Philosophy is a concrete social activity engaging everyone, not elite abstraction

Evidence

This section of Gramsci’s philosophical notebooks is in two parts. … The premiss behind this approach is that philosophy is not just the abstract cogitation of a few professional intellectuals but a concrete social activity in which, implicitly, all men are engaged. … In this way ideas are not only corrected and made adequate to the situation but become, in the phrase of Marx frequently quoted by Gramsci, “a material force”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1163

Categorization

• XREF: This is the kernel of Gramsci’s notion that all people are philosophers, foundational for how subaltern classes come to hold ideology — connects forward to hegemony readings in Islamophobia scholarship.
• DEFINE: Establishes philosophy-as-social-activity, the premiss that frames everything else in the notebook.