Political intuition means connecting disparate facts and directing passions toward action

Evidence

Divergence, in the meantime, between political intuition and aesthetic, lyric or artistic intuition; only by metaphor does one speak of the art of politics. Political intuition is not expressed through the artist, but through the “leader”; and “intuition” must be understood to mean not “knowledge of men”, but swiftness in connecting seemingly disparate facts, and in conceiving the means adequate to particular ends—thus discovering the interests involved, and arousing the passions of men and directing them towards a particular action. The “expression” of the “leader” is his “action” (in a positive or a negative sense, of launching or preventing a particular action, which is consistent or inconsistent with the end which one wishes to attain). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 942

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci redefines ‘political intuition’ against aesthetic intuition: it is not knowledge of men but the leader’s swiftness in connecting facts and conceiving means to ends.
• XREF: This distinction between leader’s ‘expression’ as action and the artist’s expression as aesthetic output connects to the concept of hegemony and the organic intellectual Gramsci develops elsewhere; also useful background for how leadership operates in Islamophobia discourse as elite-directed rather than merely ideological.