Hegemony is for Gramsci a political concept developed to
explain… the absence of socialist revolutions in the Western capitalist
democracies. The concept of hegemony is used by Gramsci to refer to a condition
in process in which a dominant class…does not merely rule a society
but leads it through the exercise of ‘intellectual and moral
leadership’. Hegemony involves a specific kind of consensus: a social group
seeks to present its own particular interests as the general interests of the
society as a whole
It is the concept of
the dominant class trying to lead a culture to a means but having it adapted to
the general interests of society as a whole.
Hegemony is never
simply power imposed from above: it is always the result of ‘negotiations’
between dominant and subordinate groups, a process marked by both ‘resistance’
and ‘incorporation’…As Gramsci makes clear, they can never be allowed to
challenge the economic fundamentals of class power…when moral and intellectual
leadership is not enough to secure continued authority, the processes of
hegemony are replaced, temporarily, by the coercive power of the ‘repressive
state apparatus’. (Storey 83)
(Popular culture:
)what Gramsci calls ‘a compromise equilibrium’. The commercially provided
culture of the culture industries is redefined, reshaped and redirected in
strategic acts of selective consumption and productive acts of reading and
articulation, often in ways not intended or even foreseen by its producers
The
word ‘hegemony’ is obtained from the Greek terminology hegemonia meaning
leadership. An extensively used specialized concept in matters of international
relations theory, hegemony is habitually used to imply the predominant position
of the most powerful state in the international arena or the commanding state
in a particular given region
The idea of a ‘third
face of power’, or ‘invisible power’ has its roots
partly, in Marxist thinking about the pervasive power of ideology, values and
beliefs in reproducing class relations and concealing contradictions (Heywood,
1994: 100). Marx recognised that economic exploitation was not the only
driver behind capitalism, and that the system was reinforced by a dominance of
ruling class ideas and values – leading to Engels’s famous concern that ‘false
consciousness’ would keep the working class from recognising and rejecting
their oppression (Heywood, 1994: 85).
False consciousness, in relation to
invisible power, is itself a ‘theory of power’ in the Marxist tradition. It is
particularly evident in the thinking of Lenin, who ‘argued that the power of
‘bourgeois ideology’ was such that, left to its own devices, the proletariat
would only be able to achieve ‘trade union consciousness’, the desire to
improve their material conditions but within the capitalist system’ (Heywood
1994: 85). A famous analogy is made to workers accepting crumbs that fall off
the table (or indeed are handed out to keep them quiet) rather than claiming a
rightful place at the table.
The Italian
communist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned for much of his life by Mussolini, took
these idea further in his Prison Notebooks with his widely influential notions
of ‘hegemony’ and the ‘manufacture of consent’ (Gramsci 1971). Gramsci
saw the capitalist state as being made up of two overlapping spheres, a
‘political society’ (which rules through force) and a ‘civil society’ (which
rules through consent). This is a different meaning of civil society from the
‘associational’ view common today, which defines civil society as a ‘sector’ of
voluntary organisations and NGOs. Gramsci saw civil society as the public
sphere where trade unions and political parties gained concessions from the
bourgeois state, and the sphere in which ideas and beliefs were shaped, where
bourgeois ‘hegemony’ was reproduced in cultural life through the media,
universities and religious institutions to ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy
(Heywood 1994: 100-101).
The political and
practical implications of Gramsci’s ideas were far-reaching because he warned
of the limited possibilities of direct revolutionary struggle for control of
the means of production; this ‘war of attack’ could only succeed with a prior
‘war of position’ in the form of struggle over ideas and beliefs, to create a
new hegemony (Gramsci 1971). This idea of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle
– advancing alternatives to dominant ideas of what is normal and legitimate –
has had broad appeal in social and political movements. It has also contributed
to the idea that ‘knowledge’ is a social construct that serves to legitimate
social structures (Heywood 1994: 101).
In practical terms,
Gramsci’s insights about how power is constituted in the realm of ideas and
knowledge – expressed through consent rather than force – have inspired the use
of explicit strategies to contest hegemonic norms of legitimacy. Gramsci’s
ideas have influenced popular education practices, including the adult literacy
and consciousness-raising methods of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970),
liberation theology, methods of participatory action research (PAR), and many
approaches to popular media, communication and cultural action.
The idea of power as
‘hegemony’ has also influenced debates about civil society. Critics of the way
civil society is narrowly conceived in liberal democratic thought – reduced to
an ‘associational’ domain in contrast to the state and market – have used
Gramsci’s definition to remind us that civil society can also be a public
sphere of political struggle and contestation over ideas and norms. The goal of
‘civil society strengthening’ in development policy can thus be pursued either
in a neo-liberal sense of building civic institutions to complement (or hold to
account) states and markets, or in a Gramscian sense of building civic
capacities to think differently, to challenge assumptions and norms, and to
articulate new ideas and visions.
Refernces for futher
reading
Freire, Paulo
(1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
New York, Herder & Herder.
Gramsci, Antonio
(1971) Selections from the Prison
Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York, International Publishers.
Heywood,
Andrew (1994) Political
Ideas and Concepts: An Introduction, London, Macmillan.
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