Intellectual creativity needs freedom from fixed disciplinary limits

Evidence

These developments pose many problems, the most important of which can be subsumed in the form and the quality of the relations between the various intellectually qualified strata; that is, the importance and the function which the creative contribution of superior groups must and can have in connection with the organic capacity of the intellectually subordinate strata to discuss and develop new critical concepts. It is a question, in other words, of fixing the limits of freedom of discussion and propaganda, a freedom which should not be conceived of in the administrative and police sense, but in the sense of a self-limitation which the leaders impose on their own activity, or, more strictly, in the sense of fixing the direction of cultural policy. In other words—who is to fix the “rights of knowledge” and the limits of the pursuit of knowledge? And can these rights and limits indeed be fixed? It seems necessary to leave the task of researching after new truths and better, more coherent, clearer formulations of the truths themselves to the free initiative of individual specialists, even though they may continually question the very principles that seem most essential. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1228

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s broader intellectuals/hegemony framework the reader is building toward Islamophobia studies; the question of who sets ‘rights of knowledge’ foreshadows Foucault’s power-knowledge.