Revolutionary regimes fuse state and civil society to hold national life.

Evidence

It is from this point of view that the Jacobin attempt to institute a cult of the ‘Supreme Being’ should be studied. This appears to be an attempt to create an identity between State and civil society; to unify in a dictatorial way the constitutive elements of the State (in the organic, wider sense of the State proper + civil society), in a desperate endeavour to keep a hold on all of popular and national life. But it appears too as the first root of the modern lay State, independent of the Church, which seeks and finds in itself, in its own complex life, all the elements of its historical personality. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2187

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the ‘integral State’ formula explicitly: State proper + civil society, unified.
• XREF: Echoes the nation-building and imagined-community strand of the reading list — the state manufacturing its own historical personality is the same operation as inventing a national people.