The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Hegemony

Hegemony: From the Greek for “to lead,” the dominance or dominant influence of one nation, group, or class over another or others; the ideological control of attitudes within a culture. In works such as Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) (1929—35), Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci adapted the term in developing his theory of cultural hegemony. Gramsci argued that advanced capitalist states generally rely on consensus formation, rather than force, to maintain power and perpetuate bourgeois class rule, using the institutions of civil society (e.g., art, law, religion) to propagate and shape social assumptions and values — i.e., the way things look, what they mean, and therefore what reality is for the majority of people within a given culture. Although Gramsci viewed hegemony as a potent force, he did not believe that extant systems were immune to change; rather, he encouraged people to resist the prevailing consciousness, to form a new consensus, and thereby to alter hegemony.