The state must act as an educator, not merely a punisher of danger

Evidence

The conception of law will have to be freed from every residue of transcendentalism and from every absolute; in practice, from every moralistic fanaticism. However, it seems to me that one cannot start from the point of view that the State does not “punish” (if this term is reduced to its human significance), but only struggles against social “dangerousness”. In reality, the State must be conceived of as an “educator”, in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type or level of civilisation- Because one is acting essentially on economic forces, reorganising and developing the apparatus of economic production, creating a new structure, the conclusion must not be drawn that superstructural factors should be left to themselves, to develop spontaneously, to a haphazard and sporadic germination. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 926

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Gramsci’s expanded, educative conception of the state’s law-making role — a core scaffold for later theory about how power creates subjects rather than just represses them.
• XREF: Connects forward to the Islamophobia toolkit’s hegemony/common-sense thread: the state as educator creating a ‘new type of civilisation’ is exactly how Althusser’s ISA and later culturalist accounts of racialized selfhood will be framed.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the state as educator’ shows how modern statecraft frames its own coercion as pedagogy, useful for reading integration programs and counter-extremism policy.