Political ideas must be translated to local conditions to move real movements

Evidence

The politician, however, must be an effective man of action, working on the present. Ferrari did not see that an intermediary link was missing between the Italian and French situations, and that it was precisely this link which had to be welded fast for it to be possible to pass on to the next. Ferrari was incapable of “translating” what was French into something Italian, and hence his very “acuteness” became an element of confusion, stimulated new sects and little schools, but did not impinge on the real movement. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 445

Categorization

• XREF: Translation of abstract frameworks into local idioms reappears throughout Gramsci and in later postcolonial readings of how imported theory lands in other national contexts.
• DEFINE: Gramsci here models a prototype of what later theory would call ‘translation’ of political categories across national situations.