Gramsci - Hegemony and the Battle for Common Sense

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) wrote the most influential body of Marxist theory of the twentieth century in a Fascist prison, in thirty-three notebooks, under a censor, in a code of his own devising, while dying.

This course has already used his central concept four times (4.1.2, 4.1.7, 4.2.5, 5.2.2). This lesson gives it its proper treatment — because hegemony is, on any reckoning, one of the half-dozen most useful ideas the discipline has, and because the way it was produced is inseparable from what it says.

Turi prison, Bari province, southern Italy. 1929.

A man of thirty-eight is beginning to write. He is four feet eleven inches tall, with a spinal deformity from childhood illness. He has Pott's disease, arteriosclerosis, tuberculosis, hypertension, angina and gout. He will not leave custody alive.

He is the former general secretary of the Italian Communist Party and a serving member of parliament, arrested in November 1926 despite parliamentary immunity. At his trial the prosecutor said: "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning."

He was granted permission to write in prison, and the permission came with a censor.

So Gramsci writes in code. The state is "the integral state" or is discussed through Machiavelli. Marxism becomes "the philosophy of praxis." Lenin becomes "Ilyich." Class becomes "social group." The Communist Party becomes "the modern Prince."

He writes on whatever paper he is allowed, in a cramped hand, with the notebooks numbered and periodically confiscated and returned. He has almost no library — books arrive irregularly, and he works largely from memory and from what he can get.

Between 1929 and 1935 he fills 2,848 pages.

They are not a book. They are notes: fragments, drafts, second and third versions of the same passage, marginalia, translation exercises, and long digressions on Italian literary history. They were smuggled out by his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht after his death, sent to Moscow, and published in Italy from 1948.

He was released to a clinic in 1934, too ill to move, and died on 27 April 1937, six days after his sentence formally expired, aged forty-six.

And the concept he worked out in those conditions is the best answer anyone has given to the question of why people consent to arrangements that damage them.

Gramsci's problem was concrete, urgent and political, and it is the same problem the Frankfurt School faced (5.4.1) — approached with far more strategic seriousness.

The revolution succeeded in Russia in 1917. It failed everywhere in Western Europe.

The German revolution of 1918–19 was crushed. The Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted 133 days. And in Italy, the Biennio Rosso of 1919–20 — the "two red years" of factory occupations in Turin, in which Gramsci was directly involved through the factory council movement and the newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo — collapsed, and was followed within two years by Mussolini's march on Rome.

Why? The Western working classes were larger, better organised, more literate and more experienced than the Russian. By orthodox theory they should have been more revolutionary, not less.

Gramsci's answer is a distinction between two kinds of state, and it is the foundation of everything else.

In Tsarist Russia, "the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous." Take the state and you have taken everything.

In the West, "there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks."

The fortresses are churches, schools, newspapers, trade unions, professional associations, cultural bodies, clubs, publishers, universities. They are not the state, they cannot be seized, and they hold a society together after the state has fallen.

Which means the strategic question changes entirely. In the East, a frontal assault on the state — the war of manoeuvre — could succeed. In the West, it cannot, because the fortresses remain. What is required instead is a war of position: a long struggle, conducted across civil society, for the ground on which people understand their own situation.

Hegemony

Hegemony is rule maintained principally through leadership and consent rather than through force — where the world-view of a dominant group has become the ordinary, taken-for-granted common sense of the society, so that its arrangements appear natural rather than imposed.

Gramsci's formulation of the two moments of rule:

"Domination" (dominio) — direct coercion, exercised through the state's repressive apparatus: police, courts, army, prisons.

"Intellectual and moral leadership" (direzione) — the capacity to make one's own outlook the general outlook, so that subordinate groups adopt it as their own.

And the key point: a hegemonic group rules by both, in a specific ratio. Force is held in reserve and applied to the minority who do not consent. The greater the hegemony, the less force is required — which is why the most stable orders look the least coercive, and why the appearance of low coercion is not evidence that domination is absent.

Gramsci's definition of the state, which is a genuine theoretical advance:

"State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion."

Political society — the coercive apparatus: government, army, police, courts, bureaucracy. Civil society — the "private" institutions: churches, schools, media, unions, parties, cultural associations, the family.

And the crucial claim: civil society is not a realm of freedom standing over against the state. It is where hegemony is produced and reproduced. The two together constitute rule.

This is his amendment to base and superstructure (4.1.2). The superstructure is not a reflection of the base; it is a terrain of struggle, with its own institutions, its own specialists, and its own real effects on what happens.

Three features of Gramsci's account that distinguish it from every cruder theory of ideology (4.1.7).

One: it is produced continuously. Hegemony is not a state that has been achieved; it is an ongoing accomplishment, requiring constant work by identifiable institutions — schools teaching, newspapers publishing, clergy preaching, parties campaigning. It can therefore fail, and studying how it is produced is an empirical research programme rather than a philosophical claim.

Two: it requires real concessions. This is Gramsci's sharpest departure from the idea that ideology is simply imposed. A hegemonic group must "make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind" — must genuinely give things up — to sustain a broad alliance. The welfare state, labour law, public health systems and the extension of the franchise are hegemony's price, not its failure. Rule by consent is expensive.

Three: it is never total. This is contradictory consciousness, and it is the most useful thing in the lesson.

Contradictory consciousness, in Gramsci's own words, is worth quoting in full because it is so often flattened:

"The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity... One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed."

Read what this claims. Ordinary people hold, simultaneously:

Ideas absorbed from the dominant culture — inherited, unexamined, verbally professed. And ideas arising from their own practical experience — implicit in what they actually do, and frequently in direct contradiction with the first set.

The warehouse worker who says "if you work hard you can get on" also says "they'd sack the lot of us tomorrow." Both are in there. Neither is false consciousness. The combination is the normal condition of everybody, including the analyst.

Why this matters so much: it removes the condescension that ruins the concept of false consciousness (4.1.7). Nobody is duped. People have a partial, practical understanding of their situation, in tension with what they have been taught, and the political question is which of the two gets developed and organised.

And it gives the analyst something to look for. Not "have these people been deceived?" but "what does their practice already know that their explicit talk does not?"

Common sense and good sense

Common sense (senso comune) is Gramsci's term for the incoherent, fragmentary, inherited outlook that everyone carries: bits of religion, folklore, past ideologies, scraps of science, proverbs, prejudice, and genuine practical wisdom, layered without order.

"It is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the 'folklore' of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms."

Crucially, it is not simply false. Within it Gramsci identifies good sense (buon senso) — the sound, practical, experientially grounded kernel that reflects people's real conditions.

And the political task he specifies is not to replace common sense with theory delivered from outside. It is to develop the good sense already within it into a coherent outlook — to "make critical an already existing activity."

This is a direct rejection of Lenin's vanguard doctrine (4.1.8), which held that revolutionary consciousness must be brought to workers "from without" by professional revolutionaries. Gramsci's position is that the raw material is already present in people's practical understanding of their own lives, and the work is to organise and clarify it.

Which is why he says: "All men are intellectuals... but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals."

Organic and traditional intellectuals

Traditional intellectuals appear to be independent of social groups and to stand above the fray — clergy, academics, writers, the liberal professions. They have historical continuity, an esprit de corps, and a self-image of autonomy. Gramsci's point is that this appearance of independence is itself a social function: their apparent detachment is what makes them useful as legitimators, and they are usually attached to an older dominant class whose formation produced them.

Organic intellectuals are produced by a rising social group as part of its own formation, and they give that group "homogeneity and an awareness of its own function" — in economics, in politics, in culture. The capitalist entrepreneur produces industrial technicians, political economists, legal specialists and organisers of a new culture.

And the strategic claim: a class that seeks hegemony must produce its own organic intellectuals and must assimilate the traditional ones — win over or neutralise the clergy, the professors, the journalists.

"The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence... but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, 'permanent persuader'."

The concept earns its keep when applied to a specific transformation, so take one that is well documented.

The reconstruction of economic common sense in Britain and the United States, roughly 1945–1990.

In 1950, the following propositions were common sense across most of the political spectrum in both countries: that governments should manage demand to maintain full employment; that key utilities and industries were properly publicly owned; that trade unions were a legitimate part of national economic management; and that progressive taxation and public provision were what a decent society did. Conservative parties governed on these terms, which is the test of a genuine hegemony — the opposition accepts the framework.

By 1990, a different set was common sense: that inflation, not unemployment, is the primary target; that public ownership is inefficient; that union power is an obstacle; that lower taxes and market provision produce better outcomes; and that there is, in the phrase, no alternative.

Now ask how that happened, in Gramscian terms.

Organic intellectuals were produced and organised. Economists working in a minority tradition were funded, published and connected. The Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947, and a network of institutes founded from the 1950s onwards — the IEA in London, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington — did exactly what Gramsci describes: they gave a group "homogeneity and an awareness of its own function," and they operated as permanent persuaders.

Traditional intellectuals were assimilated. Journalists, academics and civil servants were recruited into the new framework through seminars, publications, appointments and the sheer availability of a coherent alternative when the previous consensus ran into trouble.

A crisis supplied the opening. The stagflation of the 1970s discredited the existing framework, and a prepared alternative was available — which is exactly Gramsci's account of how hegemonies are replaced.

And the war of position was long. Thirty years of institution-building preceded the political victory, and its architects said so explicitly. Hayek wrote in 1949 that the task was to persuade the "second-hand dealers in ideas" — teachers, journalists, publicists — and that this was work of decades.

Note two things about this example. First, it is offered as an analysis of a mechanism, not an evaluation: the same account can be given by supporters and opponents of the outcome, and both have given it. Second, it demonstrates the concept's political neutrality. Gramsci was a Communist and his concept describes the successful hegemonic strategy of his opponents at least as well as anything on his own side. A concept that works for people who reject its author's politics is a good concept.

Counter-hegemony and the war of position

Because hegemony must be continuously produced, it can be contested.

Counter-hegemony is the construction by subordinate groups of their own coherent outlook, their own organic intellectuals, and their own institutions.

The war of position is the long struggle for this ground: not a frontal assault on the state but the patient occupation of civil society — building unions, presses, schools, cultural organisations, mutual aid societies, and above all a coherent alternative account of how things are and could be.

The historic bloc (blocco storico) is Gramsci's term for the alliance of social forces, bound by a shared world-view, that can sustain hegemony. It is not a single class. Constructing one requires a group to articulate the interests of others to its own — which means genuine alliance, with genuine concessions, not a coalition of convenience.

And this is where Gramsci's strategic advice differs sharply from the tradition he came from. The Italian working class, he argued, could not win alone; it required an alliance with the Southern peasantry, and constructing that alliance meant taking the Southern question seriously as more than a distraction from class politics.

Go deeper

The Southern question and passive revolution

Two further concepts, both underused and both excellent.

The Southern question. Gramsci was Sardinian, from a poor family in an impoverished region, and he never accepted the Northern socialist movement's view of the South as backward. His unfinished 1926 essay argues that Italian unification produced an internal colonial relation — Northern industry protected by tariffs, Southern agriculture supplying cheap labour and a captive market — and that Northern workers benefited from it, which is why an alliance was hard and necessary.

This is a sophisticated analysis of how a subordinate group can be complicit in another's subordination, made independently of and around the same time as Du Bois's public and psychological wage (4.5.4).

Passive revolution (rivoluzione passiva) — Gramsci's term for change from above that transforms social relations while preventing popular participation. Italian unification, in his reading, was one: a national state constructed by elites, without a popular revolution, leaving the old order's structures largely intact.

Its later applications are extensive: postcolonial state formation, top-down modernisation, and — most productively — transformism (trasformismo), the absorption of opposition leaders into the dominant bloc, which decapitates a movement without confronting it. Anyone who has watched a radical group's leadership taken into a government or a board has seen transformism.

The transmission

Gramsci's reception is a case study in how ideas travel.

The notebooks were published thematically in Italy from 1948, in an arrangement by Palmiro Togliatti's party that was later criticised for smoothing Gramsci into a more orthodox Communist than the text supports. Valentino Gerratana's critical edition (1975) restored the notebooks' actual order and made scholarly work possible. The English Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Hoare and Nowell Smith, 1971) is the standard entry point, and a complete critical translation is still in progress.

The Anglophone impact came through Birmingham. Stuart Hall and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies made Gramsci the central theoretical resource of British cultural studies from the 1970s. Policing the Crisis (1978) — Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts — applied hegemony to a moral panic about "mugging," and it remains one of the best pieces of applied social theory anyone has produced. Hall's essay "The Great Moving Right Show" (1979) analysed the emerging Thatcher project in Gramscian terms, coining "authoritarian populism," and it was written before the 1979 election.

Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) took the concept in a post-structuralist direction, detaching it from class entirely and treating hegemony as the articulation of any set of demands into a chain of equivalence. This is the most contested development: it made Gramsci central to post-Marxist political theory and, in the view of orthodox critics, dissolved the material anchoring that made the concept explanatory.

And elsewhere: subaltern studies in India (Guha, Chatterjee, and 6.2); Latin American political sociology; international relations theory (Robert Cox's neo-Gramscian school); education (Apple, Giroux); and media studies, where hegemony is the standard framework for the analysis of consent.

The criticisms

Is it unfalsifiable? If consent proves hegemony and dissent proves counter-hegemony, what would count against it? The best answer is that hegemony is a claim about identifiable institutions doing identifiable work, and that this is checkable — you can trace the funding, the appointments, the publications, the curricula. Analyses that skip that step are asserting.

How much consent is there really? Abercrombie, Hill and Turner's The Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980) argued that subordinate classes are held in place primarily by economic compulsion and lack of alternatives rather than by belief, and that the dominant ideology is most thoroughly absorbed by the dominant class. James C. Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) argue that apparent consent is frequently a public performance — a public transcript — behind which a hidden transcript of resistance is maintained continuously. Scott's evidence from Malaysian villages is strong, and it is the sharpest empirical challenge to hegemony as usually deployed.

Gramsci's own partial answer is contradictory consciousness, which anticipates much of Scott: he never claimed people wholly believe the dominant outlook. But the two positions genuinely differ on how much of compliance is belief and how much is calculation, and the honest position is that the mixture varies and is an empirical question in each case.

Is it too textual? Later cultural studies applications sometimes treat hegemony as a matter of meanings and representations, losing the institutional and material analysis Gramsci actually conducted.

And the elasticity. "Hegemony" is now used for almost any form of dominance, including in international relations for simple military preponderance — which is not what it means.

"Hegemony means dominance." It means rule by consent won through intellectual and moral leadership, with coercion held in reserve. Simple dominance is what Gramsci calls dominio, and the distinction is the whole point.

"Hegemony means people are brainwashed." Contradictory consciousness says the opposite: people hold dominant ideas and practical understandings that contradict them, simultaneously. Nobody is duped.

"Civil society opposes the state." For Gramsci, "state = political society + civil society." Civil society is where hegemony is produced, not a refuge from it.

"Hegemony costs the dominant nothing." It requires real economic sacrifices to sustain an alliance. Welfare states and labour law are hegemony's price.

"Common sense is false consciousness." It is fragmentary and contains good sense — a practically grounded kernel to be developed, not replaced from outside. This is Gramsci's explicit rejection of the vanguard doctrine.

"Gramsci is only useful to the left." The best-documented modern instance of a successful war of position was conducted by people who would have found his politics abhorrent — which is evidence the concept is analytical rather than partisan.

Why it matters

It is the best available answer to the question of consent. Better than false consciousness (condescending and unfalsifiable), better than pure coercion (insufficient), and better than the Frankfurt School's culture industry (which cannot register that audiences argue back). Hegemony is produced by institutions, requires concessions, is never total, and can be contested — four features that make it usable.

It makes ideology researchable. If consent is produced by identifiable institutions doing identifiable work, then you can study the funding, the appointments, the curricula, the publications and the networks. That converts a philosophical claim into an empirical programme.

It supplies a theory of strategy. War of position, organic intellectuals, historic bloc, transformism, passive revolution. These are analytical concepts and they are also instructions, which is why Gramsci is read by practitioners as well as by academics — and by practitioners across the political spectrum.

And it demonstrates something about the relationship between conditions and thought. These notebooks were written by a dying man in a Fascist prison, in code, without a library, in fragments he never revised. They are more useful than most of what has been written in comfortable conditions with full access — which is not a romantic point about suffering but a specific one: the question of how rule survives its own crises is easier to see from inside a prison built by a regime that had just answered it.

Gramsci wrote 2,848 pages in thirty-three notebooks in a Fascist prison between 1929 and 1935, in code to evade a censor, and died at forty-six.

The problem: revolution succeeded in Russia and failed across Western Europe. The answer: in the East "the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous"; in the West "the State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks" — churches, schools, press, unions, associations. Hence war of manoeuvre in the East, war of position in the West.

Hegemony is rule through intellectual and moral leadership (direzione) with coercion (dominio) held in reserve. "State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion." Civil society is where hegemony is produced, not a refuge from it.

Three features that make it usable: it is produced continuously by identifiable institutions, and can therefore fail and be studied; it requires real economic concessions — welfare states are hegemony's price; and it is never total.

Contradictory consciousness: people hold "two theoretical consciousnesses" — inherited dominant ideas, and understandings implicit in their own practice, in tension. Nobody is duped. And common sense contains good sense, which the task is to develop rather than to replace from outside — an explicit rejection of the vanguard doctrine.

Traditional intellectuals appear autonomous, which is itself their function; organic intellectuals are produced by a rising group to give it homogeneity and self-awareness, as permanent persuaders.

Also: the Southern question (a subordinate group complicit in another's subordination, arrived at independently of Du Bois); passive revolution; and transformism — absorbing opposition leaders to decapitate a movement.

Criticisms: Abercrombie, Hill and Turner on economic compulsion rather than belief; Scott's public and hidden transcripts; the risk of unfalsifiability; and the concept's elasticity.

Hegemony — rule through intellectual and moral leadership, with consent won continuously in civil society.

Domination (dominio) / leadership (direzione) — the coercive and consensual moments of rule.

Civil society — churches, schools, media, unions, associations: where hegemony is produced.

War of manoeuvre / war of position — frontal assault on the state, versus long struggle across civil society.

Contradictory consciousness — the simultaneous holding of inherited dominant ideas and understandings arising from practice.

Common sense (senso comune) / good sense (buon senso) — the fragmentary inherited outlook, and the practically grounded kernel within it.

Traditional intellectuals — those appearing autonomous, whose apparent detachment is their social function.

Organic intellectuals — those produced by a social group to articulate its outlook; "permanent persuaders."

Historic bloc — the alliance of social forces, bound by a shared world-view, that sustains hegemony.

Counter-hegemony — the construction by subordinate groups of their own outlook, intellectuals and institutions.

Passive revolution — transformation from above that prevents popular participation.

Transformism (trasformismo) — the absorption of opposition leaders into the dominant bloc.

Public and hidden transcripts — Scott's terms for the performance of deference and the resistance maintained behind it.

One — find your own contradictory consciousness. Write two things you believe about how success works that do not sit together. Then ask which came from what you were taught and which from what you have observed. Gramsci says everyone has both.

Two — trace a war of position. Take any shift in what a society treats as obvious — on smoking, marriage, markets, empire, diet. Identify the institutions, funders and publications that did the work, and over how many years.

Three — locate the concessions. For any stable order, list what those in charge have given up to keep it stable. If the list is empty, the order is running on coercion and is less stable than it looks.

Four — spot a transformism. Find a movement whose leaders were brought inside an institution. Ask what happened to the movement afterwards.

Five — read one page. The "war of position" passage in Selections from the Prison Notebooks is about two pages. Read it and note that it was written in a cell by a man who had just watched his own side lose.