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Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK.

Abstract
Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is characterised by the spatialisation as well as historicisation of its analytical categories. These theoretical practices are deeply intertwined in his ‘absolute historicism’. Highlighting the spatiality of Gramsci’s analysis not only enables us to recover the many geographical themes in his work but also provides a useful counterweight to the emphasis on the historical dimensions of his historicism. In addition to obvious references to Gramsci’s use of spatial metaphors and his discussion of the Southern Question, it is shown that many of his key concepts are best interpreted from a spatio-temporal as well as social and material perspective. After introducing the concepts of space, place, and scale, the article shows that all three are relevant to Gramsci’s analyses of issues such as language, the historical significance of the Catholic Church, the role of intellectuals, cosmopolitanism, class and class struggle, Americanism and Fordism, the nature of the Italian state, the social bases of state power, Jacobinism, passive revolution, and hegemony. The article concludes that Gramsci’s interest in place, space, and scale was not merely academic but had to do with his analysis of revolutionary conjunctures.
Key Words: Gramsci, space, place, scale, absolute historicism, International Relations, state power

This contribution argues that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis involves not only the historicisation but also the spatialisation of its analytical categories. These theoretical practices are deeply intertwined in his ‘absolute historicism’. This argument is useful not only because Gramsci regularly explores geographical themes but also because ‘bending the stick in the other direction’ enriches our understanding of his overall approach. I do not claim that Gramsci was a geographer manqué or was more a geographer than historian. These are disciplinary questions inappropriate to the pre-disciplinary traditions of Italian philosophy and historical materialism and to the political agenda of Italian state formation. Conversely, while it is certainly appropriate to consider, like Said (2001),  the import of Gramsci’s familiar spatial metaphors, it would be misleading to focus exclusively on these here. For this would divert attention from Gramsci’s less obvious but more significant analyses of the inherent spatiality as well as temporality of social relations. This approach has significant practical as well as theoretical implications and is my primary focus here.

Spatialising the philosophy of praxis
Gramsci writes that, while everyone is an intellectual, not everyone is an intellectual by social function (1971: 9, Q12§3).  One might add that, while everyone has a practical sense of place, space, and scale, not everyone is a geographer by social function. This certainly holds for Gramsci himself. He was a deeply spatial thinker but he did not explicitly prioritise spatial thinking. This may explain both why Gramsci ‘did not fully and explicitly develop his geographical insights’ (Morera 1990: 89) and why the inherently spatial nature of his thought has been neglected. But he did take geography seriously. He studied it alongside his major subject of philology at Turin University (passing his geography exam in 1912). He called for its teaching in primary schools together with reading, writing, sums, and history; and proposed that a potential party textbook contain a ‘critical-historical-bibliographical examination of the regional situations (meaning by region a differentiated geo-economic organism) (Gramsci 1985: 415, Q24§3). He continued to explore geology, geography, and geo-politics after leaving university and also taught history and geography in prison following his arrest (Gramsci 1971: 30, Q12§1; Gramsci 1995: 195-217, Q2§passim, Q3§5passim, Q5§8, Q6§39, Q6§123, Q8§47; Hoare and Nowell-Smith 1971: lxxxix). He noted the popularity of geographical novels (Gramsci 1985: 360, Q21§6); and recommended that touring clubs promote national culture by combining geography with sport (Gramsci 1995: 153, Q8§188). He reflected on the geo-political and geo-economic implications of the international conferences in the 1920s for Italy, Europe, internationalism, and future world politics (Gramsci 1995: 195-215, Q2§passim, Q3§5passim, Q5§8, Q6§39, Q8§47). And he regularly approached political problems not only in terms of ‘structural’ (economic and class) factors but also in regional terms (cf. Morera 1990: 149).
These interests reflect his experiences as a Sardinian in the most exploited and oppressed part of the Mezzogiorno and his movement to Turin, the capital city of Piedmont and the North’s industrial centre. They also derive from his reflections on more general influences in Italian economic, political, and cultural development. These include the Vatican’s role as a cosmopolitan mini-state situated at the heart of Italy supported by a traditional intellectual elite with a long-established supranational orientation serving the leaders of Europe; the long-running debate on the Southern Question (especially from the 1870s); the spatiality of the Risorgimento and the flawed Italian unification process dominated by the Piedmontese state; the continuing economic and social problems posed by uneven development, dependent development, and, indeed, internal colonialism in Italy; the communists’ political problems in breaking the class alliance between northern capital and the southern agricultural landowning class and in building an alliance between the northern workers and southern peasants; the changing nature and forms of imperialism (including the obstacles, challenges, and opportunities involved in the diffusion of Americanism and Fordism in Europe); and the problems for the wider communist movement posed by the Soviet Union’s international isolation.
Gramsci’s university training in philology under Matteo Bartoli also stimulated his spatial sensibilities. He followed the latter’s new approach to linguistics as an historical science concerned with the social regularities of language (Gramsci 1985: 174, Q3§74). Bartoli developed a ‘spatial’ analysis of language that sought to trace ‘how a dominant speech community exerted prestige over contiguous, subordinate communities: the city over the surrounding countryside, the “standard” language over the dialect, the dominant socio-cultural group over the subordinate one’ (Forgacs and Nowell-Smith 1985: 164-7). He also charted the continuing flow of innovations from the prestigious langue to the receiving one, such that earlier linguistic forms would be found in a peripheral rather than central area, isolated rather than accessible areas, larger rather than smaller areas (Brandist 1996: 94-5). Gramsci inflected Bartoli’s analysis in a strongly materialist direction and highlighted its practical implications. For he saw the problem of revolution as closely tied to the unification of the peoplea task that had to pass through the medium of language if a coherent collective will was to emerge that could unify different classes, strata, and groups (Lo Piparo 1979; Helsloot 1989; Ives 2004). The resulting complexities are evident in his analyses of how language use is stratified. Among many examples is his comment on how country folk ape urban manners, how subaltern groups imitate the upper classes, how peasants speak when they move to the cities, etc. (Gramsci 1985: 180-1, Q29§2). In short, Gramsci’s work on language as a medium of hegemony is not just historical but also highly sensitive spatially.
These influences suggest, as remarked earlier, that there is more to Gramsci as a spatial theorist than his famous use of several spatial metaphors (on which, see box one). These have certainly been influential in the reception of his work but we should also consider his interest in the actual rather than metaphorical spatiality of social relations and practices, in their spatial conditioning, and in the relevance of social relations and practices to spatial issues. For Gramsci was not only sensitive to the historical specificity of all social relations (Morera 1990: 85) but also to their distinctive location in place, space, and scale. Indeed these two are clearly interconnected in any ensemble of social relations. Thus I now consider how Gramsci integrates place, space, and scale in his philosophy of praxis. However, because he does this in a largely ‘pre-theoretical’ manner, I will define these concepts before illustrating their significance for Gramsci’s theory and practice.

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Box One about here
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Place (or locale) refers to a more or less bounded site of face-to-face relationships and/or other direct interactions among social forces. It is generally closely tied to everyday life, has temporal depth, and is bound up with collective memory and social identity. Its boundaries serve both to contain and to connect: they provide a strategically selective social and institutional setting for direct interactions that privileges some identities and interests over others and also structure possible connections to other places and spaces on a range of scales. For this and other reasons, the naming, delimitation, and meaning of places are always contested and changeable and the coordinates of any given physical space can be connected to a multiplicity of places with different identities, spatio-temporal boundaries, and social significance. Gramsci was sensitive to all of these aspects. He stresses the importance of place or locale in his comments on how common sense, popular culture, and everyday practices are shaped by life in different types of cities and in the countryside, the design of locales (e.g., school architecture), or built forms (e.g., street lay-out and street names) (Gramsci 1971: 30-33, Q12§1; 40, Q12§2; 90-2, Q19§26; 282-3, Q22§2; Gramsci 1995: 155, Q3§49). He discusses the struggle for control over places (factories, public buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, etc.) (Gramsci 1977; 1978). He famously emphasised that hegemony in the United States is grounded in the factory (Gramsci 1971: 285, Q22§2). He contrasts the secure meeting places of the industrial and landowning bourgeoisie with the vulnerability of working-class premises and the problems of protecting the streets (‘the natural place where the proletariat can assemble without cost’) (Gramsci 1978: 35, 268-9). In addition to exploring the contestability of places and their intertwining with other places, he also comments on their links to memory, identity, and temporality (Gramsci 1971: 93-5, Q19§26; 272-4, Q3§46; 324-5, Q11§12, 453 Q11§16; Gramsci 1978: 446). This is especially clear in his comments on the folklore of the subaltern and provincial classes and his discussion of the social origins of intellectuals in spatially-specific rather than a-spatial class terms and their implications for building different types of hegemony. And, of course, it pervades his analysis of the Southern Question with its emphasis on the rootedness (or otherwise) of social classes and political and intellectual forces in specific places, spaces, and scales of economic and social life.
Space comprises the socially produced grids and horizons of social life. It offers a whole series of strategically selective possibilities to develop social relations that stretch over space and time. Gramsci considers space from several viewpoints: (a) the spatial division of labour between town and countryside, between north and south, between different regional, national, and even continental economies; (b) the territorialisation of political power, processes of state formation, and the dialectic of domestic and external influences on political life; and (c) different spatial and scalar imaginaries and different representations of space. Gramsci did not believe that space exists in itself, independently of the specific social relations that construct it, reproduce it, and occur within it. As a profoundly relational and practical thinker, he was never tempted by such spatial fetishism.  Nor did he accept the geographical determinism common in the nineteenth century ‘scientific’ field and still reflected in folklore and common sensea determinism that regards the physical and/or human environment as the most important determinant of social relations and their historical development. This would have been equally anathema to Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis.  Instead he treated space like history, that is, in relational terms. For example, he regarded historical grammar (philology) comparatively, arguing that ‘the linguistic fact, like any other historical fact’, cannot have strictly defined national boundaries’ (Gramsci 1985: 181, Q29§2). This is reflected in his exploration of local linguistic usages and particularisms, tendencies to territorial unity and fragmentation, and external influences on national languages. He concluded ‘that history is always “world history” and that particular histories exist only within the frame of world history’ (Gramsci 1985: 181, Q29§2; cf. Gramsci 1971: 182, Q13§17). This is directly comparable to his view that national states are not self-closed ‘power containers’ but should be studied in terms of their complex interconnections with states and political forces on other scales. Indeed he combines temporal and spatial perspectives in an early form of ‘geographical historical materialism’ (cf. Harvey 1982).
Scale comprises the nested (and sometimes not so nested) hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size, e.g., local, regional, national, continental, and global. Scale is typically the product of social struggles for power and control. Gramsci was extremely sensitive to issues of scale, scalar hierarchies of economic, political, intellectual and moral power, and their territorial and non-territorial expressions. He was not a ‘methodological nationalist’ who took the national scale for granted but typically analysed any particular scale in terms of its connection with other scales. Thus he examined relations of hegemony and domination at the local level (e.g., the Parisian urban bloc’s domination of other French cities), regional level (e.g., Piedmontese domination of Italy’s flawed and incomplete unification or the Giolittian strategy of passive revolution based on an alliance between a dominant northern urban bloc and a southern rural bloc), national level (e.g., the influence of the French bourgeoisie as the leading, dominant class throughout the Continent), the Transatlantic level (e.g., Americanism and Fordism), and the hemispheric level (e.g., the probable transfer of economic and political domination from America to Asia). The general methodological principles involved here are evident in his insistence on interpreting the organic connection of internal and international forces in Italian nation-formation as a problem of ‘co-ordination and subordination’ (Gramsci 1985: 199, Q21§1) and in his spatialised as well as historical analyses of the development, consolidation, and crises of coherent historical blocs formed through reciprocal linkages between structure and superstructure. Finally, far from affirming that there is a simple ‘nested hierarchy’ of scales from the local to the global with distinct sets of economic, political, and social relations on each scale, Gramsci was especially sensitive to the ways in which tangled hierarchies of scale acted as a source of economic, political, and socio-economic instability. This can be seen, for example, in his comment that:
In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change: the internal and international organisational relations of the state become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of ‘civil hegemony’ (Gramsci 1971: 243, Q13§7).
A crucial issue in the analysis of scale is the relative dominance of different scales of economic, political, intellectual, and moral life. Scale dominance is ‘the power which organisations at certain spatial scales are able to exercise over organisations at other, higher or lower scales’ (Collinge 1999: 568). It can derive from the general relationship among different scales considered as strategically selective terrains of power and domination and/or from the features, characteristics, capacities, and activities of organisations located at different scales. One or more scales can gain special socio-political significance by playing the dominant role in the scale division of labour within and across different fields of social practice. In turn, nodal scales are non-dominant overall but nonetheless serve as the primary loci for delivering certain activities in a given spatio-temporal order or matrix (Collinge 1999: 569). Finally, subaltern scales are marginal or peripheral but may also become sites of resistance.
Gramsci operates implicitly with these distinctions in analysing historical and contemporary patterns of domination. For example, he can be interpreted as arguing that the national level was nodal rather than dominant in Italian state- and nation-building. For he lived in a conjuncture when, Italia fatta, bisogna fare gli Italiani (Italy being made, we must make the Italians) and could not have presumed the primacy of the national scaleespecially politicallythat appeared to characterise the dominant powers in Continental Europe, namely, France and Germany. He argued that Italy was weakly integrated domestically, the national scale had not yet become dominant over local and regional scales, and that this posed problems both for the completion of the bourgeois revolution and for revolutionary communist strategy. Gramsci was also acutely aware of the international weakness of the Italian state and the influence of external factors on its development. On the other hand, he saw ‘Italian Catholicism was felt not only as a surrogate for the spirit of the nation and the state but also as a worldwide hegemonic institution, an imperialistic spirit’ (Gramsci 1985: 220-1, Q17§8). He also recognised the distinction between dominant and nodal scales on a continental as opposed to the world scale. Concerning European and World politics, for example, he wrote:
These two are not the same thing. In a duel between Berlin and Paris or between Paris and Rome, the winner is not master of the world. Europe has lost its importance and world politics depends more on London, Washington, Moscow, Tokyo than it does on the Continent (Gramsci 1995: 195, Q2§24).
And, more generally, he remarked on the need to examine
the organic relations between the domestic and foreign policies of a state. Is it domestic policies which determine foreign policy, or vice versa? In this case too, it will be necessary to distinguish: between great powers, with relative international autonomy, and other powers; also, between different forms of government (a government like that of Napoleon III had two policies, apparentlyreactionary internally, and liberal abroad (Gramsci 1971: 264, Q8§141)
In short, for Gramsci, the international order should not be studied in terms of the mechanical interaction among formally sovereign nation-states but as a concrete, emergent international order, based on an informal hierarchy of states  and other international forces (such as Catholicism) that were characterised by complex and tangled internal and external relations. Thus his analyses of struggles for national hegemony were not confined to the national but closely examined the articulation and, indeed, interpenetration, of the local, regional, national, and supranational scales. He commented on the opportunities and constraints involved for different social forces in the dissociation of scales across different institutional ordersnotably the disjunction between the increasing formation of the world market and the continued survival of national states (Gramsci 1995: 220, Q15§5). He discussed the different scalar horizons of action and influence associated with such dissociations. The best known example of this, of course, is the cosmopolitanism and external orientation of traditional intellectuals in Italy from Imperial Rome to the contemporary Catholic Church based in Rome and their impact on Italian and European politics. And, just as he remarked on the implications of dissociation and the possibilities of scale jumping available to some social forces but not others, he also identified and elaborated the need for new forms of interscalar articulation to mobilise multiple social forces behind specific projects and/or to form new historical blocs. This is especially clear in his comments on the Southern Question (see below) and on the appropriate political strategies to enable the Soviet Union to break out of the isolation produced by Stalin’s policy of ‘socialism in one country’.
Arguments about different scales of economic, political, intellectual, and cultural organisation were also central to his analyses of individual identity formation and the creation of collective wills. For example, noting that Pirandello identified himself as local, national, and European, Gramsci argued that he could only become an Italian and national writer because he had deprovincialised himself and become European (Gramsci 1985: 139, Q9§134; 141-2, Q14§15). This observation may reflect Gramsci’s own thoughts regarding whether he himself was Albanian, Sardinian, Italian, or, perhaps, an internationalist starting out from a local, regional, and national viewpoint (Gramsci 1994a: 267; Gramsci 1994b: 86). More generally, Gramsci distinguished between the social functions of northern (industrial, technical) and southern (rural, organic) intellectuals in building different types of hegemony (Gramsci 1971: 11-12, Q12§1; 93-4, Q19§26). He also observed that the cosmopolitan role of traditional Italian intellectuals contributed to the continued territorial disintegration of the peninsular (Gramsci 1971: 18-19, Q12§1). And, in another example of scalar dissociation, he noted that intellectuals, because of their disembedding from national life, might fail to develop a specific national-popular project and draw instead on other national complexes or present abstract and cosmopolitan philosophies and worldviews (Gramsci 1985: 118, Q15§20).

Gramsci and the southern question
The Southern Question was posed in many ways as a central problem in Italian state- and nation-building. Gramsci analysed these twin processes in terms of the ‘passive revolution’ that occurred as the Italian northern bourgeoisie sought to unify the peninsular in the face of a heterogeneous and divided population and vast regional disparities (Davis 1979). Italy’s weak economic, political, and social integration and the lack of dominance of the national scale inform Gramsci’s early political writings, the ‘Lyons Theses’ (co-authored with Togliatti), and his incomplete essay on ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (1926). These discuss three issues: (a) the complex, multi-layered economic and political subordination of secondary centres of accumulation to the northern industrial and financial centre and its implications for class alliances; (b) the resulting complexities of class formation, regional disparities, and fragmented forms of intellectual and moral life that block a Jacobin road to national unification; and (c) the problems this poses for the leading role of the proletariat, which is ‘a minority of the working population and geographically distributed in such a manner, that it cannot presume to lead a victorious struggle for power unless it has previously resolved very precisely the problem of its relations with the peasant class’ (Gramsci 1978: 316, cf. 233-4, 299). Thus, in their Lyons Theses, Gramsci and Togliatti write:
Industrialism, which is the essential part of capitalism, is very weak in Italy. Its possibilities for development are limited, both because of the geographical situation and because of the lack of raw materials. It therefore does not succeed in absorbing the majority of the Italian population (4 million industrial workers exist side by side with 3½ million agricultural workers and 4 million peasants). To industrialism, there is counterposed an agriculture which naturally presents itself as the basis of the country’s economy. The extremely varied conditions of the terrain, and the resulting differences in cultivation and in systems of tenancy, however, cause a high degree of differentiation among the rural strata, with a prevalence of poor strata, nearer to the conditions of the proletariat and more liable to be influenced by it and accept its leadership. Between the industrial and agrarian classes, there lies a fairly extensive urban petty bourgeoisie, which is of very great significance. It consists mainly of artisans, professional men and state employees (Gramsci 1978: 343).
Gramsci takes this theme up again in his essay on the Southern Question. He claims that the capacity of the Italian proletariat, which is a minority class and geographically concentrated in the north, to become the leading (dirigente) and dominant class depends on its capacity to form class alliances, mobilising in particular the real consent and active support of the broad peasant masses (1978: 79-82, 129-131, 347, 449-450). But he adds the peasant question is historically determined in Italy; it is not the ‘peasant and agrarian question in general’. In Italy the peasant question, through the specific Italian tradition, and the specific development of Italian history, has taken two typical and particular formsthe Vatican and Southern Questions (Gramsci 1978: 443).
This argument, his earlier analyses, and his Prison Notebooks all involve a deeply spatialised rather than a-spatial analysis of classes, social categories, and political forces. Gramsci identified five crucial forces in Italy based on the relation between city and countryside: ‘1. the Northern urban force; 2. the Southern rural force; 3. the Northern-Central rural force; 4. the rural force of Sicily; 5. that of Sardinia’ (Gramsci 1971: 98, Q19§26). On this basis, he analysed the inter-urban and inter-regional relations on the analogy of a train whose locomotive would be the northern urban force. The key question then becomes which other forces should be mobilised by this locomotive to effect a rapid and successful path to communism. Accordingly he recommended that the communist party promote a hegemonic alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry and petty-bourgeois intellectuals and lead them in a war of position before the final military-political resolution of the conflict. This would dissolve the defensive alliance between northern industrialists and southern landowners, which also benefited from rural and urban petty-bourgeois support.

Gramsci on economic geography
Gramsci’s analyses of economic relations are spatial as well as historical. Indeed, one could say that they are spatial because they are historical or, better still, that they are inherently spatio-temporal. Rejecting classical and vulgar political economy as well economic liberalism and economistic Marxism, he emphasised the broad historical location and specific spatio-temporal specificities of economic organisation and economic regularities. This is why he substituted the notion of mercato determinato (definite forms of organising and regulating market relations with their associated laws of tendency) for transhistorical economic analysis based on the actions of rational economic man. Thus he explored dependent development in the Mezzogiorno and the general tendency towards internal colonialism in Italy; the interrelations between different economic places and spaces, including geographical variations in relationships between town and country and how different parties aimed to remodel this relationship (Gramsci 1971: 90-102, Q19§26); and the interconnection, articulation, and real or potential tensions between local, regional, national, international, and transnational economies. He was well-attuned to the spatial division of labour, issues of the differential integration of rural, urban, and regional economies both within a national territory and in relation to foreign markets, the importance of scale in an emerging world market, and the conflict between place and space. And he paid special attention theoretically and practically to the class relations that follow from the placing, spacing, and scaling of economic organisation. In short, as Morera, an acute interpreter of Gramsci’s ‘absolute historicism’, argues ‘Gramsci not only rejected sociology for abstracting from time conditions, but also from space. That is, from the geographical conditions of social processes’ (Morera 1990: 89).
Turning to international economic relations, Gramsci attacked liberalism for taking the nation-state as its horizon of economic policy-making and assuming that the world economy could safely be left to market regulation (Vacca 1999: 160). In the same context, he argued that laissez-faire, laissez-passer could not be rooted in agriculture but only in commerce and strong industrysuggesting that different economic and political strategies and policies were grounded in specific relations to place and space. He also remarked upon the growing contradiction between cosmopolitanism in the world market and the nationalism of political lifewhich, he claimed, had to be the starting point for any move to internationalism in the revolutionary socialist movement (Gramsci 1995: 220, Q15§5). Gramsci was interested in the dynamics of uneven and combined development in an emerging global capitalism (Morton 2005 ref here?). His notes on Americanism and Fordism explored how the centre of economic dynamism was moving from old Europe to the United States and was prompting Europe to adapt. He did not adopt a narrowly economically-determinist view of American economic progress herelet alone a simplistic technological determinism. Instead he examined the specific historical and material conditions that had enabled a new techno-economic paradigm to develop there, including the establishment of an economia programmatica at the level of the enterprise, the factory town, and the wider society. The originality and significance of Fordism as accumulation regime, mode of regulation, and way of life hindered its diffusion to Europe because this required more than the export of technical means of production and a technical division of labour. Nonetheless, to the extent that it did spread to Europe, it also facilitated the hegemony of American imperialism.
In contrast to the Comintern, Gramsci emphasised the shift in the centre of economic gravity from Europe to the United States, which had developed a more rationally organised economy. If workers could take the lead in adopting this model, it could become the basis for the working class to guide world historical development (Vacca 1999: 9; Baratta 1997). But he also asked prophetically whether the centre of gravity might shift again, this time from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The largest masses of the world’s population are in the Pacific. If China and India were to become modern nations with great volumes of industrial production, their consequent detachment from a dependency on Europe would in fact rupture the current equilibrium: transformation of the American continent, shift in the axis of American life from the Atlantic to the Pacific seaboard, etc. (Gramsci 1995: 196, Q5§8).

Gramsci on territoriality and state power
Gramsci did not naturalise or fetishise national territory as the pre-given or pre-destined basis of state formationand could not have done, indeed, given the historical problems of nation formation that he recognised and also struggled to overcome. The territorialisation of political power is a crucial first material step in national state formation and nation building.  It is unsurprising, then, that Gramsci studied the problems of the transition from medieval communes to absolutism and thence to a bourgeois liberal democratic state (e.g., Italy vs the Netherlands) and the need to break out of the economic-corporate phase of medieval urban relations with their political fragmentation. Thus he noted that
The chief defect of previous Italian history was not class oppression but the absence of definite class formation, due to the fact that ‘in Italy political, territorial and national unity enjoy a scanty tradition (or perhaps no tradition at all) (Gramsci 1971: 274, Q3§46).
Gramsci was also aware that territorial unity did not itself ensure political unity. This is apparent in his contrast between Bodin and Machiavelli:
Bodin lays the foundations of political science in France on a terrain which is far more advanced and complex than that which Italy offered to Machiavelli. For Bodin the question is not that of founding the territorially united (national) Statei.e., of going back to the time of Louis XIbut of balancing the conflicting social forces within this already strong and well-implanted State. Bodin is interested in the moment of consent, not in the moment of force (Gramsci 1971: 142, Q13§13).
Securing political unity also requires the institutional integration of the state through appropriate state forms, its embedding in the wider ensemble of social relations, and its capacity to engage in relatively unified action through appropriate state and national-popular projects. As symptoms of a failed national unification project in Italy, he regularly cited the Vatican and Southern Questions and the passive revolution that occurred under the domination of Piedmont and the Moderate Party. And, in one of his most famous comparisons in state theory, he claims that:
In the East the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed (Gramsci 1971: 238, Q7§16).
This approach raised crucial issues concerning passive revolution, hegemony, and the historical bloc. Gramsci provides many other examples of problems in the mechanisms in and through which political unity is created and identifies enormous variability in its formsranging from sheer coercion through force-fraud-corruption and passive revolution to inclusive hegemony. Nor did he see this mainly as a technical question of public administration, political reform of the state apparatus, or constitutional design. Instead it was deeply related to the social bases of the state in class, religious-secular, and territorial terms and to the concomitant articulation between political and civil society to form the state in its integral sense. This reflected in the rich conceptual vocabulary he developed for analysing class relations and the different moments in the balance of forces in economic, political, military, intellectual, and moral terms. And, for present purposes, it is especially important to note how much attention he paid to the local, regional and urban-rural origins and the cosmopolitan-national orientations of intellectuals, functionaries, bureaucrats, soldiers, the clergy, and so forth (Gramsci 1971: 79, Q19§24; 203-4, Q13§29; 214-17, Q13§23; Gramsci 1995: 12, Q1§52). For, far from being a neutral instrument with wide-ranging capacities, the state had to be analysed theoretically and addressed politically in terms of its embedding in the wider ensemble of social relations in all their spatio-temporal specificity. This in turn implies the spatiality as well as the historicity of the state as a social relation.
The chief defect of Italian intellectuals was not that they formed a powerful and resilient ‘cultural hegemony’, but that, because they were cosmopolitan rather than national, no authentic hegemony had ever been realised. Like the artificial or perverted state hegemony of Piedmont, the cultural tradition deriving from the Renaissance humanists could provide only a weak and eccentric form of hegemony, because it was not national (Ghosh 2001: 36).

Gramsci and International Relations
Although Gramsci regrets the failure of the Italian nation-state compared with France’s successful Jacobin state-building project, he recognises that even this took decades to accomplish and that contemporary nation-states were being forged in a much changed and deeply contested international context. For example, he suggests that, whereas Versailles re-established the prerogatives of nation-states, the Bolshevik world revolution project aimed at an eventual society of nations. After Versailles, the nation could no longer remain, if it ever had fully been, the dominant horizon of state life. Thus it was crucial to analyse how the internal balance of forces was overdetermined by international forces and a country’s geo-political position and to assess whether and how the latter balance modifies domestic forces, reinforcing or breaking progressive and revolutionary movements (Gramsci 1971: 116, Q10II§61). He therefore deemed it ‘necessary to take into account the fact that international relations intertwine with these internal relations of nation-states, creating new, unique and historically concrete combinations’ (Gramsci 1971: 182, Q13§17). He also noted that winning international hegemony was partly an educational relationship, affecting complexes of national and continental civilisations (Gramsci 1971: 350, Q10II§44; cf. Gramsci 1995: 207-8, Q3§5). This applied not only to Americanism and Fordism but also to the role of the international communist movement and its involvement in united front activities.
When exploring the international dimensions of economic, political, and socio-cultural relations, Gramsci did not assume that the basic units of International Relations were national economies, national states, or nationally-constituted civil societies. Instead, he explored the mutual implications of economic and political organisation, their social and cultural presuppositions, and the consequences of the dissociation of the dominant scales of economic, political, intellectual, and moral life. This made him sensitive to the complexities of interscalar relations and he never assumed that they were ordered in a simple nested hierarchy. 
Gramsci’s approach to International Relations was never presented in systematic form. But it is nonetheless worth drawing out some of its implications because of the very widespread tendency to try to reconstruct it on the basis of a simple generalisation of his arguments from a presumed national scale to the transatlantic or wider transnational scale. But a simplified ‘re-scaling’ of concepts such as passive revolution, historical bloc, hegemony, power bloc, etc., fails to capture the complexities of Gramsci’s engagement with questions of place, space, and scale. His philosophy of praxis and vernacular materialism (Ives 2004) made him very sensitive to the social construction of social relations, institutions, and identities, including their international dimensions. Indeed he was careful to emphasise the social constitution of categories such as ‘North-South’ and ‘East’ and ‘West’, their reflection of the viewpoint of European cultured classes, their ideological representation of differences between civilisations, and their material significance in practical life (Gramsci 1971: 447, Q11§20). This also meant that he was interested in the material and intellectual struggles to reconstruct place, space, and scale in response to the crisis of liberalism, dependent development and internal colonialism in Italy and to analogous crises in the international order with its imperialist rivalries and clash between capitalism and a fledgling socialism.
First, whereas Marx mainly developed an abstract-simple analysis of the capitalist mode of production, Gramsci took this for granted and focused on concrete conjunctures in emerging and developed capitalist social formations in a world shaped by imperialism and the Bolshevik Revolution. Second, Gramsci integrated his analysis of structure and superstructure with concrete political analyses. This was a key element in his concept of historical bloc and his systematic concern with the role of intellectuals in mediating these relations (see, for example, Portelli 1972). This analysis began beneath the national scale and extended beyond it (e.g., his analyses of Italian intellectuals, Americanism and Fordism, and failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to spread from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’). Third, in opposing economism both theoretically and politically, Gramsci showed the role of political and civil society in constituting and reproducing economic relations on diverse scales up to and including the international. Fourth, in contrast to (neo-)realism in more recent International Relations theory, Gramsci did not fetishise the nation-state as the basic unit or scale of analysis. Indeed his work could be interpreted as a protracted reflection on ‘the failure of the Italian state to constitute itself as a national statea failure that reflects the laborious emergence of a modern Italian nation, impeded by a balance of internal and international forces’ (Gramsci 1985: 199, Q21§1). Fifth, writing during and after the Great War with its inter-imperialist rivalries and open hostility between the capitalist bloc and the fledgling Soviet Union, Gramsci was especially concerned with two issues: (a) the international as well as national and regional context of the defeat of the working class movement and the rise of fascism; and (b) the spread of Americanism and Fordism as the basis for modernisation in Italy and Europe more generally. And, sixth, he was strongly interested in International Relations and studied work on geo-politics and demo-politics (which would now be called bio-politics) to better understand the political implications of the international balance of forces.
In this context, and in contrast to the methodological nationalism that still affects much thinking on International Relations, Gramsci did not draw a rigid distinction between the national and the international but explored issues of interscalar articulation and reciprocal influence in a more complex and dialectical manner.
Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There can be no doubt that they follow. Any organic innovation in the social structure, through its technical-military expressions, modifies organically absolute and relative relations in the international field too. Even the geographical position of a national State does not precede but follows (logically) structural changes, although it also reacts back upon them to a certain extent (to the extent precisely to which superstructures react upon the structure, politics on economics, etc.). However, international relations react both passively and actively on political relations (of hegemony among the parties) (Gramsci 1971: 176, Q13§2).
Gramsci explores the links between economic, political, and international strategy in his analysis of the inter-linkage between domestic class alliances and foreign economic policy. Italy’s ruling class had to choose between rural democracy based on ‘an alliance with the Southern peasants, a policy of free trade, universal suffrage, administrative decentralisation and low prices for industrial products’; or ‘a capitalist/worker industrial bloc, without universal suffrage, with tariff barriers, with the maintenance of a highly centralised state (the expression of bourgeois dominion over the peasants, especially in the South and the Islands), and with a reformist policy on wages and trade-union freedoms’ (Gramsci 1978: 449-50). As Gramsci then immediately added, it was no accident that the ruling class chose the latter solution.

Conclusions
Gramsci not only emphasised the historical specificity of all social relations but was also less explicitly attuned to their distinctive location in place, space, and scale. Thus almost all of his crucial concepts are sensitive to issues of place, space, and scale as well as to issues of periodisation, historical structures, specific conjunctures, and social dynamics. Whether we consider the relations of production, the determined market (mercato determinato), the contrast between the dynamism of Americanism and Fordism and the relative stagnation of European and Soviet planned economies, the forms of class relations (economically, politically, intellectually), the territoriality of state formation and the relative strengths or weakness of specific states (considered both in terms of political and civil society), the spatial roots of intellectuals and their different functions in economic, political, and moral organisation, the nature of political alliances, the appropriate forms of economic-corporate, political, and military strategy, etc., Gramsci emerges as a spatial thinker as much as he does as an historical thinker. This is rooted in his profoundly historicist concern with the spatio-temporality of all social relations. In addition, Gramsci’s analysis of strategy was objectively as well as metaphorically sensitive to temporality and spatiality. Not only did Gramsci emphasise the interweaving of different temporalities into complex conjunctures and situations and search for the openings between a path-dependent present and possible futures. But he also regarded strategy as inherently spatial. He was always aware of the need to mobilise in and across specific places, spaces, and scales, each with their own distinctive determinations and strategic selectivities. At stake in both cases is the transformation of spatio-temporal horizons of action and the interweaving of different temporalities and spatialities. It is only in this context that his notions of war of position and war of manoeuvre make sense. For Gramsci’s interest in place, space, and scale was not merely academic but had to do with his analysis of revolutionary conjunctures. Thus he argues that a collective will must be formed ‘with the degree necessary and sufficient to achieve an action which is co-ordinated and simultaneous in the time and the geographical space in which the historical event takes place’ (Gramsci 1971: 194, Q8§195). In short, his comments on the political failures of left strategy are also spatially as well as historically attuned.

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Box One: Some Spatial Metaphors in Gramsci
 
Notes