Welcome to Monday Methods, a bi-weekly feature where we discuss, explain, and explore historical methods, historiography, and theoretical frameworks concerning history.
Today we are doing a redux of a concept we have already discussed previously: Hegemony!
While originally formulated as a theoretical concept in the 1920s Hegemony as formulated by Antiono Gramsci and its various further developments have taken on a rather prominent role in the formulation of theories and concepts that are very relevant to historiography until this day. From Spivak's conceptualization of the subaltern to Said's work on Orientalism to postcolonialist scholarship of the 2000s, Gramsci's concept of Hegemony has been a major intellectual and theoretical force in the humanities and the field of history.
So, to gain a deeper understanding of what this concept that obviously drives fruitful debates in the field of history actually is, here is a more in-depth introduction than the one provided last time:
Hegemony or cultural hegemony as a concept was, as previously mentioned, pioneered by an Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a communist activist in Italy in the 1910s and 1920s and in 1926 the fascist Mussolini government imprisoned him because of his communist activities. During the remaining 11 years of his life, which he spent in prison, Gramsci wrote a series of notebooks in which he laid down his philosophical and theoretical considerations of society, capitalism, socialism and the revolution.
Gramsci's main concerns and the reason why many of the concepts he pioneered are such staples of later ideas, theories and frameworks were systems of power, that is, how political and social power are organized and can persist. Being a Marxist, Gramsci saw the way a society is organized socially and politically as the result of how it is organized economically. The base (meaning the economic relationships in a society) influences or even determines the superstructure (meaning ideology, politics, social relations, the role of religions etc.). As already written in the last installment, a social-economic system based on landholders, tenants, and serfs produces, according to Marxist thought, different social and political relationships as well as a different view and understanding of the world. Yet, what all social-economic systems have in common is a conflict between between different groups in their setting based on their interest and position within this social-political-economic structure. These groups are called classes and within modern capitalism, the main classes are the bourgeois, i.e. the people who own the means of production such as facilities, machinery, tools, infrastructural capital and natural capital (the things used to produce economic value), and the proletariat, i.e. the people who have nothing to offer but their labor force. Within the social-political-economic system these groups have opposed interests, which they will struggle over influence whether it is on the ballot box, in the workplace or in other venues.
Capitalism, then, is an economic-social-political system organized around the economic-social-political interests of the bourgeois. In fact, in terms of the class struggle, capitalism as a system represents the dictatorship of the bourgeois because of the entire economic, social, and political system being geared towards and designed to accommodate their interest of accumulating capital and profit (not just financial but also cultural and social to bring Bourdieu into it). Because this system rests on the exploitation of the proletariat (exploitation in the sense of their labor producing a surplus of value to which they have no access), the question poses itself of how this system can be maintained and why, like previous communist activists had expected, revolution had not already yet broken out on a global scale.
This is the essential question that Gramsci deals with in his writing and a big part to that answer is hegemony. Broadly speaking, Gramsci formulates that any system of power rests mainly on two factors: Coercion and consent. Coercion is the rather obvious one and is meant to encompass how what Gramsci calls "political society", meaning the state with its monopoly of violence, its laws, and its armed forces can use coercive force, from literal military force to the more abstract legal force to enforce the existing order. Consent, which according to Gramsci belongs to the sphere of civil society, is however the more important one. It is effectively more important that the subaltern (as opposed to the dominant) consent to their position of being subaltern and governed by the dominant class than the ability to use force against them – for any system solely build on force is eventually going to be overturned.
So, how is this achieved; how, in the words of Gramsci, is consent manufactured?
This is where ideology enters the equation. Ideology, the way Gramsci uses the term, is not just an abstract system of ideas and thoughts. On the contrary, ideology in the way Gramsci uses it has a material existence in that "they have a validity which is psychological; they according to Gramsci “organise human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc." It has a material existence in practical activities. It provides people with rules of practical conduct and moral behavior, and is equivalent to, again in Gramsci's words, "a religion understood in the secular sense of a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct." Ideologies are therefore embodied in the social practices of individuals and in the institutions and organizations within which these social practices take place, be they trade unions, political parties, or any other organization forming part of civil society.
Ideologies represent a set of idea, practices and assumptions that holds together blocs of individuals and groups. For example, Gramsci uses how Italian and German bourgeois, nobility, and proletariat came together in an alliance, a bloc of interest, to create the Italian and German nation state as an example of the power of national ideology – the ideas and practices of them understanding themselves as Italian and German had created the consent among them that this represented a historical necessity, even when it practically stood against some of their individual and collective economic interests. National ideology functioned as the cement that bound their bloc together.
In order to maintain power, a class must build an ideological system that can act as the cement of social forces and creates the consent for the current political-social-economic system – this is the hegemony.
A class does not achieve hegemony by simply imposing its own outlook on all other classes and social groups and it can not be ready made, rather it is a process that must happen slowly and in building upon previous achievements in that direction but once achieved, it is a powerful tool. Simply for the reason that when ideology has achieved hegemony, its ideology has become common sense, meaning, in the words of Roger Simon in his introduction to Gramsci
the uncritical and largely unconscious way in which a person perceives the world; and [Gramsci] said ‘all men are philosophers’ for all men and women have some conception of the world, or world outlook. Their conscious conception of the world, their religion or ideology, may often be in contradiction with their political activity, which can be in advance of their conscious ideas. (...)
It is through common sense that the workers, trying to live their lives under capitalism, have organised their experience. Common sense is the site on which the dominant ideology is constructed, but it is also the site of resistance and challenge to this ideology. Gramsci stresses that the consent which is secured by the hegemony of the bourgeoisie is an active consent, not a passive submission. It is not imposed; rather, it is ‘negotiated’ by unequal forces in a complex process through which the subordination and the resistance of the workers are created and recreated.
Effectively, what this means is that in order to maintain power, it is necessary to build an ideological hegemony so deeply socialized within those dominated that they will perceive their own world and experiences through the views, ideas, and practices formulated by your ideology: Pursuit of profit, capitalist systems being the only ones that "make sense", capitalism being a force or progress and akin to the natural state of human relations and so forth are all these "common sense" perceptions of the world and the individuals place in it that make up the capitalist hegemony and ultimately, the most important factor of why capitalism stay in power.
That is why in Gramsci's conception, the task for Marxist theory is to be a criticism of common sense, and to enable people to develop its positive nucleus – what Gramsci called good sense – into a more coherent outlook. Because the hegemony needs active consent and constant renegotiation there is a potential of resistance in our daily lives and practices, in our collective and communal modes of living.
The "war of the trenches" as he called precedes the "war of attack", meaning the revolution. And this line of thinking is what has endeared him not just to Marxist thinkers but to historians, especially those wishing to study the ordinary people, the subaltern, those whose voices are less commonly found in the sources that survive their period. It gives us as historians a theoretical frameowrk to study how these people perceived the world around them and structured and understood their modes of living and their daily practices and how that relates to systems of power within a historical society. It can help gain deeper understanding in the subject of slave or colonial revolts and why they so often remained unsuccessful and why they were successful when they were. It can help us contextualize practices such as Afro-caribbean religions and Rastafarianism, the acts of colonial subjects in their daily practices or the way the English working class perceived themselves within the world and so much more. All by framing it within the context of systems of power and negotiating a hegemony in the form of ideology that entered and is negotiated in the "common sense".
Further reading:
Roger Simon: Gramsci's Political Thought, 2015.
Erci Hobsbawm: How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, 2011.
The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities (can be read for free with a JSTOR account)
I wanted to add a suggestion for the further reading list that was super helpful for me in looking at literary history: Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams. He critiques previous conceptions of base and superstructure as being too deterministic where they should be conceived of as interactive. He notes that this privileging of base trapped culture in the superstructure and failed to adequately question bourgeois notions of culture. He views hegemony as the link between the contradictions of capitalism and culture, thus focusing on the production rather than consumption of culture as part of this interactive relationship creating hegemony. This then leads to what I found the most helpful development in his work, which was the theorization of "emergent" formations or "emergent hegemony". These emergent formations (for the purposes of literature, typically movements or styles) exist in opposition to the hegemonic formation and thus the hegemonic culture.
I found this helpful, not only in conceiving of the role and importance of specific Latin American movements to political developments in the region, but also in assessing the production of later critical readings of these movements for the purposes of establishing or defending hegemony. Hopefully others will find it helpful as well.
Edit: Here is a very in depth analysis of the text with lots of chunky quotes to pick apart.
Is consent necessarily consensual? Consumerism, imposed by mass media through false needs, allows capitalistic hegemony to go unchallenged by the subaltern. The consumption of advertising is often not consensual and its effects are often unconscious and uncontrolled. Googling Marcuse + Gramsci only gets me conservative websites worrying about "Cultural Marxism".
Also, the fourth link is dead.
Did Gramsci ever explicitly address Max Weber's theories? The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism seems like it could potentially argue that the roles of Gramsci's base and superstructure could be reversed.