Hegemony

Conceptual Overview

The term hegemony (from the Greek hegeisthai, to lead) has been used since antiquity for describing the dominance of one nation over another. Its modern use, however, derives from the 1930s analysis by the Italian Marxist political leader and scholar Antonio Gramsci.

Deviating from the prevailing Marxist view of the time, which viewed ideology as a set of values and beliefs mechanically imposed for defending a specific economic order, Gramsci claimed that the organization of consent arises as a contingent accomplishment of strategic interventions and is based on the deployment of specific figures and apparatuses. A critical role is played in particular by the organic intellectuals, who perform the task of extending the range of consent by imposing the hegemonic views through prestige and intellectual seduction. An equally important part is played by the education system, the bureaucracy, the popular writers and filmmakers, and the media in general.

Because in any given historical moment more than one class of group aspires to impose its dominance, hegemony is necessarily a continuous exercise and an unfinished task: Maintaining a dominant position requires activity in the economic, political, and cultural spheres.

Gramsci's notion of hegemony had the historical merit of introducing a cultural and strategic dimension into the rigid, deterministic Marxist model of the time. In doing so, he provided a much more sophisticated account of domination, one in which hegemonic ideology mediates between social being and social consciousness. At the same time, he broadened the meaning of politics beyond the immediate struggle for control of the means of coercion to include the activities that organize (or disorganize) consent within the economy, state, and civil society.

Gramsci's idea that leadership relies on the cultural activity of social groups as much as on their political and economical influence attracted great interest during the cultural and linguistic turn in European social theory in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea of hegemony appealed especially to authors who were trying to rescue Marxism from its orthodox slumbers, but it resonated also with poststructuralists and postmodern scholars. The notion of hegemony, in fact, supported the idea of the historicity of cultural and discursive formations and their capacity to constitute at the same time the instrument, the arena, and the outcome of power struggles. Often deprived of its original immediate practical flavor (for Gramsci, who was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, hegemony constituted above all a political strategy), the idea was thus extended beyond the realm of concrete politics and became a general principle for explaining the[Page 581] relationship between identity, cultural formations, and domination. Authors such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, for example, argued that hegemony is a generalized political strategy that operates at the level of the formation of personal identity. Hegemony is, in fact, the attempt to impose a dominant horizon of social orientation and action through discourse. A hegemonic discourse, such as capitalism or managerialism, aims thus at fixing meaning and identity in a context marked by antagonistic forces; it does so by imposing an ideology that is a totalizing horizon with its basis hidden from view and hence subtracted from scrutiny and dissent. All discourses, however, are unable to fulfill their will to totality and constitute by definition unfinished attempts to stabilize and condense social meaning around privileged signifiers. Hegemony is therefore a form of politics based on the continuous effort by both the dominant and the antagonist groups to occupy the spaces left undomesticated by the prevailing discourses. Hegemony, in this sense, signifies both the organization of consent around any dominant group and the possibility of constructing counterhegemonic formations by disarticulating the existing signifying relationships and constituting new ones.

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