Selections from the prison notebooks

When one distinguishes between intellectuals and non intellectuals, one is referring in reality only to the immediate social function of the professional category of the intellectuals, that is, one has in mind the direction in which their specific professional activity is weighted, whether towards intellectual elaboration or towards muscular-nervous effort. But even the relationship between efforts of intellectual-cerebral elaboration and muscular-nervous effort is not always the same, so there are varying degrees of specific intellectual activity. Therefore journalists, who claim to be men of letters, philosophers, artists, also regard themselves as 'true' intellectuals. The intellectuals are the dominant group's 'deputies' exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. The function of organizing social hegemony and state domination certainly gives rise to a particular division of labour and therefore to a whole hierarchy of qualifications in some of which there is not apparent attribution of directive or organisational functions.