Hegemony

Introduction

Hegemony (from the Greek hēgemonia, meaning “leadership” or “dominance”) refers to the predominance of one social class, group, or nation-state over others. In critical theory, particularly through Antonio Gramsci’s influential reformulation, hegemony describes a form of political and cultural leadership in which a dominant group maintains power not primarily through force or economic coercion, but through the manufacturing of consent—by making its worldview appear as common sense, natural, and inevitable to subordinated groups.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony represents a crucial advancement in Marxist theory, addressing the failure of orthodox Marxism to explain why the working class in Western capitalist societies had not revolted as predicted. Rather than depicting domination as purely economic or coercive, hegemony explains how ruling classes maintain power through cultural and ideological means, achieving the active consent of those they dominate. This insight has profoundly influenced cultural studies, media theory, postcolonial studies, and analyses of contemporary politics.

Key Figures

Related Thinkers:

• Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) - Foundational theorist in Prison Notebooks
• Stuart Hall (1932-2014) - Applied hegemony to cultural studies and media analysis
• Raymond Williams (1921-1988) - Culture and hegemony in British context
• Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014) & Chantal Mouffe (1943-present) - Post-Marxist radicalization
• Edward Said (1935-2003) - Applied to Orientalism and colonialism

📖 Essential Reading: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971), especially sections on intellectuals, civil society, and the state

Historical Context and Development

Etymology and Earlier Uses

The term “hegemony” derives from ancient Greek hēgemonia, originally referring to the leadership of one city-state over others in military alliances. Classical Athens, for example, exercised hegemony over the Delian League, maintaining dominance through a combination of military power and ideological legitimation—Athenian democracy was presented as a model for allied states, making Athenian leadership appear natural and beneficial.

Before Gramsci, the term appeared primarily in discussions of international relations and empire. Nineteenth-century European imperialism operated hegemonically, justifying colonial domination through ideologies of civilizational superiority, the “white man’s burden,” and missions to “develop” colonized peoples. Colonial hegemony combined brutal violence with cultural and educational projects that taught colonized populations to accept (or at least not resist) their subordination.

Lenin used “hegemony” to describe the proletariat’s leadership role in revolutionary alliances, but his usage remained primarily political and organizational. Gramsci transformed the concept, making it central to understanding how capitalism maintains power in the absence of revolution.

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) developed his mature theory of hegemony while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime from 1926 until his death in 1937. Writing in coded language to evade censors, his Prison Notebooks sought to understand why the predicted proletarian revolution had failed to materialize in Western Europe, despite economic crises and widespread working-class militancy.

Gramsci observed that while Marx correctly identified economic contradictions in capitalism, he underestimated the power of cultural and ideological institutions in maintaining capitalist social relations. The bourgeoisie maintained power not merely through control of the means of production or state violence, but through institutions like schools, churches, media, and cultural organizations that shaped consciousness and manufactured consent.

Distinguishing Political and Civil Society

Gramsci drew a crucial distinction between:

Political Society (or the state): The apparatus of direct coercion—government, police, military, courts, prisons—which rules through force and dominance (dominio).

Civil Society: The network of institutions between the economy and the state—schools, churches, media, cultural organizations, voluntary associations—which rules through hegemony and the organization of consent.

While political society relies on coercion, civil society operates through persuasion, education, and the shaping of common sense. Hegemony is primarily exercised through civil society, though it always rests ultimately on the possibility of coercion.

The Problem of Revolutionary Strategy

For Gramsci, this analysis had profound strategic implications. In Russia, where civil society was weak and the state apparatus relatively isolated from the masses, a frontal assault (the Bolshevik revolution of 1917) could succeed. But in Western Europe and America, where civil society was dense and deeply rooted, revolutionary strategy required a different approach.

Gramsci advocated a “war of position” rather than a “war of maneuver”—a long-term struggle to win cultural and ideological dominance before attempting to seize state power. The working class needed to establish its own counter-hegemonic culture, its own intellectuals, its own conception of the world, before political revolution could succeed.

Key Concepts

Cultural Hegemony

Cultural hegemony describes the process by which a dominant class projects its way of seeing the world so successfully that its view is accepted as common sense, as the natural order, by those who are in fact subordinated by it. When hegemony is successful, dominated groups actively consent to values, norms, and representations that actually work against their interests.

Examples of hegemonic ideas in capitalist societies include:

• The “free market” as natural and efficient
• Individual responsibility for poverty or unemployment
• Private property as sacred
• Consumerism as freedom
• Competition as inevitable human nature
• Capitalism itself as the only realistic economic system

These ideas feel self-evident, beyond question, like descriptions of reality rather than partisan ideological positions. This is the achievement of successful hegemony.

Common Sense and Good Sense

Gramsci distinguished between “common sense” (senso comune) and “good sense” (buon senso):

Common sense is the incoherent, contradictory, folklore-derived understanding that most people use to navigate daily life. It contains both progressive and reactionary elements, kernels of practical wisdom mixed with inherited prejudices and ruling-class ideology presented as eternal truths.

Good sense represents the practical, critical elements within common sense—the nuggets of genuine insight and class consciousness that can be developed through political education and struggle.

The task of revolutionary politics is to work within common sense, developing its good sense elements into a coherent counter-hegemonic worldview while challenging its mystifications and ruling-class elements.

Organic Intellectuals

Gramsci argued that every social class produces its own “organic intellectuals”—not necessarily academics or writers, but anyone who functions to organize and articulate the class’s worldview and interests. The bourgeoisie produces managers, priests, educators, and journalists who organize consent to capitalism. The working class needs its own organic intellectuals—union organizers, political leaders, worker-educators—to develop counter-hegemonic consciousness.

Traditional intellectuals (academics, clergy, established writers) often see themselves as autonomous and independent, but Gramsci insisted they ultimately serve hegemonic functions, legitimating existing social relations even when they imagine themselves as above politics.

Historic Bloc

A “historic bloc” represents the alliance of social forces united under a hegemonic project. A successful hegemony doesn’t simply impose the worldview of a single class, but articulates the interests and aspirations of multiple groups into a coherent political and cultural project.

For example, neoliberal hegemony since the 1980s constructed a historic bloc uniting:

• Financial capital and corporate interests
• Middle-class professionals seeking market opportunities
• Working-class voters attracted to promises of property ownership and consumer choice
• Cultural conservatives supporting “traditional values”

This coalition was held together not just by material interests but by a shared common sense about markets, freedom, and individual responsibility.

War of Position vs. War of Maneuver

These military metaphors describe two strategies for political transformation:

War of Maneuver: Direct frontal assault on state power, appropriate where civil society is weak and the state relatively isolated (as in Russia 1917).

War of Position: Long-term struggle to win cultural and ideological dominance, building counter-hegemonic institutions and common sense before attempting to seize state power. Necessary in advanced capitalist societies with dense civil societies.

Most revolutionary movements in the 20th century underestimated the need for war of position, attempting premature wars of maneuver that failed or led to authoritarian outcomes.

Influence and Development

British Cultural Studies

Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies adopted and developed Gramsci’s concept of hegemony for analyzing contemporary culture, particularly how media and popular culture function to organize consent to capitalism while also containing spaces for resistance and negotiation.

Hall showed how hegemony is never total or permanent but must be constantly renewed and renegotiated. Subordinate groups don’t simply accept dominant ideology but engage in complex negotiations, incorporating, resisting, and reinterpreting hegemonic messages.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau and Mouffe radicalized Gramsci’s concept, arguing that all political identity is hegemonic—there are no pre-given class interests or essential identities, only provisional articulations constructed through political struggle.

They argued for a “radical democracy” that recognizes the contingent, constructed nature of all political identity while working to expand democratic struggles across multiple sites (class, race, gender, environment, etc.).

Postcolonial Applications

Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and other postcolonial theorists adapted hegemony to analyze how Western cultural and intellectual dominance—not just military or economic power—maintains global hierarchies. Said’s concept of “Orientalism” shows how Western scholarship and culture produced a hegemonic representation of “the East” that justified colonialism.

Contemporary Relevance

Neoliberal Hegemony

Since the 1980s, neoliberal ideology—emphasizing market fundamentalism, privatization, deregulation, and individual responsibility—achieved hegemonic status across much of the global North. Even center-left parties accepted core neoliberal premises as “realism,” as Margaret Thatcher famously declared: “There is no alternative” (TINA).

This hegemony began fracturing in the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, opening space for both left populist and right-wing nationalist challenges. The current period might be understood as an “interregnum,” using Gramsci’s phrase: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Media and Digital Platforms

Contemporary hegemony operates increasingly through digital media platforms and algorithmic systems. Tech companies don’t simply transmit ideology but actively shape what becomes visible, trending, and “common sense” through algorithmic curation, creating new forms of manufactured consent.

Algorithmic hegemony differs from traditional mass media in key ways. Where broadcast media aimed at broad audiences, algorithms create personalized filter bubbles, delivering different “common sense” to different users. TikTok’s “For You Page,” YouTube recommendations, and Facebook’s news feed engineer reality itself—determining what events, perspectives, and interpretations users encounter. This creates fragmented, contested hegemonies rather than unified common sense.

Social media platforms enable rapid hegemonic shifts and counter-hegemonic mobilization (Arab Spring, Occupy, #BlackLivesMatter) while simultaneously facilitating micro-targeted manipulation, conspiracy theories, and authoritarian mobilization. The speed of viral spread means hegemonic common sense can shift rapidly—but also that manufactured controversies and moral panics can be engineered at scale.

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X (2022-present) demonstrates hegemonic struggle over digital infrastructure. By deliberately amplifying right-wing voices, suppressing links to competitors, and using the platform to shape political discourse, Musk wields hegemonic power directly—not through subtle shaping of common sense but through ownership and algorithmic manipulation.

Right-Wing Hegemonic Projects (2010s-2020s)

The 2010s-2020s have seen intensified right-wing efforts to establish hegemony after neoliberal common sense fractured in the 2008 financial crisis:

Trumpism (2015-present) represents an attempt to build right-wing populist hegemony articulating white nationalism, economic grievance, anti-elitism, and authoritarian nationalism. Trump’s success lay not in policy coherence but in articulating widespread disaffection with neoliberal globalization into a reactionary common sense blaming immigrants, elites, and “wokeness” for working-class decline.

The MAGA movement’s “Make America Great Again” slogan exemplifies hegemonic myth-making, constructing a nostalgic past (implicitly white, male-dominated, industrial) as natural and desirable. This hegemonic project succeeded electorally (2016, nearly 2020, significant in 2024) by mobilizing constituencies previously excluded from neoliberal prosperity while offering no actual solutions—pure hegemonic politics divorced from material improvement.

Culture wars over “critical race theory,” “gender ideology,” trans rights, and “wokeness” represent organized right-wing efforts to establish counter-hegemony. These campaigns don’t primarily aim at policy but at shifting common sense—making anti-racism and LGBTQ+ acceptance appear as elite impositions rather than justice claims, reconstructing discrimination as “common sense” and rights as “ideology.”

Anti-”woke” backlash attempts to make progressive movements appear as elite-driven political correctness oppressing ordinary people, inverting power relations. This hegemonic strategy has proven remarkably effective, creating permission structures for renewed racism, sexism, and transphobia framed as resisting elite imposition.

QAnon and conspiracy movements represent fragmenting hegemony—where mainstream common sense fractures, conspiratorial explanations proliferate. These aren’t simply false beliefs but alternative hegemonic structures, complete explanatory frameworks that make sense of disorientation and decline by identifying enemies (globalists, satanic pedophiles, George Soros) and promising redemption through authoritarian salvation.

Christian nationalism in the United States mobilizes religious hegemony for authoritarian politics, presenting theocratic governance as return to authentic American identity. Supreme Court decisions overturning abortion rights and attacking LGBTQ+ protections demonstrate successful right-wing hegemonic capture of state institutions.

Counter-Hegemonic Movements

Recent social movements demonstrate ongoing hegemonic contestation:

Occupy Wall Street (2011) challenged neoliberal hegemony with the “99% vs. 1%” frame, making economic inequality visible and speakable again after decades of silence. Though the movement faded, its framing permanently shifted discourse—inequality is now widely acknowledged as political problem rather than natural outcome.

Black Lives Matter (2013-present) contests hegemonic narratives of color-blindness and police legitimacy, making structural racism and state violence visible. The 2020 George Floyd uprising forced mainstream acknowledgment of police violence and systemic racism, shifting what had been marginal activist claims into common sense for broad publics. Yet ongoing backlash (attacks on “CRT,” “wokeness”) demonstrates hegemony’s contested, unstable character.

#MeToo (2017-present) disrupted patriarchal common sense about gender, consent, and power, making previously normalized behavior suddenly appear as unacceptable. What was once “just how things are” (harassment, assault, power imbalances) became visible as abuse requiring accountability. The speed of this shift demonstrates hegemony’s fragility—but also its persistence, as backlash reasserts older norms.

Climate Justice movements challenge growth-oriented capitalist common sense, arguing for radical transformation rather than market-based solutions. Youth movements (Greta Thunberg, Sunrise Movement, Ende Gelände) attempt to make climate catastrophe the organizing political question, against fossil capital’s hegemonic common sense that frames climate action as unrealistic or economically unviable.

Bernie Sanders campaigns (2016, 2020) temporarily disrupted neoliberal common sense within mainstream American politics, making democratic socialism and universal programs (Medicare for All) thinkable and popular. Though electorally unsuccessful, these campaigns shifted what counts as realistic, expanding political imagination.

Labor organizing (2020s) including “essential worker” strikes during COVID, Starbucks unionization, Amazon Labor Union, and graduate student organizing challenge decades of anti-labor common sense. The rhetoric of “essential workers” exposed contradictions (workers are essential but paid poverty wages) that enabled new organizing.

Each movement attempts to shift what counts as common sense, making previously naturalized arrangements suddenly appear as political choices open to contestation. Success is always partial and contested—hegemony is never totally won or lost but constantly renegotiated.

Critiques and Debates

Determinism and Agency

Critics argue Gramsci’s hegemony theory, despite its emphasis on culture and consciousness, remains too deterministic. If ideology is so pervasive, shaping even common sense, how can counter-hegemonic consciousness emerge? Gramsci’s answer—through good sense and organic intellectuals—may underestimate the difficulty of escaping hegemonic frameworks.

Totalizing Concept

Some critics worry “hegemony” becomes a totalizing explanation for all forms of power and consent, obscuring important differences between various types of domination. Power operates through multiple mechanisms—not all domination is hegemonic, not all consent is manufactured through ideology.

Economic Reduction

While Gramsci expanded Marxism beyond economic determinism, some critics argue he ultimately reduces cultural struggle to class conflict. Feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial critics have shown how gender, race, and colonial domination can’t be adequately explained as epiphenomena of class hegemony.

Revolution vs. Reform

Gramsci’s “war of position” strategy is interpreted differently by radicals and reformists. Some see it as justifying gradual reform within existing institutions. Others argue Gramsci meant building counter-institutions that eventually challenge state power. This ambiguity continues to generate political debate.

Consent vs. Coercion

Critics question whether hegemony theory adequately accounts for the ongoing role of violence and coercion in maintaining power. Even in liberal democracies, subordinated groups (especially racialized and colonized populations) face direct violence from police and military forces, suggesting hegemony and coercion aren’t as separable as Gramsci implied.

Contemporary Applications

Electoral Politics

Understanding electoral outcomes requires analyzing hegemonic common sense. Trump’s 2016 victory and Brexit can’t be explained purely by economic interest or misinformation, but by successful mobilization of certain elements of popular common sense (nationalism, anti-elitism, cultural conservatism) into a right-wing populist hegemonic project.

Environmental Politics

Climate change activism confronts deeply hegemonic assumptions: growth as progress, consumption as freedom, nature as resource. Building an ecological counter-hegemony requires not just policy advocacy but transforming common sense about human-nature relationships, prosperity, and the good life.

Digital Capitalism

Platform capitalism creates new forms of hegemony: the naturalization of surveillance, the equation of connectivity with community, the conflation of corporate services with public infrastructure. Challenging digital capitalism requires making these arrangements—which feel inevitable and convenient—visible as political choices.

Cultural Resistance

Popular culture remains a site of hegemonic struggle. While mainstream culture generally reinforces dominant ideology, it also contains moments of resistance, negotiation, and alternative imagination. Understanding culture through hegemony means seeing it as contested terrain rather than simple domination or pure resistance.

Further Reading

Primary Sources

• Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. International Publishers, 1971.
• Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. 3 volumes. Edited by Joseph Buttigieg. Columbia University Press, 1992-2007.

Secondary Sources

• Anderson, Perry. “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.” New Left Review I/100 (1976-77): 5-78.
• Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 5-27.
• Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, 1985.
• Lears, T.J. Jackson. “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities.” American Historical Review 90.3 (1985): 567-593.
• Sassoon, Anne Showstack. Gramsci’s Politics. Second edition. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review I/82 (1973): 3-16.

Contemporary Applications

• Fraser, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017).
• Hall, Stuart, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Palgrave Macmillan, 1978.
• Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.

See Also

• Antonio Gramsci
• Ideology
• Cultural Studies
• Civil Society
• Marxism
• Base and Superstructure
• False Consciousness
• Culture Industry
• Power/Knowledge