Hegemony by A. Gramsci

Abstract 

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony says ruling groups keep power not just by force, but by getting people to accept their ideas as natural, common sense. It highlights the role of civil society, culture, schools, media, religion, and intellectuals in shaping consent. It also contrasts coercion with consent, and says social change in advanced societies usually needs a “war of position” rather than a direct assault on the state.

Context

Marxist model

Marx laid out his model most clearly in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. There he argued that humans enter into definite relations of production that are independent of their will, and that the totality of these relations forms the economic structure of society. This is the base.

The base has two components. The forces of production are the tools, technology, resources, and labour used to produce goods. The relations of production are the social and class relationships people enter into during this process, such as the relationship between a factory owner and a worker. According to Marxist theory, the superstructure includes everything else: law, politics, religion, education, art, and ideology.

In the classical reading, the relationship runs in one direction. The base determines the superstructure. The economy is the engine, and culture, law, and ideas reflect and justify the economic arrangements that already exist. Marx famously wrote in the Preface:

“The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

However, if the base mechanically determines the superstructure, how can ideas, movements, or political organising ever change anything? Revolutions are often sparked by precisely those superstructural forces, by new ideas and cultural shifts, yet a strict reading of the model leaves little room for them. Critics also argued that treating people as passive products of their economic circumstances ignores human agency and the capacity to resist and create meaning. This is the gap Gramsci set out to fill.

Georges Sorel

Sorel influenced Gramsci mainly through revolutionary syndicalism, especially the idea that political change needs a lived collective will, not just economic determinism. Gramsci adopted Sorel's emphasis on myth, voluntary action, and the need to mobilize people emotionally and morally, but he rejected Sorel’s narrower focus on spontaneous violence and syndicalist anti-political attitudes.

For Gramsci, the useful part of Sorel was that politics is not only about interests; it is also about building a shared worldview that can organize mass consent. That fed into Gramsci’s later ideas about hegemony and the role of intellectual and cultural leadership. He also adapted the notion of myth into something more political and strategic: a force that can unify a class or coalition around a common project.

Sorel helped push Gramsci away from economic determinism and toward the importance of culture, leadership, and collective political will, but Gramsci transformed those ideas into a much broader Marxist theory.

The evolution of Gramsci's thinking in his works

In the early period, before his imprisonment, his writing is closely tied to immediate political struggle. From 1916 to 1920, in articles such as Newspapers and the Workers (1916) and The Revolution Against ‘Capital' (1917), he is focused on current events, the Russian Revolution, and the practical problems of workers’ politics.

By 1921–1926, his work becomes more strategic and party-centered: he writes on the Communist Party, the Italian situation, the peasantry, and the “southern question,” showing a stronger concern with organization, leadership, and the conditions for revolution.

After his arrest in 1926 by the fascist regime of Mussolini he used his long prison sentence (1929 to 1935) to mark a major shift toward a more historical and theoretical reflection. In Quaderni del carcere (1947) (published as Prison Notebooks (1971) he develops the concepts most associated with his mature thought: hegemony, the modern prince, civil society, political leadership, war of position, organic crisis, and the relation between structure and superstructure. Here Gramsci is no longer writing mainly for immediate intervention, but reworking Marxism into a broader theory of culture, power, and state formation.

His evolution is from urgent journalism and revolutionary commentary, to organisational and political analysis and finally to a theoretical reconstruction of Marxist politics, all created while under fascist imprisonment. The continuity across all three phases is his commitment to the emancipation of subaltern groups and the method becomes increasingly historical, conceptual, and reflective over time.

Download Selections from Prison Notebooks

Summary 

Gramsci’s central puzzle was the failure of socialist revolution in Western Europe. If economic crises automatically produced revolution, the advanced capitalist countries should have been the first to fall. Instead, the ruling classes there held firm. Gramsci concluded that the ruling class maintained power not only through economic control and coercion but through what he called hegemony: the ability to make its own worldview appear as natural, obvious “common sense” to everyone else.

This was a major departure from a purely economic analysis. Power, for Gramsci, rested on two pillars that he described using the terms dominio (domination or coercion) and direzione (direction or consent). A class rules not just by force but by securing the moral and intellectual leadership that wins genuine consent from the population. Once you accept that consent matters as much as coercion, the superstructure stops being a passive mirror of the economy. Culture and ideology become active battlegrounds.

The blocco storico (historic bloc) is Gramsci’s solution to the base-superstructure problem. He borrowed the term from the French thinker Georges Sorel but transformed its meaning. For Gramsci, the historic bloc is the organic unity of the base and the superstructure, of material conditions and ideological forces, bound together so tightly that they form a single, coherent whole.

The key word is unity. In the classical model, base and superstructure were separate levels stacked on top of each other. Gramsci argued that in a functioning society they fuse into one structure. The economic foundations and the cultural, political, and ideological forms are not two things but two aspects of the same reality. As one detailed study of the concept explains, the historic bloc integrates subjective elements with larger objective societal structures rather than keeping them in separate boxes.

Gramsci’s argued that hegemony held the historic bloc together. It acts as the “cement” that binds the base and superstructure into a unified whole and keeps the social order stable. A ruling class achieves a stable historic bloc when its economic dominance is matched by ideological leadership, so that the way society is organised seems legitimate and even inevitable to most people.

This explains the durability of established orders. A workforce that genuinely believes existing inequalities are fair, deserved, or natural will not rise up, even during economic hardship. The bloc holds because consent reinforces coercion and economics reinforces ideology. Importantly, this is not a one-way street. The superstructure does not simply reflect the base; it actively stabilises it, and the two shape each other continuously.

The deepest change Gramsci made was to the direction of causation. In the classical reading, the base shapes the superstructure. Gramsci insisted on a dialectical, two-way relationship. Cultural and ideological factors can influence economic conditions, not simply echo them. Thinkers who built on Gramsci, such as Christine Buci-Glucksmann, stressed that the historic bloc is more than a simple class alliance. It implies a specific form of hegemonic leadership rooted in an organic relationship between leaders and the masses. The historic bloc, in other words, is a way of thinking about how economics, politics, and ideology hold together as a unity within the theory of hegemony.

If a historic bloc requires both material conditions and ideological leadership, someone has to provide that leadership. For Gramsci, this is the job of intellectuals. He argued that every social class produces its own intellectuals who give it coherence and self-awareness.

Gramsci distinguished between two types. Traditional intellectuals, such as priests, professors, and established philosophers, appear to float above class struggle and seem politically neutral. Gramsci argued this neutrality is an illusion. In practice they tend to legitimise the existing order. Organic intellectuals, by contrast, emerge directly from a particular class, especially a rising one. As Gramsci put it, every social group creates alongside itself one or more strata of intellectuals who give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function.

Organic intellectuals are not detached thinkers. They interpret the material conditions a class faces and turn that interpretation into action, leadership, and organisation. Without them, favourable economic conditions remain just that, conditions, with no force to act on them. This is why Gramsci believed transformation needs both elements at once: the development of productive forces and the presence of intellectuals who can read those conditions and mobilise people around a new vision.

Gramsci’s reworking of the base-superstructure relationship had direct strategic consequences. If the ruling order is held together by hegemony as well as force, then it cannot be overthrown by a single dramatic seizure of state power alone. Gramsci described a shift from a war of manoeuvre, a direct and violent assault on the state, to a war of position, the patient and gradual winning of tactical strongholds across civil society.

This is where his expanded view of the state matters. Gramsci proposed an “integral” conception in which the state equals political society plus civil society. To change society, a counter-hegemonic movement must contest the schools, media, religious institutions, and cultural arenas where consent is manufactured, while also building real strength among the masses. Only when an emerging class has developed both its material base and its own hegemonic leadership can it form a new historic bloc capable of replacing the old one. This framework helps explain why some movements succeed in transforming society while others, despite favourable economic conditions, collapse.

Themes 

State and Civil Society

Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony hinged, in part, on the empirical observation that capitalist rule in developed western states, increasingly, is founded on the generation of consent across civil society, not solely on the deployment of coercion via the army, police or law courts.

Expanding on his suggestion from 1926 that the ruling class had available to it “political and organisational reserves”, Gramsci now argued that modern states since the mid-nineteenth century have tended to cultivate consensual support — or hegemony — across civil society such that coercion, or its threat, was no longer the primary form of rule, except in

“moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed”

Gramsci drew on a distinction, common in Italian political thought, between "forza e consenso” (force and consent). Hegemony referred to consent, although this was understood usually to be balanced with force. Modern states aimed to absorb threats to their power by winning over potentially hostile social groups and classes, compromising the immediate interests of the dominant class to maintain general support. Such efforts may often be fragile or limited, but that basic condition fundamentally altered the terrain of political contest. 

States could not be reduced to mere administrative units of executive authority — that is, to a separate “political society” — but were intertwined with a sturdy structure of civil society, schools, churches, private associations, newspapers, intellectuals and so on. Unlike in Russia, where state power was strong and civil society weak (“primordial and gelatinous”), modern states utilize the “trenches” of civil society by exercising “civil hegemony”. This protected them from the threats to their rule caused by economic crises or civil disruption.

The state, then, was a complex structure combining both force and consent: it was both the instrument by which a ruling class maintained its dominance over society and the medium through which it undertook a “civilising activity”, functioning as an “ethical state” or “educator” by promoting “a certain way of life” for its citizens. At one point Gramsci formulated this as “State = political society + civil society (in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion)”, or what he also called an “integral” conception of the state.

Gramsci’s remarks elaborated his earlier rejection of an exclusively insurrectionary model of revolution. In the Prison Notebooks he was further suggesting that hegemony described a general condition applicable to both bourgeois and proletarian forms of rule. Revolutionary transformation — for any class — cannot be focused exclusively on the seizure of coercive and bureaucratic power, but must engage the state’s wider system of defenses. He referred to this in the military terms that had become commonplace after the First World War as a switch from a “war of manoeuvre” (a direct and violent assault on the forces of the state) to a “war of position”, the gradual winning of tactical strongholds. A revolutionary project, he suggested, must first build consent across civil society before taking formal power. That did not mean that coercion would never be necessary, only that its status was diminished in modern states.

Gramsci explored various historical examples and concepts of political rule in the Prison Notebooks. In extensive notes on the 19th. century Italian Risorgimento he highlighted the failure of the northern bourgeoisie to develop an extensive hegemonic leadership by incorporating “subaltern” social classes in the South. He borrowed the concept of “passive revolution” to describe this situation in which a change in economic structure occurs but without a radical political transformation; this was a concept he also suggested could describe Fascism.

Ideology and Common Sense

Gramsci’s attention to intellectuals connected to his reflections on popular consciousness and its practical organisation in, for example, religion, education, language, and folklore. Popular attitudes, he underlined — drawing on his linguistic training — should not be dismissed but, rather, understood as part of how ordinary people lived and experienced their world. They were also the medium through which hegemony was exercised.

The tendency among Marxists to diminish “ideology and politics”, reducing them to an immediate expression of an economic structure, was dismissed by Gramsci as “primitive infantilism”. Instead, ideology should be grasped as a conception of the world that “serves to cement and unify” human practice. It had a lived “psychological” validity that enabled people to become conscious of their practical situations, however inadequately.. It was therefore important to explore and understand that practical function. Gramsci did this in his remarks on senso comune (common sense).

Common sense — popular attitudes and beliefs, frequently accepted as “eternal” truths by ordinary people — denoted, for Gramsci, a largely uncritical and “fragmentary” mode of consciousness. Consisting of superstitions and forms of “folklore” concerning the nature of reality and ethical conduct, common sense was a “philosophy of the popular masses”, often born from religion, that differentiated “simple” folk from educated intellectuals. Its danger was that it tended to invite resignation and passivity rather than collective action. That was a problem for what Gramsci referred to as “subaltern” groups, marginalized and subordinate classes, such as the peasantry and the proletariat, who, despite periodic rebellions, never adequately challenge dominant classes. 

Yet, common sense thinking often had a “healthy nucleus” in “good sense”, that is, in the practical and realistic attitudes that could be made “more coherent and unitary” if joined to a systematic and critical conception of the world. It was necessary not to dismiss common sense thinking (nor the struggles of subaltern groups) but to critically engage the “contradictory consciousness” of ordinary people, that is, the tendency to hold beliefs contradicted by actual conduct, and educate it.

Gramsci understood that educative task to belong to intellectuals, not to advance a superior and abstract philosophy but to work on common sense, thereby “renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing activity”. A hegemonic worldview had to connect to the “simple” to become embedded in everyday life. The past success of traditional intellectuals in this regard explained the ongoing influence of the Catholic Church in Italy.

The Philosophy of Praxis

The Prison Notebooks present an extensive critique of what Gramsci saw as the prevailing orthodoxy in Marxist philosophy. Exemplary here was the analysis by the Russian philosopher and economist, Nikolai Bukharin, in his Theory of Historical Materialism: A Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology (1921), a text Gramsci had used in party schools. Bukharin represents a more systematic and textbook-style Marxism, aimed at explaining society with general laws. Compared with Gramsci Bukharin is less focused on lived political struggle and more on Marxism as a coherent scientific doctrine.

Gramsci rejected Bukharin’s treatment of Marxism as a deterministic science of society and used his text as a foil to present an alternative account of historical materialism that he labelled the “philosophy of praxis”, following the late nineteenth century Hegelian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Labriola. Gramsci probably used Labriola’s term to evade the prison censor but it captured the primacy he gave to practical, political questions in his approach to theorising. He saw Marxism as a philosophy aimed at critically engaging popular common sense, laying the basis for a new hegemony.

Labriola influenced Gramsci by helping define Marxism as a theory inseparable from practical political struggle. That idea pushed against rigid determinist versions of Marxism and helped Gramsci think of history as shaped by human action, organization, and culture. The author took this further by making culture, intellectuals, and hegemony central to politics. Where Labriola emphasised the unity of theory and practice, Gramsci turned that into a broader strategy for how a class builds leadership in civil society.

The Popular Manual, as Gramsci referred to it, demonstrated the worst of what he called “vulgar materialism”. It reduced Marxism to a search for the causal laws of social evolution and accepted, without reflection, the positive sciences as the sole model of knowledge. It took up a speculative “method” positioned outside of history to observe supposedly “objective” mechanical regularities and to make predictions about their development. This view was mistaken for various reasons: instead of treating Marxism as an original philosophy, it subordinated it to the natural sciences. It failed to grasp the “dialectic” in Marxism, which underscored the critical struggle against established thought and it separated thought from action, “science and life”, and therefore divided intellectuals with knowledge from the experiences of “the great popular masses”.

To remedy these defects, Gramsci argued that Marxism, or historical materialism, be understood as a philosophy rooted in history, as an expression of the practical struggle to rethink those circumstances anew. As such it 

“... contains in itself all the fundamental elements to construct a total and integral conception of the world”.

Thought and action should be understood as dialectically intertwined in a developmental process that can 

"... bring into being a new form of State […] a new intellectual and moral order […] a new type of society”.

Historical materialism was not an abstract framework from which merely to observe historical change, it was the philosophical vehicle whose expansion into a cultural outlook aimed to bring about that change. Gramsci affirmed Labriola’s designation of Marxism as a “philosophy of praxis” because it insisted on the unity of thought and action (praxis), and through that the gradual formation of an autonomous moral and cultural worldview as the guiding principle of Marx’s philosophy.

Gramsci also proposed that Bendetto Croce’s idealism could be of “instrumental value” to a renewed philosophy of praxis. Influenced by Marxism, Crocean historicism conceived thought and expression as entirely “immanent” to history, that is, as responses to concrete problems, undetermined by any transcendent scheme or teleology. Croce presented “liberty” as the unifying ethical principle expressing this historicist sensibility, the basis to what he conceived as a modern religion. Gramsci acknowledged that Croce had

"...forcefully drawn attention to the importance of cultural and intellectual factors in the development of history […] to the moment of hegemony and consent."

Yet, he claimed, Croce also erased class conflict in his historical writing, emphasising only periods of liberal hegemony, the consensual, ethical aspects of history and not the violence or political struggles that ushered in bourgeois society, such as the French Revolution. 

By contrast, a philosophy of praxis would build on Croce’s insights, focusing instead on “ethico-political” history, the socio-economic divisions that bring, dialectically, a new culture into existence, without his partial, liberal gloss. It would vigorously critique received common sense beliefs, philosophies, and hierarchies that prevented the advance of ordinary people. Gramsci described the philosophy of praxis as an

“absolute ‘historicism’, the absolute secularisation and earthliness of thought”.

In rejecting the scientific model of knowledge in favour of a form of historical consciousness, Gramsci radically shifted Marxism’s epistemological bearings. The measure of historical materialism lay not exclusively in the immediate empirical “truth” of its propositions or predictions but, moreover, in the cultural and political efficacy of its overall intellectual and moral reform, which enabled creative subjective engagement with objective conditions: “it is a philosophy which is also politics”. 

He suggested that mass 

“... adhesion or non-adhesion to an ideology is the real critical test of the rationality and historicity of modes of thinking”, 

not just direct correspondence of theory to an independent reality, and that “prediction” was not so much “a scientific act of knowledge” as “the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will”. Gramsci compared the philosophy of praxis to the Protestant Reformation in so far as its success resided in generating cultural agreement to cement civil and political unity.

The Modern Prince

Gramsci still considered the agent of a revolution to be, by necessity, a centralised and ideologically disciplined party. But now he presented the party as the vehicle of a “total and integral conception of the world” that, in advance of the revolution itself, would organise across civil society.

The character of the revolutionary party, for Gramsci, could be grasped by reference to Niccolò Machiavelli’s treatise on political leadership: The Prince. The figure of the prince combined in one person both tactical calculation and an ambition to lead the people in building a state. That image of leadership, Gramsci continued, was later exemplified in Georges Sorel’s notion of “myth”, that is, a motivating ideal or “concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will”. Elaborating and diffusing “conceptions of the world” was what modern political parties were designed to do. Gramsci’s reflections on communist party strategy were therefore formulated as a treatise on what he conceived as “The Modern Prince”.

Drawing from the experience of the French Revolution, a modern Prince (or revolutionary party) must present itself as the type of “Jacobin force” which then had “awakened and organised the national-popular collective will, and founded the modern States”. Its strategy could not be oriented exclusively to the moment of revolutionary rupture but more “to the question of intellectual and moral reform, that is to the question of religion or world-view”. The party’s aim was to realise “a superior, total form of modern civilisation” rooted in economic relations. 

Yet the “national-popular” dimension required it to do this by transcending the corporate interests of one class alone, presenting its goals on a “universal plane”: “thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental group over a series of subordinate groups”. The party would lead by making itself the repository of popular common sense, gathering the support of allied intellectuals, and developing its own distinct worldview built on the philosophy of praxis. Gramsci’s conception of the party’s role, therefore, went beyond a temporary or mechanical alliance of separate classes; it meant mobilising a wholly new and inclusive vision of modern society.

The modern Prince was to be organised in such a way as to maintain contact with workers, but also to ensure disciplined leadership. It would be a party of “ordinary, average men”, with a leadership “endowed with great cohesive, centralising and disciplinary powers”, and an “intermediate element” to keep the two in mutual contact. The party would thus be a mass-based organisation under firm direction. To ensure “organic” discipline, Gramsci endorsed the principle of “democratic centralism” whereby decisions would be open to discussion by rank-and-file members. But, once taken, those decisions would be unquestioningly obeyed. That way “bureaucratic” rigidity would be avoided and there would be a continual adaptation of the organisation to the real movement; a matching of thrusts from below with orders from above.

This hybrid of classically “Leninist” and mass-based models of the party reflected Gramsci’s concern to steer a course between sectarian closure and reformist, representational politics. Gramsci was not optimistic that ordinary members could participate effectively without strong direction from a disciplined cadre, however much he thought revolution would eventually overcome the separation of leaders and led. Hegemonic strategy inevitably meant creating a new leading elite whose superior philosophy would 

“in the masses as such, […] only be experienced as a faith”.

Although some see in Gramsci’s politics the basis of a radically democratic politics his was not a particularly liberal conception.

The continuing influence of Gramsci

Gramsci’s idea of hegemony remains important in sociology because it explains how dominance is maintained through consent, culture, and everyday “common sense,” not only through force. In sociology, this helps explain how institutions such as schools, media, religion, and the state normalise certain values and make them seem 'natural'.

Stuart Hall was one of the most influential interpreters of Gramsci for contemporary sociology and cultural studies. In essays like Politics and Ideology: Gramsci and Gramsci and Us, collected in The Hard Road to Renewal, (1988) Hall used Gramsci to show how ideology, race, and media shape consent and political identity. Peter Mayo extended this into education studies in Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education (1999) and Hegemony and Education Under Neoliberalism: Insights from Gramsci (2015), arguing that schooling is a site of hegemonic struggle. Guido Liguori, in Gramsci’s Pathways (2015), emphasises civil society, ideology, and common sense, while Jan Rehmann’s work on ideology critique (2011) shows how Gramsci still structures contemporary critical theory.

Nudge theory fits into this discussion because it also focuses on shaping behaviour indirectly rather than through direct force. In Nudge (2008) Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that people can be guided toward better choices by changing how options are presented, while leaving freedom of choice intact. Sociologically, nudge theory is often read as a technocratic cousin of hegemony: both show how power works by organising the environment of choice, though Gramsci is broader and more political because he focuses on class, ideology, and social struggle. Gramsci explains how consent is built across society; nudge theory explains how institutions can steer individual decisions inside that broader social order.