Elite cultural unity does not equal mass political unity

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. A comparison may be made between the Jacobins and the Action Party. The Jacobins strove with determination to ensure a bond between town and country, and they succeeded triumphantly. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 439

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds directly into Orientalism-adjacent and hegemony readings on the gap between elite and subaltern consciousness that later Islamophobia theory assumes. — connects to: Constituting the people politically need not preclude pluralism within that association — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 242; Elite reform conferences excluded genuine heterodox economic schools — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 17; Political unity is constructed, not natural, and must overcome inherent faction — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 146
• DEFINE: Gramsci’s core distinction between cultural/territorial unity prefigures the famous ‘national-popular’ and passive revolution concepts developed elsewhere in the Notebooks.