A passive revolution is elite-led change without mass participation

Evidence

In his “Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Republic of 1799”, he described the episode as a passive revolution, because it was the work of an “enlightened” bourgeois class, “abstract rationalists”, “Jacobins”, imitating French models (and backed by French armies), and involved no mass participation. In the years which followed he came, paradoxically, to argue precisely in favour of such “passive revolutions”, in that his main thesis was the need to put through reforms in order to prevent revolution on the French model. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1879

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Gramsci’s pivotal concept of ‘passive revolution’ through its originator Cuoco.
• XREF: This is the foundational concept for Gramsci’s later analysis of Risorgimento and of how ruling classes absorb revolutionary pressures — central to ‘revolution-restoration’. Links forward to how hegemony co-opts subaltern demands.