Hegemony

In political philosophy and political science, the concept of hegemony refers to the
historically combined forms of political domination and ideological leadership within a class
society. Between the two World Wars, Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the modern
theory of hegemony and hegemonic apparatuses while incarcerated by the Italian Fascist
government. In his writings about the historicity of hegemonic classes captured in his “Prison
Notebooks,” Gramsci attempted to map the various political strategies used by elites to induct
social groups into their ideological projects. The term apparatus conveyed to the reader the
analysis of historically delineated practices of institutions and collective agencies.
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has since been used extensively to analyze the
interplay between class relations, the form and role of the state, shifting ideological beliefs
and conventions, and hegemonic apparatuses in civil society. The concept of hegemony can
be found in cultural and media studies (e.g. Stuart Hall and David Harris), international
relations and global political economy (e.g. Robert W. Cox, Stephen Gill and Kees Van Der
Pijl) or political semiotics and discursive analysis within theoretical humanities (e.g. Chantal
Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau).
This entry gives a full overview of Gramsci’s definition of hegemony as a historical
phenomenon and as a conceptual device for analyzing modern media societies. Gramsci
hereby shows us that hegemonic practices traverses the ideological, political and cultural
fields of modern societies.

Gramsci and hegemony

For Gramsci, the hegemonic apparatuses, situated in civil society as formal private
associations and institutions, constitute the ideological leadership of the dominant class within
the manifold social relations of society. Of these, the relations of production remain the most
significant determining force. The hegemonic class succeeds in steering the concrete
ideological content and practices of each apparatus. Nonetheless, these apparatuses can be
differentiated and classified according to their specific form of practice: mass media, religious
institutions, factories and other sites of economic activity, political parties, social voluntary
membership organizations, etc. The state apparatus takes on a multifarious form, but is
positioned as distinct and independent from civil society through its various roles with
different classes and interest groups: the codification of property relations, the monopolization
of coercive and judicial means of domination, begetting administrative and governmental
power over its population, and demarcating the political procedures of elective representation.
In bourgeois society, the state is simultaneously the preferential tool of the dominant class for
wielding political power over civil society and the general site of social conflict in political
form.
While the political hegemonic struggle revolves around laying hold of the state
apparatus, the pursued attainment of ideological hegemony demands that the contending
classes extend their influence over civil society in the form of moral and intellectual
leadership. These two forms of leadership direct the social practices of civil society, thereby
capturing the ideological imagery about both state and society. The moral and intellectual
components of hegemony refer to the normative and conceptual framework determining the
worldview of political subjects and classes. In a bourgeois civil society, each class develops
class determined ideological forms of knowledge and political values, but the specificity of a
class position in the social relations is not necessarily a direct determinant thereof. A
dominant class becomes hegemonic when it can impose certain ideological elements onto
another class, which then become the foundation to general consent. In other words, the
dominant class successfully purports to be the emblematic representation of the intellectual
and moral content of the whole society, notwithstanding the fact that class positions do not
coalesce. Thus, hegemony functions as the conjunction of both the accession to state power
and the ability to manufacture ideological consent.

The ascent of bourgeois hegemony

Up until the eighteenth century, Western European feudal societies were subject to a different
form of political domination. These societies consisted of a sovereign, a stratum of feudal
lords, well-to-do rural leaseholders and yeomen, urban merchants and middling classes in
larger cities, and a broad layer of jobbing wage workers and impoverished peasants. Each of
these classes, though legally categorized into separate estates, was socially heterogeneous.
The estate of landlords was under the rule of the most high ranked; titles and land possessions
were distributed in an unequal manner. Therefore, class struggle within a given estate was a
common feature, though, for example, lords also defended their seigneurial prerogatives
against other classes/estates and the sovereign. In a similar way, the social fabrics of cities
were highly strained by continuous class conflict between the wealthiest merchants, small
shopkeepers, master craftsmen, and the mass of journeymen and wage workers. In attempts to
extend the judicious and political power over his territory, the sovereign always saw the
pecuniary basis of his state-making abilities challenged by recurrent revolts of the estates or
cities regarding the levying of direct or excise taxes. Nonetheless, all influential classes and
class factions shared the ideal of the body politic in which a country was depicted as a
corporal entity composed of mutually supportive constituents. In reality, the realm of a
sovereign consisted of a myriad of overlapping judicial courts, venal offices and legal bodies
whose purpose was to institutionalize the intricate negotiations regarding the direct political
and economic interests of local elites. In sum, the feudal state had to consider its own
limitations when attempting to assert its rule, and no sovereign or class could present its
particular concerns as the general interest.
The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, succeeded in surmounting the feudal system’s
characteristic opposition by particular interest groups as it subjugated and profoundly
transformed state authority within a new form of political domination. The early bourgeois
state was a “class-state”, meaning that it was emboldened to shape the state according to its
particular ideological project. The national space and its governmental institutions became
judicially homogenized. Common law and customary rights were abolished, thereupon
inscribing a set of civic rights and duties onto the newly perceived nation. Furthermore, the
bourgeois class aspired to mobilize its national population under its banner. It attempted to
represent its direct economic interests as universal values, thereby reproducing its political
domination, the capitalist relations of production, and legal property relations. This class
created civil society (though it was organically interwoven with the class-state), which it
suffused with bourgeois ideology. Civil society begot numerous press houses and private
associations which celebrated the bourgeois ideology of possessive individualism and
political freedom, and acted as the propelling apparatuses to the consensual practices of
hegemony. The state apparatus did not restrict itself to the task of overseeing emerging
conflicts in civil society. Rather, it became the principal educator of the people, subsuming
their particular interests under bourgeois ideology, transforming society into a popular force
on a national scale: the apparent social-cultural emanation of the will of the people. The state
exerts power by presenting itself as the political nexus of the ethical aspirations of society. In
other words, with the consensual imposition of hegemony came the birth of modern politics as
a distinct historical practice. The efficacy of bourgeoisie hegemony rests with the political
practice of eliciting a seemingly spontaneous consent from other classes to their ideology,
whilst state-feudal predecessors only succeeded in devising pragmatic alliances between
classes.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois class also used legal and
coercive force against the incipient working class movement, thereby easily eliminating their
political opposition. In France, Belgium and England, the state prohibited collectively
organized action by the working class via the Chapelier Law (1791), Combination Laws
(1799), Combination Act (1825) respectively. In the political realm, early socialist federations
and associations were fiercely repressed and monitored by the judicial system and the police
apparatus. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Western European socialist parties
and labor unions became national organizations, posing a formidable contending force to
liberal and conservative parties. The state adapted hitherto the strategy of molecular co-
optation, a term which describes the political integration of singular rivalling torchbearers
contesting the status-quo.

Bourgeois hegemony and the integral state

Faced with the challenge of an oppositional political mass, the bourgeois class-state reacted
with a combination of the repeal of direct coercive measures and a strategy of gradual
integration of opponents into political society. The bourgeoisie opted for a political agenda of
social reform, thereby transforming its state apparatus and the ideological project to avoid a
sweeping revolutionary scenario. The bourgeoisie remains dominant, while its hegemonic
power lost its original monopoly of ideological leadership and the full potential to mobilize
active consent. The strategy of integration suggests that the old method of simple assimilation
had reached its final limits. Gramsci coined this process as an organic crisis followed by a
passive revolution. During the passive revolution, the state apparatus profoundly permeates
the civil society from above, actively administers civil society with a multiplication of
governmental offices, and generates (or at least steers) a larger number of non-state and semi-
state hegemonic apparatuses (schools, media outlets, cultural organizations, etc.).
The civil sphere – the constitutive hegemonic part of state power – becomes actively
involved in political conflict propelled by social class relations. The clear conceptual
distinctions between the class-state and civil society fade, which Gramsci suggests,
denominates the transformed state-form as the integral state. The practices of the hegemonic
apparatuses in civil society directly effectuate the reform policies of the state while the
integral state holds sway over the consensual processes of civil society. In civil society,
oppositional classes develop a counter-hegemonic force, both in political and ideological
form: the practices of mass political parties go hand in hand with the creation of counter-
hegemonic apparatuses (labor unions, press houses, local committees, etc.). Together, when
not incorporated by the integral state, they aspire to take over the role of hegemonic
leadership. In this hegemonic struggle, the counter-hegemonic apparatuses function as
educators of the subaltern classes and vice versa. The organic intellectuals, while taking
lessons from the daily practices of the subaltern classes, systemize the counter-hegemonic
ideology in order to criticize the bourgeois traditional intellectuals.

Hegemony and current media studies research

The first wave of media studies which revolved around the central question of
hegemony started in the late 1970s and 1980s after the initial reception of Gramsci’s partial
translated prison notebook in France, UK, Germany and US. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
allowed many researchers to break free from the orthodox Marxist notions of ideology as
false consciousness or capitalism as a mere social system of domination. As Gramscian
scholar David Harris has mentioned, hegemony can offer a far more rich and complex
explanation how the media operates within capitalist societies. For example, Stuart Hall was
perhaps the most well-known neo-Marxist who deployed the concept of hegemony in order to
understand the pivotal role of private media during the emergence of neoliberalism in the
1980s. In the last two decades, the number of Gramscian studies on media and culture rose
exponentially, in which the analysis of changing patterns of social communication is a critical
element of understanding the distinctiveness of late-capitalist societies in contrast to the first
post-war Fordist societies. Furthermore, the concept of hegemony is now being frequently
deployed in pair with Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality or Pierre Bourdieu’s types
of capital, fields and symbolic power.

Jelle Versieren
University of Antwerp

Cross references: British Cultural Theory; Capitalism; Class Dominant Theory; Critical
Theory; Discourse Analysis; Dissemination of Ideas; Ideology; Marxist and Neo-Marxist
Theories; Objectivity; Perception; Propaganda; Propaganda, Theories of; Representation;
Subjectivity

Further Readings

Gill, Stephen (ed.). Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Green, Marcus E. (ed.). Rethinking Gramsci. London: Routledge, 2011.

Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure. The effects of Gramscianism
on cultural studies. London: Routledge, 1992.

Mouffe, Chantal (ed.). Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

Thomas, Peter D. The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leiden:
Brill, 2009.

Versieren, Jelle and Brecht De Smet. “The passive revolution of spiritual politics: Gramsci
and Foucault on modernity, transition and religion,” in: Gramsci and Foucault: A
Reassessment. (ed.) Kreps, David (ed.). Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.