Hegemony

Hegemony in common use means domination or authority over others. As the term was conceived by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, hegemony implies domination by consent, particularly the[Page 207] domination of subordinate classes by the ruling class. Hegemony stands in contrast to direct forms of domination such as force, persuasion, coercion, and intimidation. Instead, hegemony is achieved through cultural institutions whereby the interests of the dominant class are expressed as the interests of all classes. Hegemony conveys the power of social, political, and economic systems to produce the consent of subordinate classes to interests of the dominant class. The process by which dominant class interests become naturalized is known as hegemony, and it is through hegemony that the power of the dominant class is maintained.

Gramsci credited V. I. Lenin, the Russian leader and Marxist theorist, with the original conceptualization of hegemony, but it was Gramsci who explored the cultural aspects of the idea in his Prison Notebooks. Gramsci understood the control of civil society as deriving from the pairing of hegemony—meaning the political and cultural leadership of subordinate classes by the dominant class—with direct domination through the force of the state. Gramsci developed the notion of hegemony as an explanation for how dominant classes continue to further their own interests at the expense of, and with the participation of, subalterns (Gramsci's term for subordinate classes). He was interested in how a counterhegemony of subordinate classes might be sustained and eventually overthrow the hegemony of the dominant class.

Hegemony is achieved through individual participation in the activities of everyday life and culture. Subalterns come to accept ruling-class values and attitudes as natural and appropriate by engaging in ordinary political, social, and economic institutions (e.g., schools, media, markets, political parties). For Raymond Williams, a British social theorist, hegemony was culture in its deepest sense. As a form of control, hegemony encompasses the whole of lived practices. It is through everyday experiences that hegemonic processes are created and repeated. Hegemony is something in which individuals are fully immersed and which they re-create in their daily lives. The concept and process of hegemony may be understood as infiltrating all aspects of social life and relationships. Due to the extent to which hegemony penetrates everyday experiences, those who are immersed in it come to reproduce it.

Hegemony differs from active persuasion or coercion insofar as subjects come to accept it through their everyday activities and interactions. Ordinary social institutions and relationships are infused with the interests and values that validate the dominant position of the ruling class. By participating in social life, the interests of subordinate classes fall in line with those of the dominant class and subordinate classes becomes invested in maintaining and reproducing the interests of the dominant class as if they were their own. By accepting the worldviews and values of the dominant class, the subordinate classes acquiesce to their social and political leadership, allowing the ruling class to maintain its dominance.

However, care must be taken not to elevate hegemony to a totality (the whole of reality) or an ahistorical (timeless) form that denies its great flexibility and currency. Rather, hegemony is made and remade in everyday life through habitual practices. Daily activities are productive of and situated within hegemony; hegemony is realized as lived experience. All political, social, and economic activities comprise and re-create hegemonic processes that constitute individuals, their knowledge of the world, and their social relationships. In daily life, ways of knowing and acting in the world appear as common sense, but from a critical perspective these processes and relationships may be seen as both producing hegemony and being products of hegemony.

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