Politics mediates between elite and popular philosophy without eliminating hierarchy.

Evidence

The relation between common sense and the upper level of philosophy is assured by “politics”, just as it is politics that assures the relationship between the Catholicism of the intellectuals and that of the simple. There are, however, fundamental differences between the two cases. That the Church has to face up to a problem of the “simple” means precisely that there has been a split in the community of the faithful. This split cannot be healed by raising the simple to the level of the intellectuals (the Church does not even envisage such a task, which is both ideologically and economically beyond its present capacities), but only by imposing an iron discipline on the intellectuals so that they do not exceed certain limits of differentiation and so render the split catastrophic and irreparable. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1193

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the key Gramscian move: ‘politics’ as the assurance of the common sense- philosophy relation — core scaffolding for hegemony theory.
• XREF: Connects forward into Islamophobia readings on how elite discourse and popular prejudice are bridged — ‘politics’ as the mechanism making elite Orientalism circulate as popular common sense. — connects to: The public can be won to progressive politics despite imperial power structures. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 762
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Gramsci says intellectuals must be disciplined downward toward the simple, not the simple raised upward — what does this imply for how theorists of Islamophobia should position themselves?