Elite cultural movements fail to penetrate society unless they win collective popular faith
Evidence
The movement of the Renaissance remained an aristocratic movement and one of elite circles, and even in Italy, which was both mother and nurse to the movement, it did not escape from courtly circles, it did not penetrate to the people or become custom and ‘prejudice’, in other words collective persuasion and faith. The Reformation, on the other hand, did indeed possess this efficacity of popular penetration, but it paid for it with a retarding of its intrinsic development, with the slow and often interrupted maturation of its vital germ. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1399
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Gramsci defines ‘prejudice’ here as collective persuasion and faith — a terminological gloss worth keeping.
- XREF: This distinction between elite culture and popular penetration feeds directly into Gramsci’s hegemony theory, which the Islamophobia readings will build on.
Related
- A national-popular bloc requires religious and intellectual cohesion between elite and masses (similarity 0.81)
- Religion can bind intellectuals and masses only when it originates from the people (similarity 0.79)
- Politics mediates between elite and popular philosophy without eliminating hierarchy. (similarity 0.78)