Gramsci uses “hegemony” to theorize not only the necessary condition for a successful overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat and its allies (e.g., the peasantry), but also the structures of bourgeois power in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European states (SPN 20).
Gramsci’s “hegemony” refers to a process of moral and intellectual leadership through which dominated or subordinate classes of post-1870 industrial Western European nations consent to their own domination by ruling classes, as opposed to being simply forced or coerced into accepting inferior positions.
It is important to note that, although Gramsci’s prison writings typically avoid using Marxist terms such as “class,” “bourgeoisie,” and “proletariat” (because his work was read by a Fascist censor), Gramsci defines hegemony as a form of control exercised by a dominant class, in the Marxist sense of a group controlling the means of production; Gramsci uses “fundamental group” to stand in euphemistically for “class” (SPN 5 n1). For Gramsci, the dominant class of a Western Europe nation of his time was the bourgeoisie, defined in the Communist Manifesto as “the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour,” while the crucial (because potentially revolution-leading) subordinate class was the proletariat, “the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live” (SPN 473 n5). Gramsci’s use of hegemony cannot be understood apart from other concepts he develops, including those of “State” and “Civil Society.”
Hegemony as Education
According to Gramsci, one of the most important functions of a State 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 class” (SPN 258). The ruling class in Gramsci’s Italy (and in the other Western European States of which he writes) was the bourgeoisie, though it seems that his remarks might function also as a blueprint for Communist rule. Gramsci proceeds to claim that the State — which at one point Gramsci asserts is equivalent to the “fundamental economic group” or ruling class (bourgeoisie) itself (SPN 16) — implements its educative project through a variety of channels, both “public” and “private”, with the “school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function” constituting “the most important State activities in this sense [...][B]ut, in reality,” Gramsci maintains, “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” (SPN 258). Hegemony, therefore, is a process by which “educative pressure [is] applied to single individuals so as to obtain their consent and their collaboration, turning necessity and coercion into ‘freedom’”. The “freedom” produced by instruments of the ruling class thus molds the “free” subject to the needs of an economic base, “the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production” (SPN 242). It is difficult to determine the status of this educated “freedom” in Gramsci’s writing, but Gramsci does assert its “immense political value (i.e. value for political leadership)” in a discussion of political parties, which for Gramsci “must show in their specific internal life that they have assimilated as principles of moral conduct those rules which in the State are legal obligations. In the parties necessity has already become freedom” (242). The party exemplifies the “type of collective society to which the entire mass must be educated” (SPN 267).
For a discussion of ways in which educative practices, particularly those of literary studies, have been used to establish hegemony in a colonial setting, see Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Viswanathan’s text demonstrates how English literary studies emerged as a discipline in colonial settings — prior to its institutionalization in England itself — with “the imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England,” thus “serv[ing] to strengthen Western cultural hegemony in enormously complex ways” (2-3). As Viswanathan argues, the process of moral and ethical formation of Indian colonial subjects through the study of English literature was intimately linked to the consolidation and maintenance of British rule in India.