Gramsci Books

“Before proceeding with a detailed analysis, it is worth elaborating what I mean by the word ‘state’ within the context of this book. Gramsci presented a number of definitions for the term in his Prison Notebooks, written while imprisoned by the fascist regime in Italy(1). The one that I find most relevant to the case of Egypt under direct military rule is a definition that views the state merger between the concepts of civil and political society. In simpler terms, the state as a social reformation contains both: the public apparatus of the state (political society), such as the judicial system, and the private apparatus (civil society), like the media, education system and so on (Carnoy, 1983). Accordingly, the state is everywhere and is the tool used by the ruling class to project their power over society, which is very germane to the Egyptian case. Indeed, the ultimate goal of the Egyptian military establishment is not only dominance over the public state apparatus, but the use of its position to accumulate social power, extending the boundaries of the state so that it swallows up the private sphere—establishing total dominance over society and transforming the public space into a militarized space. This metaphor has been used by Zineb Abu-El Magd in her detailed study of the military’s economic empire (Abu Al Magd, 2018), albeit through a Foucaultian theoretical lens. Abu-El Magd has argued that the military’s economic dominance allowed it to penetrate the lives of ordinary Egyptians, transforming the country into a military camp. In this chapter, however, I intend to use the metaphor to examine the military’s dominance over the state and its ability to use the state apparatus to transform the public space, in a manner that is unique to Sisi and his regime.”
Chapter 2: The New Leviathan, page 51”
― Maged Mandour, Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge