ABSTRACT
The next appearance of “common sense” in Notebook 1 occurs in a note entitled “Types of periodicals” where it carries the pejorative connotation indicated in (b) above. Gramsci’s study of “types of periodicals” in the notebooks is important because, among other things, it explores the terrain of the organization of hegemony and thus examines the conscious efforts to disseminate an ideology, that is “the educational-formative work that a homogenous cultural center performs” (Q1 §43: 34). It seems that in writing this, Gramsci was also thinking, albeit in coded terms, about the efforts that a communist party should undertake. He cautions against the “‘enlightenment’ error” of thinking that “a well propagated, ‘clear idea’ enters diverse center consciousnesses with the same ‘organizing’ effects of widespread clarity.” He then adds:
The ability of the professional intellectual skillfully to combine induction and deduction, to generalize, to infer, to transport from one sphere to another a criterion of discrimination, adapting it to new conditions etc., is a “specialty”; it is not endowed by “common sense.” Therefore, the premise of an “organic diffusion from a homogeneous center of a homogeneous way of thinking and acting” is not sufficient.
