Intellectual gatherings concentrate influence and steer lower-rank intellectuals by caste spirit.

Evidence

The Scholars’ congresses which were repeatedly organised in the period of the early Risorgimento had a double effect: 1. they regrouped the intellectuals of the highest grade, concentrating them and multiplying their influence; 2. they obtained a more rapid concentration and a more decisive orientation of the intellectuals of the lower grades, who normally tend to follow the university professors and great scholars, through spirit of caste. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 546

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘spirit of caste’ mechanism prefigures how elite opinion-makers steer broader intellectual classes - useful frame for how orientalist knowledge production was concentrated in specific institutions. — connects to: Genius requires belonging to a privileged caste that treats the universe as its own. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1951