Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations

by Stephen Gill (Editor)

The essays collected here relate the writings of Antonio Gramsci and others to the contemporary reconstruction of historical materialist theories of international relations. The contributors analyze the contradiction between globalizing and territorially based social and political forces in the context of past, present, and future world orders, and view the emerging world order as undergoing a structural transformation, a "triple crisis" involving economic, political and "socio-cultural" change. The prevailing trend of the 1980s and early 1990s toward the marketization and commodification of social relations leads the contributors to argue that socialism needs to be redefined away from the totalizing visions associated with Marxism-Leninism, toward the idea of the self defense of society and social choice to counter the disintegrating and atomizing effects of globalizing and unplanned market forces.

Genres: International Relations, Politics

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Stephen Gill is Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science, Communications and Culture at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Senior Associate Member of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University. In 2009-10 he was the Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland and in 2016 he was the Hallsworth Visiting Professor in Global Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. His main fields are Global Political Economy, International Relations, and Social and Political Theory.

Reviews

[Sinai]

I had to read one essay from this book for school and then I started reading the whole book. It's about gramsci's view on "hegemony": someone who controls not through froce or coercian but through ideas.

[Justiina Dahl · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enlighting recaptualization of the many diverse and useful ideas and concepts that Gramsci put forward in his work (and which were way ahead of his times) that have unfortunately been tainted by communist propaganda and thus left more untouched than used in mainstream Ir.