No treaty, no enforcement, and a distribution of advantage everybody maintains.
Hegemony
Dominance maintained through consent rather than force - where the arrangement is accepted by those it disadvantages.
- Theme
- Society, politics and power
- Tradition
- Modern
- Term
- ἡγεμονία · hēgemonia
- Term fixed
- 1935
In plain terms
A group can rule by force, which is expensive and unstable, or it can rule by making its way of running things seem obviously right - including to the people who do worst out of it.
The second is hegemony. It works through schools, newspapers, churches, professions and ordinary common sense, and it does not feel like domination from inside because nobody is being made to do anything. People are choosing, and choosing what the arrangement requires.
What makes the idea powerful is that it explains something force does not: why arrangements that plainly disadvantage most people persist for centuries without continuous coercion. What makes it slippery is that the same reasoning can explain away any agreement at all as manufactured, which is a conclusion that flatters whoever is making the argument.
As a philosopher would put it
Gramsci's problem was why revolution had not occurred in the industrialised West. His answer distinguishes domination through coercion from leadership through consent, and locates the latter in civil society - the schools, associations, press and churches through which a class establishes its outlook as common sense.
The strategic consequence is his distinction between wars of manoeuvre and position. Where civil society is thin, a frontal seizure of the state may work; where it is dense, a long struggle over culture and institutions is required first, since the state is protected by an outer network of trenches.
Organic intellectuals - those produced by a class rather than inherited from an older order - are the agents of that work. Laclau and Mouffe later detach hegemony from class, making it a general logic by which any political identity is constructed through articulation, which broadens it considerably and severs the connection to the economic base Gramsci retained.
Where you meet it
About ninety-eight per cent of research in the natural sciences is published in English. No treaty established this and no body enforces it.
The costs fall unevenly and have been measured. A 2023 study across eight countries found that researchers whose first language is not English spend around twice as long reading a paper, up to twice as long writing one, face substantially higher rejection rates on language grounds, and pay for editing services out of budgets their anglophone colleagues do not need.
Every individual decision that sustains it is rational. A researcher publishes in English because that is where the readers are; a journal operates in English because that is where the submissions are; a university requires it because that is what the rankings count. Nobody is compelled and the outcome is a distribution of advantage nobody chose and everybody maintains - which is what hegemony describes, in a case where the mechanism is fully visible and no less effective for it.
What is actually disputed
Whether consent under hegemony is real consent.
If people accept an arrangement because their sense of what is normal was formed by it, then their agreement is not independent evidence that it is acceptable. That is the concept's whole force. The objection is that the same argument applies to every belief anyone holds, since all of them were formed somewhere - so the analyst ends up distinguishing genuine from manufactured consent by their own lights, which is the third face of power problem again.
A second dispute concerns scope. Once hegemony is detached from class, as in Laclau and Mouffe, it becomes a general account of how political identities form, which is analytically flexible and loses the explanatory claim that made Gramsci's version substantive - that the outlook serving a particular class becomes everyone's common sense.
Commonly confused with
- hegemony in international relations There it means one state's preponderance over others. Gramsci's sense concerns leadership within a society through consent.
- Domination 1997 Domination works through the capacity to coerce. Hegemony works because coercion is not needed.
- majority opinion A majority can hold a view that serves it. Hegemony picks out the case where a view serving a minority becomes everyone's common sense.
Defined against
- Emancipation Hegemony explains why arrangements persist without force, and emancipation names the project of undoing them, which is why the pair defines the field
Philosophers
- Karl Marx The base on which the theory of ruling ideas rests
- Paul-Michel Foucault The alternative account of dispersed power
- Slavoj Žižek Hegemony reworked through ideology critique
- Achille Mbembe Hegemony under colonial and postcolonial conditions
- Judith Butler Hegemony and the constitution of political subjects
Works
- The German Ideology The ruling ideas thesis Gramsci develops
- Dialectic of Enlightenment The culture industry as a hegemonic apparatus
- Orientalism Hegemony analysed as a scholarly discourse
- Discourse on Colonialism The imperial case
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed The educational counter-strategy
Schools
- Classical Marxism Where the concept develops
- Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where cultural domination is analysed in parallel
- Post-Structuralism Where it becomes a general logic of articulation
- Modernity-Coloniality School Where its imperial forms are examined
- Situationism Where consumption carries it
Related concepts
Ideology 1846 · Power 1532 · Domination 1997 · Discourse 1966 · Oppression 1990
The Greek word means leadership among allies; Gramsci's use, developed in prison notebooks written between 1929 and 1935, is the one the modern concept derives from.