Elite intellectuals must subordinate individual flexibility to the collective doctrine’s demands

Evidence

This second necessity, if satisfied, is what really modifies the “ideological panorama” of the age. But these elites cannot be formed or developed without a hierarchy of authority and intellectual competence growing up within them. The culmination of this process can be a great individual philosopher. But he must be capable of re-living concretely the demands of the massive ideological community and of understanding that this cannot have the flexibility of movement proper to an individual brain, and must succeed in giving formal elaboration to the collective doctrine in the most relevant fashion, and the one most suited to the modes of thought of a collective thinker. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1225

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the relation between organic intellectuals and the mass community they articulate — key Gramscian vocabulary.