Incorporation without determination: Iran and the passive revolution problem

Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, the selective incorporation of oppositional forces by ruling elites, carries two functions. As a middle-range account of absorption, the term proved durable across settings, but as a macro-historical diagnosis it fractured, yielding opposing conclusions about whether incorporation impedes or advances capitalism. Rather than applying the concept to Iran, I treat Iranian historiographical disputes as a limiting case. Three turning points, the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911), the oil crisis (1951–1953), and the 1979 revolution, generated opposed developmental readings. The persistence of this split, even where Gramscian vocabulary is absent, shows that the problem arises in inferring developmental claims from political sequences. Drawing on Arrighi and Piselli’s analysis of southern Italy, I argue that incorporation’s economic consequences depend on a polity’s position within wider relations, not on the political process alone, and that the concept’s value lies in tracing how absorption proceeds rather than predicting what it produces.