“Political Crisis and Social Transformation in Antonio Gramsci. Elements for a Sociology of Political Praxis”

Abstract The paper deals with the analogy between the concepts by which Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, analyzes the post-war crisis of democracy and the contemporary crisis of representative democracy. Gramsci’s analy-sis is centered on the crisis of political parties, transformism, the crisis of the authority of republican institu-tions, the spread of apoliticism in the social body, the decline in the prestige of Parliament, as well as on Cae-sarism. Today’s political sociologists are once again interested in the study of the same set of phenomena: crisis of mass-based parties, antipolitics and antiparliamentarism, transformism, crisis in the authority of the political class, prevailing corporate interests within republican institutions, and populism. In the light of a cyclical recurrence of the same phenomena, which suggests the presence of a systemic correlation with to-day’s democracy, the theoretical instruments used to investigate such phenomena in Gramsci’s Notebooks, seem to provide relevant interpretative tools still today. In the present paper, we try to identify the usefulness that the categories employed by Gramsci to analyze the crisis of parliamentary democracy may provide in analyzing today’s crisis of representativeness, within the more global Gramscian understanding of political modernity.