Wednesday 10 March 2021

The Modern Prince and the Jacobins

In his Prison Notebooks, the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci calls Machiavelli the “precocious Jacobin” in whose work, The Prince, political ideology and political science get represented not in the form of a utopia or a scholarly treatise but in the dramatic form of a myth. 

He exhorts the communist party to act as the Modern Prince and use Jacobin force to bring communism in society. Developing a union between Modern Prince and Jacobinism means ending the conflict between the myth and the critique of the myth—or between the utopian (revolutionary) and the reactionary (counterrevolutionary). Gramsci says that the communist movements must strive to hold together in a dialectical unity the utopian enterprise and the reaction to the utopian enterprise. 

The liberals can be viewed as the inheritors of Gramsci’s communism—they operate by holding in a dialectical unity the forces which can act to create the utopia (bureaucracy, financial institutions, law and order machinery, and big businesses) and the forces which can try to counter the utopia (academia, media, and entertainment industry).

No comments: