Hegemony (ἡγεμονία, hēgemonía) — In Antonio Gramsci, a form of domination based on intellectual and moral leadership and consent, not merely coercion, exercised by a class over society. The Greek word means “leadership” or “command” (from hēgemōn, “guide,” “leader”) and denoted, in antiquity, the supremacy of one city over others. In Russian social democracy the concept was used to describe the proletariat’s leadership in the revolution; Gramsci developed it in the Prison Notebooks (written between 1929 and 1935), after using it in “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926). His thesis is that in Western societies with a dense “civil society” (schools, churches, press, associations), a class’s power depends on winning the consent of the governed, not just on controlling the coercive apparatus. Gramsci distinguishes domination (coercion) from leadership; in Notebook 6, §88, he formulates the state as political society plus civil society, that is, hegemony armored with coercion. “Organic” intellectuals have the role of organizing consent (Notebook 12, §1). Hence the strategy of a “war of position” within civil society and the building of a counter-hegemony. The concept was taken up by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), in a post-Marxist key, and by Robert Cox in international relations. Criticisms: Perry Anderson, in “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” (1976–1977), pointed to oscillations in the term’s usage; Louis Althusser, with his ideological state apparatuses, proposed a structuralist alternative. See also ideology and the article Western Marxism: Lukács, Gramsci, and Althusser.
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