Antonio Gramsci: Power, Hegemony & Civil Society

Hegemony = dominance maintained not merely through coercion but through consent. Ruling class presents its worldview as natural, moral, common sense.

“The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’.”

Antonio Gramsci

Hegemony = ideology organised through institutions. Corresponds to Lukes’ 3rd dimension of power.

Counter-Hegemony

Hegemony in International Relations

Robert W. Cox applies hegemony to IR: global hegemony requires military power + economic power + ideological leadership + institutions that normalise worldview (UN, World Bank, IMF, free markets, democracy, US global influence).

Susan Strange: structural power = power to shape global structures of money, trade, production and knowledge. Joseph Nye: soft power = attraction makes one country’s preferences appear universal.

The Theory of Hegemony

Hegemony The predominance of one social class over another through leadership, consent and moral-intellectual direction — “predominance by consent,” not mere domination by force. A class becomes hegemonic when its worldview is accepted as natural, normal and universal by subordinate classes.

Hegemony works on the economic, political, moral and intellectual planes together; the dominant class projects its particular interests as the general interest of society. It must also be a fundamental class — an owner or non-owner at one of the two poles of production. Lucio Gruppi captures it: hegemony is “the ability to unify and maintain united a social whole via ideology that is… characterized by deep class contradictions.”

Two faces: domination and leadership

Supremacy shows as domination (coercive control through political society) and intellectual and moral leadership (guidance of allied groups through persuasion, education and culture). Political society supplies force; civil society supplies legitimacy. Coercion never disappears — it remains the “armoured core” behind the legal order, and a rule based on repression alone is a “dictatorship of the night-watchman.” Stuart Hall adds that hegemony must be “continually renewed, recreated, defended and modified”: “Hegemony is not a state of grace which is installed forever.”

Consent, common sense and the historic bloc

The ruling class converts its ideas into common sense — “a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions” diffused through schools, churches, family, media and popular culture until domination appears spontaneous. It does not rule alone: it builds a historic bloc through alliances, compromises and limited sacrifices, “winning over” subaltern classes. Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick: hegemony “mystifies power relations… encourages fatalism and political passivity, and justifies the deprivation of many so that few can live well.” Colonial rule worked the same way — the “White Man’s Burden,” an Anglicised elite, civil servants and zamindars easing imperial domination; the Gandhian era reads as a struggle against that ideological legitimacy.

Limited and expansive hegemony

Limited hegemony — the dominant class fails to accommodate subaltern interests; revolution becomes more feasible. Expansive hegemony — it accommodates them through reforms and concessions; revolution becomes harder. Hegemony is therefore a moving process of negotiation, not a static fact.

The Integral State — Political and Civil Society

Gramsci expands the state beyond government. The integral state = political society + civil society; it rules through force and consent together. His line “Every State is a dictatorship” underlines that even consent-based orders keep a coercive capacity.

The integral state — coercion and consent fused. Civil society (family, school, church, unions, media, culture — legitimacy and consent; a “trench system” of fortresses shielding the state) + Political society (government, law, police, military, courts — coercion and domination, open when consent fails) = Integral State (rule by force AND consent)

Transparent and opaque states

Passive revolution & the state as educator

Under modern capitalism the bourgeoisie often changes the forms of its rule without surrendering class power — absorbing demands from below and reorganising hegemony. Gramsci calls this passive revolution; reformism, fascism and the assembly-line methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford are examples. Perry Anderson reads the Gramscian state as an educator — it socialises and carries cultural transformation, so belief and consent become the basis of state power rather than the reverse. This is why Gramsci is called a “theoretician of superstructure.”

Counter-Hegemony and Revolutionary Strategy

If bourgeois hegemony blocks revolution, proletarian politics must first break it. Counter-hegemony means constructing alternative values, beliefs, institutions and leadership — working-class intellectuals, broader alliances and a new “collective will.” Gramsci does not expect subordinate groups to liberate themselves automatically; education, organisation and critical consciousness are necessary.

Drawing on Niccolo Machiavelli, the Modern Prince is the revolutionary party: it develops organic intellectuals, educates the masses in the art of government, converts dispersed grievances into direction, and becomes the expression of the collective will. Counter-hegemony begins when imposed “common sense” is punctured and subaltern groups articulate their own “good sense,” forming a “coalition of subalterns.”