Bourgeois Italian intellectuals fail to apply their talent due to national conditions

Evidence

The figure of Mario Missiroli (b. 1886), historian, journalist and editor, appears to have exercised a peculiar fascination on Gramsci and references to him abound throughout the Quaderni . In a sense Gramsci sees him as the type-figure of the bourgeois Italian intellectual, prevented by a natural facility and superficiality and by the general conditions of Italian intellectual life from any consistent application of his considerable talent, and a willing victim, despite his brilliance, of intellectual and political fashions. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2631

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Introduces Gramsci’s ‘type-figure of the bourgeois Italian intellectual’ as a diagnostic category — useful for the toolkit.
• XREF: Foreshadows Gramsci’s broader theory of organic vs. traditional intellectuals developed elsewhere in the Prison Notebooks and central to later hegemony readings.

Related

• Gramsci’s project centers on forging working-class organic intellectuals (similarity 0.78)
• Organic versus traditional intellectuals is the key axis for analysis (similarity 0.78)