Gramsci on Bureaucracy

This essay reconstructs Antonio Gramsci’s account of bureaucracy as it unfolds in his magnum opus, the Prison Notebooks. By adopting the “philological” way of reading this work developed in recent decades by Gramsci scholars and significantly anticipated by Joseph Buttigieg’s “Gramsci’s Method” (1990), I show how the concept of bureaucracy is closely connected to some key elements in Gramsci’s political reflections, such as the categories of “hegemony” and “organic crisis.” While drawing out the “constellation” of Gramsci’s references to bureaucratic apparatuses throughout his carceral writings, I stress in particular their relationship with his investigation of the nature and the role of political parties, as well as with his overall assessment of parliamentarism (and of its degeneration). In this framework, a further pivotal element is represented by Gramsci’s conception of “modernity,” that is, of the features that characterize the contemporary political panorama and to which the issue of bureaucracy is closely related. To conclude, I compare Gramsci’s and Max Weber’s theories of bureaucracy, showing both similarities and differences.