Hegemony

Hegemony is the process by which a dominant group or state maintains power through intellectual, moral, and cultural leadership that secures the consent of subordinate groups, rather than through coercion alone. The term has older roots in Greek political usage, referring to leadership among city states, but its sociological meaning derives from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Gramsci argued that ruling classes govern through civil society institutions such as schools, churches, the press, and the family, which make their worldview appear as common sense, and that hegemony must be continually renewed and can be contested through counter-hegemonic projects and organic intellectuals. Louis Althusser's ideological state apparatuses and Pierre Bourdieu's symbolic violence offer related accounts of legitimated domination. Raymond Williams extended hegemony to lived culture, Stuart Hall applied it to media and Thatcherism, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe reworked it within discourse theory. In international relations, Robert Cox and Immanuel Wallerstein used it to analyze global power, and Raewyn Connell applied it to gender. Critics argue it can overstate ideological unity and underplay resistance. Hegemony remains central to research on power, ideology, culture, media, and social movements.