A party can function as ideological glue binding rival factions into one bloc
Evidence
The party as general ideology, superior to the various more immediate groupings. In reality the liberal party in Italy after 1876 was characterised by the way in which it presented itself to the country as a number of national and regional fractions and groups ‘in open order’. All of the following were fractions of political liberalism: the liberal Catholicism of the Popular Party; nationalism (Croce was a contributor to Politica , the journal of A. Rocco and F. Coppola); the monarchist unions; the Republican Party; a great part of socialism; the democratic radicals: the conservatives; Sonnino and Salandra; Giolitti, Orlando, Nitti and Co. Croce was the theorist of what all these groups, grouplets, camarillos and mafias had in common; the head of a central propaganda office which benefited all these groups and which they all made use of; the national leader of the cultural movements which arose to renovate the old political forms. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2137
Categorization
- DEFINE: Gramsci’s concept of the ‘party as general ideology’ — a party whose substance is shared worldview rather than organization, fusing fractions, camarillos, and mafias.
- XREF: Directly parallels Gramsci’s later claim that hegemony is exercised through a ‘general staff’ of organic intellectuals; reader’s Islamophobia module will need this to read ‘moderate Muslim’ spokesmen as ideological unifiers. — connects to: A party can function as a general ideology superintending scattered rival groups