Week 8 Questions Pleming

 1. More than a question, I wanted to highlight Hall's description of why Gramsci's thoughts are important. As Hall discusses at length in his piece on Gramsci's relevance to race, Gramsci pushed against "mechanistic" thinking. While Gramsci certainly uses a Marxist framework, I agree with Hall's analysis that Gramsci introduced examples of, or simply allowed for, the various particularities that make rigid theory clumsy to apply. While I certainly haven't read all of Gramsci's available writings, I tend to find that he excelled at creating systematic, ideologically grounded theories that were pliable enough to apply to Italy during Gramsci's time, the contemporary United States, and many, many other times/places. 

2. I found Gramsci's brief piece on the separation of powers to be very striking. Specifically, his identification of bureaucracy as a defining trait, and weakness, of liberalism. As the executive branch of the United States's government attempts to dissolve this bureaucracy, I think Gramsci's writing here has renewed relevance. In particular, I think it is important to question further the place of bureaucracy in any government and is the moment we're in now inevitable. Does liberal bureaucracy lead, necessarily, to an anti-bureaucratic conservatism?