Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T20:50:55.705Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

GRAMSCI'S REVOLUTIONS: PASSIVE AND PERMANENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2018

PETER D. THOMAS
PETER D. THOMAS*
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University, London, UK School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Antonio Gramsci's notion of “passive revolution” has often been understood as a distinctive historical narrative, political concept, or theory of state formation. This article proposes to consider it instead as a “heuristic formula” within the “lexical architecture” of the Prison Notebooks. Based upon a diachronic and contextualist analysis of the usage of the formula, I argue that Gramsci's research on passive revolution emerged as a critical element within the development of his own distinctive conception of the “sublation” and “actualization” of the slogan of “the revolution in permanence.” Attending to this dialectical relationship allows the political and strategic dimensions of passive revolution to be highlighted, and suggests new paths of research for the debate about its analytic fertility and contemporary relevance.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 117 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Previous versions of this paper were presented at conferences and seminars at Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, Istanbul, in the Department of Political Economy at University of Sydney, and at the University of Oxford. I am grateful to participants at those events for their critical engagement with my arguments. I would also like to thank Francesca Antonini, Rjurik Davidson, four anonymous readers and the coeditors of this journal for helpful comments and criticisms.

References

1 On the history of the reception of hegemony in the early 1950s see Chiarotto, Francesca, “I primi dieci anni (1948–1958). Note sulla ricezione del Gramsci teorico politico: la fortuna dell'egemonia,” in D'Orsi, Angelo, ed., Egemonie (Naples, 2008), 65–76Google Scholar; and Chiarotto, , Operazione Gramsci: alla conquista degli intellettuali nell'Italia del dopoguerra (Milan, 2011)Google Scholar. On the different seasons of Gramsci studies see Liguori, Guido, Gramsci conteso: Interpretazioni, dibattiti e polemiche 1922–2012 (Rome, 2012)Google Scholar.

2 On the focus on passive revolution in the debates of the 1970s see Frosini, Fabio, “Beyond the Crisis of Marxism: Thirty Years Contesting Gramsci's Legacy,” in Bidet, Jacques and Kouvelakis, Stathis, eds., Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Leiden, 2007), 663–78Google Scholar. Seminal early contributions included De Felice, Franco, “Una chiave di lettura in ‘Americanismo e fordismo’,” Rinascita-Il Contemporaneo 29/42 (1972), 33–5Google Scholar; and De Felice, Franco, “Rivoluzione passiva, fascismo, americanismo in Gramsci,” in Ferri, Franco, ed., Politica e storia in Gramsci, vol. 1 (Rome, 1977), 161–220Google Scholar. For a critical contextualization of these essays see De Felice, Franco, Il presente come storia, ed. Sorgonà, Gregorio and Taviani, Ermanno (Rome, 2017)Google Scholar. Perhaps under the influence of the debate on the Risorgimento as a “failed agrarian revolution” (rivoluzione agraria mancata) initiated by Rosario Romeo in the 1950s, discussions prior to De Felice's interventions did not tend to emphasize the specificity of passive revolution, when it was noted at all. See Romeo, Rosario, Risorgimento e capitalismo (Bari, 1959)Google Scholar; and compare to Zangheri, Renato, “La mancata rivoluzione agraria nel risorgimento e i problemi economici dell'unità,” Studi gramsciani: Atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11–13 genaio 1958 (Rome, 1958), 369–83Google Scholar. On the influence of the concept of a rivoluzione mancata on Risorgimento studies see Salomone, A. William, “The Risorgimento between Ideology and History: The Political Myth of Rivoluzione Mancata,” American Historical Review 68/1 (1962), 38–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See, for example, Kanoussi, Dora, Una introducción a los Cuadernos de la cárcel de Antonio Gramsci (México D.F., 2000)Google Scholar; Voza, Pasquale, “Rivoluzione passive,” in Frosini, Fabio and Liguori, Guido, eds., Le parole di Gramsci: per un lessico dei “Quaderni del carcere” (Rome, 2004), 187–207Google Scholar; Bianchi, Alvaro, O laboratório de Gramsci Filosofia, História e Política (São Paulo, 2008)Google Scholar; Thomas, Peter D., The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frosini, Fabio, “Reformation, Renaissance and the State: The Hegemonic Fabric of Modern Sovereignty,” Journal of Romance Studies 12/3 (2012), 63–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Antonio di Meo, “La ‘rivoluzione passiva’ da Cuoco a Gramsci: Appunti per un'interpretazione’,” Filosofia italiana (2014), 1–32.

4 Rehmann, Jan, Max Weber: Modernisierung als passive Revolution (Hamburg and Berlin, 1998)Google Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Morton, Adam, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (Lanham, MD, 2011)Google Scholar; Modonesi, Massimo, “Revoluciones pasivas en América Latina: Una approximación gramsciana a la caracterización de los gobiernos progresistas de inicio de siglo,” in Modonesi, ed., Horizontes gramscianos: Estudios en torno al pensammiento de Antonio Gramsci (Mexico City, 2013), 209–36Google Scholar; Del Roio, Marcos, “Translating Passive Revolution in Brazil,” Capital and Class 36/2 (2010), 215–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coutinho, Carlos Nelson, Gramsci's Political Thought (Leiden, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tuğal, Cihan, Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism (Stanford, 2009)Google Scholar; Hart, Gillian, Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (Atlanta, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; De Smet, Brecht, Gramsci on Tahrir: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt (London, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Davidson, Neil, “Scotland: Birthplace of Passive Revolution,” Capital and Class 34/3 (2010), 343–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Hesketh, Chris, “Passive Revolution: A Universal Concept with Geographical Seats,” Review of International Studies 43/4 (2017), 389–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an attempt to articulate passive revolution with the theory of uneven and combined development see Allinson, Jamie C. and Anievas, Alex, “The Uneven and Combined Development of the Meiji Restoration: A Passive Revolutionary Road to Capitalist Modernity,” Capital and Class 34/3 (2010), 469–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the claim that passive revolution represents the “general form of the transition from colonial to postcolonial national states in the 20th century” see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 50.

7 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, Gramsci and the State, trans. David Fernbach (London, 1981; first published 1975)Google Scholar, emphasized the significance of trasformismo in a now classic study. Rehmann, Max Weber, develops this theme in relation to a (broadly Weberian) notion of rationalization.

8 For attempts to think passive revolution in terms of such “contemporaneity” see Tuğal, Passive Revolution; the articles included in the special issue of Capital & Class 34/3 (2010); and Chatterjee, Partha, “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 43/16 (2008), 53–62Google Scholar.

9 Morton, Adam, Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (London, 2007), 68Google Scholar; Morton, , “The Continuum of Passive Revolution,” Capital & Class 34/3 (2010), 315–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 The notion of a “conceptual core” is explicitly theorized by Roccu, Roberto, “Passive Revolution Revisited: From the Prison Notebooks to Our ‘Great and Terrible World’,” Capital and Class 41/3 (2017), 537–59, at 544CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 I have previously proposed one such narrativization in Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, 133–58. See also the accounts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provided under the rubric of passive revolution in Bianchi, O laboratório de Gramsci; Burgio, Alberto, Gramsci storico: Una lettura dei “Quaderni del carcere” (Rome and Bari, 2002)Google Scholar; Burgio, , Gramsci: Il sistema in movimento (Rome, 2014)Google Scholar; Vacca, Giuseppe, Modernità alternative: Il novecento di Antonio Gramsci (Turin, 2017)Google Scholar.

12 White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in White, , The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 1–25, at 1, 24Google Scholar.

13 Fabio Frosini's work is the most developed example of a “reconstructive-intentional” philological approach of this type; see, most recently, Frosini, Fabio, “Rivoluzione passiva e laboratorio politico: appunti sull'analisi del fascismo nei Quaderni del carcere,” Studi storici 58/2 (2017), 297–328Google Scholar. Adam Morton's reflections on methodologies in the history of ideas and the “unravelling” of Gramsci's thought in the process of comprehending the present provide a representative example of an analytical deployment based on such a presupposition. See Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, 15–38.

14 Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (1969), in Skinner, , Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), 57–102, at 45–8Google Scholar.

15 Callinicos's notion of an “implicit” concept of passive revolution existing in a gestational state prior to its explicit nomination can be taken as an example of the former approach. See Callinicos, Alex, “The Limits of Passive Revolution,” Capital and Class 34/3 (2010), 491–507CrossRefGoogle Scholar. De Smet's reconstruction of passive revolution as a synthetic concept capable of comprehending organically the “constitution of the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois society” represents an example of the latter approach. See De Smet, Gramsci on Tahrir, 6, 37–71.

16 Koselleck, Reinhart, “Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte,” in Koselleck, , Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), 107–29, at 119–20Google Scholar.

17 Davis, John A., “Introduction: Antonio Gramsci and Italy's Passive Revolution,” in Davis, ed., Gramsci and Italy's Passive Revolution (London, 1979), 11–30, at 14Google Scholar: passive revolution “is in essence both a description of the nature of the [Italian] liberal state and an assessment of the shortcomings of that state.”

18 References to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are given to the Italian critical edition: Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Gerratana, Valentino (Turin, 1975)Google Scholar. I follow the internationally established standard of notebook number (Q), number of note (§) and page reference. “A texts” refers to Gramsci's first drafts, and “C texts” to revised notes, while “B texts” exist in a single version. Dates of individual notes are given according to the chronology established in Francioni, Gianni, L'officina gramsciana: Ipotesi sulla struttura dei “Quaderni del carcere ” (Naples, 1984)Google Scholar; and the revisions contained in Cospito, Giuseppe, “Verso l'edizione critica e integrale dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’,” Studi storici 52/4 (2011), 896–904Google Scholar. For a discussion of diachronic and contextual readings of the Prison Notebooks, informed by the tradition of Filologia d'autore, see Francioni, Gianni, “Un labirinto di carta (Introduzione alla filologia gramsciana),” International Gramsci Journal 2/1 (2016), 7–48Google Scholar.

19 I derive the notion of a “lexical architecture” from Peter de Bolla's reflections on an “architecture of concepts”; see de Bolla, Peter, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (New York, 2013)Google Scholar. However, whereas de Bolla's project assumes a distinction between “words” and “concepts,” and focuses upon the organization of the latter, my conception of a “lexical architecture” aims instead to investigate the role played by words or discrete formulations in the economy and structure of a text, without presupposing the existence of concepts as their first, formal or final cause. In a Wittgensteinian sense, I aim to explore the way in which words can be conceived as “deeds” in the material act of their inscription, without reference to a prefigurative or summational instance, whether conceived as “intention” or as “concept.”

20 Important exceptions in the existing scholarship include the different readings offered by Frosini, Fabio, Da Gramsci a Marx (Rome, 2009)Google Scholar; De Smet, Gramsci on Tahrir; Maso, Juan dal, El marxismo de Gramsci: Notas de lectura sobre los Cuadernos de la cárcel (Buenos Aires, 2016)Google Scholar. While these studies register the theoretical importance of the relationship between passive and permanent revolution for Gramsci's thought, they do not undertake the specification of the times and significance of their different uses that is attempted in this article.

21 For a reconstruction of these dual perspectives and context see Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, 197–242.

22 Gerratana, Valentino, Gramsci: Problemi di metodo (Rome, 1997), 132Google Scholar.

23 Q1, §44, 40–54, at 41.

24 For Cuoco's original usage of the term see Cuoco, Vincenzo, Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione di Napoli, ed. De Francesco, A. (Manduria, 1998Google Scholar; first published 1801), particularly 325–6. For a detailed study of the different emphases of Cuoco and Gramsci's formulations, see di Meo, “La ‘rivoluzione passiva’ da Cuoco a Gramsci.”

25 A similar retrospective addition is made to Q1, §150, 133, originally written in late May 1930. Both Gerratana and Francioni note that “passive revolution” is inserted in the margins of these notes at a later date, after the term is first used (in a chronological sense) in Q4 §57, 504, in November 1930. See Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Gerratana, 2479; and Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere: Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, vol. 1, ed. Francioni, Gianni (Rome and Cagliari, 2009), 4Google Scholar. A more precise dating of these marginalia does not seem possible on the basis of external references or the manuscript itself. Gramsci may have inserted them immediately in November 1930, at some stage during 1931, or even in early 1932. It is significant to note that after November 1930 “passive revolution” is not used again in other notes until early 1932, in Q8, §25, 957, when Gramsci relates Cuoco's formula to Quinet (and Gioberti).

26 It is not coincidental that Gramsci begins to explore the significance of passive revolution in the same period in which he is engaged in intense political discussions (and disagreements) with fellow communist inmates in the Turi Prison. See Lisa, Athos, Memorie: In carcere con Gramsci (Milan, 1973)Google Scholar; and, for a critical contextualization, Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, 237–90.

27 Q4, §57, 504. For readings that emphasize the centrality of this note for all of Gramsci's research on passive revolution see Voza, “Rivoluzione passiva,” 195; De Felice, “Rivoluzione passiva, fascismo, americanismo in Gramsci,” 163.

28 Alex Callinicos, “The Limits of Passive Revolution,” argues that a tendency to “over-extension” (or, following Lakatos, “concept-stretching”) of passive revolution, both in Gramsci's own writings and in those of later scholars, leads it to lose analytic precision. While he notes Gramsci's retrospective insertion of “passive revolution” in his first Notebook (493), he nevertheless insists that “Gramsci uses the expression ‘passive revolution’ initially as a means of interpreting the Risorgimento” (492) (a claim justified by recourse to the notion of an “implicit” (or “practical”) presence of the “concept” of passive revolution in notes before Q4, §57, even if the formula itself is absent: see 493). Callinicos's genealogy of “passive revolution” thus depends on ignoring the textual evidence that Gramsci used “passive revolution” in an “expanded” sense from the outset.

29 On the presence of Jacobinism throughout Notebook 1 see Paggi, Leonardo, “Giacobinismo e società di massa in Gramsci,” in Salvadori, Massimo L. and Tranfaglia, Nicola, eds., Il modello politico giacobino e le rivoluzioni (Florence, 1984), 223–39Google Scholar.

30 Gramsci, Antonio, Scritti (1910–1926), vol. 2, 1917, ed. Rapone, Leonardo (Rome, 2015), 255Google Scholar.

31 On the significance of Gramsci's encounter with Mathiez see Areco, Sabrina, “Antonio Gramsci e Albert Mathiez: jacobinos e jacobinosmo nos anos de Guerra,” Revista Outubro 24 (2015), 37–60Google Scholar.

32 Medici, Rita, Giobbe e Prometeo: filosfia e politica nel pensiero di Gramsci (Florence, 2000), 153Google Scholar. For Lenin's invocation of a “plebeian Jacobinism” see Massimo L. Salvadori, “Il giacobinismo nel pensiero marxista,” in Salvadori and Tranfaglia, Il modello politico giacobino e le rivoluzioni, 240–53; and Levine, Norman, “Jacobinism and the European Revolutionary Tradition,” History of European Ideas 11 (1989), 157–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See Q8, §21, 951–3; Q13, §1, 1558–60.

34 On Gramsci's changing assessment of Jacobinism see Gervasoni, Marco, Antonio Gramsci e la Francia: Dal mito della modernità alla “scienza della politica ” (Milan, 1998)Google Scholar; Medici, Giobbe e Prometeo; Leandro de Oliveira Galastri, “Revolução passiva e jacobinismo: Uma bifucação da historia,” Filosofia e Educação 2/1 (2010), 101–26.

35 Q1, §44, 44.

36 See, for example, Brinton, Clarence Crane, The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History (New York, 1930)Google Scholar; Furet, François, “Jacobinism,” in Furet, François and Ozouf, Mona, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 704–15Google Scholar; Higonnet, Patrice, Goodness beyond Virtue. Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar.

37 Q1 §44, 42. This was the reason for Gramsci's affiliation of Machiavelli to a Jacobin tradition avant la lettre. “Any formation of a national popular collective will is impossible without the masses of peasant farmers entering simultaneously into political life. This is what Machiavelli wanted with the reform of the militia, this is what the Jacobins did in the French Revolution, in this consists Machiavelli's [precocious] Jacobinism, the fertile germ of his conception of national revolution” (Q8, §21, 951–2). While much Machiavelli scholarship, particularly in the twentieth century, has focused on the Prince or the Discourses to the neglect of The Art of War, Gramsci effectively “Jacobinizes” his reading of the former texts by means of a focus on the political implications of the latter. For a consideration of the centrality of The Art of War in Machiavelli's “political philosophy” see Del Lucchese, Filippo, The Political Philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli (Edinburgh, 2015), 105–13, 120–22Google Scholar.

38 Exceptions in the scholarship on Jacobinism that stress the importance of their rural policies include Ado, Anatoli, Paysans en révolution: Terre, pouvoir et jacquerie, 1789–1794 (Paris, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maciak, Jill, “Learning to Love the Republic: Jacobin Propaganda and the Peasantry of the Haute-Garonne,” European Review of History/ Revue européenne d'histoire 6/2 (1999), 165–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heller, Henry, The Bourgeois Revolution in France (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

39 On the importance of peasant mobilization for Gramsci's understanding of Jacobinism see Adamson, Walter L., Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley and London, 1980), 184Google Scholar. Gramsci may have drawn inspiration for this reading from Mathiez, who briefly valorizes this dimension of Jacobin politics. See Mathiez, Albert, Le bolchévisme et le jacobinisme (Paris, 1920), 5Google Scholar.

40 Q1, §48, 58; see also Q1, §44, 51–2. Superare, here rendered as “to sublate,” is the standard Italian translation of Hegel's aufheben, or the dialectical unity of cancellation and preservation. Previous translations of this passage have tended to reduce the Hegelian resonance. Hoare and Nowell Smith, translating the corresponding formulation in the C text (Q13, §37, 1636: superato e respinto più lontano progressivamente), opt for “transcended and pushed progressively back”; see Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin and Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (New York, 1971)Google Scholar. Buttigieg and Callari instead render superato e allargato as “overcome and slackened”; see Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, ed. Buttigieg, Joseph A., trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and A. Callari (New York, 1992)Google Scholar. Both translations seem to me to be misleading. Gramsci's argument in this note is not that the “class limit” of the Jacobins was “transcended” or “overcome” by the parliamentary regime, in the sense of being negated, or no longer being operative. On the contrary, this limit not only remained in force during the early nineteenth century, but was even strengthened in unprecedented and highly mediated forms, thereby increasing the capacity of the bourgeois class to integrate antagonistic social classes within its own political project, within and according to its own class limits and interests.

41 See Q8, §35, 961; see also Q11, §66, 1498.

42 Tosel, André, “Gramsci et la Révolution française,” in Tosel, ed., Modernité de Gramsci? (Paris, 1992), 97–42, at 99Google Scholar.

43 Q1, §44, 53.

44 Q1 §44, 54.

45 See, for instance, the synthetic definitions offered in Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, 310–17; Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, 63–73; De Smet, Gramsci on Tahrir, 37–71; Roccu, “Passive Revolution Revisited,” 544–6.

46 Q8, §25, 957.

47 Q8, §36, 962; Q8, §39, 966.

48 Q8, §52, 973, Feb. 1932.

49 Q8, §236, 1089.

50 Q8, §236, 1089; see also, from the same period, Q10I, §9, 1226–9, in which these themes are specified in terms of the intersection of colonialism, imperialist rivalries and domestic class struggle in recent Italian history, with a particular focus on the role played by Fascism in stabilizing relations between the traditional ruling class and the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie.

51 Q10I, “Summary,” 6°, 1208, April–May 1932; see Q10I, §6, 1219–22, April–May 1932; Q9, §97, 1160–61, May 1932; Q10II, §41xiv, 1324–7, Aug.–Dec. 1932.

52 Q10I,’Summary’, 9°, 1209; see also Q10II, §61, 1358–62, Feb.–May 1933.

53 Q8, §240, 1091, May 1932.

54 Q10I, §12, 1234–5, April–May 1932.

55 For an analysis of these notes, see subsection “Machiavelli and the expansion of the political (May 1932–November 1933)” below.

56 Q15, §11, 1766, March–April 1933; Q15, §15, 1772, April–May 1933; Q15, §17, 1774, April–May 1933; Q15, §25, 1781, May 1933.

57 Q15, §11, 1766–7. This line of research is continued between April and July 1933 in Q15, §15, 1772; Q15, §25, 1781; Q15, §56, 1818–19; Q15, §59, 1822–4 (the “Piedmont function”: “dictatorship without hegemony”), culminating in Q15, §62, 1827.

58 Q15, §11, 1767.

59 On the dating of this translation see Francioni, Gianni, “Nota al testo,” in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, I, Quaderni di traduzione (1929–1932), ed. Cospito, Giuseppe and Francioni, Gianni (Rome, 2007), 870–90Google Scholar.

60 See, for example, Q4, §38, 455–65, Oct. 1930; Q7, §4, 855, Nov. 1930; Q7, §20, 869, Nov. 1930–Feb. 1931; Q8, §195, 1057–8, Feb. 1932; Q10II, §6, 1244–5, May 1932; Q11, §22, 1422–6, July–Aug. 1932; Q13, §17, 1578–89, May 1932–Nov. 1933; Q13, §18, 1589–97, May 1932–Nov. 1933.

61 Q15, §17, 1774, April–May 1933.

62 Q15, §62, 1827, June–July 1933.

63 Q15, §62, 1827.

64 Q4, §38, 456–7.

65 For a classic account of this development see Löwy, Michael, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

66 See, for instance, Davidson, Neil, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago, 2012), 279Google Scholar; Saccarelli, Emanuele, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

67 A comprehensive assessment of these limitations is provided by Rosengarten, Frank, “The Gramsci–Trotsky Question (1922–1932),” Social Text 11 (1984–5), 65–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 For a study of the terms of the transformation of Gramsci's judgment of Trotsky's positions in the Russian party and in the Communist International see Grigoreva, Irina V., “Gramsci e le lotte all'interno del PCUS (1923–1926),” in Gramsci e il Novecento, vol. 1 (Rome, 1999), 87–92Google Scholar.

69 On Gramsci's relation to Bukharin's positions throughout the early and mid-1920s see Paggi, Leonardo, Le strategie del potere in Gramsci: Tra fascismo e socialismo in un solo paese 1923–26 (Rome, 1984)Google Scholar. Bukharin's contributions to the literary discussion are available in Corney, Frederick C., ed., Trotsky's Challenge: The “Literary Discussion” of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution (Leiden, 2016), 147–62, 514–54, 555–69Google Scholar. “The Theory of Permanent Revolution” (28 Dec. 1924) in particular was an influential text, widely translated and discussed in the international communist movement. Echoes of this text's understanding of permanent revolution's meaning in 1848 arguably can be found in Gramsci's later reflections.

70 The notion of an affinity between, if not the equation of, Trotsky and Bordiga effectively constituted the lens through which Gramsci read the emerging factional struggle in the Russian party throughout 1924 and 1925. See, for instance, Gramsci, Antonio, La costruzione del Partito comunista 1923–1926 (Turin, 1971), 459–62Google Scholar. For analyses of this conjuncture see Somai, Giovanni, “Sul rapporto tra Trockij, Gramsci e Bordiga (1922–1926),” Storia contemporanea 1 (1982), 73–98Google Scholar; Pons, Silvio, “Il gruppo dirigente del PCI e la ‘questione russa’ (1924–26),” in Giasi, Francesco, ed., Gramsci nel suo tempo, vol. 1 (Rome, 2008), 403–29Google Scholar.

71 Different readings in this sense are offered by Bianchi, O laboratório de Gramsci, 199–252; De Smet, Gramsci on Tahrir; Dal Maso, El marxismo de Gramsci. I have previously explored the Gramsci–Trotsky relationship in related terms in Thomas, Peter D., “Uneven Developments, Combined: The First World War and Marxist Theories of Revolution,” in Anievas, Alex, ed., Cataclysm 1914: The First World War in the Making of Modern World Politics (Leiden, 2015), 280–301Google Scholar.

72 Q1, §44, 54.

73 Both Knei-Paz and Day and Gaido emphasize that the terms “permanent revolution” (permanentnaya revolyutsiya) and “uninterrupted revolution” (niepreryvnaya revolyutsiya) were used synonymously in the debates in Russian social democracy in the early twentieth century, from which Trotsky's formulation derives. See Knei-Paz, Baruch, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford, 1979), 152Google Scholar; Day, Richard and Gaido, Daniel, eds., Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record (Leiden, 2009), 449–50, editorial noteCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Larsson argues that the term implies a conception of “compressed” development: Larsson, Reidar, Theories of Revolution: From Marx to the First Russian Revolution (Stockholm, 1970), 31Google Scholar; while Draper uses the term “telescoping” in relation to Engels's assessment of Germany in the Vormärz: Draper, Hal, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, vol. 2, The Politics of Social Classes (New York, 1978), 175Google Scholar. Löwy concedes that the text of Marx and Engels contains both “stagist” and “permanentist” concepts of permanent revolution, but argues that it is ultimately a conception of continuous, “uninterrupted and combined revolution” that constitutes their decisive innovation. Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development, 3, 9.

74 See Day and Gaido, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution; Lih, Lars, “Democratic Revolution in Permanenz,” Science & Society 76/4 (2012), 433–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 See, for example, Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development; Kouvelakis, Stathis, “Marx's Critique of the Political: From the Revolutions of 1848 to the Paris Commune,” Situations 2/2 (2007), 81–93, at 81Google Scholar; Frosini, Fabio, Da Gramsci a Marx (Rome, 2009), 32Google Scholar; van Ree, Erik, “Marxism as Permanent Revolution,” History of Political Thought 34/3 (2013), 540–63Google Scholar.

76 See, for instance, Marx's critique of the Jacobins in On the Jewish Question, or his related critique of Napoleon in The Holy Family: Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Collected Works (London, 1975–2005), 3: 155–6, 4: 123Google Scholar.

77 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 10: 281–7. For a similar usage in the same period, in The Class Struggle in France, see ibid., 127: “Communism . . . is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally.”

78 For the classical formulation of this argument see Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development. For an argument that a distinct notion of permanent revolution only emerged retrospectively and interpretively, “in the gap between the historical and the political registers of the Manifesto” that opened up after 1848, see Saccarelli, Emanuele, “The Permanent Revolution in and around the Manifesto,” in Carver, Terrell and Farr, James, eds., The Cambridge Companion to The Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 2015), 105–21, at 110Google Scholar.

79 “An Herrn Karl Marx, Redakteur der Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung,” Freiheit, Arbeit (Cologne), 25 Feb. 1849, reprinted in Freiheit, Arbeit: Organ des Kölner Arbeitervereins (Glashüttem im Taunus, 1972). For two opposing views of the implications of Marx and Engels's conjunctural appropriation (already in 1849) of Gottschalk's slogan and programme of independent working-class political representation see Sperber, Jonathan, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York, 2013), 251–2Google Scholar, and Lars Lih, “What did Marx mean by ‘Revolution in Permanenz’?”, Historical Materialism, forthcoming. Stedman Jones neglects these contextualist determinations, and consequently reproposes an older notion (now discredited, because lacking in textual evidence) that the March 1850 Address represented a “Blanquist” aberration before Marx definitively returned to the conception of “stages” that had supposedly marked The Communist Manifesto. See Jones, Gareth Stedman, “The Young Hegelians, Marx and Engels,” in Jones, Gareth Stedman and Claeys, Gregory, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2011), 556–600, at 581CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Stedman, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London, 2016), 301CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 On the difficulties of translating the formulation “die Revolution in Permanenz” into English see Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, 169–263, 591–5, 599–612. In Marx and Engels's (and Gottschalk's) usage, in Permanenz is a simple German calque of the French en permanence. In constitutional–juridical terms, it refers not to a temporally continuous session of an assembly (that is, permanence in the sense of temporal endurance), but rather to an assembly's constitutional power to determine the duration and modality of its own sessions, without exterior (in particular, executive) interference. Regarding the meaning of the term in French constitutional law see Duguit, Léon, Traité de droit constitutionnel, tome 4 (Paris, 1924), 234–5Google Scholar.

81 On declarations of “permanence” in the early 1790s, particularly by the sectional assemblies, see Soboul, Albert, The French Revolution 1787–1799, trans. Alan Forrest and Colin Jones (London, 1974), 382–3Google Scholar; Soboul, , The Sans-Culottes, trans. Rémy Inglis Hall (Princeton, 1980), 118–27Google Scholar; Alpaug, Micah, Non-violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris 1787–1795 (Cambridge, 2015), 83Google Scholar. On resistance to the imposition of passive citizenship see Sewell, William, “Le Citoyen/la Citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship,” in Lucas, Colin, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), 105–25Google Scholar.

82 Lenin, “Plekhanov's Reference to History,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 8 (Moscow, 1962), 463–73, at 470.

83 Q4, §38, 456–7, Oct. 1930.

84 Q4, §57, 504, Nov. 1930.

85 Q15, §62, 1827, June–July 1933.

86 As Gramsci here inverts the order of propositions in Marx's “Preface,” emphasizing the need to check the “exact formulation” of these principles, this note was most likely written before he had finalized his translation of Marx's text. See the the order and wording of propositions in the C Text: Q13, §17, 1579, May 1932–Nov. 1933.

87 Q4, §38, 456–7.

88 Q8, §52, 972–3, Feb. 1932.

89 Q8, §52, 973.

90 Q8, §52, 973. Once again, previous translations of superato do not seem to me to emphasize adequately the Hegelian and dialectical dimensions of Gramsci's argument. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 243: “transcended”; Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Buttigieg, 267: “superseded.”

91 Q10I, §12, 1235, mid-April–mid-May 1932; see Q13, §18, 1595–6, May 1932–Nov. 1933.

92 Q13, §7, 1565–7; Q13, §17, 1578–89; Q13, §18, 1589–97; Q13, §27, 1619–22; Q13, §37, 1635–50; all May 1932–Nov. 1933.

93 On the emergence of the figure of the modern Prince as a decisive reorganization of Gramsci's research in 1932 see Frosini, Fabio, “Luigi Russo e Georges Sorel: sulla genesi del ‘moderno Principe’ nei Quaderni del carcere di Antonio Gramsci,” Studi storici 54/3 (2013), 545–89Google Scholar; and Thomas, Peter D., “The Modern Prince: Gramsci's Reading of Machiavelli,” History of Political Thought 38/3 (2017), 523–44Google Scholar.

94 Similarly, while often associated with passive revolution, Gramsci's analysis of “Caesarism” is in fact elaborated in notes that focus upon permanent revolution. See Q9, §133, 1194–5, Nov. 1932; Q13, §27, 1619–22, May 1932–Nov. 1933.

95 Q13, §7, 1566, May 1932–Nov. 1933. See the A text: Q8, §52, 973, Feb. 1932. The increasing complexity of Gramsci's historical analysis of the nineteenth century in notes drafted in late 1932 can also be observed in Q9, §133, 1195, Nov. 1932.

96 Q13, §37, 1636. This distinction is not noted by Bull, who thus ends up collapsing the narratives of two distinct historical periods into one generic concept. See Bull, Malcolm, “Levelling Out,” New Left Review 2/70 (2011), 5–24, at 21Google Scholar.

97 Q22, §1, 2140.

98 Q8, §236, 1089.

99 Q19, §24, 2010–34, July–Aug. 1934–Feb. 1935.

100 Compare the consistency of this metaphor over the five or more years that separate Q1, §44, 54 and Q19, §24, 2034.