Abstract

The notion of passive revolution is nowadays recognised as one of Gramsci’s most important theoretical contributions. Not only has it been the subject of extensive work in foreign languages, this concept is also used to analyse various historical phenomena or present concrete situations. The aim of this article is to provide a synthetic study of the development and uses of the notion of passive revolution in the Prison Notebooks. To this end, we follow the notion through its various phases of development, tracking the shifts in meaning according to the cases for which it is used (the Risorgimento, nineteenth-century Europe, Fascism, Americanism, etc.). For Gramsci, the contributions of this notion seem to be positioned on at least two levels, linked dialectically: To conceive a modality of historical change that cannot be reduced to revolutionary upheavals in the strict sense; and to critically highlight the dominant classes’ political strategies to advance the emancipation of subaltern autonomous activity.