ABSTRACT
The intellectual and artistic glories of the Italian Renaissance attract tourists to museums, lure scholars to libraries, inspire novels. Yet Renaissance culture remains strangely opaque. Most agree that the situation is more complicated: that ideas are generated within social frameworks, and that intellectual activity is active and helps to move history. Antonio Gramsci — philosopher, journalist, linguist, cofounder of the Italian Communist Party, recently “discovered” and now much in vogue—assigns a unique and crucial role to intellectuals in the process of social change. The concept fundamental to Gramsci's theory of intellectual activity and social process is the distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals. Organic intellectuals are the members of each social group who, whatever their profession or economic role, create the ideas which rationalize and justify the interests of their own social group and its claim to dominance.
