QuestionsWhat is a just society?All men are intellectuals
What is a just society?Equality

All men are intellectuals

Antonio Gramsci 1891 · 1937Power rests on cultural hegemony, not just force.
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What it claims

All men are intellectuals, but not all have in society the function of intellectuals.

Why

No work is purely physical, and outside their job everyone holds a view of the world and a conscious moral conduct.

In short

"All men are intellectuals" is an argument by Antonio Gramsci (Prison Notebooks, Q 12, §1 and §3 (around 1932)) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: equality). Its claim: All men are intellectuals, but not all have in society the function of intellectuals. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Prison Notebooks, Q 12, §1 and §3 (around 1932)
Valid with an implicit premise

People sort the world into "intellectuals" (writers, teachers, scholars) on one side and those who work with their hands on the other. Gramsci says this split is false. All work calls for thought and everyone has a view of the world. What sets intellectuals apart is the function society gives them, not a special nature. Hence his political task: each social group must bring forth its own intellectuals, by raising the thought that already exists in everyone. We file the argument under the question of the just society, on the side of equality, for want of a better place: it is about the place of knowledge in society, and this filing remains approximate.

P1There is no purely physical work: even the most mechanical and degraded demands a minimum of technical qualification, hence a minimum of creative intellectual activity.
P2Outside his profession, everyone carries out some intellectual activity: in his own way he is a "philosopher", an artist, a man of taste, he shares a conception of the world and follows a conscious line of moral conduct.
P3History has formed specialised categories to exercise the function of the intellectual.
P4 · implicit premiseIf everyone thinks, but only some groups have been given the function of intellectual, then "intellectual" names a social function and not a capacity: all are intellectuals by capacity, only some by function.
Therefore all men are intellectuals, but not all have in society the function of intellectuals.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where everyone thinks a little, specialised categories exist, but "intellectual" refers only to those categories: then the conclusion "all are intellectuals" is false.
Valid with P4. The first three premises say that everyone thinks and that society has specialised some people. P4 draws from this that the word "intellectual" has two senses, one for all, one for a few. The whole debate is about this point: is it still the same word, or does the sense change along the way?
Analogy. Everyone sometimes runs for a bus, but only some are professional runners. Gramsci says: everyone thinks, only some make it their function. The critic answers: if you put the bus and the marathon in the same basket, the word is no longer useful.

Objections

2

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Plato, Republic, VI (Socrates) 375 BC · attacks premise 2

Socrates argues that the crowd does not recognise the beautiful in itself, only the many beautiful things. He concludes that it is impossible for the people to be philosophers. So not everyone thinks at the same level: pursuing wisdom is reserved for rare natures.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Gramsci in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Gramsci does not answer Plato in our texts. But the disagreement is clear. For him, every man is a "philosopher" in his own way, in language, common sense and popular religion (Q 11, §12), and the task is to make this philosophy critical. For Plato, to philosophise is to grasp the Forms, which the crowd cannot do. The disagreement is partly verbal (what does "philosopher" mean?), partly real (can the many be raised up?).
T
The too-broad-word objection attacks the conclusion

If everyone is an intellectual, the word no longer means anything. Someone who fries an egg is not thereby a cook. Calling all men "intellectuals" is a striking phrase, not a thesis.

Gramsci replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Gramsci Gramsci foresees the objection in the same passage
Because anyone may, at some moment, fry two eggs or sew up a tear in a jacket, we shall not say on that account that all are cooks and tailors.
The debate goes on (our summary) Gramsci's criterion is social function, not occasional activity: he looks for it in "the whole system of relations" in which activities are found (Q 12, §1). One difference with cooking remains: he does not say all are cooks, but he does say all are intellectuals. His reason is that no human activity is without some intervention of the intellect: one cannot separate homo faber from homo sapiens (Q 12, §3). But he gives no measurable threshold between an ordinary use of thought and an intellectual's function.