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Journal of Modern Italian Studies

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Gramsci's concept of common

sense: a useful concept for
anthropologists?
Kate Crehan

College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center

Published online: 22 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Kate Crehan (2011) Gramsci's concept of common sense: a useful
concept for anthropologists?, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16:2, 273-287, DOI:
10.1080/1354571X.2011.542987
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Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16(2) 2011: 273287

Gramscis concept of common sense: a useful concept

for anthropologists?
Kate Crehan

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College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center

Abstract
The article begins with a brief look at the anthropological notion of culture and some
of its ghosts, contrasting this with Gramscis very different approach. It goes on to
look in detail at Gramscis concept of common sense, arguing that common sense as
theorized by Gramsci provides anthropologists (whose discipline is so concerned
with the quotidian) and others, with a useful theoretical tool with which to map
everyday life. Gramscis understanding of common sense encompasses its givenness
how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as an external reality
but also stresses its contradictions, fluidity and potential for change. To help clarify
the specific character of the Gramscian notion of common sense, the article compares
it with another concept that has been widely embraced within anthropology and
elsewhere: Pierre Bourdieus notion of habitus a notion, I argue, that remains in
many ways tethered to its anthropological origins.

Keywords
Gramsci, common sense, culture, anthropology, Bourdieu, habitus.

Common sense . . . the traditional popular conception of the world what

is unimaginatively called instinct, although it too is in fact a primitive and
elementary historical acquisition. (Gramsci 1971: 199)

How might Gramscis concept of common sense be useful for anthropologists?

In English common sense is a term whose meaning tends to be taken as selfevident. In one recent anthropological study, for instance, Ann Stolers (2009)
Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense,
common sense (as the subtitle indicates) is a central category; and yet nowhere
in the book does Stoler feel it necessary either to define common sense or to
discuss its character as a theoretical category. The meaning of common sense in
Gramscis writings, however, is far from self-evident. First, there is the problem
that the English term common sense is not a simple equivalent to the Italian
term senso comune. While common sense is a generally positive term, signifying,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Good sound practical sense;
combined tact and readiness in dealing with the every-day affairs of life; general
Journal of Modern Italian Studies
ISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2011.542987

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Kate Crehan

sagacity, the Italian term has none of these positive connotations. Senso comune
refers simply to the beliefs and opinions supposedly shared by the mass of the
population. And indeed one of the main arguments I want to make in this essay
is that one of the great virtues of Gramscis concept of common sense for
anthropologists is precisely its broad, all-inclusive character. To understand why
this inclusiveness might be so helpful to anthropologists, however, it is necessary
to go back to the historical origins of one of anthropologys most fundamental
concepts, the concept of culture, and the lingering effects of these origins.1
The anthropological view of humankind as comprised of a diversity of
cultures, each with its own way of life, emerges out of Romanticism and
nineteenth century narratives of Nationalism. At the heart of these narratives is
the claim that a nation represents a specific people born of a specific territory
to which, by virtue of this special kind of belonging, they have an inalienable
right. Actual nation-states may be quite recent creations in historical terms and
their boundaries in reality far from fixed, but nations themselves those
imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson termed them, underpinning the
concept of the nation state seem almost to inhabit a realm outside time. They
both loom out of an immemorial past and glide into a limitless future
(Anderson 1991: 1112). This assumption of a fixity and permanence rooted in
tradition is one of the major roots of the anthropological concept of culture.
In line with this way of imagining cultures, there has been a tendency for
history to be seen as something that happens to cultures, rather than cultures
being seen as themselves the ever-shifting products of history.
One strand in the broader discourse of nineteenth-century Nationalism, as
Andersons use of the term community indicates, is a fundamental opposition
between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. And this has left its legacy in anthropology.
The opposition was first formalized by Frederick Tonnies in his enormously
influential Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Here Tonnies defines gemeinschaft
as an authentic, usually relatively small, community, which is woven together by
ties of kinship, and often a common religious affiliation, into a tight-knit web of
moral cohesion. Gesellschaften, by contrast, are the impersonal, conflict-ridden
and essentially artificial associations characteristic of the modern industrial
world. The allure of community an entity more often evoked than defined
remains powerful. Tellingly, unlike other terms of social organization, such as
state or society, community is a term that seems, as Raymond Williams noted,
never to be used unfavourably (Williams 1983).
Let me be clear here: in no way am I suggesting that contemporary
anthropologists think of the cultural worlds they study in the Romantic terms
of nineteenth-century Nationalism. My point is, simply, that the notion of
culture remains marked by its emergence within this context and that the
anthropological concept of culture continues to be haunted by the ghost of the
traditional, and the pervasive warm glow of gemeinschaft.
Another significant characteristic of the anthropological notion of culture is
the assumption that cultures are essentially systems. In an enormously

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influential formulation, Edward Tylor (1871) defined culture as that complex

whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any
other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Anthropologists over the years have had very different understandings of the
precise nature of that complex whole, but running through these different
understandings tends to be the assumption that, whatever else they may be,
cultures are in some sense systems. Anthropologists today may no longer think
of cultures as bounded entities, but certain a priori, if often implicit,
assumptions that cultures, however conflictual and contradictory they may be,
are nonetheless systems of one kind or another tend to linger.
Gramscis concept of culture
Gramsci offers us a very different notion of culture. In part this is because his
concern with culture stems from quite other roots than those of anthropology.
The anthropological projects origins can be traced to Europes expanding
confrontation with new and unfamiliar worlds and a determination to
dominate these new worlds - but also reflected is the would-be dominators
awareness that to be successful they needed to understand those with whom
they were now having to deal. The emergence of anthropology as a distinct
discipline was rooted in a concern to understand these unfamiliar others in
their own terms. Anthropologists may often have failed to live up to this ideal;
but whatever their faults, colonial anthropologists tended to be more
concerned with the understanding and preservation of the cultures they
studied rather than their transformation one reason why actual colonial
administrators often found the work of anthropologists of little practical use.
Gramscis project, however, was not that of anthropology. He was a
political activist committed to the revolutionary transformation of his society, a
transformation that for him necessarily involved radical cultural change. This is
because the realities of power bring into being cultures of subordination; the
subordinated come to see the hierarchies of the world they inhabit as inevitable
and inescapable, the will of God or the law of nature. They may not like their
subordination, but they cannot see how things could possibly be other than as
they are. Any revolutionary transformation both brings about and depends on
the transformation of the existing culture of subordination. There is no simple
recipe, however, for cultural transformation; it is a complex historical process in
which there needs to be an active dialogue between intellectuals and nonintellectuals. Those who live the harsh realities of subordination, however
capable they may be of everyday resistance, cannot, in Gramscis view,
themselves come up with the coherent, effective counter-narratives necessary if
the existing hegemony is to be overcome. But it is just as true that intellectuals
cannot themselves devise these narratives unaided. It is their interaction with
the subordinated and what Gramsci termed their feeling-passion in other
words the raw experience of oppression that educates the intellectuals. And it

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is only when there is a genuine dialogue between intellectuals and nonintellectuals that an effective political force, a historical bloc, capable of
transforming society can come into being:
If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the
leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic
cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence
knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then
is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an
exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders
[dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social
force with the creation of the historical bloc. (Gramsci 1971: 418)
If they were to have any hope of being effective, in Gramscis view, Italian
revolutionaries needed to understand the complicated relationship between
intellectuals and the mass of the population over the course of the history of their
country, and devise strategies for change that make sense in the cultural worlds
occupied by the mass of the population. This conviction lies behind Gramscis
interest in culture and its prominence as a topic in the prison notebooks.
The prison notebooks themselves were Gramscis response to his
incarceration. Despite having been condemned in 1928 by Mussolinis fascist
regime to a twenty-year prison sentence, Gramsci was determined, as far as
humanly possible, to use his time to study and write. And, not surprisingly, a
question that runs through the prison notebooks is: What had led to the defeat
of the left in Italy? And how might that defeat be reversed? Before his arrest,
Gramsci had a long career as a political journalist, but while he saw such writing
as important, he also saw it, as he put it in a letter from prison to his sister-inlaw Tatiana Schucht, as essentially ephemeral: In ten years of journalism I
wrote enough lines to fill fifteen or twenty volumes of 400 pages each, but they
were written for the day, and in my opinion, were supposed to die with the
day (Gramsci 1994: 66). Forcibly removed from the immediacy of the day-today political struggle, Gramsci was determined to devote himself to a more
rigorous study of the roots of fascisms triumph in Italy and the failures of the
Left that had led to this triumph. Understanding this required, in Gramscis
view, an exploration of culture. When and how has culture changed? When
and how has it persisted? The concept of culture here is best understood as a
shared way of being and living, which has come into existence as a result of the
interaction of myriad historical forces, and that remains subject to history.
Cultures for Gramsci, while they may seem to persist for long periods of time,
are always also in flux, coming into being, undergoing transformation, passing
away. Gramsci never assumes that cultures constitute systematic wholes. The
degree to which a given culture can be seen as some kind of system is an
empirical question which, like the question of its persistence or transformation,
can only be answered by careful empirical study.

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Gramscis thinking was very much grounded in Marx and for him, as for
Marx, the ultimate shaping forces in human history were a societys basic
economic structures structures defined by how resources are distributed in
that society. The systematic and persistent inequalities of such structures give
rise to distinct classes. But while Gramsci saw culture as fundamentally shaped
by economic forces, he was no crude economic determinist, stressing, for
instance (Gramsci 1971: 162), Engelss caution that,
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither
Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence if somebody twists this
into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he
transforms the proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. (Marx
and Engels 1975: 394, original emphasis)
One way of characterizing Gramscis approach to culture is that culture is how
the realities of class are lived.2 We all of us come to consciousness as members of
specific cultural worlds at specific historical moments and we tend to experience
the particular realities of our cultural world as fixed and unalterable, no more
than simple reflections of the way the world is. Such realities as disparities of
wealth and power, for instance, may be thought of as the manifestation of the
laws of economics or of divine will, and they may be celebrated or railed against,
but to those whose everyday reality they are, they appear unchangeable. Only a
fool or a madman would even try. The emblematic figure here is Don Quixote
charging windmills. To capture the solidity and apparent naturalness of
cultures in the eyes of those who inhabit them, Gramsci uses the notion of
common sense, and it is this aspect of Gramscis approach to culture on which I
focus here.
I want to begin, however, not with Gramsci, but with another theorist,
whose way of naming the taken-for-granted in everyday life has been widely
embraced within anthropology. The theorist is Pierre Bourdieu and the
concept that of habitus. Habitus has seemed to many anthropologists to offer a
powerful theoretical tool for those wrestling with the problem of theorizing
everyday life. Here I want to use the notion of habitus to throw into relief the
character of Gramscis very different concept of common sense.
Habitus and doxa
The concept of habitus was introduced into sociology by Marcel Mauss in his
essay Techniques of the body, but it is Bourdieus formulation (very different
from that of Mauss) with which most anthropologists are familiar. Although
Bourdieu would come to define himself as a sociologist, he began his intellectual
career as an anthropologist, and it was empirical anthropological research that
gave birth to many of his theoretical concepts, including his elaboration of

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habitus. In A reply to some objections (first presented in the mid-1980s) he

draws attention to the ethnographic works which are at the origin of most of
my concepts and takes his critics to task for ignoring, the anthropological
foundation of a theory of action, or of practice . . . condensed in the notion of
habitus (Bourdieu 1990a: 107, emphasis added). As he explains, he developed
the concept of habitus in response to specific questions that arose for him in the
course of his fieldwork among the Kabyles in Algeria. Notions that I developed
gradually, such as the notion of habitus, came from the desire to recall that beside
the express, explicit norm, or the rational calculation, there are other principles
that generate practices (Bourdieu 1990a: 76). His explication of habitus in
Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) can be seen as rooted in the very
anthropological project of attempting to understand the structuring mechanisms
shaping a way of life (in this case that of the Kabyles), which those who live it,
simply live, without apparently having any need to be consciously aware of these
mechanisms. Indeed, as Bourdieu shows and this is as true of other societies as
it is of the Kabyles sometimes it is important that members of a culture are not
consciously aware of the rules they are following. Gift giving is one example he
uses. All societies have their shared understandings of what constitutes
acceptable and appropriate norms of reciprocity; too close an examination of
whether particular individuals are observing those norms, or whether a given
transaction adheres to them, risks bringing the whole edifice of assumed
disinterested generosity crashing down. With the concept of habitus Bourdieu
seeks to provide a way of thinking about the all-important but submerged
mechanisms that orchestrate how the members of a given group go about their
daily lives. He defines it in Outline of a Theory of Practice as follows:
The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the
material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce
habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the
generation and structuring of practices and representation which can be
objectively regulated and regular without in any way being the product of
obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a
conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to
obtain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the
product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu, 1977: 72,
original emphasis)
Note here that one example of what produces habitus is: the material
conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition, and that habitus is
defined as comprising systems of dispositions. I shall come back to both these
points. The term disposition itself, as Bourdieu explains in a footnote to this
passage, seems particularly suited to express what is covered by the concept of
habitus (defined as a system of dispositions). First, because it conveys the idea

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Gramscis concept of common sense

of the result of an organizing action, with a meaning close to that of words such as
structure . . . . Second, it also designates a way of being, a habitual state
(especially of the body) and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity, or
inclination (Bourdieu 1977: 214, original emphasis). For Bourdieu, therefore,
the disposition captures the crucial but unarticulated knowledge that in the
course of their socialization embeds itself not only in patterns of thought, but in
the very bodies of individuals. Such dispositions play a powerful role in
directing their actions, even if they would find it hard to put such knowledge
into words. This acknowledgement of the importance of embodied knowledge
often unmediated by language and simply lived, is one of the strengths of
habitus as a theoretical concept.
In addition to a system of dispositions (a habitus), any established order is
characterized by what Bourdieu terms doxa: an agreed account of how the
world works. The more this account is unspoken and taken for granted, the
more secure that regime of power. Doxa is both unspoken and essential; in his
much-quoted phrase, what is essential goes without saying because it comes without
saying . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 167, original emphasis), Bourdieu also makes a
clear distinction between doxa and opinion:
In class societies, in which the definition of the social world is at stake in
overt or latent class struggle, the drawing of the line between the field of
opinion, of that which is explicitly questioned, and the field of doxa, of that
which is beyond question and which each agent tacitly accords by the mere
fact of acting in accord with social convention, is itself a fundamental
objective at stake in that form of class struggle for the imposition of the
dominant systems of classification. (Bourdieu 1977: 169, original emphasis)
I want to draw attention to the implicit assumption in this passage that there
are societies without classes in which doxa rules unchallenged. Indeed, lurking
here, it seems to me, is something like Levi-Strausss problematic distinction
between hot and cold societies (see, for instance, Levi-Strauss 1969: 33). In
addition both the dispositions of habitus and doxa are concerned with ways of
being, habitual states embedded deep within the subjectivity of individuals,
and as a result they necessarily stress the fixity of certain ways of being.
It is not coincidental, I would argue, that the anthropological data that led
Bourdieu to develop the concept of habitus were collected during his
fieldwork among the Kabyles. This fieldwork was carried out in the 1950s in
extraordinarily difficult circumstances at a time when the Algerians were
engaged in an often brutal liberation struggle against the French colonial state.3
Nonetheless the Kabyles we encounter in Outline of a Theory of Practice which
builds its theoretical schemas on the basis of Bourdieus Kabyle data still
follow a traditional pastoralist life. Bourdieus well-known essay on the Kabyle
house (reprinted in Bourdieu 1990b: 27183) provides a similar picture of an
unchanging peasant way of life, in which each dwelling is constructed

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according to the same strict rules that determine the arrangement of every inch
of living space, down to the storage of each item of household equipment.
Within the world of the Kabyles, according to this account, any deviation,
however minor, is unthinkable. It is perhaps not surprising that a man so
fiercely opposed to French colonialism and so deeply sympathetic to the
Algerians fighting for their independence should stress the autonomy of Kabyle
culture and its profound difference from the culture of the French colonizers.
Something that is not apparent from Bourdieus account of the Kabyles is that
the Kabylia was in fact a hotbed of Algerian nationalist struggle.4
It is important to emphasize that, while habitus may focus on fixity,
Bourdieu does not see it as rigid and unchanging; in certain respects it is highly
flexible. As a system of dispositions guiding behaviour, this system of lasting,
transposable dispositions is continually having to adapt to specific and, in a
sense, unique circumstances:
[I]ntegrating past experiences, [this system] functions at every moment as a
matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the
achievement of infinitively diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers
of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems, and thanks
to the unceasing corrections of the results obtained, dialectically produced
by those results . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 83, original emphasis)
Nonetheless this flexibility has its limits. We can see habitus as something like a
particular language which, while it allows its speakers to come up with an
infinite number of different utterances, maintains an essentially unchanging
grammatical structure. This raises the question of more fundamental change.
How is it possible for this system of dispositions, woven into the very being of
individuals, to change in fundamental ways? And, since human history is a story
of transformations, in certain circumstances this must happen. Significantly, for
Bourdieu, it is not within habitus itself that the seeds of change lie, but in the
dialectical relationship between a specific habitus and objective events that
demand a response beyond that of the given habitus:
collective action (e.g. revolutionary action) is constituted in the dialectical
relationship between, on the one hand, a habitus, understood as a system of
lasting, transposable dispositions . . . and on the other hand, an objective event
which exerts its action of conditional stimulation calling for or demanding a
determinate response. (Bourdieu 1977: 8283, original emphasis)
This stimulation is conditional because it only acts on
those who are disposed to constitute it as such because they are endowed
with a determinate type of dispositions (which are amenable to reduplication and reinforcement by the awakening of class consciousness, that is, by

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the direct or indirect possession of a discourse capable of securing symbolic

mastery of the practically mastered principles of the class habitus). (Bourdieu
1977: 8283, original emphasis)
Habitus, it would seem, does not contain within itself the potential
for transformation; there needs to be, as it were, another habitus waiting
in the wings ready to displace the existing one and take its place on the stage.
As a theoretical concept, therefore, habitus provides a powerful account of
how and why cultures persist through time, reproducing themselves from
generation to generation, but it does not tell with much about the dynamics of
change. And one of the problems here is Bourdieus insistence on the systematic
character of habitus. In other words, the different elements of habitus are
assumed in some sense to constitute a whole. As he defines it in one of the
passages quoted above, habitus refers to systems of durable, transposable
dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures,
that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representation . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 72; emphasis added). Given habituss systematic
character, it makes sense that any fundamental transformation involves the shift
of one habitus to another, and that the potential for change comes not from
within habitus itself, but from external events.
In summary, while the concept of habitus provides a persuasive account of
the power of the taken-for-granted substructure of embodied and other
knowledges that play such an important role in the shaping of day-to-day life, it
is less useful as a tool for the analysis of social transformation. If we want to
understand not only why things stay the same, but also why they sometimes
change, Gramscis notion of common sense, it seems to me, might provide a
more fruitful approach, or at the very least, a useful corrective to the
assumption that cultures necessarily constitute systems of some kind.
Common sense and good sense
In the prison notebooks Gramsci is centrally concerned with the dynamics of
social change: how and why has a given change happened, or not happened;
how might it be brought about in the future? And in thinking this through he
spends a good deal of time teasing out the complex and contradictory nature of
common sense, how it both helps reproduce and maintain existing power
regimes, but can also carry within it the seeds of transformation. But what
exactly does Gramsci mean by common sense, and why might it be a useful
analytical concept for anthropologists?
The first point to make is that common sense for Gramsci is always a
heterogeneous jumble. He describes it like this:
Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time
and space . . . it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental

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characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one

individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and [inconsistent5], in conformity
with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is.
(Gramsci 1971: 419)
As a result, Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and
one can find there anything that one likes (Gramsci 1971: 422).
This radically unsystematic concept of common sense, I would argue, is
useful for anthropologists because it offers them a way of thinking about the
taken-for-granted cultural worlds of quotidian life free of certain lingering
assumptions that cling to the term culture. As I have already argued, the very
term culture in anthropology implies something made up of different
elements that nonetheless hang together. Remember how for Bourdieu habitus
is very much a system of dispositions. Gramscis concept of common sense, by
contrast, insists that while there may be systematic elements within the
confusion of common sense, such systematic elements can only be discovered
through careful empirical analysis; they cannot be assumed to exist a priori. And
this radically open way of approaching quotidian, lived reality, it seems to me,
provides anthropologists with a useful model. In the space of a short article, it is
not possible to explore this at length, but I want to begin at least to sketch out
how Gramscis concept of common sense productive might be productive for
anthropologists.
Very importantly, it offers anthropologists an approach to the mapping of
cultural worlds free of the gemeinschaft of Romantic nationalist narratives. As a
would-be revolutionary, Gramscis concern with the cultural worlds inhabited
by those of the bottom of the social pyramid was not that of conventional
anthropology. He was interested in these worlds because he wanted to bring
about fundamental social change and this, as he saw it, necessarily involved the
radical transformation of common sense. Achieving this demanded that
progressive political activists, such as himself, neither celebrated nor
condemned the world of common sense, but understood it in all its
contradictory complexity. Gramscis approach here his refusal either to
romanticize or demonize popular culture and his insistence that what is claimed
as tradition must always be rigorously scrutinized and unpacked offers
anthropologists a way of thinking about the communities they study that
escapes any residual notions of the traditional, authentic gemeinschaft.
Gramscis careful, analytical attitude to common sense is illustrated by his
scathing comments on one of the leading Italian intellectuals of his
time, Giovanni Gentile. Gentile had claimed that philosophy could be
thought of
as a great effort accomplished by reflective thought to gain critical certainty
of the truths of common sense and of the naive consciousness, of those
truths of which it can be said that every man feels them naturally and which

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constitute the solid structure of the mentality he requires for everyday life.
(quoted in Gramsci 1971: 422)

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For Gramsci this was simply yet another example of the disordered crudity of
Gentiles thought. Honing in on Gentiles formulation: the truths of common
sense, Gramsci asks:
And what does a truth of common sense mean? Gentiles philosophy, for
example, is utterly contrary to common sense, whether one understands
thereby the nave philosophy of the people, which revolts against any form of
subjectivist idealism, or whether one understands it to be good sense and a
contemptuous attitude to the abstruseness, ingenuities and obscurity of certain
forms of scientific and philosophical exposition. (Gramsci 1971: 42223)
For Gramsci the messy conglomerate that is common sense precisely because
it is not any kind of systematic whole must be teased apart and its separate
elements analysed. And this is especially important for those seeking to change
society The bringing into being of new, genuinely counter-hegemonic
narratives a crucial part of any social transformation has to start with the
world inhabited by the mass of the population. And that world is the world of
common sense: the starting point must always be that common sense which is
the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made
ideologically coherent (Gramsci 1971: 421). As this comment makes clear,
while Gramsci insists on common senses chaotic and incoherent character
and incoherence is always negative for Gramsci he is far from simply negative.
The term he uses for the positive part of common sense is good sense, which
for him has a meaning closer to the English common sense than senso comune. In
several Notes he reflects on this good sense dimension of common sense,
writing in one, for instance:
In what exactly does the merit of what is normally termed common sense
or good sense consist? Not just in the fact that, if only implicitly, common
sense applies the principle of causality, but in the much more limited fact
that in a whole range of judgments common sense identifies the exact cause,
simple and to hand, and does not let itself be distracted by fancy quibbles and
pseudo-profound, pseudoscientific metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. (Gramsci
1971: 348)
In another Note he defines good sense more precisely. Taking the common
expression being philosophical about it, he notes that, while this expression
may contain an implicit invitation to resignation and patience, it can also be
seen as an invitation to people to reflect and to realise fully that whatever
happens is basically rational and must be confronted as such. It is specifically this
appeal to use reason rather than blind emotion that is the part of [common

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sense] which can be called good sense and which deserves to be made more
unitary and coherent (Gramsci 1971: 328). In general it is the elements within
common sense that reflect rational thought, however naive and raw a form this
may take, which for Gramsci constitute good sense.
For Gramsci, we can say, common sense is a multi-stranded, entwined knot
of, on the one hand, clear sightedness (good sense), which, like the little boy in
the story, is not fooled by the sophistry of the Emperors tailors; but, on the
other, blinkered short-sightedness that clings defensively to the comfortable
and familiar. Common sense is, as he puts it, crudely neophobe and
conservative (Gramsci 1971: 423). Nonetheless any genuinely counter
hegemonic narrative has to begin with common sense:
Is it possible that a formally new conception can present itself in a guise other
than the crude, unsophisticated version of the populace? And yet the historian,
with the benefit of all necessary perspective, manages to establish and to
understand the fact that the beginnings of a new world, rough and jagged
though they always are, are better than the passing away of the world in its
death-throes and the swan-song that it produces. (Gramsci 1971: 34243)
As this passage indicates, for Gramsci a central task for any serious
revolutionary is a transformation of popular culture which builds on the
beginnings of a new world that culture already contains. And it is this concern
that lies behind Gramscis interest in subordinated peoples understandings of
their world. He was very from being a disinterested, objective observer of
popular culture. It is important to stress this point, since anthropologists who
have drawn on Gramsci in part precisely because of his concern with culture
have not always paid sufficient attention to this basic differences between
Gramscis project and theirs. Anthropologists tend to focus on describing the
cultural worlds they study, and rather than seeking to change them, have often
argued passionately for their right to exist in their present form. Gramscis far
from celebratory approach to popular culture comes through very clearly in his
observations on folklore. While many of the original nineteenth-century
collectors of folk tales, such as the Grimm brothers, saw these tales, and folklore
in general, as in some sense an embodiment of the authentic and ancient nation,
Gramsci certainly did not. He did believe that it was important to study folklore,
but this was because of the traces of oppositional world views that could be
found there. By definition subordinated people tend to leave few traces in the
official historical record, any evidence of their narratives, therefore, however
fragmentary, is valuable. Folklore should be studied because it represents:
a conception of the world and life implicit to a large extent in determinate
(in time and space) strata of society and in opposition (also for the most part
implicit, mechanical and objective) to official conceptions of the world (or
in a broader sense, the conceptions of the cultured parts of historically

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determinate societies) that have succeeded one another in the historical

process . . .. This conception of the world is not elaborated and systematic
because, by definition, the people (the sum total of the instrumental and
subaltern classes of every form of society that has so far existed) cannot
possess conceptions which are elaborated, systematic and politically
organized and centralized in their albeit contradictory development. It is,
rather . . . a confused agglomerate of fragments of all the conceptions of the
world and of life that have succeeded one another in history. In fact, it is
only in folklore that one finds surviving evidence, adulterated and mutilated,
of the majority of these conceptions. (Gramsci 1985: 189)
As this quotation makes clear, Gramscis concern is to understand the history
of subordinated groups better, not to celebrate or preserve authentic cultures.
Indeed he argues that individuals need to transcend the cultures that have
formed them, asking in a passage that reflects his own scorn for the kind of
Italian provincial culture in which he himself grew up:
[I]s it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed
by the external environment, i.e. by one of the many social groups in which
everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the
conscious world (and this can be ones village or province; it can have its
origins in the parish and the intellectual activity of the local priest or
ageing patriarch whose wisdom is law, or in the little old woman who has
inherited the lore of the witches or the minor intellectual soured by his own
stupidity and inability to act)? Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out
consciously and critically ones own conception of the world and thus, in
connection with the labours of ones own brain, choose ones sphere of
activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be
ones own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the
moulding of ones personality? (Gramsci 1971: 32334)
Gramscis palpable disdain here for Italian rural society is very far from the
empathetic identification with those studied which has long been a hallmark of
anthropology. What the anthropological and the Gramscian project do share is
a commitment both to taking the cultural worlds in which they are interested
seriously and to understanding them in their own terms.
Common sense, culture and history
Gramscis concept of common sense also has interesting implications for how
we think about the relationship between culture and history, a relationship that
has been much debated within anthropology ever since its establishment as a
recognized discipline. In recent years there has been much fruitful collaboration
between anthropologists and historians, and many anthropologists, such as

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Stoler, do deeply historical work. Nonetheless, within the discipline a sense

that history is something that happens to cultures has not been completely
banished.6 Common sense in Gramsci, however, is never opposed to history in
this way. Rather, it is in the course of history, and as the result of historical
processes, that common sense emerges. As with the material debris that
gradually accumulates in any area of human habitation, new ideas are
continually drifting down to join the existing agglomerate of common sense.
Some may only remain there momentarily, others for somewhat longer, while
some manage to embed themselves in seemingly more secure ways. Common
sense, therefore, is never stable but is continually changing in piecemeal ways.
The key point here is that common sense is not defined by whatever systematic
elements it may contain. It should be seen rather as a whole mass of disparate
beliefs and opinions that have come together over time. In any given time and
place this common sense provides a heterogeneous bundle of taken-for-granted
understandings of how the world is that make up the basic landscape within
which individuals are socialized and chart their individual life courses.
The analysts task, like that of the archaeologist, is to sort through this mass of
beliefs and opinions: identifying the very different elements it contains and the
social realities to which they are linked, exploring just whose common sense
they are (mens, womens, poor peoples, the better-off, the more educated, the
less educated, the old, the young, and so on), and mapping out just what linkages
there are between the different elements. As with material strata, there are
reasons why some elements persist and some do not, but the forces acting to
consolidate or destroy are multiple and the results of their interactions are always
unpredictable. Understanding this process in a given time and place again
requires empirical analysis of how particular elements of common sense are
disseminated; for instance, the mechanisms through which specific individuals
do, or do not, internalize them what indeed does it mean to internalize them?
To what extent do the different elements hang together? Do individuals pick
and choose between them?
What Gramscis concept of common sense offers anthropologists, I would
argue, is a way of thinking about the texture of everyday life that encompasses
its givenness how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as
an external and solid reality but that also acknowledges its contradictions,
fluidity and flexibility. For all its apparent solidity it is continually being
modified by how actual people in actual places live it. Gramscis inherently
vague concept of common sense, I would argue, is one from which the ghost
of the bounded culture, existing outside history a ghost anthropology has
found hard to banish completely has genuinely been exorcised.
Notes
1 Crehan (2002) discusses this at greater length.
2 Crehan (2002) examines Gramscis general notion of culture in more detail.

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3 Bourdieu describes the circumstances of his Algerian fieldwork, Sketch for a SelfAnalysis (2008), an account of his intellectual formation written at the end of his life.
4 See, for instance, McDougall (2008: 88). Edward Said (1989: 223) also noted this
absence in his article Representing the colonized: anthropologys interlocutors,
writing: Bourdieu, in Outline of a Theory of Practice, perhaps the most influential
theoretical text in anthropology today, . . . makes no mention of colonialism, Algeria,
and so on, even though he writes about Algeria elsewhere . . . It is the exclusion of
Algeria from Bourdieus theorizing and ethnographical reflection in Outline that is
noteworthy. I am grateful to Aisha Khan for drawing this article to my attention.
5 Gramsci writes inconsequente, which Hoare and Nowell Smith translate as
inconsequential. In this context inconsistent is a better translation. I am grateful
to Frank Rosengarten for drawing my attention to this mistranslation.
6 Marshall Sahlins for one continues to be a fierce defender of the distinction between
history and culture, as in his 2004 collection of essays, Apologies to Thucydides.

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