From philosophy to politics

Gramsci was a process-thinker but, unlike Henri Bergson, he did not treat change and transformation as eternal flux. Change and transformation are always relative in the human world. Gramsci emphasized the distinction between what is ‘permanent’ and ‘occasional’, between what is ‘organic’ and ‘conjunctural’. For Gramsci, history coincides in practice with politics via transformation: man makes history just like history makes man. Unlike love, politics never ends. It always starts from effectual reality of the occasion. The Machiavellian virtù denotes virtual potency. Machiavelli made a distinction between ‘grand politics’ and ‘minor politics’. This was crucial for Gramsci, whose interest in ‘grand politics’ centred on the constituent power to create new states. The lack of this power made Machiavelli imagine a ‘Prince to come’, while Gramsci envisages a ‘party to come’. Their political attention was placed on the future in the present, on prevision. Virtù is the ability of prevision. It can be conceived as the ‘formgiver’ in the modal matrix of necessità, fortuna, occasione.