The Social Role of Organic Intellectual: Four Amendments to Gramsci

Based on a study of the social role of intellectuals in the Middle East, this paper explores evidence that suggest that the role of intellectuals in the public sphere can be analyzed with the aid of four important revisions to Gramsci’s old outline of the notion of the “organic intellectual.” First, while the organic intellectual may be a product of a social group, that figure may also be understood as a producer of such a group. Second, organic intellectual activity seems to be most effective when it is intertwined with the intellectual demands of complex everyday life, rather than with any specific ideological program. Third, the organic intellectual tends to have a nuanced connection to “high culture,” which such an intellectual tends to regards as a vehicle for one’s own social program, rather than as its own fetish. And fourth, the effectiveness of the organic intellectual can be measured in the extent to which the intellectual transforms the audience’s reality even as he or she claims to preserve it. At the end, the paper suggests that organic intellectuals ought to be seen in a more comprehensive way than in terms of standing in for a specific group. It also suggests that their social role is enhanced through a particular balancing of the dialectics of innovation and rootedness, a dialectic that the organic intellectual is more equipped to handle than any other.