Gramsci's Theory of Hegemony

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Antonio Gramsci, a writer, politician, and philosopher, was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascist state in 1926. At this time, he was the General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, and although unfortunately he was imprisoned for almost ten years, he wrote countless pages commenting on Marxist theory, called the Prison Notebooks. While commenting on Marx’s theories, he created his own, hegemony. Living in the early twentieth century, Gramsci took Karl Marx’s ideas and created his version of hegemony, that is his “theoretical response to that fin de siècle crisis of Marxism and to those far-reaching questions about consciousness and society posed in the Italian revolt against positivism.” Fin de siècle means relating to the end of the nineteenth century, which is a little before the Italian Fascist Party began to take over. Gramsci was able to create two superstructures of society, one being civil society, the other being political society, as a part of the capitalist state that he was living in at the time. Political society rules through force, while civil society rules through consent. Gramsci noticed that hegemony was created and reproduced in “cultural life through the media, universities, and religious institutions to ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy.”
According to Bates, Gramsci “incorrectly identified [a] period of hegemony with [Benedetto] Croce,” who looked to “discover the quality of universality, in every struggle some sign of the human spirit seeking to realize its freedom.” Gramsci’s period of political hegemony was that dictatorship is not the powerful force in society; but hegemony, the idea that man is not ruled just by force, but by ideas as well, is more po...

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...eferred ideology due to the popularity of the movie.

Works Cited

Bates, Thomas R. “Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony.” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (April 1975): 351. doi:10.2307/2708933.

Clark, Kingsley. “Whatever Works: Hegemonic Masculinity in Disney Movies.” Whatever Works, July 12, 2011. http://ohlawdgawd.blogspot.com/2011/07/hegemonic-masculinity-in-disney-movies.html.

Gail Dines, and Jean M. Humez. Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader. SAGE, 2011.

Kerry Manderback. “Hegemony, Cultural Hegemony, and The Americanization of Imported Media.” Accessed November 28, 2013. http://www.academia.edu/2942539/Hegemony_Cultural_Hegemony_and_The_Americanization_of_Imported_Media.

Stuckey, Mary E., and Richard Morris. “Pocahontas and Beyond: Commodification and Cultural Hegemony.” World Communication 28, no. 2 (April 1999): 45.

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