Mass parties transform popular feeling from mechanical force into conscious, critical co-participation.

Evidence

With the extension of mass parties and their organic coalescence with the intimate (economic-productive) life of the masses themselves, the process whereby popular feeling is standardised ceases to be mechanical and casual (that is produced by the conditioning of environmental factors and the like) and becomes conscious and critical. Knowledge and a judgment of the importance of this feeling on the part of the leaders is no longer the product of hunches backed up by the identification of statistical laws, which leaders then translate into ideas and words-as-force. (This is the rational and intellectual way and is all too often fallacious.) Rather it is acquired by the collective organism through “active and conscious co-participation”, through “compassionality”, through experience of immediate particulars, through a system which one could call “living philology”. In this way a close link is formed between great mass, party and leading group; and the whole complex, thus articulated, can move together as “collective-man”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1531

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘living philology’ as Gramsci’s term for leader knowledge acquired through active co-participation with masses rather than statistical abstraction.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior notes on Hall: social phenomena as overdetermined conjunctural ensembles, not single-cause or statistical outcomes. — connects to: Mass parties transform popular feeling from passive conditioning into conscious, critical knowledge.; Real mass politics unites subaltern spontaneity with conscious leadership; Political parties prove that organized permanent passion is operationally possible (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Mass parties transform popular feeling from passive conditioning into conscious, critical knowledge. #corroborates (0.95)
• Real mass politics unites subaltern spontaneity with conscious leadership #corroborates (0.85)
• Parties historically convert diffuse rage into organized political capital through formalization #epitomizes (0.80) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 176
• Political parties prove that organized permanent passion is operationally possible #expands (0.75)