Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of the Civil Society

Abstract

This article focuses on one relatively under-researched notion in Gramsci’s cultural theory, namely the notion of civil society. Civil society is a direct expression of hegemony, which Gramsci famously theorised as a pattern of established power relations among social groups in a given historical political situation. In Gramsci’s view, hegemony is not simply a matter of domination because it also requires “direction”, that is, headship or consensual leadership. With Gramsci, hegemony stretches beyond the pure “economic-corporative” level, being supplemented by a veritable “ethical-political” layer. In this context, the civil society features simultaneously an object of conquest, a battlefield among different social and political groups, and the outcome of a given configuration of forces in a specific historic context. Civil society is also intimately linked to the production, circulation and consumption of discourses and myths; its constitution, in other words, is ideological. Gramsci took ideology seriously arguing that, to become operative, critical ideas must make their way into in people’s everyday existence. As a consequence, common sense – the domain of ideas and discourses as they exist in the everyday – emerges as the real battlefield for any political project.