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 [Page 738]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 ...