Severe ideological rifts cannot be cured by pure force, only rearranged

Evidence

The problem is the following: can a rift between popular masses and ruling ideologies as serious as that which emerged after the war be “cured” by the simple exercise of force, preventing the new ideologies from imposing themselves? Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this way, necessarily be resolved in favour of a restoration of the old? Given the character of the ideologies, that can be ruled out—yet not in an absolute sense. Meanwhile physical depression will lead in the long run to a widespread scepticism, and a new “arrangement” will be found—in which, for example, Catholicism will even more become simply Jesuitism, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1022

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘interregnum’ concept — the crisis between an old order that has died and a new one struggling to be born — a core Gramsci tool.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding work: the interregnum as a failed-hegemony crisis will be assumed by later Soviet/colonial-theory readings. Also echoes Zamyatin’s ‘We’ in tracking how crisis reshapes ideology.