“Il tempo della politica”: l’egemonia in José Aricó

Abstract

The paper examines José Aricó’s approach to the problem of hegemony between the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, in the context of his exile in Mexico. We argue that Arico’s work on the concept of hegemony is framed in a quest for elements that provide Marxism with a strong political theory, against the economicist tendencies that dominated the tradition. In this context, re-reading Gramsci enables Aricó to emphasize that the temporality of politics is not reducible to an economic determination, since it involves a series of specific dilemmas, in which hegemony articulates conceptually with the state, democracy and political subjects. In the same period, and in the same pursuit of a strong dense conceptualization around the political, Aricó oversees the collection "El tiempo de la política" [The time of politics] in the publishing house Folios. This collection, visibly influenced by the work of Mario Tronti in Italy, published texts on Gramsci, but also anthologies of Weber and even "The concept of the political", of Carl Schmitt. Our purpose is to show the originality of Arico’s work in combining these diverse inputs in order to defend the need for a Marxist political theory.