Hegemony

Hegemony

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The concept of hegemony has been central and most developed in the work of Antonio Gramsci, the leading Italian Marxist intellectual who spent the last eleven years of his life in Benito Mussolini’s prisons between 1927 and 1935. Gramsci defined hegemony as a condition under which a group establishes its supremacy not only by physical force but also through a “consensual submission of the very people who [are] dominated” (Litowitz 2000, p. 518). However this notion of hegemony has a long history and multi layers and it is important to unravel its complete meaning to understand its significance in Gramsci’s adoption of the concept.

According to Raymond Williams the word hegemony probably comes from the Greek word egemonia whose root is egemon, meaning “leader, ruler, often in the sense of a state other than his own” (1976, p. 144). From the nineteenth century onward hegemony came to indicate a “political predominance, usually of one state over another” and subsequently described a “policy expressing or aimed at political predominance” (p. 144). In his Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (1976), Perry Anderson points out the concept of hegemony or gegemoniya that had started to emerge in the writings of Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856–1918), a Marxist theoretician and founder of the Social Democratic movement in Russia, was subsequently used by the Russian Marxists as a central political slogan during the Russian Social Democratic movement from 1890s through the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Russian Marxists used hegemony to refer to the political struggle and leadership by the working class to overthrow the tsarist rule in Russia. This emphasis placed on the primacy of the working class to acquire hegemony in the bourgeois revolution in Russia was further developed by Vladimir Lenin especially in What Is to Be Done, written in 1902.

The notion of hegemony so far debated in the works of Russian theorists gained an international valence through the first two World Congresses (1919, 1920) of the Third International (1919) and emphasized the need for the proletariat to exercise hegemony in order to form alliance with other exploited groups to struggle against capitalism in the Soviet Union. However, according to Perry Anderson it was in the Fourth Congress (1922) of the Third International that hegemony for the first time also included the idea of “domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, if the former succeeded in confining the latter to a corporate role by inducing it to accept a division between political and economic struggles in its class practice” (1976–1977, p. 18). It was this notion of hegemony brought forth in the Third International that seemed to have influenced most Gramsci’s conceptualization of the term.

In accordance with the principles of the Third International, Gramsci defined hegemony as class alliance of the proletariat with other peasants to forge a common struggle against capitalism. This notion of hegemony included the need for certain “concessions” or “sacrifices” necessary on the part of the proletariat to be able to include the needs and interests of the group over which hegemony is to be exercised without resorting to win them over through violence.

However as Douglas Litowitz pointed out in his 2000 article, “Gramsci, Hegemony, and the Law,” Gramsci’s view of hegemony changed when he noticed that in Italy under the fascist dictatorship of Mussolini the very people who were exploited by fascism and capitalism willingly consented to their exploitation. Thus Gramsci concluded that domination could be exercised not only through physical force but also through persuasion, when the dominant group is able to disseminate its values through mediums such as church, schools, or popular culture. This consensual hegemony is not only economic but also political and cultural as well. In this conceptualization of hegemony as political and cultural, Gramsci was quite influenced by the Italian philosopher and politician Benedetto Croce’s (1866–1952) work on the role of culture and consent in politics.

According to Gramsci hegemony always has its basis in economy and “must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity” (Hoare, Quintin, and Smith 1971, p. 161). However his concept of “economic” is different from Karl Marx’s distinction between an economic base and a political and cultural superstructure and Marx’s assertion that only if the base changes, superstructure will change as well. Gramsci argued that dominance in economic relations of production as well as means of production, although necessary, is not a sufficient condition for social dominance. Thus according to Robert Bocock (1986), by opposing the economic determinism of Marx, Gramsci emphasized the political and the cultural by including the state and the civil society as areas in which power is exercised and hegemony established.

Gramsci argued that while hegemony pertains to civil society, which is an ensemble of organizations, force/coercion belongs to the realm of the state. Within capitalism, state thus resorts to coercive domination to conform the popular mass to certain types of production and economy, while civil society exercises hegemony through cultural institutions such as the church, trade union, schools, media or through the print culture. Thus hegemony in this context refers to the cultural control or the “ideological subordination of the working class by the bourgeoisie, which enables it to rule by consent” (Anderson 1976–1977, p. 26). According to Anderson Gramsci has used this model to analyze the difference between Tsarist Russia and western Europe to imply that the tsars ruled by force while the British and French bourgeoisie by deception, flattery, and concessions.

This first model of hegemony by Gramsci underwent further mutations to give rise to a second model when hegemony is seen as being exercised not only by the civil society but by the state as well. Hegemony exercised by the state can be termed as political hegemony and the organs of political hegemony consists of executive, legislature and judiciary.

The third model of Gramsci erases the distinction between state and civil society so that “consent and coercion alike become co-extensive with the State” (p. 125). This was Gramsci’s idea of an “integral state,” a term he borrowed from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). As Jeremy Lester (2000) noted, this concept of “integral state” encompasses a complex set of practices and activities through which the ruling class can not only dominate through force but obtain consensus as well. Thus State embodies not only coercion but cultural and ideological hegemony as well. Gramsci used this model to elucidate how bourgeois capitalism maintains its rule over the working class through consensus as well as coercion. In this third model Gramsci, alludes to Niccolò Machiavelli’s conceptualization of “Centaur,” which is half beast and half human and a combination of the dual traits of fox and lion that is deception and violence respectively. Gramsci thus argued that in order to dominate, the state must include the dual levels of force and consent, domination and hegemony, violence and civilization.

Thus hegemony—by constituting a synthesis of political, economic, and cultural meanings and values and experienced and internalized by people who are exposed to it—plays a pivotal role in the process of normalization where such values appear to be “common sense” to those who are subordinated and hegemonized by the ruling group.

SEE ALSO Culture; Fascism; Gramsci, Antonio; Ideology; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Marx, Karl; Marxism; Mussolini, Benito; Propaganda; State, The

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Perry. 1976–1977. The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review 100 (November–December): 5–78.

Bocock, Robert. 1986. Hegemony. In Key Ideas, ed. P. Hamilton. London and New York: Ellis Horwood Limited.

Hoare, Quintin, and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. 1st ed. New York: International Publishers.

Lester, Jeremy. 2000. The Dialogue of Negation: Debates on Hegemony in Russia and the West. London: Pluto Press.

Litowitz, Douglas. 2000. Gramsci, Hegemony, and the Law. Brigham Young University Law Review 2000 (Spring 2): 515–551.

Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 2nd ed. London: Fontana.

Srabani Maitra