Conclusion

As mentioned in Chapter 1, in his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci introduced the concept of the interregnum in contemporary politics (1972). Whereas in the Middle Ages the term referred to the period between the death or abdication of a king and the crowning of the next one, for Gramsci the interregnum was related to the period of transition between the old Italy and the new Italy. He famously described it thus: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (1972: 276). We definitely live in an interregnum.