Elite-led and popular revolutionary forces jointly make outcomes even when unaware

Evidence

The “restorations” need to be judged “dynamically”, as a “ruse of providence” in Vico’s sense. … One problem is the following: in the struggle Cavour-Mazzini, in which Cavour is the exponent of the passive revolution/war of position and Mazzini of popular initiative/war of manoeuvre, are not both of them indispensable to precisely the same extent? … Yet it has to be taken into account that, whereas Cavour was aware of his role (at least up to a certain point) in as much as he understood the role of Mazzini, the latter does not seem to have been aware either of his own or of Cavour’s. … If, on the contrary, Mazzini had possessed such awareness—in other words, if he had been a realistic politician and not a visionary apostle (i.e. if he had not been Mazzini)—then the equilibrium which resulted from the convergence of the two men’s activities would have been different, would have been more favourable to Mazzinianism. … In other words, the Italian State would have been constituted on a less retrograde and more modern basis. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 558

Categorization

• XREF: The mutual, partly-unconscious interdependence of elite and popular initiative prefigures the co-construction of hegemony that later Islamophobia scholarship applies to state and civil-society actors. — connects to: Revolutionary success requires security-force defection, elite division, and contagion waves — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 89