Intellectual clarity only becomes politically effective as disseminated passion

Evidence

It is necessary to avoid posing the problem in “intellectualistic” rather than historico-political terms. Naturally it is not disputed that intellectual “clairvoyance” of the terms of the struggle is indispensable. But this clairvoyance is a political value only in as much as it becomes disseminated passion, and in as much as it is the premiss for a strong will. 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. Out of the Action Party and the Moderates, which represented the real “subjective forces” of the Risorgimento? Without a shadow of doubt it was the Moderates, precisely because they were also aware of the role of the Action Party: thanks to this awareness, their “subjectivity” was of a superior and more decisive quality. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 572

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s core distinction: raw intellectual clairvoyance versus ‘national-popular consciousness’ — a key mechanism for how ideas become hegemonic.
• XREF: Connects to the later Islamophobia readings on how intellectual critique fails without popular dissemination; also to Gramsci’s hegemony concept. — connects to: Political knowledge alone cannot enable visible political engagement — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1189