The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political

Behavior
Hegemony

Contributors: Heidi Rimke

Edited by: Fathali M. Moghaddam
Book Title: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior
Chapter Title: "Hegemony"
Pub. Date: 2017
Access Date: June 5, 2017
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks,
Print ISBN: 9781483391168
Online ISBN: 9781483391144
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483391144.n164
Print pages: 353-354
2017 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of
the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
SAGE SAGE Reference
Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.

The concept of hegemony comes predominantly from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci (18891937), who was also a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy. As a
university student, he became involved in the Italian labor movement and was arrested and
incarcerated in 1926 for challenging Mussolinis fascist control of Italy. Gramsci spent the next
decade in prison, where his health steadily deteriorated. He died shortly after his release in
1937.

Gramsci struggled over the conflict between fascism and communism in Italy in the 1920s.
Although he saw that his country was in a position to create a left-wing revolution, instead, the
fascists conquered popular opinion by engaging with the everyday life of the working classes.
In a period of great social, political, and economic crisis, the Italian fascists were able to tap
into and exploit popular sentiments and frustrations to their benefit.

Despite bouts of poor health while in prison, Gramsci filled more than 35 thick notebooks with
analyses that focused on the social relationship between consciousness, institutions, and
culture to answer one fundamental question: Why (and how) do the dominated consent to
their domination? To answer this question, Gramsci relied on the concept of hegemonia, the
active process of mobilizing popular support or spontaneous consent for the ruling classes
through the moral and intellectual leadership that reflects and serves the interests of the
ruling classes. The notion of hegemony thus emphasizes the ways in which large masses of
people willingly agree to the claims that the powerful are entitled to wealth, power, and
status. Advanced liberal societies are ruled not by state force and repression, but rather by
continually winning the consent of the dominated.

Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gramsci took the view that capitalist societies are built
upon fundamental inequalities (class domination) where the bourgeoisie (ruling class)
dominate and exploit the proletariat (working class). The latter sell their labor power to the
former in the form of wage slavery. However, the bourgeoisie not only own and control the
capitalist means of production but also influence and control the state and its repressive
apparatuses (law, police, prisons, army) to quell uprisings and to ensure and enforce
conformism, if and when necessary. Significantly, however, social control and conformity occur
primarily through the intellectual and moral leadership of traditional intellectuals (priests,
professors, physicians, lawyers, etc.), who are in a position to influence and persuade the
masses.

The hegemonic apparatuses of society include churches, schools, media, religion, art, and
even the names of streets and buildings. Individuals are socialized to accept social institutions
such as education, religion, universities, and popular culture as givens where the vast majority
of people, most of the time, are not in open resistance and revolt to capitalist society, thus
giving the appearance of a consensual relationship between the citizen and the state in
capitalism. The dominant classes, by virtue of their social positions of power, use mass media,
communications, and popular culture to construct other groups into target markets and
consumers, thus highlighting the role of culture in securing the capitalist society as a whole.

For Gramsci, the state plays an educative and expansive role whereby the dominant ideology
becomes lived discourses and routinizations encompassing multiple social institutions and
everyday norms. The state is conceived at two levels: political society and civil society, the
latter referring to an ensemble of social relations commonly called private, whereas the former
refers to the level where coercive power is located. The dominant classes seek to contain,
repress, and incorporate all human conduct within the terms and limits set by, and

Page 2 of 3 The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior

SAGE SAGE Reference
Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.

disseminated through, traditional intellectuals, who promote common sense (traditional

authority) versus good sense (critical counteranalysis).

Counterhegemony refers to the anticapitalist strategies to challenge class society through a

variety of revolutionary tactics, practices, and coalitions needed to challenge the status quo.
The goal is to overthrow the capitalist system by expansion, eventually overtaking all areas of
civil society. Subaltern groups, trade unions, and revolutionary parties must displace ruling-
class hegemony and become hegemonic themselves, before assuming state power. Rather
than a bloody revolution contingent upon state force and coercion, he advocated a gradual
democratization of all social institutions to include the involvement of all people in all aspects
of their lives and communities based on a socialist rather than bourgeois ideology.

Working-class movements can fight to win back the hearts and minds of the subaltern
groups. Counterhegemonic strategies thus promote uprising and revolution, but alliances and
coalitions must be made if an effective opposition is to be mounted and carried out.
Countering the dominant ideology with a working-class philosophy signaled the need for
popular workers education to encourage the development of intellectuals from the working
class. Gramsci argued that the mobilization of the revolution hinged upon the working classs
will to exploit the social, political, and economic conditions to their benefit.

Originally applied to Marxist studies on class inequality and capitalism, the concept of
hegemony has recently been applied to various kinds of social domination to analyze
historically mobile and dynamic power structures and hierarchical relations between different
social groups. Western hegemony, for example, can be seen as a serious problem in many
areas: major armed conflicts, nuclear proliferation, climate change disasters, global financial
instability, and failing food production and distribution to the most vulnerable societies. For
those interested in questions of power, cultural practices, social inequality, and social
injustice, the ongoing relevance of Gramscis scholarship can be seen in Marxism, anarchist
theory, cultural studies, sociology, criminology, media studies, political science, sociolegal
studies, and postcolonial research.

Heidi Rimke
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483391144.n164
10.4135/9781483391144.n164
Further Readings
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York, NY: International
Publishers.
Le Blanc, P. (2009). Gramsci, Antonio (18911937). In I. Ness (Ed.), The international
encyclopedia of revolution and protest: 1500 to present (8 vols., pp. 14221427). Cambridge,
England: Blackwell.

Page 3 of 3 The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior