Political radicals in backward national contexts can outpace those in advanced ones

Evidence

In his Rinnovamento civile dell’Italia (1851), written towards the end of his life and just after the abortive revolutions of 1848 and the consequent blood-bath of repression, Gioberti comes to take up position in favour of a massive renewal of the popular forces in alliance with the liberal bourgeois intellegentsia, a position far more advanced in relation to its time and place than Proudhon’s hardly dialectical oscillations between Utopian socialism and acceptance of the bourgeois order. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2655

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s broader framework of uneven development and the ‘passive revolution’ where a more backward country’s national-liberal movement can be more radical than an advanced one’s socialist movement.