Gramscian Hegemony

Gramsci's insight that durable rule rests on winning hearts and minds in civil society, making it possible to study culture as a terrain of political struggle.

Definition

Hegemony is the leadership a dominant group exercises by securing the active consent of subordinate groups through cultural, moral, and intellectual means in civil society, so that its interests appear as the general interest and common sense.

Scope

This topic covers Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony and its associated ideas of civil society, common sense, the war of position, and counter-hegemony, together with their later development in cultural studies and radical democratic theory. It does not cover Williams's cultural materialism or the Birmingham School in detail.

Core questions

• Why do the dominated often consent to their own domination?
• How is hegemony built and maintained across civil society?
• What is a counter-hegemonic strategy?

Key theories

Hegemony and consent

Gramsci distinguished domination by coercion from hegemony, the moral and intellectual leadership through which a class wins consent and naturalises its rule as common sense.

Articulation and radical democracy

Laclau and Mouffe reworked hegemony as the contingent articulation of disparate demands, detaching it from a fixed class subject and recasting it for radical democratic politics.

History

Imprisoned by Mussolini, Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony in notebooks written between 1929 and 1935, published and translated decades later. Stuart Hall imported it into cultural studies to analyse race, Thatcherism, and popular consent, while Laclau and Mouffe generalised it into a post-Marxist theory of articulation in 1985.

Debates

Class-anchored versus discursive hegemony

Classical readings tie hegemony to class leadership, whereas Laclau and Mouffe's discursive reworking severs it from any privileged class subject, prompting debate about its political implications.

Key figures

• Antonio Gramsci
• Stuart Hall
• Ernesto Laclau
• Chantal Mouffe

Seminal works

• gramsci1971
• laclaumouffe1985
• hall1986

Frequently asked questions

Is hegemony just propaganda?

No. It is broader and subtler: not deliberate manipulation but the way a worldview becomes embedded in everyday common sense, institutions, and consent.