For Gramsci the leap-vs-evolution debate marks where theory becomes political action.

Evidence

It is worth observing that the present debate between “history and anti-history” is nothing other than a repetition, in the language of modern philosophical culture, of the debate that took place at the end of the last century, in the language of naturalism and positivism, about whether nature and history proceed by “leaps” or only by gradual and progressive evolution. The same debate can be seen to have been engaged in by earlier generations, whether in the field of natural science (the doctrines of Cuvier) or in that of philosophy (where it can be found in Hegel). The history of this problem should be dealt with in all its concrete and significant manifestations. One would find that it has always been contemporary, since at all times there have been conservatives and Jacobins, progressives and reactionaries. But the “theoretical” significance of this debate seems to me to consist in this: that it marks the “logical” point at which every conception of the world makes the passage to the morality appropriate to it, when contemplation becomes action and every philosophy becomes the political action dependent on it. In other words, it is the point at which the conception of the world, contemplation, philosophy become “real”, since they now aim to modify the world and to revolutionise praxis. One could say therefore that this is the central nexus of the philosophy of praxis, the point at which it becomes actual and lives historically (that is socially and no longer just in the brains of individuals), when it ceases to be arbitrary and becomes necessary—rational—real. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1310

Categorization

• XREF: The line that ‘at all times there have been conservatives and Jacobins’ prefigures the revolutionary-vs-reactionary axis that recurs in hegemony and common-sense theory the reader will map onto Islamophobia discourse.