and ideologies the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces. ¹

A difficulty in considering these linked theses is that even such a short passage contains some complex, but distinct, shifts of position. The last sentence would be enough on its own to mark Gramsci out as a clear 'historicist', but this is tricky to assess when it falls at the end of a paragraph in which the now classically 'Gramscian' idea that ideology is a 'terrain of struggle' has been suggested -- a view that sits rather ill with the historicist tendency to think in terms of 'expressive totalities'. Another problem is that frequently Gramsci is not explicit about whether something is or is not to be thought of as an 'organic ideology', hence his discussions of cultural and intellectual struggle are often somewhat ambiguous. (This is not a criticism, but it certainly has a bearing on the fact that Gramsci's work has become such a rich field for different interpretations.) These ambiguities surround even fairly basic questions. It is often assumed, for example, that Gramsci's general discussions of cultural and intellectual phenomena are couched under the rubric of ideology, but this is not exactly or necessarily the case. It is not clear whether Gramsci's illuminating classification of different levels of 'making sense of the world' -- from philosophy to folklore -- should be thought of as a treatment of ideology or not. Gramsci distinguishes, in another famous passage from the Prison Notebooks, between philosophy, religion, common sense and folklore as conceptions of the world with varying (decreasing) degrees of systematicity and coherence. Philosophy involves intellectual order, which religion and common sense do not, 'because they cannot be reduced to unity and coherence even within an individual consciousness, let alone collective consciousness'. Gramsci goes on to say that 'Every philosophical current leaves behind a sedimentation of "common sense": this is the document of its historical effectiveness. . . ."Common sense" is the folklore of philosophy, and is always half-way between folklore properly speaking and the philosophy, science and economics of the specialists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future.' ²

Thus we have a hierarchy of forms, in which philosophies -systematic bodies of thought which can be espoused coherently -- take their place above religion, which is subject to philosophical criticism. 'Common sense' will take many forms, but is a fragmented body of precepts; 'folklore' he describes as 'rigid' popular formulae. Gramsci points out that there may be considerable conflict between these levels, noting that there may be contradictions between the philosophy one

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