Judging a regime as historically transitory prevents that judgement from becoming endorsement.

Evidence

This passage appears to refer to fascism again—particularly if it is related to the passage on “Self criticism and the Hypocrisy of Self-criticism” on pp. 254-7 below, where Gramsci makes similar points about the non-”epochal” character of the regime, and about its “relatively” progressive character vis-a-vis the preceding bourgeois regime. In the other passage, Gramsci is careful to stress that it is important in making any such judgement “to exclude the slightest appearance of support for the ‘absolutist’ tendency, and that can be achieved by insisting on the ‘transitory’ character of the phenomenon …”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2266

Categorization

• XREF: A method for holding a structural, non-epochal analysis of fascism without lapsing into apology — directly transferable to how Islamophobia scholarship judges the ‘War on Terror’ state without legitimating liberal empire.
• DEEPTHINKING: The rule that analytic distance from a regime’s claims must be purchased by insisting on its transience is a genuine methodological principle, not just a caveat — it shapes how any immanent critique of a hegemonic order is written.