Bourgeois rule transforms the State into an educator assimilating all classes

Evidence

The revolution which the bourgeois class has brought into the conception of law, and hence into the function of the State, consists especially in the will to conform (hence ethicity of the law and of the State). The previous ruling classes were essentially conservative in the sense that they did not tend to construct an organic passage from the other classes into their own, i.e. to enlarge their class sphere “technically” and ideologically: their conception was that of a closed caste. The bourgeois class poses itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level. The entire function of the State has been transformed; the State has become an “educator”, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 967

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes closed-caste aristocratic rule from the bourgeois State’s absorbing, educative mission — core scaffolding for how modern power works through conformity.
• XREF: Links forward to how the later Islamophobia readings will frame the modern State’s assimilative project and who counts as unassimilable. — connects to: Horace Mann saw schooling as the sole counter to capitalist class domination — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 333