Co-opting local elites into state offices neutralizes potential regional opposition leadership.

Evidence

Second, political-police measures: personal favours to the “intellectual” stratum or paglietta —in the form of jobs in the public administration; of licence to pillage the local administration with impunity; and of ecclesiastical legislation less rigidly applied than elsewhere, leaving considerable patrimony at the disposal of the clergy, etc.—i.e. incorporation of the most active Southern elements “individually” into the leading personnel of the State, with particular “judicial” and bureaucratic privileges, etc. Thus the social stratum which could have organised the endemic Southern discontent, instead became an instrument of Northern policy, a kind of auxiliary private police. Southern discontent, for lack of leadership, did not succeed in assuming a normal political form; its manifestations, finding expression only in an anarchic turbulence, were presented as a “matter for the police” and the courts. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 515

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of co-opting elite individuals to preempt collective opposition connects directly to colonial and imperial cooptation strategies described in Orientalism-era scholarship, and to later Islamophobia literature on how Muslim elites are incorporated into state structures as regime instruments. — connects to: Centralizing budget authority neutralized regional rivals by making them compete for funds — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 782; Incumbents use policy to both neutralize opposition and mobilize supporters to entrench themselves. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 247
• DEFINE: Clarifies Gramsci’s concept of how a social stratum becomes an ‘auxiliary private police’ for hegemonic power — a key mechanism in his analysis of Northern domination over the South.