The Sources for Gramsci's Concept of Hegemony

Abstract

This article attempts to single out key sources, avoiding any unilateral attribution, for the concept of hegemony as developed by Antonio Gramsci throughout the entire course of his prison writings. Among these sources one may point to the well-established (albeit usually ignored) use of the term by Italian socialists when Gramsci was a young journalist. Later, when he was a member of the Comintern Executive in Moscow (1922–3), the term circulated freely among leading Bolsheviks (Lenin included), as Bukharin confirms explicitly, and shortly afterward began to appear in Gramsci's letters and other writings. Major inputs, as seen from the Prison Notebooks, also stem from Benedetto Croce and from various aspects of Machiavelli, including language. Gramsci's university linguistics studies also proved important, with the questions of linguistic substrata (which foreshadow later sociolinguistic notions) and the dialect/national language relation being crucial. Overriding all, however, is Gramsci's reading of the concrete situation.