Gramsci's concepts allow scholars to transcend some of the current debates dividing the field of international relations (IR) while preserving the insights of the major traditions, whether ‘realist’ or ‘idealist’, ‘structural’, or ‘historical’, at the same time that they help us break the habit of reifying the nation-state by turning our attention toward the deeper sources of social continuity and change. This paper discusses these benefits of employing Gramsci's insights and illustrates them with conclusions from a study of American foreign policy toward the Third World in the Reagan and Bush era.

GRAMSCI'S CONCEPTS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The field of international relations studies the consolidation of power over large populations and territories in a world of multiple, territorially separate, power centres. Gramsci's concern in his investigations of ‘hegemony’ and the broader notion of ‘supremacy’ was also to understand the dynamics of the consolidation of power, including those dynamics in international relations. Thus, in his commentary on the history of modern Italy, Gramsci is able to treat both the Renaissance state system and politics within the twentieth-century state within the same framework and with the same concepts.

We see Gramsci's sociology of power as beginning with the distinction between rule by ‘force’ and rule through ‘consensus’, borrowed from Machiavelli.