The Concept of Hegemony

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the concept of hegemony and its applicability to understanding contemporary social and cultural developments. The concept of hegemony as used in social and cultural discourse has its roots in Marxist notions of class, oppression, ideology, base and superstructure, as well as Leninist notions of the vanguard, ​and was further developed by Antonio Gramsci, whose thoughts on cultural hegemony elaborated how one social group gained and then maintained power through cultural institutions, which constituted hegemony, and state institutions, such as the police, courts, and the military, which constituted domination. Adorno and Horkheimer developed a conception of a hegemonic culture industry and showed how the production of standardized cultural products could produce a dulled and docile populace. The concept of hegemony in understanding contemporary social and cultural developments has applicability not only through the thinking of the theorists named above, but also through what can be called a hegemonic discourse, which determines what can be thought, talked about or written, and thus is a concept which even a post-structuralist theorist, such as Foucault, makes use of, and whose applicability to understanding contemporary developments will be illustrated by recent events. The paper is consequently structured as follows: the first section introduces the concept of hegemony; the second section shows the origin of the concept of hegemony in Marxist thinking about ideology, superstructure, and the vanguard; the third section is concerned with Antonio Gramsci’s differentiation between rule, which is exercised directly through political institutions, and hegemony, which is maintained through culture; the fourth section addresses the notion of a culture industry, set forth by Horkheimer and Adorno, which creates mass produced culture for consumption by the masses, and whose function is a dulling of the consciousness of the same; the fifth section shows that the concept of hegemony is present in the thinking of Foucault about discourse; and the final section shows the applicability of the concept of hegemony to understanding recent events and concludes.