Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations

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