I recently published a chapter, ‘Hegemony as a protean concept‘, in The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci edited by William K Carroll. A cornerstone of Marxist discourse, and pervasive more broadly in the humanities, social sciences, and amongst social activists, hegemony is now understood and used in diverse ways. This chapter retraces Gramsci’s original development of the notion, and situates it within his overarching framework of historical materialism as a philosophy of praxis.
The chapter navigates the complexities of the term’s evolution, tracing its evolution through Gramsci’s earlier pre-imprisonment writings and the Prison Notebooks. The notion is situated in Gramsci’s wider conceptual framework, by examining in turn the terrain of hegemony (in civil society and the ‘integral state’) and the political project of hegemony (effected through intellectuals and the ‘modern prince’).
