According to Gramsci, ‘hegemony is primarily based on the organisation of consent’. Comment. (2019, 20 Marks)
The statement condenses Antonio Gramsci‘s answer, in the Prison Notebooks (1929–35), to why workers in the advanced West did not revolt. Two words carry it. Organisation means that consent is produced by institutions and people, not given naturally. Primarily means that coercion is held in reserve rather than abolished.
Consent Is Made, Not Found
Gramsci put “spontaneous” in quotation marks when describing the masses’ consent to the direction set by the dominant group. That consent only looks spontaneous; it is historically caused by the ruling group’s prestige in production and continuously organised. The result is that a particular interest appears universal and natural, and people take part willingly in an order that may not serve them.
- Institutions. Consent is manufactured in civil society’s “private” organisms: church, school, press, family, parties and unions. The Catholic Church was his model of an apparatus that bound intellectuals and the “simple” in one worldview.
- Intellectuals. Organic intellectuals act as the ruling group’s “deputies”, each a “permanent persuader”; every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship.
- Common sense. The ruling worldview settles into the incoherent common sense of the masses. It coexists with good sense drawn from experience, so consent is active but never complete.
- Material concessions. Consent is bought with real concessions, within a historical bloc whose economic nucleus is untouched.
- Absorbing opponents. Passive revolution and trasformismo organise consent from above by co-opting rival leaders, as the Moderates did in the Risorgimento.
- Counter-organisation. What is organised can be contested. Subaltern groups with their own organic intellectuals can wage a war of position, as B. R. Ambedkar‘s newspapers, schools and satyagrahas did against the hegemony of caste.
Why “Primarily”, Not Wholly
The state remains hegemony protected by the armour of coercion. The coercive apparatus disciplines those who do not consent and moves to the front when leadership fails, in a crisis of authority. India’s 65 internet shutdowns in 2025, in Access Now’s count, show that even electoral democracies keep the armour close at hand.
Critiques
- Perry Anderson (1976): in the West consent is organised above all by the parliamentary state itself, through the belief that citizens govern themselves, and less by civil society.
- Louis Althusser (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, 1970): the school, family and media are apparatuses that reproduce consent structurally, leaving little room for the contest Gramsci expected.
- James C. Scott (1990): hidden transcripts suggest much apparent consent is public performance.
- Partha Chatterjee (Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 1986) applied passive revolution to India: a bourgeoisie too weak to lead alone governed through a developmental state. His “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India” (2008) adds that consent is now organised by welfare transfers to those displaced by capital, managed in political society rather than won through civil society.
Contemporary Relevance
Consent is now organised through media ecosystems: concentrated ownership, advertising dependence, “paid news” and algorithmic feeds. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky‘s propaganda model (Manufacturing Consent, 1988) is the instrumentalist cousin of the argument; Gramsci’s version is more open because the same channels carry dissent. Nepal proves the point: the ban on 26 social-media platforms on 4 September 2025 provoked the “Gen Z” uprising, and the government fell within days.
Conclusion
The statement is accurate if both key words are kept. Hegemony rests mainly on consent, but consent that is organised through institutions, intellectuals and concessions and backed by coercion. That is why the struggle for power in modern societies is first a struggle over the institutions that organise consent.