Antonio Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony

The concept of cultural hegemony is nothing new.

Most of my work is empirical. Any given article of mine will be filled with plots, tables, and numbers.

However, I do occasionally nerd out about the history of ideas. And to be a “serious thinker,” you are typically expected to have a “big idea.”

My big idea is cultural hegemony. It is a concept that explains a lot for me. I believe it explains why the people of the United States are so divided in the 21st century. It explains why my neighbors are so boring to me. And it explains why I was foolish to try to pursue a career in scholarship.

Like everybody else, I did not invent my big idea. Therefore, I thought it was a good idea to understand what earlier thinkers have thought about cultural hegemony before taking the concept in my own direction.

Antonio Gramsci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian communist who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist government on November 8, 1926. He was given a 20-year sentence, but his health deteriorated to the point that he was released to medical custody on August 19, 1935. He was formally released before dying on April 27, 1937.

I am not interested in an international workers’ revolution or a dictatorship of the proletariat. Reading a Marxist typically results in me rolling my eyes. However, Gramsci is generally credited with coining the term “cultural hegemony” and providing the concept with its earliest known serious treatment, so I attempted a reading.

I use the phrase “attempted a reading” deliberately. Most of Gramsci’s writings are from his “prison notebooks,” fragmentary writings he cobbled together while imprisoned. He would write a paragraph or two about one topic, then write a few paragraphs about another topic, then another. In time, he would eventually return to write more about the first topic. This went on for dozens of notebooks.

Gramsci’s prison notebooks were rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming influential in the “New Left” movement.

I tried various approaches to reading Gramsci’s prison notebooks, including consulting what would have been an authoritative academic translation by Joseph Buttigieg,¹ only to discover that Buttigieg died before completing his translation, leaving notebooks that contained passages about the concept of cultural hegemony untranslated.

Ultimately, I adopted a straightforward approach. I obtained a copy of Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971), reviewed the topic index, and read any section in the book index under “hegemony” or related concepts such as “common sense.”

Civil Society vs. Political Society

A lot of political theory is concerned with the coercive power of the state. Gramsci noted that there is another component that is just as important, if not more so.

What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural “levels”: the one that can be called “civil society”, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private”, and that of “political society” or “the State”. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of “direct domination” or command exercised through the State and “juridical” government. The functions in question are precisely organisational and connective. The intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. These comprise:

1. The “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.

2. The apparatus of state coercive power which “legally” enforces discipline on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively. This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed.

This way of posing the problem has as a result a considerable extension of the concept of intellectual, but it is the only way which enables one to reach a concrete approximation of reality.

Political society refers to the state's coercive power. Think police, courts, and prisons.

Cultural (or “social”) hegemony occurs in civil society and is the way the ruling classes dominate society not by force, but by prestige. Think Harvard or the New York Times.

Mechanisms of Cultural Hegemony

Gramsci puts his quotation marks to work in the preceding passage. The way cultural hegemony works is to create the appearance of “consent” from the masses and to appear to be “spontaneous.” In reality, consent and spontaneity are engineered by the ruling classes and their deputies.

This engineering can be done by controlling the mass media.

The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent. Indeed, the attempt is always made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion—newspapers and associations—which, therefore, in certain situations, are artificially multiplied. Between consent and force stands corruption/fraud (which is characteristic of certain situations when it is hard to exercise the hegemonic function, and when the use of force is too risky).

It can also be done by controlling education.

In my opinion, the most reasonable and concrete thing that can be said about the ethical State, the cultural State, is this: every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes. The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important State activities in this sense: but, in reality, a multitude of other so-called private initiatives and activities tend to the same end—initiatives and activities which form the apparatus of the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes.

Regardless of how hegemony is practiced, the hegemonic power of culture and the coercive power of law complement each other.

When Gramsci refers to the “ethical State” or the “cultural State” in the above, he is referring to civil society, as his definition of the state encompasses civil society.

But what does that signify if not that by “State” should be understood not only the apparatus of government, but also the “private” apparatus of “hegemony” or civil society?

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

Intellectuals, aka the Professional-Managerial Class

Gramsci refers to “intellectuals” as the ruling class’s deputies. This is an early reference to what James Burnham would call the “managerial class,” what John and Barbara Ehrenreich would call the “professional-managerial class (PMC),” what Daniel Patrick Moynihan would call “The New Class,” and more recently what Musa al-Gharbi calls “symbolic capitalists.”²

The thinkers in this genre necessarily grapple with the rise of the PMC, which came with the growth of credentialism and university degrees in the 20th century. The PMC comprises individuals who hold college degrees and earn an income through occupations that do not involve manual labor. I would hazard a guess that most of the people reading this article are in the PMC.

Gramsci further distinguishes between “traditional” and “organic” intellectuals.

“Traditional” intellectuals are those who have been around for so long that they are no longer associated with a particular social class and so are effectively a separate social class themselves. Gramsci’s go-to example appears to be the clergy of the Catholic church.

Organic intellectuals, on the other hand, represent a specific social class. When a social class becomes the new ruling class (or tries to be), it brings along its own organic intellectuals. The rise of entrepreneurial capitalism brought with it its own organic intellectuals.

If not all entrepreneurs, at least an elite amongst them must have the capacity to be an organiser of society in general, including all its complex organism of services, right up to the state organism, because of the need to create the conditions most favourable to the expansion of their own class; or at the least they must possess the capacity to choose the deputies (specialised employees) to whom to entrust this activity of organising the general system of relationships external to the business itself. It can be observed that the “organic” intellectuals which every new class creates alongside itself and elaborates in the course of its development, are for the most part “specialisations” of partial aspects of the primitive activity of the new social type which the new class has brought into prominence.

Gramsci paints “intellectuals” with a broad brush, much like how later authors describe the PMC.

The function of organising social hegemony and state domination certainly gives rise to a particular division of labour and therefore to a whole hierarchy of qualifications.… at the highest level would be the creators of the various sciences, philosophy, art, etc., at the lowest the most humble “administrators” and divulgators of pre-existing, traditional, accumulated intellectual wealth.

As early as the 1930s, Gramsci wrote that the PMC was undergoing “unprecedented” growth.

In the modern world the category of intellectuals, understood in this sense, has undergone an unprecedented expansion. The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group. Hence Loria’s conception of the unproductive “worker” … a conception which could in part be justified if one takes account of the fact that these masses exploit their position to take for themselves a large cut out of the national income. Mass formation has standardised individuals both psychologically and in terms of individual qualification and has produced the same phenomena as with other standardised masses: competition which makes necessary organisations for the defence of professions, unemployment, over-production in the schools, emigration, etc.

Symptoms of Cultural Hegemony

Hegemony is not as simple as autocracy. It is not simply the ruling class bossing everyone else around. In a hegemony, the ruling classes must at least consider the interests of those they subordinate.

Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain com­promise equilibrium should be formed— in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind.

Cultural hegemony tends to be anti-conservative and anti-religious because the new ruling classes will need to replace traditional intellectuals with their own organic intellectuals.

…the content of the political hegemony of the new social group which has founded the new type of State must be predominantly of an economic order: what is involved is the reorganisation of the structure and the real relations between men on the one hand and the world of the economy or of production on the other. …Cultural policy will above all be negative, a critique of the past; it will be aimed at erasing from the memory and at destroying. The lines of construction will as yet be “broad lines”, sketches, which might (and should) be changed at all times, so as to be consistent with the new structure as it is formed. This precisely did not happen in the period of the mediaeval communes; for culture, which remained a function of the Church, was precisely anti-economic in character (i.e. against the nascent capitalist economy); it was not directed towards giving hegemony to the new class, but rather to preventing the latter from acquiring it.

Common Sense

Gramsci spends a considerable amount of time ruminating about “common sense,” the received wisdom of the masses.

A work like the Popular Manual,³ which is essentially destined for a community of readers who are not professional intellectuals, should have taken as its starting point a critical analysis of the philosophy of common sense, which is the “philosophy of non-philosophers”, or in other words the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed. Common sense 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. Its most fundamental characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is.

Common sense can be a barrier to the hegemony of ruling classes. Therefore, aspiring hegemons often try to rewrite common sense to suit their own worldviews. This can be observed in the experiences of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

The attitude of French philosophical culture towards common sense can indeed offer a model of hegemonic ideological construction. American and English culture can also offer some suggestions, but not in such an organic and complete way as the French. “Common sense” has been treated in various ways. Sometimes it has even been taken as the base of philosophy itself. Alternatively it has been criticised from the point of view of another philosophy. In reality, in either case, the result was to transcend a particular form of common sense and to create another which was closer to the conception of the world of the leading group.

Rewriting common sense is also what many Marxists try to do.

References to common sense and to the solidity of its beliefs are frequent in Marx. But Marx is referring not to the validity of the content of these beliefs but rather to their formal solidity and to the consequent imperative character they have when they produce norms of conduct. There is, further, implicit in these references an assertion of the necessity for new popular beliefs, that is to say a new common sense and with it a new culture and a new philosophy which will be rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and imperative quality as traditional beliefs.

Conclusion

In Gramsci’s work, you can clearly see the beginnings of much of the criticism I have regarding cultural hegemony in the United States in the 21st century. You can also see the outlines of a whole genre of criticism of elites that followed. However, he left a large number of scattered writings, so he addressed these points in part due to sheer volume.

Gramsci is a much more nuanced and interesting thinker than the archetypal blowhard in the Marxist-Leninist tradition. Despite his nuance, he is not very readable because of the fragmentary nature of his work. Undoubtedly, both of these were caused, at least in part, by his imprisonment at the time of his writings.

Furthermore, most of his thinking is not timeless, but particular to his historical context. He spends a lot of time thinking about the French Revolution, the Risorgimento (the 19th-century movement that reconstituted Italy as a nation), the Russian Revolution, and why Marxism failed to materialize in Italy and the West. He goes over every minute difference between his philosophy and that of Benedetto Croce, the liberal Italian statesman, and Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher of Fascism.

Am I glad I took the time to read some of Antonio Gramsci’s writings? Yes. Am I blown away? No. Would I recommend others read Gramsci? Probably not.

Gramsci is of historical interest to those of us who labor intellectually in a tradition that he, in some sense, started. He gave us some labels, such as “cultural hegemony,” that endured. He started other labels, such as “organic intellectual,” that were quickly replaced. It is interesting to see many of the concepts we use today expressed as early as the 1930s. Still, anyone who wants to learn about them is better off learning from a contemporary writer who uses modern examples.

Reference

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers.

1. I didn’t discover that the Buttigieg translations were incomplete until I was in my local university’s library, with the volumes in hand, and ChatGPT was recommending to me passages from notebooks that were not in the physical books.

2. While there are subtle differences in every formulation, I will refer to this class as the “PMC” since that appears to be the most common label.

3. Gramsci is referring to Theory of Historical Materialism: A Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology by Nikolai Bukharin.