Historical acts require a common cultural-social worldview unifying dispersed individual wills

Evidence

From this one can deduce the importance of the “cultural aspect”, even in practical (collective) activity. An historical act can only be performed by “collective man”, and this presupposes the attainment of a “cultural-social” unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular, operating in transitory bursts (in emotional ways) or permanently (where the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated and experienced that it becomes passion. 423 Since this is the way things happen, great importance is assumed by the general question of language, that is, the question of collectively attaining a single cultural “climate”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1251

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Gramscis definition of the cultural-social unity ‘collective man’ requires — dispersed wills welded by a common conception of the world.
• XREF: Connects forward to how a hegemonic Islamophobic discourse could in principle weld dispersed wills toward a single political aim; also links to Benedict Anderson’s imagined community concept the reader is building.