Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MAKING NATIONS 57
Despite the growing popularity of religious elites in the agrarian world, and
their devotion to the human flock, they took good care of the working tool that
enabled them to maintain their authority. Reading and writing, as well as the sacred
tongue, were preserved by the "book people," and there was neither the will nor
the means to propagate these practices throughout the populace. Anderson puts
it well: "the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin,
mediated between earth and heaven." 49 Not only did the religious elites know the
sacred languages and, in some cases, the language of the administration, but they
were also familiar with the peasant dialects. This mediating function of bilingual
or trilingual intellectuals gave them a power they would not readily give up.
But the process of modernization—the decline in the power of the church,
the shrinking of the religious communities, the disappearance of the patronprotégé
relations that had sustained the medieval producers of culture, and the
formation of a market economy in which almost everything might be bought
and sold—inevitably contributed to the transmutation of all cultural morphologies,
leading to major alterations in the place and status of the intellectuals.
Gramsci repeatedly emphasized the links between these new literati and
the rising bourgeoisie. These intellectuals, whom he described as "organic,"
were not large capitalists but came mainly from the urban and rural middle
strata. Some became skilled experts who administered production, while
others followed the free professions or became public officials.
At the top of the pyramid Gramsci placed the "creators in the various
fields of knowledge: philosophy, art, etc.," 50 but he used the term "intellectual"
broadly, including in effect the politicians and bureaucrats—that is, most of
the modern states organizers and directors. In fact, although he does not say
so, for him the new state apparatus as an intellectual collective replaced the
rational "Prince," the famous, idealized autocrat depicted by Niccolo Machiavelli.
But unlike that mythological figure, the modern prince is not a single
and absolute ruler, but rather a corps of intellectuals who control the apparatus
of the nation-state. This body does not express its own interests but is
supposed to represent the totality of the nation, for which purpose it produces
a universal discourse claiming to serve all its members. In bourgeois society,
Gramsci argued, the political-intellectual prince is a dependent partner of
the property-owning classes that control production. Only when the party of
workers comes to power—a new intellectual prince—will the universal dimension
be realized in society's upper political spheres. 51
49 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15-16.
50 Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, 125.
51 Actually Gramsci applied the term "prince" to a political organism seeking to seize