Genuine political knowledge requires sentimental connection between intellectuals and the people

Evidence

The popular element “feels” but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element “knows” but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel. The two extremes are therefore pedantry and philistinism on the one hand and blind passion and sectarianism on the other. Not that the pedant cannot be impassioned; far from it. Impassioned pedantry is every bit as ridiculous and dangerous as the wildest sectarianism and demagogy. The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned (not only for knowledge in itself but also for the object of knowledge): in other words that the intellectual can be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated—i.e. knowledge. One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. In the absence of such a nexus the relations between the intellectual and the people-nation are, or are reduced to, relationships of a purely bureaucratic and formal order; the intellectuals become a caste, or a priesthood (so-called organic centralism). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1497

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Establishes Gramsci’s core distinction between ‘feeling’ and ‘knowing’ as linked faculties required for politics-history, against the ‘pedant’ model of pure knowledge.
• XREF: Directly underpins the Islamophobia field’s critique of expert/analyst discourse that claims analytical neutrality about Muslim communities without felt engagement.
• DEEPTHINKING: This ‘pedantry’ vs ‘passion’ formulation is a dense, paradigm-shifting claim about the nature and limits of intellectual labor that resists one-sentence summary.

Related

• Intellectuals who remain detached from popular passions become a caste, not leaders (similarity 0.91)
• Intellectuals who detach from popular feeling become a bureaucratic caste, not true intellectuals (similarity 0.88)
• Intellectual clarity only becomes politically effective as disseminated passion (similarity 0.80)
• Political intuition means connecting disparate facts and directing passions toward action (similarity 0.79)
• Politics mediates between elite and popular philosophy without eliminating hierarchy. (similarity 0.78)
• Intellectual clairvoyance only becomes political when it becomes disseminated passion (similarity 0.78)