Alternative Paradigms: Gramsci and Non-Western Philosophy

A number of key alternatives and paradigms have emerged that challenge the Eurocentric liberal based model of political philosophy. An important critique of Eurocentrism was Edward Said's Orientalism (1979). Said, was a Palestinian born intellectual who held a distinguished chair of literature at Columbia University.  While an undergraduate I had the privilege of meeting with him in a short seminar arranged by my professors at the University of Texas at Austin where Said was doing some final research on his book.  He was a very encouraging and inspiring teacher and mentor to undergraduate and graduate students alike.

Chief among these are the writings of Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937) and his Prison Notebooks.  Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party and member of the Italian parliament, was imprisoned by the Fascists and spent the last decade of his life in prison where he completed a substantial series of writings that were released and published after the Second World War.  Gramsci offered a theory of hegemony that explained how elites achieve consent and influence to rule and maintain power.  Gramsci was a keen observer of contradictions of regions and culture in the construction of the modern state and capitalism and showed how traditional intellectuals, the clergy for example, could be used by the state to defeat or contain progressive forces and labor demands. Another key aspect of Gramsci was his observations on the epistemology of political philosophy.

The expressions "ethical State" or "civil society" would thus mean that this "image" of a State without a State was present to the greatest political and legal thinkers, in so far as they placed themselves on the terrain of pure science (pure utopia, since based on the premise that all men are really equal and hence equally rational and moral, i.e. capable of accepting the law spontaneously, freely, and not through coercion, as imposed by another class, as something external to consciousness).  Antonio Gramsci, in Hoare and Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, (1971), p. 103. 

Gramsci also argued there was a hegemony of Western Culture imposed on the whole of world culture.  The critique of Hegel's theory of Western European superiority shows Gramsci's originality and emphasis of this relation.

• Even if one admits that other cultures have had an importance and significance in the process of "hierarchical" unification of world civilisation (and this should certainly be admitted without question), they have had a universal value only in so far as they have become constituent elements of European culture, which is the only historically and concretely universal culture - in so far, that is, as they have contributed to the process of European thought and been assimilated by it 

• However, even European culture has undergone a process of unification and, in the historical moment that interests us, this has culminated in Hel and the critique of Hegelianism.   ....

•  It is not important that this movement had its origins in mediocre philosophical masterpieces.  What matters is that a new way of conceiving the world and man is born an that this conception is no longer reserved to the great intellectuals, to professional philosophers, but tends rather to become a popular, mass phenomenon, with a concretely world-wide character, capable of of modifying (even if the result includes hybrid combinations) popular thought and mummified popular culture. Antonio Gramsci, in Hoare and Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, (1971), p. 235 et seq.

Other writers have offered critiques of the Hegelian Eurocentric political philosophy.  Alternatives are found in the writings of the Martinique born physician Frantz Fanon, who worked in Algeria during the Algerian Civil War of the late 1950s and early 1960s and who wrote in The Wretched of the Earth of the problem of colonialism and emergent postcolonial struggles of the Third World.  A link to the conclusion of this work is here.  His work may be read in tandem with the Tunisian Jewish writer and philosopher, Albert Memmi.

Another Caribbean writer of importance here is Eduard Glissant, whose essays on culture also provide a political theory of culture and the position of intellectuals and society.  His Poetics of Relation (1996) and his earlier Caribbean Discourse:  Selected Essays, (1989) offers a cogent attack on Hegelianism and the imposition of a world-system:

It is difficult to separate theoretically the notion of individual dignity from th eoppressive reality of private property.  This makes sublimation necessary.  This explains why Western philosophy and ideology all aim for a generalizing universality.  Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 138. 

Here is a guide to the study of late 20th century Filipino Philosophy
F.P.A. Demeterio, “Rereading Emerita Quito's Thoughts Concerning the Underdevelopment of Filipino Philosophy,” Online Article