Passive revolution

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Antonio Gramsci

Passive revolution is a term coined by Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci during the interwar period in Italy. Gramsci coined the term to refer to a significant change that is not abrupt but a slow and gradual metamorphosis that may take years or generations to accomplish.[1]

Gramsci uses "passive revolution" in a variety of contexts with slightly different meanings. The primary usage is to contrast the passive transformation of bourgeois society in 19th-century Italy with the active revolutionary process of the bourgeoisie in France. Whereas the French case is seen by Gramsci as an authentic revolution guided by social forces, the Italian case was 'elite-driven'; a process of modernization that did not disrupt the social arrangements of power in Italy but instead modernized it on the behalf of elite classes to secure their own position. However, Gramsci also associates Italian fascism with the notion of passive revolution.

Passive revolution is a transformation of the political and institutional structures without strong social processes by ruling classes for their own self-preservation. It has been characterized by the quote from Prince Don Fabrizio Corbera of Salina in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo: ‘Everything must change so that everything can remain the same’.[2] Gramsci also used the term for the mutations of the structures of capitalist economic production that he recognised primarily in the development of the US factory system of the 1920s and 1930s. Passive revolution is detailed by Gramsci as an elite process of state restructuring in Italy specifically, but it has been used as a frame of analysis for viewing other transitions to capitalist modernity.[3]

References[]

  1. ^ Gramsci, Antonio; Forgacs, David (1988). An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935. New York: Schocken.
  2. ^ Cox, Robert W. (2007). Review of the book Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy, by A. D. Morton. Capital & Class, 31(3), pp. 258-261.
  3. ^ Morton, Adam David (2007), 'Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution and the International', Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 35 (3), 597-621.

Further reading[]

  • Gramsci, Antonio; Forgacs, David (1988). An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935. New York: Schocken.

External links[]

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