What is Hegemony? Antonio Gramsci and the Prison Notebooks

This video concerns the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. It asks one basic question: why do the powerless consent to be dominated by the powerful? Consent is linchpin of hegemony as an ideological tool.

To complicate the phenomenon further, Gramsci argued that the ruling class uses instruments like civil society, mass media, the educational system, and interest groups to maintain dominance or hegemony over the masses. As a result, the ruling class disperses its political, social, moral, and cultural values into society so that the masses accept those values as their own. This is hegemony by consent, which must be both juxtaposed to and differentiated from coercion and/or force used to stop the masses from rising up against the ruling class and its system of domination. Gramsci pointed out that this interdependence of consent, coercion, and force is especially the case in more developed and sophisticated societies.

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