Summary
Cultural hegemony is rule by consent: a dominant group holds power less by force than by shaping what a whole society takes for common sense. The term comes from the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, writing in a Fascist jail, and was developed further by Stuart Hall. Gramsci had seen Turin’s workers take over factories and hand them back within weeks. Seizing factories and the state, he concluded, wasn’t enough without a culture to back it.
The activist and scholar Stephen Duncombe puts it this way: “culture is a politics that doesn’t look like politics”. No culture is completely hegemonic, though, and Gramsci never thought cultural power alone would be enough.
Rationale
Part 1’s line on power, that dominant dispositions make arrangements “feel natural or inevitable”, is hegemony in other words. We interviewed Jeremy Gilbert, co-author of ‘Hegemony Now’, which updates the concept.