Political parties are the laboratories where world-conceptions become practical ethics

Evidence

One should stress the importance and significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their historical “laboratory”. The parties recruit individuals out of the working mass, and the selection is made on practical and theoretical criteria at the same time. The relation between theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For this reason one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral and totalitarian intelligentsias 408 and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place. It is clear from this that the parties should be formed by individual memberships and not on the pattern of the British Labour Party, because, if it is a question of providing an organic leadership for the entire economically active mass, this leadership should not follow old schemas but should innovate. But innovation cannot come from the mass, at least at the beginning, except through the mediation of an elite for whom the conception implicit in human activity has already become to a certain degree a coherent and systematic ever-present awareness and a precise and decisive will. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1203

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the party as the historical ‘laboratory’ where theory and practice unify into an ethos.
• XREF: The mechanism of intellectual mediation from mass to elite echoes in Gramsci’s fuller hegemony/organic-intellectual theory needed later for Islamophobia’s analysis of leadership strata.