Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political

This chapter explores Antonio Gramsci’s position on the relationship between intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political. Relying on Gramsci’s work and secondary sources, it provides answers to the following questions: Who is an intellectual? What kind of an intellectual plays a role in the politics of social transformation? What is ideology? What is (counter) hegemony? What is the ethico-political? Where is a counter-hegemonic discourse crafted? And how, and in what ways, does an intellectual facilitate the politics of social transformation? It proposes that, for Gramsci, the effectiveness of a counter-hegemonic project depends on the degree to which an existent ideological landscape is dis-articulated from capitalist hegemony and re-articulated in a socialist direction, oppositional spaces facilitate the formation of moral and emotional convictions, and proletarian organic intellectuals and subaltern actors share a reciprocal learning relationship as well as a relationship based on the unity of theory and practice and the unity of reason and emotion.