As the title suggests, this book has a great and admirable ambition. It seeks to write a version of Antonio Gramsci's Modern Prince for a post–New Left, postmodern era. While it does not actually do this, it does provide a critical settling of accounts both with the legacy of the American New Left and the subsequent appearance of a (largely academic) leftism informed by postmodern theory. More significantly, it tries to suggest, though very sketchily, what a unitary actor with strategic acumen and a leftist program might look like, given the decline of parties of the working class and the fragmentation of emancipatory social movements. Both the criticism and the reconstructive aim are informed by Gramsci's emphasis on politics as a struggle for hegemony.

John Sanbonmatsu's book has two parts, a critical narrative of left academic theories and a Gramsci-inspired account of a left political theory that centers on an imagined left political actor and political strategy tied to organic social and economic development. The first part of the book tells a story of the decline of New Left theories in the United States. According to Sanbonmatsu, the early theories of political action rooted in the civil rights movement were something of an ideal political moment. For a very short time, expressive political actions and political strategy mutually reinforced each other. However, post–New Left theory became purely expressive, trading in an interest in strategy in favor of a focus on disrupting ordinary discourse with the aim of finding a repressed genuine self and recovering organic community. These expressive notions of radical negation of the present were, in turn, replaced by poststructuralist theories of discourse that used rhetorical analysis to demonstrate that organicism and expressive unity of the subject were mere functions of textual strategy.

Sanbonamtsu is particularly unhappy with this last development, arguing that in rejecting the concept of “totality,” “postmodernism represents a disavowal of political strategy” (p. 96). For Sanbonmatsu the poststructuralist (and structuralist) rejection of these fundaments of previous left political theory leads to a fatal incoherence: On the one hand, poststructuralism claims that undermining the representational and totalistic pretensions of texts is a kind of radical politics; on the other hand, it rejects the possibility of there being anything like a unitary political agent to be emancipated or guided by theory. Worse yet, he argues, in rejecting a concept of political conflict in which unitary actors with total world views struggle for hegemony, for leadership over state, civil society, and economy, poststructuralist theory has proved to be a poor guide to the actual shifts in the political relations of right and left, at least in the United States: “It was the political and religious right, not the left, which was to succeed in mobilizing a transformative hegemonic political project with truly global reach” (p. 154). And it was the failure of the Left to grasp this that provided the Right with this opening.

This practical criticism of poststructuralism becomes the basis for the second part of the book: a defense of Gramsci's strategic notion of political agency against Michel Foucault's concept of archaeology and an explication of how Gramsci's theory of collective agency and hegemony could be applied to a left post-Marxist form of politics. Here the book seeks to make good on the promissory note of its title. In probably the most analytically illuminating chapter in the book, entitled “The Prince and the Archaeologist,” Sanbonmatsu sets up a one-to-one comparison between Foucault's subject-less, discursive theory of control and strategy and Gramsci's theory of a unitary collective political subject located in a constantly shifting struggle for hegemony. Not surprisingly, Sanbonmatsu embraces Gramsci's notion of political foresight, that is, his claim that an analysis of long-run historical tendencies needs to be complemented by a notion of a partisan political strategist who understands that an engaged political will is necessary for us to distinguish the particular conjunctural features of political situations from their durable aspects. Thus, Foucault stands accused of having explicitly abandoned the attempt to discover how “the oppressed”—however they may be defined under present conditions—can be transformed into conscious willing agents in a political struggle. Further, by valorizing the fragmentation of social movements as microresistances, according to Sanbonmatsu, Foucault, as well as post-Foucaultians, discourage the oppressed from entering the struggle for hegemony over state, civil society, and economy. It is interesting, and problematic, as we shall see momentarily, that Sanbonmatsu intertwines his defense of a Gramscian notion of hegemonic struggle with the phenomenological theory of meaning—the very theory that structuralist and poststructuralist theory sought to overthrow.

We would expect at this point for Sanbonmatsu to provide a Gramscian analysis of the present relations of state, civil society, and economy as viewed by an emerging collective actor. Gramscian theory, after all, aims to reconstruct imaginatively a modern version of Machiavelli's prince as a collective actor striving by means of a political party to enter the struggle for hegemony. Interpreting Machiavelli's literary strategy, Gramsci spoke of the modern prince as a “concrete phantasy” organizing a shattered and collective will into a unified whole—a projection of possibility in a time of disaggregated political forces. It is this imaginative leap that Sanbonmatsu would promise us in claiming to provide a “postmodern prince.”

Toward the end of his book, the author finally seeks to make good on this promise. Arguing that in the present the working class organized in a political party cannot be the potential agent leading the struggle for an egalitarian and nonoppressive society, he describes this new postmodern prince, albeit in rather vague terms, as an “organic coalescence” of diverse social movements for human and nonhuman liberation unified into a universal project (p. 160). This coalescence of social movements will be democratic, combine long-term goals with tactical coordination, and embrace a philosophy of life consisting of an ethic of empathy for all those who suffer. Its organizational principle would consist of a collegial coordination of different groups spanning international civil society.

Needless to say, even readers sympathetic with this project would expect a more sharply drawn account of the relation among hegemonic struggle, political agency, and strategy. Instead of providing this, Sanbonmatsu swerves into a metatheoretical defense of the later Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concept of totality. Here, the modern prince as imagined unitary collective actor is analogized to a field of perception in which different perspectives come together into a perceptual whole—in this case, different perceptions of oppression on the part of particular social movements merge into a total understanding of oppression (pp. 200–201). Sanbonmatsu's retreat at this juncture into a critical defense of the phenomenological notion of multiple perspectives constituting our perceptual horizon signals a curious dilemma that recurs throughout this work—namely, the attempt to rehabilitate phenomenology against the poststructuralist onslaught seems at crucial moments to arrest rather than further the political argument on left political agency. The result is that his argument starts needlessly to depend on whether, say, Foucault's rejection of the subjective constitution of experience is valid or not.

This problem aside, Sanbonmatsu is often convincing in demonstrating why a Gramscian approach to left political agency has more to recommend it than a poststructuralist one. Nevertheless, an (imaginative) account of the present political field as viewed by oppressed collectivities seeking leadership of state, civil society, and economy is still waiting to be written. Perhaps it is asking too much even of a book entitled The Postmodern Prince to provide that.