72 Philosophical Frames
Reformation, the commercial revolution, and the industrial revolution, if
judged by the standards of social and economic “progress” set in England,
Scotland, the Low Countries, France, and New England.
ndeed, Habermas’s well known model of the public sphere can only I
be fully appreciated if located at the sensible border between the mainly
Anglo-American liberal tradition and the German critical voices.^21
Continental Europe provided other avenues of critical reflection, how-
ever, which unfortunately Habermas himself neglected to a large extent.
In the following section, we provide a combined reading of Gramsci’s and
Foucault’s assessment of the counterhegemonic potential of religious prac-
tice and mobilization vis-à-vis the bourgeois, hegemonic forms of politi-
cal order and the public sphere.
Gramsci’s movement: From common sense to alternative
hegemonies
The twentieth-century Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci was moved
by a mixture of respect and aversion in his approach to religion, seeing
in it a token of antimodernity but also the possible key to an alterna-
tive modernity—to the extent that it could be seen to possess a kernel
of immunity from contemporary forms of socioeconomic and cultural
domination. This ambivalence prompted him to analyze religion in terms
of its capacity to guarantee a degree of resistance to, and a critique of,
hegemonic discourses which would not alienate the cultural worlds of
the rural masses. Accordingly, some specific dimensions of religion had
the potential to allow to reconstruct an alternative hegemony based on
notions of the common good liberated from the ideologies concealing
class domination—including the domination of the high hierarchies of
the Catholic church.
ramsci’s diagnosis was that in a still largely precapitalist country G
like Italy of the 1920s and 1930s one could not destroy religion. What
could be achieved was the establishment of “a new popular belief, that is,
a new common sense and thus a new culture and a new philosophy that is
rooted in the popular conscience with the same solidity and imperative-
ness as traditional belief.”^22 Given this power of religion, Gramsci believed