The notion of ‘social bloc’ is increasingly present in the political economy literature but its different uses do not always correspond to the same meaning. We compare our concept of social bloc with some of the different notions of bloc that one can find in Gramsci’s writings, which are often cited as a reference by scholars who use the notions of social, hegemonic or historical bloc. Stressing the differences between our concept and Gramsci’s historical bloc, we discuss how different notions of domination and crisis are related with our own concept and we conclude by looking at what a historical bloc would be in our own approach.