Nineteenth-century parliamentary hegemony channeled rising energies while continuously re-formation society

Evidence

The ‘limit’ which the Jacobins had come up against in the Le Chapelier law and in the law of the maximum was transcended and pushed progressively back in the course of a whole process, in which propagandists and practical (economic, political-juridical) activity alternated. The economic base was continually enlarged and reinforced through industrial and commercial development. Those social elements which were most highly endowed with energy and spirit of enterprise rose from the lower classes to the ruling classes. The entire society was in a continuous process of formation and dissolution, followed by more complex formations with richer potentialities. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1952

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘continuous process of formation and dissolution’ of social strata is Gramsci’s account of how bourgeois hegemony absorbed social mobility, relevant background for later readings on the construction of national/racialized subjects.