Hegemony

Hegemony is a sociological concept developed by Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci in prison, after he was incarcerated by the Fascists, [Page 710]between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. It refers to the dominance of a social class or group over the others in a given society. The dominance is practiced without materially violent methods but through veiled dynamics, by making all the other social classes of groups perceive its own values and choices as natural norms, which are claimed to benefit everyone but actually, and invisibly, express the interests of the ruling class and its strategic will to control and dominate. In many respects, the concept of hegemony underpins many contemporary fears of consumer culture as an ideological tool for controlling the masses, for example, the mass-culture thesis of the Frankfurt School and, later, developments in cultural studies.

The concept of hegemony was articulated through a number of fragmented reflections collected within twenty-nine Prison Notebooks, which were written in prison by Gramsci before dying sick at the age of forty-six, posthumously published by Einaudi (Turin) in 1949 and partially translated into English in 1971. Gramsci's critical thought was intrinsically based on the historical and political environment of Italy's post–World War I period in which it developed. In his daily notes elaborated in prison, Gramsci was trying to address two major sociopolitical problematic conditions in Italy: the economic underdevelopment of the southern regions and the failure of the project of a working-class revolution. Gramsci's explanation was elaborated precisely through the concept of hegemony—an originally Russian term that had also been adopted by Lenin. Conceived as the moral and civic dominance of a social class over another, hegemony refers to the power of the dominant (industrial and rural) bourgeois class over the so-called subaltern classes and, at the same time, of the arguably more advanced working class on the rural class, which was mainly living in Italian southern regions. This second hegemonic form was claimed to hopefully and strategically induce rural peasants to give up their historically rooted spirit of resignation to enter into an alliance with the working-class members in a joint revolutionary project (this was also the reason behind the title chosen by Gramsci for the national newspaper he founded in 1924, L'Unità [The Unity], which is still diffused in Italy nowadays). Even without providing a coherent theoretical model, Gramsci's fragmented and critical reflections on the concept of hegemony provided an explanation of the historical, political, and cultural foundations on which class dominance operated in Italy during the first decades of the twentieth century. What really differentiated and made Gramsci's theory so fertile was his focus not only on material power relationships but also, and most interestingly, on the ability of acquiring consensus over the subaltern classes through the ruling class' moral and intellectual—that is, deeply cultural, not merely economic—leadership. Gramsci's explanatory efforts were indeed profoundly connoted in political and cultural terms: his analysis of the class domination dynamics was highly focused not only on traditional political institutions (such as the parliament, the law courts, the prisons) but also on the institutions of the so-called civic society (such as the media, the schools, the churches, the trade unions) that perform educative, cultural, and representative functions.

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