7 Nov 2023 2:36 pm
What Gramsci noticed is as true today as it was in his time, even if the actual circumstances have changed—namely, that modern civilization is very fragile and so are the forms of freedom that come with it. In Gramsci’s time, the impoverishment of civil society prepared the ground for fascism. In our time, civil society in the developed countries appears to be relatively safe, and it would be demagogic (and ahistorical) to suggest that fascism of the same kind that flourished in the 1930s might return.