Italian communes failed to transcend the corporative phase into a modern state

Evidence

It is necessary to determine what significance the ‘State’ had in the Communal State: a limited ‘corporative’ significance, which meant that it was unable to develop beyond middle feudalism, i.e. that which succeeded the absolute feudalism without a third estate, so to speak which had existed before the year a.d. iooo, and which was itself succeeded by the absolute monarchy in the fifteenth century, up to the French Revolution. There was an organic transition from the Commune to a system that was no longer feudal in the Low Countries, and there alone. In Italy, the Communes were unable to go beyond the corporative phase, feudal anarchy triumphed in a form appropriate to the new situation and then came the period of foreign domination. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1867

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘corporative phase’ failure is the historical embryo of Gramsci’s account of Italian state formation, which later ‘passive revolution’ readings of state-civil-society relations build on. — connects to: Indian tribal denotification enabled organic intellectuals where Italy’s peasant masses could not produce them — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2235