ABSTRACT

The notion of ‘passive revolution,’ which is usually rated as “one of the richest and most complex concepts” developed in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Buci-Glucksmann 1980, p. 314), has recently been the object of intense debate with fairly concordant commentary. Morton (2010, p. 316) defines it as a rupture in society leading to radical changes that are instantly, though only partially, implemented; others describe it as a process producing systematic changes by non-revolutionary means (Callinicos 2010, p. 492) or as a government-directed process of radical changes aimed to perpetuate the existing mode of production (McKay 2010, pp. 363-64); others still explain it as the response of an elite to social unrest and an attempt to oust the masses from transformation processes by strengthening the role of the State (Simon 2010, pp. 430-31) or a ‘top-down’ bourgeois revolution antithetical to the French Revolution (Davidson 2010, p. 343).