Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) gave much thought to the question of the role of intellectuals in society.

Famously, he stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. He distinguished between a intellectuals who see themselves as a class apart from society, and the thinkers that every class produces from its own ranks "organically. Such "organic" intellectuals articulate the feelings and experiences which the masses do not express for themselves. Gramscis ideas about an education correspond to the notions of critical literacy practiced in later decades by Paulo Freire.