Hegemony, as developed by Antonio Gramsci, names the process by which a ruling class maintains power not primarily through force but through the production of consent — by making its worldview appear as common sense, its interests as universal interests, its culture as culture itself. Hegemony operates through education, media, religion, law, and everyday practice, producing a social order that appears natural, inevitable, and unquestionable.
Gramsci developed the concept in the Prison Notebooks to explain why the working classes in Western Europe had not revolted as Marx predicted. His answer: because the ruling class had achieved not just economic dominance but cultural and ideological dominance. Workers consented to their own exploitation because the framework through which they understood the world was already structured by ruling-class interests. Revolution required not just economic struggle but cultural struggle — the construction of counter-hegemonic institutions, practices, and ways of seeing.
The concept has been widely adopted — and widely diluted. In its strongest form, hegemony names a structural condition: the internalization of ruling-class ideology by the ruled, such that domination reproduces itself through the willing participation of its subjects. In its diluted form, hegemony becomes a synonym for “dominant culture” or “mainstream opinion,” losing its specificity as an analysis of power.
For this research program, hegemony connects to the analysis of substance metaphysics as the hegemonic ontology of the West: the assumption that reality is composed of independent substances with intrinsic properties is not a neutral philosophical position but a cultural achievement — one that has been naturalized through institutions, education, and everyday practice to the point where it appears as simply “how things are.” Relational ontology is, in this sense, a counter-hegemonic ontology.
Related terms
- Antonio Gramsci — who develops the concept
- Recuperation — how counter-hegemonic movements are absorbed
- Legibility — the state apparatus that enforces hegemonic categories
- Substance metaphysics — the hegemonic ontology of the West
- Settler colonialism — the political structure hegemony sustains
- COINTELPRO — what happens when hegemony fails and force returns