social revolution and worked out fully its consequences in new modes of pro- duction and social relations.England and France were cases that had gone further than most others in this respect.The other kind were societies which had so to speak imported or had thrust upon them aspects of a new order created abroad,without the old order having been displaced.These last were caught up in a dialectic of revolution-restoration which tended to become blocked as neither the new forces nor the old could triumph.In these societies,the new indus trial bourgeoisie failed to achieve hegemony.The resulting stalemate with the traditionally dominant social classes created the conditions that Gramsci called passive revolution',the introduction of changes which did not involve any arous al of popular forces.11 One typical accompaniment to passive revolution in Gramsci's analysis is caesarism:a strong man intervenes to resolve the stalemate between equal and opposed social forces.Gramsci allowed that there were both progressive and reactionary forms of caesarism:progressive when strong rule presides over a more orderly development of a new state,reactionary when it stabilises existing power.Napoleon I was a case of progressive caesarism,but Napoleon III,the exemplar of reactionary caesarism,was more representative of the kind likely to arise in the course of passive revolution.Gramsci's analysis here is virtually identical with that of Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:the French bourgeoisie,unable to rule directly through their own political parties, were content to develop capitalism under a political regime which had its social basis in the peasantry,an inarticulate and unorganised class whose virtual rep- resentative Bonaparte could claim to be. In late nineteenth century Italy,the northern industrial bourgeoisie,the class with the most to gain from the unification of Italy,was unable to dominate the peninsula.The basis for the new state became an alliance between the industrial bourgeoisie of the north and the landowners of the south-an alliance which also provided benefits for petty bourgeois clients (especially from the south)who staffed the new state bureaucracy and political parties and became the intermedi- aries between the various population groups and the state.The lack of any sustained and widespread popular participation in the unification movement explained the 'passive revolution'character of its outcome.In the aftermath of the First World War,worker and peasant occupations of factories and land demonstrated a strength which was considerable enough to threaten yet insuffi- cient to dislodge the existing state.There took place then what Gramsci called a 'displacement of the basis of the state2 towards the petty bourgeoisie,the only class of nation-wide extent,which became the anchor of fascist power.Fascism continued the passive revolution,sustaining the position of the old owner classes yet unable to attract the support of worker or peasant subaltern groups. Apart from caesarism,the second major feature of passive revolution in Italy Gramsci called trasformismo.It was exemplified in Italian politics by Giovanni Giolitti who sought to bring about the widest possible coalition of interests and who dominated the political scene in the years preceding fascism.For example, he aimed to bring northern industrial workers into a common front with industri- alists through a protectionist policy.Trasformismo worked to co-opt potential leaders of subaltern social groups.By extension trasformismo can serve as a strategy of assimilating and domesticating potentially dangerous ideas by adjust- 166 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on Odlober 10,2010Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on October 10, 2010