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

hegemony This concept is to be understood in the context of Karl Marx's historical materialism. It refers to the ideal representation of the interests of the ruling-class as universal interests. The cumulative nature of the universalization of ideas not only broadens the scope of each ruling-class hegemony but at the same time sharpens the conflict between it and each subsequent ascendant class until such a time as a class (the proletariat) emerges which really does represent the universal interest. According to Marx, each ruling class does actually represent a broader range of interests than its predecessors, by providing (for example) avenues of social mobility into a higher class; hence, it comes to power not only on the illusion of the common interest, but also because it does in fact serve a broader range of interests. Likewise, the ideas which express the dominant material relationships within and between classes also take a firmer grip, and for that reason are all the more embedded, providing no obvious alternatives. However, in due course the specific class interests of the ruling class become apparent, demanding a more radical negation for its transcendence.

The major vehicle for bourgeois hegemony is civil society. Antonio Gramsci locates hegemony within the role of the ‘private’ or non-state levels of superstructure, distinguishing this social hegemony from the use of force, as the principal means of maintaining social order in capitalist societies. Seen in Weberian terms, it would correspond to the ‘myth of natural superiority’, or the legitimating of a status order. It is, in short, the manufacturing of consent. Cultural hegemony, which is generally identified as the major dimension of this manipulation, involves the production of ways of thinking and seeing, and of excluding alternative visions and discourses. For that same reason it is difficult to identify what are non-hegemonic modes of reasoning and penetrative analysis, especially since hegemony permeates all of the levels distinguished in Marx's schema, from the basic items of labour-power and capital, through the connections of commodity fetishism, into the fractions of classes and politics. According to Marxists, therefore, hegemony has to be confronted at every level. The same conceptual as well as methodological strictures as apply to false consciousness and its transcendence must be applied in the case of hegemony.

The sociological significance of the concept, and some idea of its use in empirical research on ideology, is demonstrated in Joseph Femia , ‘Hegemony and Consciousness in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci’, Political Studies (1975)
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hegemony , [Gr.,=leadership], dominance, originally of one Greek city-state over others, the term has been extended to refer to the dominance of one nation over others, and, following Gramsci , of one class over others. Conflict over hegemony fills history from the war between Athens and Sparta to the Napoleonic wars, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War. Gramsci's use of the concept extends it beyond international relations to class structure and even to culture.

Bibliography: See K. J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline (1985).

hegemony Leadership or dominance of one state over others. The term originated in ancient Greece where the cities of Athens, Sparta and Thebes held hegemony over Greece in the 5th and 4th centuries bc. Italian Marxian theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) also employed the term hegemony to refer to the phenomenon of one social class monopolizing the creation and transmission of values.

he·gem·o·ny / həˈjemənē; ˈhejəˌmōnē/ • n. leadership or dominance, esp. by one country or social group over others: Germany was united under Prussian hegemony after 1871.

hegemony həˈjemənē; ˈhejəˌmōnē n.leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others: Germany was united under Prussian hegemony after 1871.

hegemony XVI (aegemonie; rare before XIX). — Gr. hēgemoníā, f. hēgemōn leader, f. hēgeîsthai lead, rel. to L. sāgīre track, and SEEK; see -MONY.

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