When an established order is losing its hold and no successor can yet take its place, the interval breeds extreme and pathological politics.
Gramsci wrote it in the Prison Notebooks around 1930, describing a crisis of authority in which ruling groups had lost consent but kept power by coercion, so that the old could not continue and the new could not yet arrive. The passage is frequently quoted to describe periods of political fragmentation.
In practice
- A party system that has lost its old loyalties without forming new ones throws up a string of short-lived movements and extreme candidates.
- A company whose founder is leaving and whose successor is undecided sees feuds, rumours and resignations.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is that institutions hold extremes in check through loyalty and routine, and when loyalty lapses before a replacement forms, the checks fail. Another is uncertainty: when the future order is unknown, people bet on radical options.
- In its favour
- A widely used frame in political history, consistent with research linking falling institutional trust to support for anti-system parties.
- Against it
- Descriptive rather than predictive: it does not say which symptoms appear or how long the interval lasts, and an interregnum is usually recognisable only afterwards.
- Standing
- Compare Tocqueville's paradox.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works