Antonio Gramsci's categories for the study of the history of intellectuals and their apparatus of hegemony in the fabrication of ideas

Abstract

In this article, our objective is to approach the research method developed by Antonio Gramsci in “Cadernos do Cárcere” about the history of intellectuals and their role in the “hegemonic apparatus” (magazines/newspapers and political parties). In this path of investigation, we see and discuss how their respective apparatus are the “weapons” of intelligentsia combat to create, regulate, transform and maintain certain conceptions of the world. In this way, we realize that the Gramscian concept of “organic intellectual” helps in the analysis not only of the intellectuals of progressive thought (at the service of the dominated class), but also of the authoritarian/conservative timbre (of the work of the ruling class), both of which compromise, organically, its activity.