9
to employ state authority is to avoid pushing the minorities to the edge of desperation and
oblige them to entertain the recourse to physical force, as Tocqueville and Madison have
warned.
8
The best way to win the general consent of those over whom the government
rules, as Gramsci elaborated, is to develop an ideology to weave together the interests of
the ruling elites and the subordinate followers.
9
Political entrepreneurs endeavor to set up
a coherent set of values or common social experiences, tantamount to a new cultural
framework, which attempts to transcend the boundary lines of different groups and
classes as “the whole moral and intellectual condition of a people.”
10
Once the
movement gains ground in social space and achieves political legitimacy, it will continue
to guide the direction and growth of civil society and to stay hegemonic in any civic
realm to ensure the perpetual defeat of countermoves.
11
At this stage, without the
extensive necessity of sophisticated reasoning and coercion, political entrepreneurs could
banish those “impious” and “unsociable” non-believers in the new belief system from
serious political function within the society.
12
Visions of Political Entrepreneurs
The reciprocal relationship between political entrepreneur and followers is an
interactive process of “questioning” followed by “answering,” each alternating with the
other. In an action-reaction move, a vision is proposed, the knowledge is built, and a
purposive intellectual framework is laid out subject to historical conjectures and readings
of the surrounding environment in order to extract supporters’ response and to have a sea
change in cultural discourse and political awareness.
13
Convention