Summary
Italian theorist whose distinction between civil and political society, and whose concept of Hegemony as cultural leadership by consent, Said uses to explain Orientalism’s durability, and whose Prison Notebooks inventory of traces frames the personal dimension of the study (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.15-16, 34 / printed p.6, 25).
Details
- Civil society is made up of voluntary or noncoercive affiliations like schools, families and unions; political society of state institutions — the army, the police, the central bureaucracy — whose role is direct domination; culture operates in civil society, where influence works by consent, and the form of cultural leadership is what Gramsci identified as hegemony (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.15-16 / printed p.6-7).
- Political society in Gramsci’s sense reaches into civil-society realms such as the academy and saturates them with significance of direct concern to it, which is why a general subject matter such as Russia carries political priority over finer disciplinary distinctions (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.20 / printed p.11).
- Said quotes the Prison Notebooks on knowing thyself as a product of the historical process, and restores from the Italian the conclusion the English translation omits: that it is imperative at the outset to compile an inventory of the traces deposited in one (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.34 / printed p.25).