Ideas become durable only when they penetrate the masses as collective belief

Evidence

The movement of the Renaissance remained an aristocratic movement and one of elite circles, and even in Italy, which was both mother and nurse to the movement, it did not escape from courtly circles, it did not penetrate to the people or become custom and ‘prejudice’, in other words collective persuasion and faith. The Reformation, on the other hand, did indeed possess this efficacity of popular penetration, but it paid for it with a retarding of its intrinsic development, with the slow and often interrupted maturation of its vital germ. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1399

Categorization

• XREF: Frames the toolkit term ‘collective persuasion and faith’ as the popular base Gramsci’s hegemony/ideology work assumes. — connects to: Ideas gain force only when paired with practical execution and political will — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 422
• DEFINE: Gramsci glosses ‘prejudice’ positively as ‘collective persuasion and faith’ — an inversion of the ordinary negative sense.
• ADDENDUM: Gramsci’s tradeoff between popular reach and cultural depth reads as the scaffold for how inherited worldviews become ‘common sense’ that later Islamophobia readings critique.