Interrogating the Interregnum

Abstract

Of the various theoretical concepts utilised to understand our current global conjuncture, one, Antonio Gramsci's interregnum, has increasingly breached both academic and popular consciousness. The evocative power of Gramsci's century-old analysis whereby the dying out of an existing order bears witness to a variety of morbid symptoms seems to speak to our own era in which systemic morbidities are overt and omnipotent. Yet despite a flourishing literature base, no systematic review of the interregnum as a concept has been undertaken. This paper acts to fill that lacuna, offering a review of the key themes which emerge from an interrogation of the interregnum. In doing so, the paper allows the concept to advance from its previously under-analysed status and permits for a fuller consideration of the benefits and limitations of utilising the interregnal concept as a methodological tool to assist in understanding the current global conjuncture.

A decade-and-a-half on from the Global Financial Crash (GFC), crisis continues to define global and national politics and political economy. The legitimacy of the Liberal International Order (LIO) has been undermined and key elements of its material and ideological architecture have been challenged. Core aspects of this dominant truth regime, from rationalism itself, through globalisation, unrestricted free trade, constitutional democracy and universal human rights have been queried, paused and reversed. Key global economic and governing institutions have proven progressively ineffective (Gisclon & Keyman, 2025) and are increasingly by-passed by powerful states. The politico-ideological contest, infamously pronounced as dead (Fukuyama, 1992) and considered as hermetically sealed throughout the post-1989 triumph of neoliberalism, has returned front-and-centre to political life. In short, liberal democratic capitalism, once seen as the universalist and ultimate mode of organising the twin pillars of representation and accumulation, is no longer seen as such.

The long series of events marking out this period have been well-rehearsed: the GFC and subsequent austerity; the euro-crisis; Trump 1.0; Brexit; the COVID-19 pandemic; the Russia–Ukraine war; Trump 2.0; the rise of so-called populists from outside of the Anglosphere. Each have given rise to – and are representative of – a feeling of widespread social disorientation or morbid symptoms (Sassoon, 2020; Worth, 2019). Consequently, citizens across multiple polities have been seeking new political alternatives, and new ways of comprehending their worlds. In turn, those political actors associated with the old order have been substantively challenged (Schäfer & Zürn, 2024).

Various theoretical concepts and nomenclature have been utilised to understand these phenomena. For Eatwell and Goodwin (2017), we are living through a period of fundamental political transformation in which electorates are de-aligning from traditional political actors, leaving polities mired in an environment of national populisms, whilst for Lawrence et al. (2024) and Tooze (2024), it is in fact a global polycrisis in which we are ensconced. Inglis (2024) argues that late capitalism is the most appropriate leitmotif as we move towards the ending of one social mode, whilst Böller and Werner (2021) maintain that we are going through a period of hegemonic transition. The ‘end of the end of history’ has even been pronounced to delineate the contemporary from the post-1989 world (Hochuli et al., 2021).

In the efforts to define our historical era, these contributions attempt to illuminate the present with reference both to the past and ‘the lineaments of the likely immediate future, while offering a narrative as to how and why transitions between the periods occur’ (Inglis, 2024, p. 521). The polycrisis lens captures a certain intuition that the crises of the current conjuncture are intertwined and accumulative (Lawrence et al., 2024). This perspective certainly allows a diversification of analytical focal points away, for example, from either a purely materialist or idealist perspective. Yet while the polycrisis analysis assumes a relational perspective, it has a clear obscurantist undertone and subtly promotes a vision of technocratic remedies to the crises (Sial, 2023). Furthermore, it stands accused of being too loose, offering no temporal directionality or causal primacy, is based on overly complex and circular intellectual maps, and thus leaves political actors with ‘absolutely no idea of where to act or intervene to achieve lasting and positive change’ (Murphy, 2024, p. 43). This obscurantist aspect of the polycrisis concept stands in contrast to interregnal analyses, which generally offer a clearer agentic focus. As for late capitalism, the term has been invoked for almost a century now, and as a consequence, its applicability in acting as a relevant conceptual tool for the post-2008 world is questionable. It remains an ambiguous term, mostly working ‘as a theory of turning points that never turn – or worse’ (Robin, 2025). The concept is thus inappropriate for defining the post-2008 world, as it is too temporally and conceptually unspecific. The focus on hegemonic transitions comes closest to representing an alternative understanding which has come into both academic and popular usage: the interregnum.

Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's most well-known quote, ‘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’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 275), the interregnum has been popularised as a way of understanding the post-GFC order. The concepts invocators span a fairly broad disciplinary and ideological spectrum, including Martin Wolf, Joseph Stiglitz, Emmanuel Macron, through geographers, sociologists, political scientists and political economists. The interregnum has been used to interpret global (Streeck, 2024), hemispheric (Nilsen, 2025), national (Cimini, 2024) and regional levels (Hassan, 2025; Ó Rálaigh, 2024).

In fact, the use of the interregnal quote has become so widespread – or, as Stahl notes, ‘oft-cited but seldom analyzed’ (2019, p. 334) – that it runs the risk of falling into the category of political cliche with little substantive content. Yet despite the increase in the deployment of the concept, surprisingly little work has focused on bringing these various interpretations together. Theophanidis’s (2016) review pre-dated the most substantial contemporary works and suffers as a result. Stahl's (2019) paper – itself 6 years old – offered the most comprehensive dissection and reassembling of the concept, yet this adds to, rather than reviews the extant literature base. This paper acts to fill that lacuna, reviewing the growing literature base dedicated to the concept of interregnum. The paper is structured along a thematic style, offering a comparative and critical analysis of the interregnal scholarship. The paper follows a simple, yet strict criteria, whereby only literature which specifically references the interregnal concept are included. The paper first foregrounds Gramsci's original use of the term, before turning to contemporary interpretations. Within this, a number of themes are identified, and their differing interpretations are compared and contrasted with one another. These include a review of morbid symptoms arising from the contemporary interregnum, the temporal-political trajectory of same, an exploration of purported pathways out of the interregnum, and a final section considering certain unresolved questions arising from interregnal analyses.

Gramsci and the Interregnum

This section makes no attempt to offer a detailed analysis of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Instead, it will isolate, foreground and briefly analyse the interregnum within the collected text. What is striking when considering Gramsci's original invocation of the interregnum is the almost ephemeral manner in which it was used – Gramsci only used the term twice. Yet the fleeting nature of the reference to interregnum should not be mistaken for lack of commitment. Instead, it would be more appropriate to identify the interregnal dilemma as motivating much of his wider analysis of national and global affairs (Martin, 2015) and his consistent focus on analysing periods of transition between historical blocs and hegemonies (Fattor, 2024). That the term is afforded such cursory attention is worthy of some investigation, however, and raises two immediate and related questions. Can interregnum be categorised as a Gramscian concept? Second, and as a partial response, was Gramsci simply using the term synonymously with certain of his other key concepts, such as crisis of hegemony or conjunctural or organic crisis?

Beginning with the latter, a return to The Prison Notebooks offers some illumination. Interregnum is referenced in the ‘Wave of Materialism’ and ‘Crisis of Authority’ passage; however, in an earlier passage entitled ‘Observations on Certain Aspects of the Structure of Political Parties in Periods of Organic Crisis’, many of the same concepts are deployed. In the latter, Gramsci writes of crises arising in which a cleavage emerges between traditional parties and their popular or social class bases. These may be precipitated by the failure of political elites to successfully navigate a major political undertaking and/or because a critical mass of the populace has moved from political passivity to political activity (Gramsci, 1971). In other words, these parties are no longer recognised by their base as embodying their interests. The consequent conflict between represented and representative weakens those parties and ultimately leads to a ‘“crisis of authority” this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 220).

Such crises can precipitate two outcomes. An intra-elite re-distribution of personnel and parties, or ‘the passage of the troops of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 221). Alternatively, a situation develops whereby neither the traditional hegemon nor the new, aspirant hegemon can mobilise the requisite forces or support for victory, leaving the space open for the ‘charismatic leader’ or Caesar figure to emerge. The conceptual overlap with the ‘Wave of Materialism’ and ‘Crisis of Authority’ passage is now revealed. The particular stanza is worth quoting at length:

That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a ‘wave of materialism’ is related to what is called the ‘crisis of authority’. If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. 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. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 275)

This reading offers a convincing argument that Gramsci was in fact using the terms interregnum and organic crisis interchangeably. A further passage within the Prison Notebooks entitled ‘Analysis of Situations – Relations of Force’ also shows overlap with the main interregnal reference. In this section, Gramsci focuses on one of his other key self-imposed analytical tasks – drawing a methodological distinction between ‘occasional’ conjunctural crises and ‘relatively permanent’ organic crises. The former are passing, relatively minor, scandalous or sensationalist affairs. The latter are substantive and systemic, ‘sometimes lasting for decades’ and revealing ‘incurable structural contradictions’ (Gramsci, 1971). The old order's efforts to contain these contradictions ‘form the terrain of the “conjunctural”, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 178).

The notion that Gramsci may have been using the interregnal concept interchangeably with organic crisis gains credibility when we understand the Prison Notebooks for what they are: a series of brief entries and notes for future elaboration on a variety of subjects. And a growing body of contemporary interpretations argues that Gramsci was conflating one with the other. Pass (2024) identifies organic crisis, crisis of hegemony and interregnum as ‘connected terms’, each co-sharing political, economic and social morbid symptoms. Taggart (2022) also conflates organic crises with interregna, identifying the former as situations presenting a ‘conflux of crises in all dimensions of social relations’ and where existing hegemonic understandings and actors are called into question, arguing that Gramsci used the term interregnum to describe the resultant condition. Similarly, Davies (2021, 2023) has consistently argued that Gramsci used the terms synonymously. For him, the original Gramscian invocation of interregnum represents the organic crisis of a state or supra-state regime and are ‘profound periods of disequilibrium’. Thus, interregna emerge from organic crises (Fattor, 2024).

Disrupting this synonymous line of argumentation somewhat, Stahl (2019) offers a clearer delineation of the two, proposing that interregna are the political form of a broader organic political economic crisis. Yet one does not inexorably lead to the other, and this is where questions of political failing and political legitimacy enter the analytical equation, for it is only when ‘a crisis for the previously hegemonic regime becomes so severe that the prevailing methods of excluding alternatives break down’ (Stahl, 2019, p. 343) can an interregnum be considered as commencing. I have outlined elsewhere (Ó Rálaigh, 2024) my own understanding of the interregnal concept, placing it in a tripartite relational framework. Using the North of Ireland as a case study, I situate that particular polity within a pre-existing and long-term organic crisis, whereby the mechanisms of its own reproduction slowly create the conditions for its potential collapse. Within this, two conjunctural crises have erupted, one in 1968 and one in 2016. These were of such a severity as to shatter the existing politico-ideological hegemony, force a re-evaluation of existing modes of thought and thus precipitate a descent into interregnum.

Important to note within these understandings of crisis is their relation to one another. The broader organic crisis and the periodic conjunctural crises which they nurture, can be managed and contradictions suffocated or ameliorated through passive revolution (Davies, 2024). Conjunctural crises do not inevitably provoke a widespread questioning of previously held beliefs: the level of resources which can be mobilised within conjunctural crises determines not just the outcome of an interregnal period, but whether one is opened up at all. This aligns with Martin's understanding of Gramsci's analysis whereby within an interregnum, a particular conjunctural crisis opens out onto a wider organic crisis of class power, completing a ‘narrative of crisis’ (Martin, 2015, p. 44). Yet even once an interregnum begins, this does not equate to an ultimate culmination of the organic crisis of a particular political economic/socio-political order. It merely creates the conditions upon which the battle for hegemony occurs. As such and returning to the first of the rhetorical questions posed at the beginning of this section, yes, interregnum can be considered a Gramscian concept given its ineluctable relationship with his other crisis concepts.

Many of these analyses suggest something of a cleavage between what we might call political interregna and political economic interregna. The former is focused on representation at both intra-elite and elite-mass levels, whilst the latter is focused on the exhaustion (or not) of a mode of accumulation. This would suggest that Gramsci was facing in two directions when utilising the concept – at times facing the political, at other times, facing the political economic. Such an interpretation would in fact align with his focus on the dialectic between base (political economic) and superstructure (political) and civil society and the state. Contemporary interpretations of the interregnum certainly straddle these two domains, re-enforcing this argument, and it is to these that the article now turns.

Contemporary definitions of the interregnum

The contemporary interregnal literature base began to develop in the aftermath of the 2008 GFC. Sociologist Tester (2009) was the first to proclaim our epoch as interregnal; however, it was globalisation and not the GFC which was the causal factor. Tester's analysis sits outside the realm of most analyses in that political processes, actors and institutions are not used as any kind of reference point. Instead, he draws on the dialectic between Freud's theory of reality and pleasure, arguing that ‘globalisation has meant the collapse of the reality principle of the Modern Era’ (Tester, 2009, p. 25), releasing an unrestrained and completely dominant pleasure principle. It is these which manifest in the form of morbid symptoms: the advent of extreme sports and risky sexual behaviours; the pandemic of clinical depression; obsessive behaviours; collecting (of material goods); and a capitalist-driven infantilisation of populaces. Alienation is the centripetal pathology of each morbidity. Tester's analysis offers an apposite reading of collective psychologies, and his various morbid symptoms share commonalities with later interregnal commentary (Streeck, 2017a, 2017b; Theophanidis, 2016), yet it diverges substantially in that it fails to make any connection with the world of shifting political power.

Conversely, fellow sociologist Baumann (2012) does locate his analysis within the political – and the political economic – arguing that the old order, based on a ‘triune’ principle of territory, state, and nation acting as the key to democracy and sovereignty, is dying out. The latter is tied – at most – only loosely to either of the triune elements, while ‘the allegedly unbreakable marriage of power and politics is … ending in separation with a prospect of divorce’ (2012, p. 50). The once ‘solid modern’ social order, based upon this triumvirate, is now falling away with no new hegemon to lead the globalised world of ‘liquid modernity’ (Davis, 2011).

Continuing the focus on modernism itself, Bordoni (2016) argues that it is modernism itself which is dying out and passing through a phase of interregnum. This has been due to modernism's failure to meet its own promises, namely, equality between men, a sustainable domination of nature, and relentless and unbreakable progress. Our current period of interregnum is united by particular characteristics:

…rules that are the absence of rules, the predominance of the strongest, the questioning of democratic achievements, the primacy of an unbridled economy that overwhelms everything…. (2016, p. 9)

Such phenomena are representative of the divorce of power and politics wherein the legitimacy of the latter is lost. Collective and individual responses to the interregnum are summarised as: nostalgia for an old order; waiting for the crisis to pass; selfishness centred on individual survival as opposed to communitarianism.

A further point of Bordoni's is that the key difference between the present and previous interregna is the former’s global extension, facilitated via institutional and technological deep-reach. While there is a certain merit in this argument, it remains open to significant challenge due to the far-reaching consequences of the inter-war and 1970s interregna. Both were world-defining in their shifts: from a liberal world of great powers to a social democratic world of multiple states and from this to the neoliberal globalism of the subsequent three decades. Where Bordoni is correct in his interregnal differentiation is where he refers to the obvious absence of a viable new order similar to the aforementioned models.

In the same year of publication, the first attempt at on overall review of the interregnum as a stand-alone concept was undertaken by Theophanidis (2016). He interprets Gramsci's understanding of an interregnum as one in which, auctoritas (authority) has vanished while potestas (power) remains, therefore ‘power exerts itself without the support of legitimacy…’ (Theophanidis, 2016, p. 111). The remainder of his contribution reviews the – at time of publication – threadbare literature base consisting of Tester (2009), Baumann (2012) and a third contribution from Etienne Balibar. The review's only original contribution is to ask whether the interregnum could act as a unique opportunity to jettison traditional power categories, with the ‘inter’ becoming the new ‘regnum’, thereby birthing ‘an alternative form of political synthesis’ (Theophanidis, 2016, p. 119).

From 2016, the year of the twin shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump's first electoral triumph, there has been a sharp uptick in the volume of literature referring to the post-GFC period as interregnal. Streeck (2017b) has been one of the more consistent proponents of the interregnal concept, offering several related analyses of the concept. Drawing on David Lockwood's work, regarding the relationship between system integration (macro) and social integration (micro), Streeck (2017a, 2017b) describes a society in interregnum as defined by:

a breakdown of system integration at the macro level, depriving individuals at the micro level of institutional structuring and collective support … a de-institutionalised or an under-institutionalised society, one in which expectations can only be stabilised for a short time by local improvisation, and which for the very reason is essentially ungovernable. (Streeck, 2017a, p. 14)

There is an epoch-defining tone within Streeck's proposal and a clear resonance with Bordoni's broad understanding of interregnum as a crisis of modernity itself.

This sense of profound disequilibrium is identified by Streeck in a slightly different interpretation of Gramsci's famous quote, whereby he translates the final section as ‘…an interregnum in which pathological phenomena of the most diverse sort come into existence….’ These pathological phenomena congeal, creating societies without the requisite institutional apparatuses to regulate and protect their citizens against the rapaciousness of the market. The use of pathological phenomena, as opposed to the ‘monsters’ of Zizek or the more commonly used morbid symptoms, allows for a synthesis between the systemic and social integration dislocations of the present interregnum and invokes a vision of a pathological process whereby the morbidities are spread throughout social institutions, social groups and down to the level of individuals. Consequently, ‘the accustomed chains of cause and effect are no longer in force, and unexpected, dangerous and grotesquely abnormal events may occur at any moment’ (Streeck, 2017b, p. 14).

Gerke (2019), analysing from a Williamesque cultural Marxist perspective, interprets Gramsci's interregnum as ‘the severe failure of the dominant order to appear natural and eternal, much less good or justified’ (Gerke, 2019, p. 42). The window of questioning ‘common sense’ has been opened and consequently the immovability, the permanence of the social order is questioned, and with material breakdown, its contingent nature is exposed. Interregna are thus a ‘liminal space between hegemonies’ (Gerke, 2019, p. 42). Therefore, a chief characteristic of the interregnum is its uncertainty (Sassoon, 2020).

These authors are not alone in their attempt to impress the systemic importance of interregnal periods. Writing in the context of global governance, Taggart (2022) conceives of interregna as ‘periods where hegemonic consensus is undermined, the “old” is unable to subsume challenges, and there is no clear alternative alliance or project that can assume the mantle of leadership’ (Taggart, 2022, p. 908). Continuing the discussion regarding the interregnum's impact on global governance, Pegram and Acuto (2015) argue that this manifests in gridlocked multilateral forums, while for Lapavitsas and Aguila (2024), what defines the twenty-first-century interregnum from previous interregna is that the contestants for hegemony have emerged not from the core of capitalism but from its periphery. Fattor (2024), drawing on the work of Robert Cox, argues that an interregnum has commenced when a dominant state is no longer willing or able to provide ideological global leadership, manages global material production, trade and money, and manages the architecture of global governance. Critically, this must be accompanied by the absence of a new hegemon and/or historical bloc with its own prevailing sets of ideas, material capacities and institutions.

The interface between the political economic and what we might refer to as the purely political – the forum of representation – is an area of critical interest in the majority of these studies. Rune Møller Stahl (2019) offers the most detailed analysis to date of the broader concept and the relation between the political economic and the political, moving to a more clearly defined and empirically grounded analytical concept.

Stahl (2019) offers a definition of an interregnum as:

…a period of uncertainty, confusion, and disagreement among the dominant elite, in which former ideologies, although they still have institutional power, lose traction and become disoriented … The orthodoxies of former times are still dominant in the bureaucracies and apparatuses of the state, but the traditional institutions are no longer as effective as they once were. In periods of interregnum, several ideologically conflicting hegemonic projects struggle for potential hegemony, each with its own solution to the crisis of the previous system. (Stahl, 2019, p. 336)

Interregna are thus the political form of an organic crisis of a mode of regulation of political economy. This contribution is notable for Stahl's extension of ideological breakdown beyond a simplistic elite-mass dialectic to one which understands the critical element of intra-elite ideology dissensus. Within our contemporary interregnum, elites themselves no longer agree on the appropriate political economic ideas to progress capital accumulation. Therefore, no set of political economic ideas can be operationalised which successfully present elite interests as universal interests. Consequently, politico-ideological breakdown occurs within and between elites and the masses. Thus, a semi-ordered system remains operational amongst the collapsing a priori hegemony, within which political competitors with different strategies articulate and seek to gain sufficient backing to develop a new material and politico-ideological historical bloc.

Several themes are evident within understandings of the contemporary interregnum. First amongst these is the ongoing separation of power and politics – of accumulation and representation. Second, we can identify a clear relation between institutional breakdown, hegemonic deterioration and societal and individual dislocation. Finally, these interpretations allow some insight into the relation between the global and the national. They also provide a neat segue into the morbid symptoms of the interregnum.

Cause and effect: or the origins and morbid symptoms of the interregnum

There is an obvious and inescapable overlap between cause and effect when applying the interregnal concept. What are the causes of a descent into interregnum and what are its morbid symptoms? Where does causation end and effect manifest? Much of the literature deals with both implicitly and explicitly, with a heavy weighting towards the latter.

As to causes, we have seen earlier that the grouping of sociologists including Tester, Baumann and Bordoni have argued that the contemporary interregnum pre-dates the GFC. Knight (2022) adds to this argument, claiming that the entire post-Cold War period can be characterised as interregnal, arguing a delineation between the pre-1989 era and subsequent years of disorder, flux and disequilibrium. In some of his initial interregnal commentary, Streeck (2016) makes reference to a post-capitalist interregnum developing from the 1970s onwards. Similarly, Davies describes how the interregnum was foreshadowed by ‘the incipient exhaustion of neoliberalism as an accumulation regime and hegemony project, and to the intractable turbulence associated with its inability to prevent new crises or produce new fixes’ (Davies, 2024, p. 4). Where these analyses are useful is in considering the interface between the latent and the manifest, in examining the causal factors operating within the architecture of globalisation and specifically the political implications of the de-nationalisation of political power.

However, the aforementioned processes in themselves did not manifest in the popular revolt against liberalism and the collapsing authority of political elites in the post-GFC era (Pabst, 2018). For this, a failure to navigate a ‘major political undertaking’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 450) was required, and within the contemporary literature base, there is near universal agreement that the GFC precipitated the global and national descents into interregnum (Babic, 2020; Davies, 2021; Delanty, 2018; Fraser, 2019). The GFC shattered one of the key ideological pillars of neoliberalism: the TINA (There Is No Alternative) consensus. Yet this was only half of the story. Paradoxically, at the same time as TINA was exposed as a fallacy, its Janus-faced qualities revealed themselves, for unlike previous interregna, there was no alternative new order prepared and ready to assume the hegemonic mantle (Streeck, 2017b). The defeat of neoliberalism's political opponents and the upward trend of decision-making to elite and non-representative fora during the three decades of neoliberal hegemony (Streeck, 2024) had laid the groundwork for the manifestation of morbid symptoms.

And it is these morbid symptoms which animates interregnal scholars. Of these, a plethora are identified at the level of global international relations,specifically the undermining of multilateralism (Babic, 2020; Taggart, 2022) and the vast gaps in wealth and income and chronic debt distress at both global and national levels (Fattor, 2024; Grabel, 2022). The interregnum has transformed the triumvirate of globalisation, financialisation and neoliberalism into a zombie status of their former selves in which they remain influential but stultified (Seyd, 2025). Yet the majority of the literature focuses on the arena of representation: the political world. Offering a fairly broad brushstroke analysis, Boyle and Kobayashi (2024) identify ‘culture wars, political pusillanimity, revanchist neoconservative eschatology, illiberal liberalism, illiberal populism, and post-truth politics’ (Boyle & Kobayashi, 2024, p. 76) as morbid political symptoms. Each of these in turn speaks to the original Gramscian recognition of a detachment from and loss of faith in existing ideologies and the emergence of alternatives, which is indicative of an interregnum. And from the GFC onwards, significant sections of populations have come to see ruling elites as having a chronic inability to find resolutions to the morbid symptoms of the interregnum, incapable of providing leadership, and thus lost their status of legitimacy (Foster & el-Ojeili, 2023). Fraser (2019) offers a neat summary whereby what has happened has been a breakdown:

…of the authority of the established political classes and parties. It is as if masses of people throughout the world had stopped believing in the reigning common sense … as if they had lost confidence in the bona fides of the elites and were searching for new ideologies, organizations, and leadership. (Fraser, 2019, p. 8)

It is Stahl (2019) who has most attempted to place a clear empirical framework around these morbid symptoms, developing a framework for ‘operationalizing’ the interregnum. The morbid symptoms of the interregnum fall under a dual crisis of legitimacy across elite–mass and elite–elite levels and are segregated into four categories. The first of these is the absence of a stable ideological consensus amongst the elite, wherein the consensus between the main class and interest groups in society is breaking down. The second is the presence of several competing hegemonic projects, whereby several potential hegemonic projects, political ideas and political vehicles emerge. Third, we witness institutional continuity, yet a continuity in which institutions of the previous hegemonic system are increasingly unable to deliver effective solutions to policy problems. Fourth, there is a realignment of social forces wherein the potential constituent pieces of historical blocs enjoy a renewed fluidity and realignment. Collectively, these offer useful empirical entry points to interregnal scholars. They also align with an earlier analysis by Martin (2015) who identifies four similar morbid symptoms: changes in popular belief; withdrawal of support for various ideologies; the emergence of new alliance, improbable associations and charismatic leaders. Stahl's framework adds significant rigour to the broader, conceptual interpretations of other accounts and should be seen as perhaps the most significant contribution to date to the literature base. Yet certain unanswered questions arise when applying Stahl's framework: must all four criteria be met for a period to be considered as interregnal? How deep must the challenge to existing hegemons be? For example, political hegemons in the Republic of Ireland and Germany have faced very considerable challenges from the Left and Right, respectively, yet have managed to exclude their challengers and maintain political power.

Stahl and Martin's more rigorous and quantifiable definitions of morbid symptoms allow for a neat segue into two of the more observable trends within the post-GFC interregnum: Caesarism and/or populism and ethno-nationalism. Both share significant areas of overlap with one another as alternative modes of legitimation, acting as very obvious public manifestations of fading neoliberal hegemony and the crisis of authority (Antonio, 2024). Donald Trump and the re-emergence of white nationalism and economic protectionism in the USA straddle these two phenomena, as do figures like Boris Johnson and the English nationalism leading to Brexit in Britain. Germany's AfD and Hungary's Fidesz cut across these trends also. And Nilsen (2025) reminds us of the ‘southern interregnum’ directing attention to the examples of Caesarism in the global south, from Erdogan to Bolsonaro, Duterte, Modi and Milei. A critical characteristic of these leaders is their spurning of existing institutions and rules and the degradation of democratic solidarity (Babic, 2020). Fattor (2024), meanwhile, offers a novel interpretation, referring to a digital Caesarism, enthroning the likes of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg in the role typically afforded political Caesars. The relentless advance and reification of the digital revolution of the past two decades has undermined previous hegemony-building capacities, replaced them with novel and dominant form of controlling the means of mental production, and ultimately led to a form of techno-feudalism (Waters, 2020).

The rise of nativism, nationalism and xenophobia is a common theme (Gentili, 2021; Sassoon, 2020; Worth, 2019). Political parties and movements espousing various combinations of all three have witnessed an acceleration in support since 2008, yet at uneven intervals. To the previously referenced list can be added the Law and Justice Party of Poland, the Latvian National Alliance, Jobbik and Magya Gárda in Hungary and others, each of which are representative of a broad disillusionment with the material and socio-cultural conditions of post-communism and liberal democracy (Sassoon, 2020). In contrast to this majority opinion, Jouke Huijzer (2021) argues that the appearance of the collective of novel right-wing political actors are not in themselves morbid symptoms but are in fact an ‘attempted remedy’ for the malfunctioning of the neoliberal order itself. Neoliberal actors recognising the weakness of their position and have co-opted either the ideas or the ideas and some of the actors of the far-right to buffer their own position and build a re-configured neoliberal historical bloc. Yet rather than classify the far-right/neoliberal alliance as a firm historical bloc, Jouke Huijzer (2021) returns us to the significant overlap between Caesarism and ethno-nationalism, arguing that the latter actually constitutes the beginnings of a form of ‘Caesarism’ which has as its intent the restoration of the neoliberal political economic order, restored to its US-dominated (and white, elite male-dominated) origins.

A further problematique in this form of analysis is its ideological blindness. From the Occupy movements, which erupted in the immediate post-GFC years, 15-M and Los Indignados, through Syriza, Sinn Féin, the Corbyn-led Labour Party, La France Insoumise, and others, these too are morbid symptoms of the new-old dialectic of the interregnum. Such an argument is recognised (Jouke Huijzer, 2021; Streeck, 2024) yet remains a minority position, which can at least in part be attributed to the very obvious defeat or retreat of many progressive left alternatives from approximately 2016 onwards.

Temporal-political location

A further theme which arises within the contemporary literature relates to temporality, specifically, the current trajectory and position within the contemporary interregnum and the duration of interregna. Beginning with the former, Hunt and Stanley beg the rhetorical question of whether this is even possible, asking ‘can we ever identify the moment of an “interregnum” ending when we are ourselves living through it’ (2019, p. 486). Yet this does little to advance our analysis, and even a brief review of literature which deals with this question demonstrates the deep analytical challenge which it represents. Bordoni (2016), for example, writing in the critical year of 2016, argued that the present interregnum was nearing its apogee, yet this assessment has proven to be premature. For Streeck (2024) and Babic (2020), the interregnum is no closer to resolution, with both arguing it may not be resolved for decades. Alternatively, Boyle and Kobayashi (2024) argue that we are in the trough of an interregnum.

None of these analyses offer much, and so we might turn to historical examples of previous interregnal periods as comparator. Here, there is a general consensus that the first interregnum of the twentieth century covered the inter-war years and the second covered the 1970s (Chomsky & Polychroniu, 2023; Sassoon, 2020; Stahl, 2019). The most striking characteristic of these two interregnal periods is their marked difference in duration, with one approximately three decades in duration and the second lasting approximately one-third of its predecessor. Such an analysis points to the inappropriateness of analysing interregna through a temporal lens, for they are political matters and can only be considered as concluding upon the establishment of a new hegemony (Stahl, 2019). The continued trend towards political Caesarism and ethno-nationalism, and towards a political economy of nationalist protectionism – accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine war, and Trump 2.0 – has demonstrated a clearer congealing since Stahl's intervention. And on current trends, it would appear that some hybrid of neo-nationalism tagged on to a rather extreme model of exploitation and capital accumulation and wrapped up within a Caesarist/authoritarian political architecture may assume a new hegemonic mantle. Yet there are many more moving pieces in play before we can affirm the construction of a coherent historical bloc. Therefore, hegemony remains unsecured, and the ability to predict an approximate conclusion to the interregnum is nothing more than educated guess work.

Potential pathways out of the interregnum

Discussions relating to the trajectory or duration of the contemporary interregna logically lead to discussions relating to potential exit pathways. These range from the general to the more specific. Taggart (2022) identifies three possible pathways: crisis stabilisation and a restoration of the old order; a second whereby there is a reconstruction of hegemony, which incorporates much while co-opting certain of the arguments from novel challengers; or third, a more fundamental transformation with ‘radically different alliances mobilized around this new consensus’ (2022, p. 909). Chomsky and Polychroniu (2023) are more binary in their assessment, identifying the two pathways emerging from the 1920/30s interregnum as the two potentials of our own moment: social democracy and fascism. This is, of course, where political agency emerges as a key variable, and Gerke (2019) returns us to the centrality of this issue and specifically whether subaltern classes and/or alternative forces have effectively prepared for the interregnal period, both internally and within the wider subaltern body. Yet, as has been argued convincingly by Streeck (2024), the traditional forces of social democracy have been largely neutralised, or at the very least, whilst the forces which currently reflect or contain latent potential to morph into a form of fascism are very much in the ascendent.

It also places front-and-centre the issue of political control of the state. As Stahl (2019) reminds us, the state is the privileged site for a redefinition of the social order during periods of crisis, therefore the particular political actors who occupy state power become central to the retention of a hegemonic consensus or a descent into interregnum. Both political parties and electoral contests, of relatively minor significance during hegemonic periods, become centrally important during interregna. Citing the 1979 British general election, which brought Margaret Thatcher to power and the subsequent neoliberal revolution, and the 1930s US election of the New Deal Democrats as examples of this, Stahl argues these political actors were central to the resolution of the interregna in Britain and the USA.

Yet the limits to the power of political actors are blatant, even for the most powerful of political actors – Donald Trump's retreat from his tariff policy in April 2025 was very obviously linked to shifts in the US treasuries markets. Yet it is this very separation which acted as probably the critical variable in the descent into interregnum and the restoration of power between the two – something which for Baumann, can only be completed at the global level and by global institutions – is just as critical to an exit from it. The focus of Baumann's proposed resolution places him at a diametrically opposite position to Streeck's (2024) more recent articulation of two potential pathways out of the interregnum. Drawing on Polanyi and Keynes, Streeck argues that the key political battle within our post-neoliberal interregnum is one between the pre-existing cosmopolitan neoliberalists and a variety of new populists. The former identify and are manoeuvring towards an upwards-facing break-out from the interregnal impasse to a globally unified political economy and global governance, or Großstaaterei (Megastatism). The latter – in both their Left and Right incantations – seek a downward exit from the impasse towards localised democracy, sovereignty and national control, or Kleinstaaterei (small-statism).

For some, there is no foreseeable exit from the interregnum. In an earlier contribution, Streeck actually identifies a prolonged period of social disintegration and social entropy as most likely over the coming decades. Gentili (2021) suggests that the very political disequilibrium that the interregnum brings forth may be used as a specific form of governance by political elites. This will be operationalised through a deliberate attempt to ignore the possible resolutions to the crisis and use crisis itself as a means of governance. There is some value in such an assertion, particularly given the rise of ‘grand coalitions’ of once-rival centrist parties in Germany, Ireland, Greece and Austria in attempts to ward off the various waves of challenge from the post-GFC left and right.

Questions arising and concluding remarks

A number of questions arise from this new and expanding body of interregnal literature. Before coming to these, an acknowledgement should be made that despite its increasingly widespread invocation, little critique of the interregnal concept exists. Inglis dismisses the concept as bland and one which ‘bypasses difficult analytical–historiographical problems’ (Inglis, 2024, p. 535) yet goes no further than this brief statement. Foroohar (2025) offers a similarly peremptory commentary, arguing that the notion of interregnum is problematic in that it provides no clear guidance for transcending the scenario which it describes. Offering a deeper analysis, Mike Davis (2022) queries the utility of Gramsci's interregnal quote in assuming that a new order will birth, issuing a call instead for a diagnosis of a ‘ruling class brain tumour’, manifest in this groupings ‘inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies’ (Davis, 2022). Tooze (2024) dismisses its relevance to the contemporary landscape due to what he considers its periodizing quality and almost teleological rationale. Yet Tooze's analysis seems to suffer from a critical – and it must be said a basic – misinterpretation on which much of his critique rests. Placing his critique in what he claims is Gramsci's simplistic birth-life-death formulae for social change, Tooze quotes the new ‘will be born’ as opposed to the original ‘cannot be born’, implying a teleology which is clearly absent from the original. His commentary also completely ignores the contemporary interregnal literature base.

Beyond these critiques, the literature base is almost entirely bereft of analyses focusing on polities and existing political hegemons who manage to successfully mediate – or even completely avoid – interregna. The likes of Australia, Canada and New Zealand stand as seemingly obvious Western examples of polities which have avoided legitimation crises. A related question is that of diffusion: how far does the post-2008 interregnum extend? The literature refers to a global interregnum (Knight, 2022), an interregnum of the LIO (Babic, 2020), and the southern hemisphere (Nilsen, 2025), in addition to the growing application of the analysis to individual polities (Cimini, 2024; Gisclon & Keyman, 2025; Ó Rálaigh, 2024). And what of the main rising alternative global hegemon, China, and how it impacts on, and in turn has been impacted by the post-2008 interregnum? Demirel (2024) goes as far as arguing that China's status as a ‘semi-core’ polity (along with Russia) within the world system is in fact a key driver of the global interregnum.

As to questions which interregnal scholars pose themselves, Streeck poses an obvious question arising from the broader analysis: what is it that keeps a semblance of societal cohesion and momentum within the architecture of a collapsing system integration? His response is that social integration at the micro level is the remaining component within structuration, relying as it does on ‘the improvised performances of structurally self-centered, socially disorganised and politically disempowered individuals’ (2017a, p. 41). Particular behaviours are required at the individual level to sustain both the individual agents – via the inculcation of a culture of resilience – and the crumbling structure. Yet he also draws attention to the very real danger of a widespread social entropy, itself reflective of Marx and Engel's (2002) warning that ultimately ‘the common ruin of the contending classes will ensue if a fading order is not superseded’.

When considering the shifting balance of consent and coercion within the interregnum, Clarke (2024) poses the questions: who constitutes about the ‘great masses’ – and their own political consciousness of who they are – of whom Gramsci speaks; and crucially, how we might begin addressing and resolving our ‘morbid symptoms’ and thus bringing the interregnum to a conclusion. Such questioning might lead us to contemplate the actual substantive depth of acclaimed politico-ideological shifts during the contemporary interregnum, especially so given the ephemeral, shallow nature of so much of contemporary political life. Stahl's framework allows for a certain analysis of the depth of ideological change via shifting voting patterns and political alliances, yet the depth of these shifts is very difficult to define in the absence of the type of mass membership organisations of the twentieth century. Related lines of enquiry might include an investigation of alternative forms of political legitimacy during interregna, specifically, the role of celebrities, influencers and other social actors as sources of political ideas. Fattor (2024) touches on this subject very briefly when considering the digital Caesarism, yet further exploration is required.

Finally, does a tension exist between seeing the interregnum as a generalised conceptual apparatus – even an argumentative stance – and seeing the interregnum as a more objective methodological category with clearly defined parameters? Such a divergence is readily apparent within the interregnal literature, represented on the former end by the sociological approach of Bordoni and on the latter end by Stahl's structured, empirical framework. Perhaps the best response to such a tension is to consider the interregnal analysis from both perspectives. Such an approach is a constitutive part of social theorising: whether the subject is capitalism, political agency, feminism, etc., these foci can be used as general conceptual tools to facilitate analysis of a given subject or structured around clear empirical indicators to provide methodological rigour. Considering both approaches, and those situated somewhere in-between, has, of course, been the core objective of this paper.

There is a thread, however, which draws these divergent perspectives together. Common to all analyses is the fracturing of the pre-2008 hegemonic consensus across both the material and the ideological. The fracturing of this hegemonic consensus has been the most overt manifestation of the post-2008 interregnum. Returning to the original reference, one of Gramsci's key self-imposed tasks was to understand the delicate relationship between these categories, the critical role of hegemony in either maintaining or fracturing that relationship, and to develop a mode of analysis which avoided the ‘frequent error in historical analysis … the inability to find the relation between the “permanent” and the “occasional…”’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 178). The review of the interregnal literature base demonstrates a clear consensus: the post-2008 interregnum is a permanent, structural shift in the organisation of global and national political economy and political life, increasingly analogous to the inter-war and the 1970s interregna.

For this reason alone, there is a pressing need to understand the various interregnal analyses more clearly. A second and related reason again returns us to Gramsci and his avoidance of teleology within his discussions of the interregnum. Gramsci interpreted the oscillating between the existing and the novel within the interregnum not as a transitional phase before the crowning of an inevitable alternative and progressive hegemon, but as a space within which the political action of an organised body presents as an opportunity for change (Filippini, 2016). For Gramsci, the failure of the Italian left in the immediate post-WW1 period was ‘a moment of incomplete transition whereby transformations in the economic structure were inhibited by unprepared political forces’ (Martin, 1997, p. 47). The parallels between this experience and the various failures of progressive movements in the post-2008 period are obvious, as is the generalised absence of organised progressive, egalitarian social forces and their formation into a coherent historical bloc capable of establishing a new hegemony. Yet within this rather pessimistic note lies perhaps the greatest benefit of deploying an interregnal analysis to our conjuncture: there are alternatives, the material and ideological landscapes have been opened for contest, and political agency will determine how the interregnum is concluded.