Thinking the Interregnum: The Relevance of Gramsci

Converging with the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine”, transitology has established itself since the beginning of the 1980s as the hegemonic paradigm for thinking about crises and changes in political regimes. The celebrated theory suffers from numerous shortcomings. Three of them are enough for our purposes. The first of these deficiencies lies in the (ontological) rejection of structures (whether economic, political, geopolitical, social, etc.), the latter being sacrificed on the altar of “methodological individualism” and “rational choice theory. The second gap follows from the first: conceived as the political counterpart of the “Washington consensus”, the paradigm of transitology depoliticizes the economy by expelling economic conflict beyond the walls of “polyarchy”, when it does not prescribe the establishment of a technocratic government to drive a pro-business policy. The third limitation relates to its liberal teleology. The failure of the transitology paradigm no longer needs to be demonstrated, as the failure of the “transitions by design” and the return of authoritarianism, too quickly condemned by liberal teleology, reminds us.

This communication intends to show, based on a comparative analysis of Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's theoretical thought for thinking about the political crisis beyond the shortcuts of the orthodox paradigm. I intend to show the heuristic contribution that Gramscian theorization allows to achieve in comparison to transitology: 1) thinking of politics as a historical process of domination and not as a sequence (of a game between leaders) suspended in time; 2) theorize the sequence of “political liberalization” as a “war of position” and not as a “transition” thought of teleologically; 3) by theorizing the articulation of coercion and hegemony, Gramsci invites us to think about domination in its political, economic, social and cultural dimensions, and therefore to complicate our understanding of polities.