Italy’s cosmopolitan intellectuals both caused and reflected its political fragmentation.
Evidence
As far as Italy is concerned the central fact is precisely the international or cosmopolitan function of its intellectuals, which is both cause and effect of the state of disintegration in which the peninsula remained from the fall of the Roman Empire up to 1870. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 302
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The cosmopolitan-intellectuals-as-both-cause-and-effect of weak statehood echoes in later debates about diasporic and colonial intellectual classes serving empires rather than nations.
Related
- A political party can absorb intellectuals by replicating the state’s services (similarity 0.82)
- A national-popular bloc requires religious and intellectual cohesion between elite and masses (similarity 0.80)
- Italian ‘internationalism’ was actually medieval Catholic cosmopolitanism without national consciousness (similarity 0.80)
- Religion can bind intellectuals and masses only when it originates from the people (similarity 0.80)
- The state lacks a unitary worldview, scattering intellectuals across strata (similarity 0.80)
- A party can wield hegemony by satisfying intellectuals’ needs like a state. (similarity 0.78)
- Moderates won intellectuals by offering a dignified national philosophy (similarity 0.78)