arguments.

Prestige: the spontaneous consent and its limits

Gramsci has a compact formula for the everyday texture of hegemony that repays attention in this comparison, his account of the spontaneous consent given by the great masses to the general direction imposed by the dominant group, born historically from the prestige, and the confidence it inspires, that the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in production. Every word is load bearing. The consent is spontaneous in the sense of unprompted, not in the sense of uncaused; its cause is prestige, and prestige is an economic fact before it is a cultural one, the reflected authority of the class that visibly organises production, builds the cities, and embodies the future’s machinery. Consent, on this account, is a judgement populations make about competence, revised as the competence is revised, which is why an economic crisis is for Gramsci always potentially a crisis of authority: the class that could not prevent the slump finds its prestige, and therefore its consent, re examined by people who had previously deferred without thinking. The formula gives the withdrawal test its sociological small print: consent tracks prestige, prestige tracks performance, and the organiser’s task is to be present, with an alternative prestige under construction, at the moment the audit fails.

The structural framework has no equivalent formula, and its absence is one of the clearest indices of the difference this article has tracked. Prestige is a relation between subjects, variable, arguable, revisable; a theory of apparatuses cannot house it except as an ideological effect among others, the ruling ideology’s representation of the ruling class’s competence, which dissolves the variable the formula isolates into the constant the theory presupposes. Yet the phenomenon the formula names is stubbornly observable: deference rises and falls with performance in ways that no functional constant can timetable, and the historian of any collapsing order finds the prestige variable doing explanatory work on every page, in the diaries of officials who record the precise season when being obeyed stopped feeling natural. The comparison does not require the structuralist to deny the diaries. It requires noticing that his framework must translate them before use, and that in the translation the event the diaries record, allegiance draining out of an order in real time, loses the name under which the rival theory files it as its central case.

The unconscious analogy: what the comparison with Freud performs

Althusser’s boldest rhetorical act is his likening of ideology to the Freudian unconscious: eternal, without history, without an outside, its subjects constituted by a structure they cannot survey. The analogy does three kinds of work, and a careful comparison should separate them. It performs, first, a demotion of the ego: just as psychoanalysis refuses the conscious self’s account of itself, the theory of ideology refuses the subject’s report of its own reasons, and in both cases the refusal is presented as the price of science. It performs, second, a transfer of prestige, borrowing for the young science of historical materialism the authority of the century’s other great discourse of hidden determination. And it performs, third, a quiet foreclosure: if ideology is like the unconscious, then the demand to step outside it is as naive as the demand to step outside one’s own psyche, and the withdrawal test is dissolved by metaphor before it can be examined as a claim. The third performance is the one a Gramscian is entitled to resist, because the analogy is, in Althusser’s own system, asymmetrical in a way that gives the game away. Psychoanalysis, whatever its doctrine of the unconscious, is a practice aimed at a subject who speaks, associates, and in some measure revises his relation to his formation; the clinic institutionalises a procedure of partial withdrawal, conducted from a position the process itself creates. Gramsci’s party and school, the institutions in which divided consciousness is elaborated into critique, are the political analogue of that clinic, and the analogy, pressed honestly, supports the existence of procedures of revision rather than their impossibility. The unconscious has no history; the analysand, fortunately, has one, and so does the analysand’s society. A metaphor that must be arrested before it reaches its own best evidence is a metaphor under strain, and the strain marks the exact point where the structural theory’s rhetoric exceeds its argument.

A crisis read twice: the events in France at the end of the sixties

The quarrel ceased to be academic within three years of the apparatus essay’s drafting, when the country of its author supplied the century’s most instructive crisis of consent in a developed capitalist state. The events in France in the spring of 1968, a student revolt detonating a general strike of some ten million workers, the government of a strong state briefly unsure whether it governed, and the restoration that followed through negotiation, concession and election, constitute a case both frameworks can be set to read, and their readings are the comparison performed on live material. The Gramscian reading writes itself from the notebooks’ categories: a crisis of authority in which the ruling bloc’s prestige, built on postwar growth and Gaullist grandeur, failed its audit among students and young workers; the old common sense detached wholesale from its carriers; and then, decisively, the absence of a prepared counter hegemony, no rival bloc with its intellectuals, alliances and programme in place, so that the interval was closed by the old order’s reserves, concessions on wages purchasing the restoration of consent, trasformismo in modern dress. The crisis, for this reading, is a war of position that one side had not prepared and therefore could not conclude, its lesson a vindication of the prisoner’s entire strategy.

The structural reading is colder and, in its place, as penetrating. What struck the apparatus theorist in those weeks was less the revolt than the speed of the subjectivation that contained it: the apparatuses, momentarily jammed in the university and the factory, reasserted their rituals through the union negotiations, the party machines, the electoral calendar, and the striking worker returned, within weeks, to the identities the order keeps ready, voter, consumer, holidaymaker, the interpellations succeeding one another like relays. On this reading the events demonstrate not the fragility of consent but the resilience of subjectivation, the structure’s capacity to survive the defection of its contents because its forms, the roles into which revolt itself must pour to become audible, were never in the rebels’ gift. The two readings divide the case between them with uncomfortable fairness: Gramsci’s explains why the moment opened and why it closed for want of an organised alternative; Althusser’s explains why the closing felt, to its participants, like waking rather than defeat. A student who can run both readings over the same six weeks, without blending them into a soup, has understood this article; a student who can say which reading the withdrawal test prefers, and what that preference costs, has understood the pair.

Translation and its traps: three words that travel badly

Comparisons of translated thinkers are comparisons of translations, and three words in this pair carry concealed freight. The Italian egemonia arrives in English as hegemony with its Greek military root intact, command of an alliance, which suits Gramsci’s active sense of leadership earned and renewed. The French appareil, rendered apparatus, suggests in English a cold machinery, where the French carries also the sense of a formal display, a ceremony’s apparatus, a nuance of ritual theatre that the essay’s own doctrine of ideology’s material practices half intends and the English reader wholly misses; the machine metaphor, on which the deterministic caricature feeds, is partly a translator’s deposit. And interpellation itself, a legal French term for the formal questioning of a minister or a suspect, enters English as a coinage so strange that readers treat it as a spell rather than an act, forgetting that its home sense is precisely an authoritative summons that constitutes its addressee as answerable, a policeman’s hail indeed, but also a parliament’s. None of this overturns the seven points, which survive translation because they concern arguments and not atmospheres. But the atmospheres steer receptions: the English speaking world received a warmer Gramsci and a colder Althusser than the originals quite warrant, and the syllabus pairing inherited the temperature difference as if it were a finding. Examiners in the know reward the candidate who remarks that the contrast between the human Italian and the mechanical Frenchman is, in some unmeasurable part, an artefact of two dictionaries.

What the prison could not know and the seminar could not see

Each theory bears the mark of the room it was written in, and the comparison is fairer for saying so once, systematically. The prison gave Gramsci enforced slowness, a censor who forbade the names of his true subjects and thereby trained the notebooks’ celebrated indirection, and a diet of books chosen by permission, heavy on history, linguistics and the Italian past, light on the contemporary economics his theory also needed. It denied him the sight of a mass movement in motion after 1926, so that his strategy is a strategy remembered and projected, audited against defeats he had witnessed and victories he had not; the authority of the notebooks is the authority of a man with nothing left but analysis, and their gaps, the undeveloped psychology, the programmatic party, are the gaps of a library cell. The seminar gave Althusser the opposite endowment and the opposite blindness: students of genius, a library without walls, the leisure of pure theory, and no responsibility, ever, for a decision whose failure would be counted in anything but reputation. His theory’s notorious indifference to the event, to timing, to the organiser’s Monday morning, is the seminar’s indifference sublimated into rigour; a man whose battlefield was the reading list could afford a process without a subject, since no subject of his acquaintance was required to seize anything but a distinction. To say this is not to psychologise two philosophies out of court. It is to apply to the theorists the method both applied to everyone else, the refusal to let ideas float free of the institutions that housed them, and to let the reader discount each system by its room: the prisoner’s system will overtrust preparation and patience, the seminar’s will overtrust structure and vigilance, and the comparison’s verdict, reached on the texts’ arguments, should be carried with those discounts declared.

A note on method: comparisons decided by consequence

This article belongs to a series pattern, used earlier for Marx against Weber and for Marx against Keynes, in which a comparison is settled not by tallying agreements or by awarding points for influence but by isolating the single disagreement from which the others follow and then judging the rivals by what each can consequently do. The pattern deserves its methodological note, because it is a choice with alternatives, and the alternatives have their devotees. One could compare the two men as biographies, and produce a moving diptych of the cell and the seminar that decides nothing. One could compare them as influences, and produce a map of faculties that this article has in fact included, as evidence rather than as verdict. Or one could compare them as vocabularies, term by term, and produce the blur with which the opening sections charged the textbooks. The decisive difference method is stricter and more useful: it obliges the comparer to say what would be different in the world if one framework rather than the other were true, and to prefer, where a preference is required, the framework whose truth would explain the phenomena both were built to face. In the present case the phenomenon is allegiance and its loss. The method’s verdict followed from it with something like necessity, and the reader who disputes the verdict is invited to dispute it at the method’s own level, by naming a phenomenon more central to the theory of ideology than the withdrawal of consent, or by showing that the structural framework houses that phenomenon better than this article has allowed. Comparisons so conducted can be lost honourably, which is more than can be said for comparisons conducted as appreciations.

Armour and shield: how coercion stands behind consent in both

Neither theory is naive about force, and the place each assigns to it is a precise discriminator that summaries usually blur. Gramsci’s formula is the integral state as hegemony protected by the armour of coercion: consent is the outer surface of rule in a developed formation, but the armour is real, worn close, and shown when the surface cracks, in the banning of parties, the militarisation of a strike, the emergency decree. The proportion between the layers is his historical variable: in the formations he called Eastern, the state was everything and the armour was the whole garment; in the West, the garment is mostly cloth, and the political art consists in remembering that the cloth is tailored over steel. Althusser’s corresponding architecture assigns the repressive apparatus the role of guarantor standing behind the ideological ones: the ideological apparatuses function, he writes, beneath the shield of the repressive apparatus, which secures by force, in the last instance, the conditions under which reproduction proceeds, and which intervenes directly when an apparatus’s output fails, the school occupied, the broadcast seized, the congregation dispersed. Armour and shield are nearly the same image, and the convergence is genuine; both men refuse any liberal separation of persuasion from violence.

The divergence reappears one level down, in what the force is for. In Gramsci the armour protects a hegemony that must still be won every day in the cloth; force is the reserve currency of a consent economy, spent at a rate that itself measures the consent’s decay, so that a regime ruling by armour alone has, by the theory’s own definition, already lost its hegemony and entered the pathology of Caesarism or mere domination. In the structural account the shield guarantees a function, and its use is not a symptom of failure but part of the design, the repressive apparatus’s second mode of operation being precisely the underwriting of the ideological ones, repression by presence rather than by act. The first treats a turn to force as evidence about consent; the second treats it as a routine transfer between departments. Historians of actual crises will recognise both patterns in the record, sometimes in the same week; the comparison’s service is to show that the patterns are not two descriptions of one mechanism but two mechanisms, whose difference becomes visible exactly when force is used and an observer asks what the using means.

The body and its habits: practice below the level of belief

Both theories, at their most original, descend below belief to the trained body, and the descent is worth a section because it is where their materialisms touch and part most intimately. Gramsci’s notes on education and on Fordism return obsessively to the manufacture of a new type of worker and citizen through the discipline of gesture: the schoolchild’s posture and handwriting, the factory hand’s timed motions, the new sexual and domestic morality of the assembly line’s civilisation, the long training by which a class’s habits are sedimented into what feels like nature. His concept of the person as a historical bloc of subjective and objective elements includes the body among the elements, and his pedagogy is frankly a technology of habituation, the active school forming, through effort and even tedium deliberately embraced, the intellectual and muscular automatisms of a ruling class in waiting. Althusser’s rituals are the same descent viewed from the structure: kneeling, signing, queuing, saluting, the practices are material acts inserted into apparatuses, and their product is not belief as an inner state but the subject who reports belief when asked, the body having been taught first.

The parting is in what the trained body can subsequently do. In Gramsci the sedimented habits are themselves historical deposits, layer upon layer from successive hegemonies, and the friction among the layers, the peasant grandfather’s gestures inside the factory worker’s grandson, is one more site of the divided formation from which critique can grow; habit is an archive, and archives can be read against their keepers. In the structural account the habitual body is the proof of constitution’s depth, the level at which the subject’s subjection no longer needs to pass through anything so contestable as an opinion. The defender of the withdrawal possibility will note, however, that habits are unlearned in practice faster than doctrines are refuted in argument, in the strike that retrains the body for the picket, in the occupation that teaches a school’s pupils to run the school; and the structuralist will answer that the new habits are a new interpellation’s rituals, and the wheel turns. The section records the exchange without pretending it terminates, since it is the comparison’s deepest stratum: whether a formed being’s capacity to be re formed, in practice, by practice, amounts to a standpoint. Gramsci’s whole politics is the bet that it does. Althusser’s whole theory is the warning that the bet, placed naively, is ideology’s favourite wager to offer its subjects.

Two styles of writing as two theories of their object

The forms of the two bodies of writing enact their doctrines, and the enactment is evidence a comparison should not waste. The notebooks are dialogic in structure even when monologic in voice: a note poses a distinction, tries it against a historical case, qualifies it three notes later, returns to it in another notebook under another heading, so that the reader watches a mind conducting the very war of position it describes, advancing a concept trench by trench, consolidating, retreating, re attacking, and the unfinished quality is not an accident of censorship alone but the truthful form of a theory whose object is process. The apparatus essay, by contrast, is a deductive machine in prose: definitions are laid down, theses numbered, consequences extracted, objections answered in footnotes that read like border guards, and the text performs the closure it attributes to its object, a structure that permits no outside, not even the reader’s. To read the two in succession is to feel the theories in the wrist. Students who report that Gramsci is warmer and Althusser colder are registering, through the styles, the difference between a theory that expects its reader to become an organiser and a theory that expects its reader to become undeceived, and while warmth is not an argument, the expectation addressed to the reader is: each text interpellates, or recruits, its own kind of subject, and the methods section of any honest comparison should declare which subject the comparison itself has tried to form. This article, which asks its reader to hold two instruments and choose between them case by case, is by that test a Gramscian artifact about an Althusserian warning, and it knows it.

The legacy inside the movements: two inheritances administered

Theories of ideology are also inheritances, fought over by institutions with memberships and congresses, and the afterlife of this pair inside the European workers’ movement is a documented part of the comparison rather than gossip around it. The Italian party administered Gramsci as a founder’s testament: his concepts supplied its vocabulary of national road, historic compromise and cultural battle, and its strategists read the war of position as a charter for the long conquest of civil society that the party visibly pursued through municipalities, cooperatives, festivals and publishing houses, until the strategy’s very success in making the party a pillar of the republic became the standing puzzle of its historians, hegemony achieved, on one reading, as integration, exactly the passive revolution its author had warned against. The French party administered Althusser very differently, as an internal dissident to be tolerated and contained: his theses were argued in its journals and disowned by its leadership, his influence ran through the universities rather than the federation secretaries, and the party whose philosopher he was pursued, in practice, an electoral politics of alliance that his theory could describe only as the political apparatus functioning. The asymmetry is the withdrawal test in institutional dress. A theory built around the organisation of consent found an organisation willing to be built by it; a theory built around the constitution of subjects found its subjects in a seminar room, and its author’s loyalty to a party his concepts could not steer became the biographical form of his theory’s limit. Movements, like readers, keep the theories that equip them, and the movements’ choices are data about the theories, not distractions from them.

A worked miniature: one classroom hour read in both vocabularies

Abstractions in this comparison earn their keep only if they can be brought down to a single observed hour, so consider a lesson in a state secondary school, unremarkable in every way: a teacher, thirty pupils, a national history curriculum, a bell at each end. Read the hour in Gramsci’s vocabulary first. The school is a trench of civil society staffed by intellectuals of several kinds, and the lesson is an act of leadership whose success is not guaranteed by the timetable. The teacher offers the pupils a conception of their nation’s past in which their own families appear, when they appear, as material rather than as authors; whether the offer is consented to depends on terms the theory teaches us to inspect, the prestige of the teacher and of the culture she carries, the concessions embedded in the syllabus, the presence or absence of the pupils’ own world in the story told, the rival conceptions carried in from home, street and screen. Some pupils consent and are formed; some perform consent while their enacted knowledge files its dissent; one, perhaps, encounters in the lesson’s own materials the fact from which a good sense critique will later grow, the grandfather’s war appearing in the textbook as a paragraph and at home as a wound. The hour, on this reading, is a small negotiation whose result is written into thirty divided consciousnesses, and its political meaning is the sum of what organising could later do with those divisions.

Read the same hour in Althusser’s vocabulary and the negotiation vanishes into a functioning. The school apparatus has taken delivery of thirty individuals and is processing them into subjects of the national ideology: the register call interpellates each by name, the timetable inserts their bodies into the ritual order of the institution, the examination system waits at the end of the corridor to certify the double output, a know how proportioned to each destination and a submission rehearsed so thoroughly that it will present itself, in adult life, as the subject’s own character. The pupil who daydreams is not outside the process; the pupil who rebels is rehearsing a subject position the surrounding ideologies stock in advance; the teacher who despises the syllabus transmits it intact, because the apparatus requires her practice, not her faith. Nothing in the hour is unexplained, and nothing in it could have been otherwise, which is the reading’s strength and its telltale limit in a single property: a vocabulary in which the hour could not have been otherwise will describe every hour ever taught and distinguish none of them, while the rival vocabulary, which distinguishes this hour from a lesson that ignites a generation of organisers, pays for its discrimination with concepts, prestige, concession, division, that it cannot render as exactly as the machine renders its constants. The miniature is the whole comparison at bench scale, and the reader who has followed the argument can now perform the exercise unaided on a newsroom, a barracks, a congregation or a feed.

The question of truth: what being right can mean in each

A comparison of theories of ideology cannot postpone forever the question the theories pose to themselves: what entitles either to be believed? The two answers close the system of contrasts. For Althusser the entitlement is science. Historical materialism knows its object the way a science knows, by concepts produced in theoretical practice and verified by their knowledge effects, and its discourse on ideology is true in the way a mechanism’s description is true, from a standpoint that is not a subject’s standpoint at all, since the science’s break with ideology is precisely the exit from the subject form that the theory describes. The elegance is undeniable and the exposure is exact: the theory of ideology must exempt its own utterance from the constitution it universalises, and every critic from Thompson onward has walked through that door, asking in whose voice the process without a subject announces itself. For Gramsci the entitlement is historical and practical. A conception of the world proves itself by becoming a historical force, by its capacity to organise the reality it interprets, to pass from the study into the common sense of an epoch and there demonstrate, in the only laboratory available to social theory, that it has grasped the relations of force it claims to map. Truth, on this account, is not correspondence contemplated but adequacy enacted, and the philosophy of praxis accepts the consequence that its own truth is as historical as everything it describes, a wager the structural reading counts as the surrender of science and the historicist counts as the honesty of a theory that refuses to forge its own passport.

The comparison’s reader need not settle epistemology to use the pair, but should register that the withdrawal test has an epistemic twin. Ask of each theory whether it can describe the conditions of its own acceptance being revoked, and the answers rhyme with the political ones: the historicist theory builds its own supersession into its self understanding, since a later epoch’s self consciousness will historicise it in turn, while the structural theory must treat its rejection as an ideological event in its object, never as a finding against itself. Frameworks, like the orders they analyse, differ in whether they can house their own ending. It is fitting that the last word of the systematic comparison belong to that symmetry, because it explains the temperaments of the two literatures at a glance: the Gramscian literature argues, revises and accumulates, a tradition behaving like a movement; the Althusserian literature defends, demarcates and periodically declares its own past a deviation, a tradition behaving like a science that has noticed, in its own archive, the workings of the structure it describes.

The word they inherited: ideology before the quarrel

The comparison is sometimes taught as though its key term descended on the two men from a clear sky, and a short genealogy corrects the impression while explaining the quarrel’s shape. The word ideology begins respectably, as the name a French philosopher of the revolutionary era, Destutt de Tracy, gave to a science of ideas, and acquires its sneer from Napoleon, who blamed the idéologues for the republic’s misfortunes and fixed the term’s association with doctrine divorced from reality. Marx inherits the Napoleonic sneer and gives it a mechanism: in The German Ideology the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class, and consciousness appears as a camera obscura in which men and their circumstances are seen upside down, an inversion generated by the material process itself. Two distinct thoughts are compressed in the inheritance, and the whole later tradition can be written as their separation. One thought is sociological: beliefs serve the order that produces them, and the beliefs that rule are the rulers’. The other is epistemological: consciousness as such inverts, so that even an honest mind sees its world reversed, and only a science of the real process can set the image upright.

Gramsci descends principally from the first thought, radicalised: ruling ideas rule not because they are believed but because they are organised, taught, ritualised and conceded to, and his entire theory is the elaboration of the verb the sociological thought leaves unexamined, rule, into institutions and specialists. Althusser descends principally from the second thought, radicalised further: the inversion is not an error about the world but the form of the subject’s lived relation to it, inescapable not because men are foolish but because subjecthood itself is the inversion’s vehicle, and the science that sets the image upright must therefore operate without a subject to receive the correction. Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge hovers over both as the road not taken, the attempt to generalise ideology into the total thought style of groups and then to exempt a free floating intelligentsia as its surveyor, an exemption Gramsci absorbs into his account of traditional intellectuals while denying their freedom, and Althusser rejects outright as the humanist fantasy in sociological dress. The genealogy’s use to the comparison is that it shows the quarrel to have been latent in the founding texts: Marx’s two thoughts were never reconciled by their author, and his two greatest readers on this terrain each built a system on one of them, then accused the other, accurately, of having dropped half the inheritance.

How the pairing entered the syllabus

The couple this article has examined is, among other things, a curricular artifact, and its manufacture can be dated. The English speaking academy received the two men within a few years of each other and in a fateful order: Althusser arrived first in bulk, with For Marx and Reading Capital in translation at the end of the sixties and the apparatus essay circulating from 1970, while Gramsci arrived in force with the Selections from the Prison Notebooks of 1971, a large and brilliantly edited volume that nonetheless presented the notebooks in extracts, thematically arranged for a readership meeting their author for the first time. A generation of students therefore met the structuralist’s system as a system and the prisoner’s as an anthology, and the asymmetry of the editions section reappeared as an asymmetry of first impressions: rigour seemed to live in Paris, wisdom in the cell, and the seminar pairing hardened around that distribution of virtues before the critical editions could correct it. Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, published in 1976, then gave the pairing its canonical frame, gathering Gramsci and Althusser into a single tradition, Western Marxism, defined by its distance from political practice, its migration into the universities, and its preoccupation with culture and philosophy over economics and strategy; the frame was a diagnosis and a reproach, and it fixed the couple as the tradition’s two poles for the syllabuses that followed.

Knowing the manufacture helps a reader discount its effects. The pairing exaggerates the symmetry: the anthology Gramsci looks like a theorist of culture because the extracts were chosen for their teachability, and the systematic Althusser looks like a theorist of everything because his essays announce total ambitions, so that courses inherit a contrast between a fragmentary humanist and a complete structuralist that the full archives, on both sides, soften considerably. The pairing also exaggerates the opposition, since the classroom needs its rivals distinguishable: the acknowledgement, the shared enemy in economism, the common Lenin, all the connective tissue this article has documented, are the first casualties of a timetable that must give each man his week. None of this makes the pairing illegitimate. The fork it marks is real, and the withdrawal test shows it running through the texts themselves and not merely through their packaging. But the reader who knows that the couple was assembled, by translators, editors and one brilliant diagnostician, in a particular decade, will hold the comparison the way its subjects taught: Gramsci’s way, as a historical product whose terms can be renegotiated, and Althusser’s way, as a structure of the curriculum that constitutes the students who pass through it, each of whom will turn, on cue, when the names are called.

For students and exam candidates

This pairing is a standard essay because it tests whether a candidate can hold a contrast steady, and scripts fail it in three predictable ways. The first failure is the blur, in which hegemony and interpellation are described as two names for socialisation; insure against it by opening with the withdrawal test, consent revocable against subjects constituted, and letting every paragraph report to that difference. The second failure is the caricature, Gramsci the voluntarist against Althusser the determinist; both men left qualifications that examiners reward, the armour of coercion on one side and the apparatuses as sites of class struggle on the other, and a candidate who quotes the qualifications against the caricature is visibly reading beyond the summary. The third failure is the missing documents: the acknowledgement in the apparatus essay and the historicism attack in Reading Capital are the two exhibits that convert a survey answer into an argument, and they should be named, placed and weighed. Build the revision as a two column card on the seven points, keep it with the worked essay plans in the Gramsci and hegemony exam guide, and store the pair as a comparison card in the VaultBook study notes, where the withdrawal question can be rehearsed against fresh examples until it answers itself.

For teachers and seminar leaders

Sequence is the pedagogical problem with this pair, since each text is the other’s best commentary and neither is intelligible at full depth alone. A reliable order is to teach the acknowledgement before the attack: students who meet Gramsci first as the honoured predecessor read the essay’s machinery as a completion to be judged, while students who meet the historicism charge first read the debt as hypocrisy and stop listening. Set the two worked exercises this article models, the classroom hour read in both vocabularies and the crisis read twice, since both force the frameworks to make distinguishable claims about the same evidence, which is the skill the examination actually certifies. Guard the seminar against the team sport the seventies bequeathed: assign the strongest objection in each direction to the side that least wishes to make it, the Althusserian statement of the humanist presupposition to the Gramscians and Thompson’s cage to the structuralists, and grade the steelmanning before the rebuttals. Where the course continues into applied fields, the media studies sequence, apparatus theory followed by encoding and decoding, lets students watch a discipline conduct this comparison for itself and draw its own conclusion about which framework generates research.

For researchers, historians, and journalists

For research use, treat the pair as two instruments with marked jurisdictions rather than as two creeds. The Gramscian instrument is calibrated for processes: the assembly and decay of blocs, the movement of strata, the pricing of concessions, the periodisation of crises of authority, and it generates archives, since its variables live in newspapers, curricula, sermons, union records and the memoirs of officials who felt prestige drain. The structural instrument is calibrated for constants: the subject forms a formation requires, the rituals by which its institutions deliver them, the points at which its apparatuses mesh or jam, and it generates readings, since its evidence is the internal organisation of texts, timetables and ceremonies. Two cautions from the textual record belong in any scholarly use. The Gramsci who enters the quarrel is edition dependent, and citations should be to the critical text with the notebook and draft stage identified, since the thematic arrangement silently systematises its author. And the Althusser who enters it is date dependent: the essayist of 1970, the self critic of the middle seventies and the posthumous theorist of the encounter are three positions, and a study that quotes them as one voice repeats, against him, the injustice the thematic edition committed against his rival.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the difference between Gramsci and Althusser on ideology?

The difference is decided by one question: can the person formed by an ideology step back from it and take their agreement away? Gramsci’s whole construction answers yes. His institutions of civil society are a terrain on which leadership is organised, paid for in concessions and liable to be lost, because the subordinate mind is divided between the conception it recites and the one its practice teaches, and politics is the work of widening that division into a rival allegiance. Althusser’s construction answers that the question is misconceived. His apparatuses do not win agreement from ready made persons; they manufacture the persons, who experience their manufactured identity as their own. Put the two side by side and every other contrast, hegemony against interpellation, historicism against structure, alliance against conjuncture, is this one disagreement in different dress.

Q: Did Althusser acknowledge Gramsci?

Yes, explicitly and in his most famous text. In the essay on ideological state apparatuses he names Gramsci as the only predecessor who went any distance down the road the essay itself travels, crediting him with the decisive insight that the state cannot be reduced to its repressive machinery but includes institutions of civil society through which domination is exercised. The acknowledgement is genuine and it is also a boundary: Althusser takes over Gramsci’s terrain while declining his method, rebuilding the widened state on structural foundations of function and interpellation rather than on historical foundations of leadership and consent. The two gestures together, homage in the essay and attack in Reading Capital, define the relationship: an inheritance administered as a dispute, in which the heir retains the discovery, dismisses the discoverer’s method, and says so.

Q: Why did Althusser attack historicism?

Because historicism, as he defined it, destroys the possibility of a science of history. Gramsci had called Marxism an absolute historicism, a doctrine that takes itself to be a historical process become conscious of itself. Althusser argued that a theory which makes itself the expression of an epoch cannot explain the age it expresses, since what merely expresses a thing belongs among its effects, not among its explanations; that historicism dissolves the specificity of theory into the movement it should analyse; and that it guarantees the outcome in advance by treating history as a single subject unfolding toward its meaning, the expressive totality his concept of overdetermination was built to refuse. Gramsci was named as the deviation’s most distinguished exponent because he was the authority to whom every historicist and humanist reading of Marx in the European parties appealed.

Q: Is consent the same as interpellation?

No, and treating them as synonyms dissolves the comparison. Consent is a relation between parties who exist before it: a leading group offers terms, makes concessions, and receives an allegiance that can be reconsidered and withdrawn when the terms rot, which is why Gramsci’s politics is a politics of negotiation, organisation and timing. Interpellation is an operation that produces the party: ideology hails individuals and, in their recognition of the hail as addressed to them, constitutes them as subjects, so that the self who might consent or refuse is ideology’s product rather than its customer. Persuasion belongs to neither concept exactly, but it sits far closer to consent; interpellation is not a plea addressed to a judge but the manufacture of the bench. The two terms answer different questions, how allegiance is maintained between agents, and how agents come to be there at all.

Q: Which framework allows for resistance?

Both allow it, but they house it in different places, and the difference decides what kind of politics each can guide. Gramsci houses resistance in a subject: the subordinate whose consciousness is divided, whose practical activity contradicts the conception he professes, and whose good sense can be organised by intellectuals and a party into a counter hegemony built inside the same institutions the ruling order occupies. Resistance there has agents, addresses and a timetable. Althusser houses resistance in the structure: the essay’s own closing qualification makes the apparatuses both a prize of the class contest and one of its arenas, and resistance appears as that contest’s echo within and between the machines, a friction that can jam reproduction. It is a real concession, but no subject in his theory is authorised to conduct the resistance, which is why his framework describes revolts better than it equips them.

Q: Do ideological state apparatuses and civil society describe the same thing?

They describe nearly the same list of things under two different principles of classification, which is not the same achievement. School, church, press, party, union, family and law appear in both inventories. Gramsci’s civil society classifies by activity: an institution belongs to it insofar as consent and leadership are organised there, and the boundary with the coercive state is historical and mobile, the two together forming the integral state. Althusser’s apparatuses classify by destination: an institution belongs to the state, whatever its legal ownership, insofar as it works to reproduce the existing relations of production, with the repressive apparatus standing behind it as guarantor. A researcher must therefore choose the question before choosing the term: whether what is at stake is an institution’s loyalty, which can be won or lost, or a function it performs regardless of who holds it. Concrete studies can be written in either vocabulary; the explanations they yield are rivals, not translations.

Q: Which theorist is more useful for strategy?

Gramsci, by design, and the asymmetry is a consequence rather than an accident. His framework was built as a strategist’s instrument: it grades situations by the relations of force, identifies which strata’s consent is detachable, prices the concessions a rival leadership must offer, assigns the work to intellectuals and a party, and supplies names for the phases of an order’s decay. A movement can plan with it on Monday morning. Althusser’s framework was built as a scientist’s instrument, and its strategic yield is deliberately negative: it warns that arguments do not dissolve apparatuses, that subjects experience their subjection as freedom, that spontaneity reproduces the ideologies it protests, and that conjunctures turn on condensations no will commands. Used together as this article recommends, his is the better audit of a strategy and Gramsci’s the better strategy; used alone, only one of them tells anybody what to do.

Q: Is Gramsci a humanist?

In the sense that mattered to the quarrel, yes, though the label needs its definition attached. Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis places human practice at the centre of its account: man is conceived as a process, the process of his actions, historically formed and yet the former of his circumstances, and the collective subject of politics is a real protagonist rather than an effect to be dissolved. That is the position Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism was defined against, since for the structural account the subject is ideology’s product and history a process without one. The complication, which fair answers register, is that Gramsci’s humanism is historical rather than essentialist: there is no eternal human nature in the notebooks doing the work, only ensembles of relations that change, so that his subject is made by history and then, organised, makes it back. Whether that position escapes the anti-humanist critique or confirms it is the underlying dispute, pursued in its own article in this series.

Q: Can the two frameworks be combined?

They can, but only at the price of transformation, never as innocent layers. The contradiction at the bedding plane is real: if subjects are wholly constituted by interpellation, the negotiator presupposed by consent is a fiction; if consent is genuinely negotiated and revocable, interpellation shrinks to one tendency among others inside a process of contest. The serious combinations in the literature all pay the price openly. Stuart Hall let each theory discipline the other, taking the unguaranteed subject from Althusser and the contested terrain from Gramsci. Laclau and Mouffe generalised hegemony into a logic of articulation in which discourses constitute their subjects, surrendering the economic anchor both originals kept. Poulantzas rebuilt the state as the condensation of a balance of forces, readmitting struggle into the structural edifice. Each synthesis is a new theory with two ancestors, which is the honest form combination takes here.

Q: Which of the two has been more influential?

Each has been more influential, in a different province, and the map of the provinces is itself evidence about the theories. Gramsci’s influence runs through the disciplines that study action: political science, which took hegemony into its working vocabulary for international order; history, where the notebooks’ manner of writing about subaltern groups was carried furthest by the Subaltern Studies collective; sociology of movements and professions; and the study of education. Althusser’s runs through the disciplines that study representation: literary theory, permanently marked by symptomatic reading; philosophy, where the break and the process without a subject set terms even opponents use; film studies in its theoretical decades; and post structuralism, whose leading figures were formed in his classroom before defining themselves against him. Influence measured in citations would crown both and explain neither; the instructive measure is which questions each made askable, consent’s organisation in the one case, the subject’s constitution in the other.

Q: How does the withdrawal test separate the two accounts of ideology?

The test asks each theory whether a subject formed inside an ideology possesses a standpoint from which agreement can be revoked, a procedure by which revocation can become collective, and an agent able to organise it. Gramsci’s framework supplies all three: the standpoint is contradictory consciousness, the split between the conception professed and the one enacted in practice; the procedure is the war of position, the construction of counter institutions in which a rival common sense can stabilise; the agent is the party as collective intellectual. Althusser’s framework declines all three on principle: no standpoint exists outside ideology, no procedure of resignation is possible for a constituted subject, and no subject exists, on his premises, to conduct one. The test therefore does not score the theories on a shared scale; it locates the exact joint at which they contradict, and lets the reader judge which description fits the documented occasions when orders have lost their people.

Q: What should a student separate between consent and interpellation?

Four separations keep essays on this pair out of trouble. Separate the parties: consent presupposes agents who precede the agreement, interpellation produces the agent in the act of agreement. Separate the direction of explanation: consent explains order by what rulers do and concede under pressure, interpellation explains order by the constitution of persons in advance of any act of theirs. Separate the failure modes: consent fails in crises of authority with a describable anatomy, interpellation fails, if at all, as malfunction and replacement between apparatuses. And separate the disciplines each equips: consent belongs to a vocabulary of strategy, alliance and timing; interpellation to a vocabulary of function, ritual and recognition. A candidate who holds the four separations can survive any phrasing of the question; a candidate who merges the terms into a general account of socialisation has surrendered the distinction the question exists to test.

Q: Why did the comparison need seven points rather than one contrast?

Because a single contrast, consent against interpellation, states the conclusion without earning it, and collapses under the first qualification an examiner raises. The seven points, institutions, mechanism, subject, resistance, party, history and explanatory range, force the decisive difference to prove itself on separate terrains, and they expose the places where the theories genuinely converge, the shared inventory of institutions and the shared refusal of the lie theory of ideology, which a one line contrast hides. They also prevent the commonest error of comparative essays, the smuggling of one theory’s answer into the other’s row: a student who gives Althusser Gramsci’s resistance has usually not noticed, because the rows were never separated. The withdrawal test then does the opposite work, reuniting the seven points by showing that each is the same disagreement, over whether the subject can stand back from its formation, wearing the dress of a topic.

Q: How does each account explain a belief’s hold on its holder?

Gramsci explains the hold as a relation maintained under terms. A belief holds because it is carried by institutions the holder needs, taught by intellectuals the holder respects, woven into a common sense the holder’s community speaks, and underwritten by the prestige of a leading group whose competence the holder’s experience confirms; it loosens when the terms fail, when prestige collapses in crisis, when the holder’s own practice contradicts the professed conception and rival intellectuals elaborate the contradiction. Althusser explains the hold as a constitution. A belief holds because the holder is the belief’s product: interpellated as a subject within the rituals of an apparatus, he recognises himself in the ideology’s address and experiences its categories as his own identity, so that the hold is not a grip on a person but the shape of the person. The first account predicts that belief can be argued, organised and priced out of existence; the second predicts it will survive its refutation.

Q: What did the two theories share despite the quarrel?

More than either camp’s polemics admitted. Both men rejected the picture of ideology as lies injected into passive minds, and both relocated the machinery of rule from barracks and ministries into civil life itself, its schools, churches, press, parties and families. Both wrote against their own tradition’s complacencies, Gramsci against the economism that waited for crisis to do politics, Althusser against the humanism that dissolved theory into a philosophy of man. Both made the reproduction of order a problem to be explained rather than a background to be assumed, both assigned intellectual work a central place in that reproduction, and both claimed Lenin as the warrant for doing so. Even the quarrel was a shared possession, conducted inside one movement’s argument about its own future. The comparison is worth its length because the sharing is real: two answers this close in their questions and this opposed in their anthropology mark the true fork in the tradition they inherited together.