A ruling class needs its own intellectuals to exercise hegemony alongside coercion

Evidence

Benedetto Croce, for example, is a kind of lay pope and an extremely efficient instrument of hegemony— even if at times he may find himself in disagreement with one government or another, etc.). This conception of the function of intellectuals, I believe, throws light on the reason, or one of the reasons, for the fall of the mediaeval communes, i.e. of the rule of an economic class which did not prove able to create its own category of intellectuals and thus exercise a hegemony as well as a dictatorship. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1869

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the mechanism by which a class that cannot produce organic intellectuals fails to achieve full state power — key to the toolkit’s account of how domination requires ideational leadership.
• XREF: connects to: Genius requires belonging to a privileged caste that treats the universe as its own. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1951; Ruling-class anti-intellectualism masks inherited stupidity as populism; A ruling class lacking organic intellectuals cannot sustain hegemony — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1869 (+2 more)