Intellectual clarity only becomes political force when it turns into shared popular passion

Evidence

In many recent works on the Risorgimento, it has been “revealed” that there existed individuals who saw everything clearly (recall Piero Gobetti’s emphasis on Ornato’s 150 significance). But these “revelations” are self-destroying, precisely because they are revelations; they demonstrate that what was involved was nothing more than personal reflections which today represent a form of “hindsight”. In fact, they never effected a juncture with actual reality, never became a general and operative national-popular consciousness. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 572

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramscian hegemony and the Islamophobia field’s interest in how elite or intellectual discourse does or does not become ‘common sense’ among populations. — connects to: Issues become political only when enough public attention first lands on them — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 446