Blackwell Reference Online

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political philosophy [from Greek hegomai , to lead or command] Domination by force and, hence, a kind of domination by one country over another. For Plekhanov and subsequent Western Marxist writers, hegemony is a form of social and political control that is based more on intellectual, moral, and cultural persuasion or consent than on physical coercion. In this way, the proletarian class can amalgamate all sections of the working class into a greater whole, which has a single unified aim. This sense of hegemony is fully developed by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci . Gramsci took hegemony [Italian diregere ] to be moral and intellectual leadership that allows a leading group to compromise with various allies who are unified into a whole. Political leadership in a democratic revolution should be based on an alliance with other sections that have similar goals. Gramsci used this concept to analyze all forms of class association, including those within a dominant social group. He even used it to explain the capacity of the bourgeoisie to hold power. For Gramsci, the concept of hegemony was central to Marxist philosophy, which he called the philosophy of praxis in his Prison Notebooks in order to escape the attention of the prison censor. “What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society’, ... log in or subscribe to read full text