Caesarist military regimes differ by whether the countryside is passive or uncoordinated

Evidence

The most important observation to be made is that neither in Greece nor in Spain has the experience of military government created a permanent, and formally organic, political and social ideology—as does on the other hand occur in those countries which are, so to speak, potentially Bonapartist. The general historical conditions of the two types are the same: an equilibrium of the conflicting urban classes, which obstructs the mechanism of “normal” democracy—i.e. parliamentarism. But the influence of the countryside in this equilibrium is diverse in the two cases. In countries like Spain, the total passivity of the countryside enables the generals of the landowning aristocracy to utilise the army politically to restabilise the threatened equilibrium—in other words the supremacy of the ruling classes. In other countries the countryside is not passive, but the peasant movement is not coordinated politically with the urban movement: here the army has to remain neutral (up to a certain point, of course), since otherwise it might split horizontally; instead the bureacratic military class comes into action. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 846

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci differentiates two types of Caesarism—one resting on passive countryside, one on bureaucratic military class—which is a core conceptual distinction.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s broader concept of passive revolution and to later Islamophobia readings on how states manage class equilibrium without revolution.