Cultural hegemony

Working Definition

Cultural hegemony is the rule of a social class or historic bloc that rests not merely on state coercion, but above all on the consent of the governed: the condition in which the existing social order, the vocabulary used to describe it, and the boundaries of what counts as sensible are accepted by subordinated groups as natural common sense. In Antonio Gramsci’s technical formulation, hegemony is “intellectual and moral leadership” exercised across civil society (schools, churches, the press, associations), always incomplete and requiring ongoing concessions to allies. In popular usage the phrase simply means the dominance of one group in culture or the media—a flattening that drops two elements essential to the original: that hegemony is a negotiated alliance rather than a monopoly, and that it must be continually renewed.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The concept was developed by Antonio Gramsci, general secretary of the Communist Party of Italy, in the Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere) written between 1929 and 1935 in a Fascist prison; they were first published after the Second World War in thematic volumes (Einaudi, 1948–1951) and only appeared in Valentino Gerratana’s complete critical edition in 1975. Gramsci sought to explain why revolution had succeeded in Russia yet failed in the West: where the state is “only an outer ditch” backed by a dense network of civil-society institutions, power cannot be seized by a frontal assault (“war of maneuver”), but must be won through a protracted “war of position” over culture and common sense. His synthesis combined Machiavelli’s pairing of force and consent with Benedetto Croce’s “ethico-political” history and his own university training in linguistics regarding how certain dialects acquire prestige over others. From the 1970s onward the concept was adopted by British cultural studies (Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams), detached from class determinism by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), and inverted by the French Nouvelle Droite into a “right-wing Gramscianism” holding that cultural capture must precede political power. In Poland, reception unfolded in two distinct waves: an official state-socialist phase (Pisma wybrane published by the party press Książka i Wiedza in 1961; Zeszyty filozoficzne at PWN in 1991) and a post-transformation wave around the left-wing circle Krytyka Polityczna (founded in 2002), which championed the 2007 Polish translation of Laclau and Mouffe.

Central European Lineage

Two documented links connect the concept to Central and Eastern Europe, both indirect. The first concerns the trajectory of the word itself. As David Forgacs notes, “hegemony” entered Gramsci’s vocabulary from the political language of Russian Social Democracy (Plekhanov, Lenin) and the Comintern, where gegemoniya proletariata denoted the leading role of the proletariat in a class alliance—first in the 1905 revolution and after 1917 toward the peasantry. Gramsci used the term in this sense in his 1926 essay on the Southern Question before expanding it in prison into cultural leadership across classes. Forgacs traces this usage to Soviet debates of 1923–1926, whose opening coincided with Gramsci’s Comintern postings in Moscow (1922–1923) and Vienna (December 1923 – May 1924). Because Russia lies in the region’s neighborhood and Vienna was only a six-month workplace rather than Gramsci’s formative environment, this link traces the word’s eastern genealogy rather than making Gramsci a regional author. The second link is a sharp Central European counterpoint. In Volume III of Main Currents of Marxism (published in 1978 by Jerzy Giedroyc’s Polish émigré house Instytut Literacki in Paris), Leszek Kołakowski—formed at the Universities of Łódź and Warsaw before being forced into exile during the March 1968 anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual campaign—devoted a chapter to Gramsci as the theorist of “communist revisionism.” Reading Gramsci through the experience of “actually existing socialism,” Kołakowski pointed out that the theory of hegemony never resolves who, and by what right, exercises “intellectual and moral leadership” once the party controls the state apparatus.

Why Now

Since 2018 the concept has returned as a master keyword in institutional conflicts. The New Right in the United States and Europe speaks openly in Gramscian terms: books and manifestos on the “long march through the institutions” and how the “radical left” captured universities, media, and corporations (such as Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution, 2023) have been used to justify campaigns against higher education, DEI programs, and public broadcasters; in 2025 the Trump administration used the freezing of federal funds at Harvard and other universities as an explicit instrument of counter-hegemony. On the other side, scholars of disinformation and digital platforms describe social networks as a new infrastructure of consent in which what feels “natural” is curated by ranking algorithms and platform owners. In Central Europe after 2015, governments in Budapest and Warsaw explicitly justified taking over public media, museums, and cultural institutes by the need to break “liberal hegemony,” while their opponents invoked the concept to defend pluralism against state-imposed hegemony. The term has thus become simultaneously a diagnosis and a strategic manual for both camps.

Explanatory Power

The concept makes power visible where no one is issuing orders. First, it explains the durability of social orders that a majority would not consciously choose—not out of fear, but for lack of an articulated language for any alternative; hence its appeal to researchers asking why those who lose economically under a system often vote for its defenders. Second, it shifts analytical attention from the content of individual messages to the institutions that decide what counts as a message in the first place: school curricula, literary canons, editorial boards, grant committees, and today content moderation and algorithmic ranking. Third, it explains why electoral victories without cultural change are so easily reversed: governments come and go, but the common sense of an era endures until a rival historic bloc constructs another. Clear examples include the neoliberal consensus of 1990–2008, when “there is no alternative” was accepted even by social-democratic parties; the generational shift in attitudes toward same-sex marriage achieved largely outside parliaments; and current debates over whether large language models trained on dominant text corpora quietly lock in a hegemony that nobody even needs to defend.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

Gramsci analyzed hegemony from the vantage point of someone who lacked it and wanted to win it; hence everything in the concept reads like insurgent strategy. Almost no one reads him as a theorist of the costs of hegemony for the hegemon itself. Yet that angle explains some of the most striking political reversals of the past decade: a bloc that has won the war of position must continually pay off its coalition partners with concessions, police the boundaries of respectable “common sense,” and react to every minor heresy, growing rigid, expensive, and blind to whatever is taking shape outside its own institutions. Hegemony exhausts itself from within faster than it is toppled from without; the major upsets of recent years—from Brexit to the defeats of establishment parties across Europe—surprised above all those who staffed the editorial boards and university chairs. Kołakowski saw this dynamic in its extreme state-socialist form: a party that claims a monopoly on “intellectual and moral leadership” eventually loses all ability to hear what the governed actually think.