A quick note on the inevitability of the same damn arguments

Reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, one comes across the same debates going on in Gramsci’s time as are currently going on today. Not only are the debates identical in theme, they are the same down to the positions taken and the points made. The vocabulary is different, but that’s the extent of it. For example, Gramsci rails against literati who view “the people” as a pure abstraction: “And in the meantime they do nothing but devise tricks for winning the electoral majority.” He discusses the complaints about two cultures in Britain: “Guido Ferrando analyzes the changes that are taking place in British culture: ‘In England there is an increasing swing toward a technical and scientific form of culture to the detriment of humanistic culture. In England, until the last century… the best schools set as their highest educational goal the formation of gentlemen.” Certainly, Gramsci inspired some of these debates, such as those over organic intellectuals, but others, like the anxiety of intellectuals who want to connect to the people, was not Gramsci’s coinage and has been a regular facet of the modern world. That’s not to say that there are no differences between now and then. Just that there aren’t a lot of new ideas.

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