Gramsci links unconscious common sense to active ideologies that can organize masses.

Evidence

Culturalism’s strengths can almost be derived from the weaknesses of the structuralist position already noted, and from the latter’s strategic absences and silences. It has insisted, correctly, on the affirmative moment of the development of conscious struggle and organization as a necessary element in the analysis of history, ideology, and consciousness: against its persistent downgrading in the structuralist paradigm. Here, again, it is largely Gramsci who has provided us with a set of more refined terms through which to link the largely “unconscious” and given cultural categories of “common sense” with the formation of more active and organic ideologies, which have the capacity to intervene in the ground of common sense and popular traditions and, through such interventions, to organize masses of men and women. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 202

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Explains Gramsci’s mechanism connecting common sense to organic ideology via intervention.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony notion and Hall’s later work on Thatcherism.

Related

• Adopting Gramsci let Hall say things Marxism could not before (similarity 0.91)
• Gramscian ideology links unconscious common sense to conscious mass organization. (similarity 0.90)
• Popular common sense is sedimented class struggle that can be actively reworked (similarity 0.83)
• Gramsci’s hegemony concept rejects economic reductionism and reframes power non-coercively. (similarity 0.82)
• Organic intellectuals must both advance theory and transmit it beyond their class. (similarity 0.82)
• Gramsci designed hegemony as a bulwark against economic reductionism. (similarity 0.81)
• Gramsci’s hegemony concept treats power as non-coercive and culture-based, not class-direct (similarity 0.81)
• Ideological factors lag behind economic ones and require conscious political struggle (similarity 0.81)
• Gramsci’s concept enables a regional theory of superstructural spheres. (similarity 0.81)
• Common sense is a historical construct with changing ideological contents. (similarity 0.80)
• Ideology must be conceived as a terrain of struggle, not just functional cement (similarity 0.80)
• Gramsci’s contribution is to complexify Marxist theory, not to supply general social science. (similarity 0.80)
• Organic ideologies organize masses while arbitrary ones only produce individual movements (similarity 0.80)
• Gramsci treats culture as the terrain where hegemony is won and contested (similarity 0.80)
• Ideologies do not spread spontaneously but require organized struggle and politics. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Ideologies take effect by working along the grooves of existing popular attitudes. #corroborates (0.75)
• Common sense is a key route to hegemonic power in democracies #expands (0.60)
• Gramsci’s state concept explains how capitalism became a whole way of social life #expands (0.50)