Cultural unity among an elite cannot substitute for political unity of the masses.

Evidence

The Action Party was steeped in the traditional, rhetoric of Italian literature. It confused the cultural unity which existed in the peninsula—confined, however, to a very thin stratum of the population, and polluted by the Vatican’s cosmopolitanism—with the political and territorial unity of the great popular masses, who were foreign to that cultural tradition and who, even supposing that they knew of its existence, couldn’t care less about it. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 439

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes cultural unity (elite, thin stratum) from political-territorial unity of the popular masses — a core conceptual distinction.
• XREF: Connects to Anderson’s imagined community and the gap between elite national culture and mass populations — and to the Islamophobia toolkit’s concern with who gets to constitute ‘the nation’.