Building upon the theoretical framework of Italian activist and scholar Antonio Gramsci, and using historical and public administrative sources, this article argues that while social justice feminism as a social movement in the United States declined by 1940, former participants continued their counter-hegemonic actions after World War II. Facing a new political and cultural hegemony increasingly dominated by fears of atomic annihilation, Soviet domination, and domestic Communist infiltration, women progressives, such as Frieda Miller and Esther Peterson, developed new approaches to continuing their counter-hegemonic aims, particularly through reviving an alternative view of public administration. Miller and Peterson thus helped prepare the way for women's activism in the United States to shift from economic security to equal rights by the mid-1960s, thus establishing an increasingly effective counter-hegemonic effort against the continuing patriarchal hegemony.

Neo-Gramscians have made invaluable contributions to expanding traditional IR/IPE theory. Nevertheless, as the following article indicates, the ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions they adopt results in a rather one-sided interpretation of Antonio Gramsci and a partial, at times erroneous, account of the nature of the current global system. In highlighting these oversights, the neo neo-Gramscian approach presented here – rooted in a critical realist philosophy of science, specifically ‘emergentist materialism’, and involving a more complete reading of Gramsci – seeks to lay the basis for the elaboration of a more convincing theoretical and conceptual framework to analyse the changing dynamics of contemporary world order, without which the Coxian critical theory dream of engendering social emancipation cannot be fully realised.

This article analyses the political economy of Henri Lefebvre's concept of ‘state space’ with specific attention directed towards the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, completed in 1938. The conditions of modernity can be generally related to the spatial ordering of urban landscapes within capital cities conjoining the specifics of national identity with imitative processes. Antonio Gramsci captured such sentiments through his understanding of the condition of ‘passive revolution’. The key contribution of this article is to draw attention to forms of everyday passive revolution, recognising both cosmopolitan and vernacular aspects of modern architecture in relation to the Monument to the Revolution. A focus on the Monument to the Revolution thus reveals specific spatial practices of everyday passive revolution relevant to the codification of architecture and the political economy of modern state formation in Mexico. These issues are revealed, literally, as vital expressions in the architecture of everyday passive revolution in modern Mexico.

In the field of political theory, few authors have spurred intellectual tirades and triggered collective fantasy as much as the sixteenth-century Florentine Secretary Niccoló Machiavelli. Despite all controversies, in the discipline of International Relations (IR) Machiavelli and his The Prince have been almost exclusively associated with classical realism. This largely unchallenged association contributed to the edification of the myth of The Prince as the ruthless symbol of raison d’état, carrying transcendental lessons about the nature of politics and a set of prescriptions on how helmsmen should behave to seize, maintain, and reinforce their power. The realist hijacking of Machiavelli is at the core of the foundation of classical realism as an IR theory and its location at the very epicentre of IR as a discipline. This appropriation has, in turn, obscured alternative myths of The Prince, which depart from Machiavelli’s reflections on the Principati nuovi to read The Prince as a radical manifesto for political change. The opening of the semantic space in the field of IR – spurred by the so-called interpretive turn – offers an opportunity to break this monochromatic reading. This article delves into two competing myths of The Prince: the classical realist myth and Gramsci’s ‘progressive’ one to demonstrate its contested nature.

Anthropological issues concerning socio-cultural evolution were important in the development of Marxism and led to the theories of cultural materialism. Besides Marx and Engels, anthropology was an important subject for other seminal Marxist theorists, such as Plekhanov. For the Marxist playwright-performer Dario Fo, Gramsci’s theories of hegemony are fundamental to his ideas of the development of art from utilitarian activities, and explain his insistence on drawing from folk and popular forms of performance. In this article Antonio Scuderi investigates some of the major anthropological and folkloric themes in Fo’s theatre, including the influence of anthropologists such as Toschi and Lévi-Strauss. Antonio Scuderi is Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri, where he founded the Italian programme. His interdisciplinary articles on Italian performance traditions have been published in leading journals of theatre, folklore, and literary studies, including Theatre Journal, Oral Tradition, and Modern Language Review. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998), Dario Fo: Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination (Lexington Books, 2011), and co-editor of Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition (Southern Illinois, 2000).