passive revolution
수동 혁명
A concept developed by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks: a transformation of political and institutional structures from above, without strong social processes, carried out by ruling classes for their own self-preservation. He used it chiefly to characterise the Italian Risorgimento of the 19th century in contrast with the active revolution of the French bourgeoisie.
In depth
The phrase was first used by the Neapolitan liberal Vincenzo Cuoco to describe the lack of popular participation and the foreign origins of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799. Gramsci argued that a social group lacking the strength to establish hegemony chooses a path on which its demands are satisfied "by small doses, legally, in a reformist manner", preserving the political and economic positions of the old ruling class. This avoided the popular masses going through a political experience such as France had in the years of Jacobinism. Italian unification was the model case, a modernisation on behalf of the elites that did not disrupt the social arrangements of power.
Gramsci also applied the concept to fascism and to the American Fordist factory system of the 1920s and 1930s. It is often summed up by the line from Lampedusa's novel The Leopard, "Everything must change so that everything can remain the same", and has since served as a frame for other transitions to capitalist modernity, such as China's reforms under Deng Xiaoping.