A critical warning concept can be inverted into a ruling-class political program.

Evidence

One should study the way in which the critical formula of Vincenzo Cuoco on the ‘passive revolutions’, which when it was formulated (after the tragic experiment of the Parthenopean Republic of 1799) was meant as a warning, to create a national mood of greater energy and popular revolutionary initiative, was converted in the minds of the neo-Guelphs and Moderates, in their state of social panic, into a positive conception, into a political programme … the determination to abdicate and capitulate at the first serious threat of an Italian revolution that would be profoundly popular, i.e. radically national. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1879

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the conceptual transformation event: a diagnostic label (passive revolution) becoming an endorsed strategy.
• XREF: The inversion of a critical concept into an ideology parallels how hegemony frameworks get co-opted by ruling classes — useful for Islamophobia readings on how critique is absorbed.