Writing in the 1920s, Gramsci maintained that such crises “were situations of conflict between representatives and represented,” and that when the “ruling class has lost its consensus,” the populace feels that the existing political and public institutions no longer provide a vision of national leadership, but merely dominate and coerce, serving their own narrow self-interest. In such a situation, both politics and the economy take on the aspect of a zero-sum squabble between competing factions and cliques.
