Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations

The essays collected here relate the writings of Antonio Gramsci and others to the contemporary reconstruction of historical materialist theories of international relations. The contributors analyze the contradiction between globalizing and territorially based social and political forces in the context of past, present, and future world orders, and view the emerging world order as undergoing a structural transformation, a “triple crisis” involving economic, political and “socio-cultural” change. The prevailing trend of the 1980s and early 1990s toward the marketization and commodification of social relations leads the contributors to argue that socialism needs to be redefined away from the totalizing visions associated with Marxism-Leninism, toward the idea of the self defense of society and social choice to counter the disintegrating and atomizing effects of globalizing and unplanned market forces.