A class born fully equipped with organic intellectuals can subordinate old classes without compromise

Evidence

France offers the example of an accomplished form of harmonious development of the energies of the nation and of the intellectual categories in particular. When in 1789 a new social grouping makes its political appearance on the historical stage, it is already completely equipped for all its social functions and can therefore struggle for total dominion of the nation. It does not have to make any essential compromises with the old classes but instead can subordinate them to its own ends. The first intellectual cells of the new type are born along with their first economic counterparts. … This massive intellectual construction explains the function of culture in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was a function of international and cosmopolitan outward radiation and of imperialistic and hegemonic expansion in an organic fashion, very different therefore from the Italian experience, which was founded on scattered personal migration and did not react on the national base to potentiate it but on the contrary contributed to rendering the constitution of a solid national base impossible. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 304

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘organic intellectuals’ and contrasts national intellectual formation integral to class emergence against scattered migration.
• XREF: Sets up the classic French-vs-Italian intellectual development contrast that later Gramsci readings in an Islamophobia-modernity toolkit will reuse for nation/hegemony arguments.