Political class and crisis of democracy in Gramsci's critical analysis

Abstract

From the early 1880s on a new genre of political literature began to take hold and to expand in Italy: the critical analysis of the existing parliamentary democracies. This literary genre had an important expression in the work of Gaetano Mosca. Decades later, during the fascist era, Antonio Gramsci confront this literature in his Prison Notebooks, specially by reappropriating and revaluating the political debate of the immediate prewar period, when the crisis of liberal democracy took on stronger contours. The present article shows how Gramsci translates the Moschian concept of political class as “the intellectual category of the dominant social group” and integrates it to his own discussion about political parties in the prison writings. Gramsci interpretates the parliamentary crisis as a decomposition of this particular “intellectual category” and the loss of its leading capacity. What appeared as a decomposition of the principle of authority in the elitist theory is now discussed as a crisis of hegemony, a crisis of the State as a whole, from which the separation between rulers and ruled would be the most evident manifestation. In the concluding section is discussed the hypothesis proposed in the Quaderni del carcere of a non-parliamentary representative regime.