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    Gramsci Hegemony

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    mdanasaziz
    1) Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to describe how dominant ideologies suppress alternative ways of thinking through institutions like education, religion, and media. 2) Hegemony maintains power through the dominant world view becoming embedded within language and culture, conditioning people to think and feel in ways that serve the prevailing ideology. 3) However, Gramsci believed that critical self-reflection allows people to question their own assumptions and develop their own coherent philosophies, moving thinking beyond merely accepting the dominant ideology.

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    Gramsci Hegemony

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    mdanasaziz
    89 views3 pages
    1) Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to describe how dominant ideologies suppress alternative ways of thinking through institutions like education, religion, and media. 2) Hegemony maintains power through the dominant world view becoming embedded within language and culture, conditioning people to think and feel in ways that serve the prevailing ideology. 3) However, Gramsci believed that critical self-reflection allows people to question their own assumptions and develop their own coherent philosophies, moving thinking beyond merely accepting the dominant ideology.

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    1) Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to describe how dominant ideologies suppress alternative ways of thinking through institutions like education, religion, and media. 2) Hegemony maintains power through the dominant world view becoming embedded within language and culture, conditioning people to think and feel in ways that serve the prevailing ideology. 3) However, Gramsci believed that critical self-reflection allows people to question their own assumptions and develop their own coherent philosophies, moving thinking beyond merely accepting the dominant ideology.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    89 views3 pages

    Gramsci Hegemony

    Uploaded by

    mdanasaziz
    1) Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to describe how dominant ideologies suppress alternative ways of thinking through institutions like education, religion, and media. 2) Hegemony maintains power through the dominant world view becoming embedded within language and culture, conditioning people to think and feel in ways that serve the prevailing ideology. 3) However, Gramsci believed that critical self-reflection allows people to question their own assumptions and develop their own coherent philosophies, moving thinking beyond merely accepting the dominant ideology.

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    One of Gramsci's ideas was the concept of "hegemony," or ideological domination.

    When one ideology, or world view, dominates, it suppresses or stamps out, often
    cruelly, any other ways of explaining reality.
    Actually, hegemony can contain a variety of ideologies.
    Some are artificial -- theoretical explanations created by academics or political
    activists or philosophers. Other ideologies are "organic," which means they come
    from the common people's lived experience.
    These consist of a culture's way of seeing and believing, and the institutions that
    uphold these beliefs, like religion, education, family, and the media.
    Through these beliefs and institutions, society endorses the ethical beliefs and
    manners which "the powers that be" agree are true, or right, or logical, or moral.
    The institutions and beliefs that the dominant culture support are so powerful, and
    get hold of people when they are so young, that alternative ways of envisioning
    reality are very hard to imagine.
    This is how hegemony is created and maintained.
    According to Gramsci, hegemony locks up a society even more tightly because of
    the way ideas are transmitted by language.
    The words we use to speak and write have been constructed by social interactions
    through history and shaped by the dominant ideology of the times. Thus they are
    loaded with cultural meanings that condition us to think in particular ways, and to
    not be able to think very well in other ways.
    For a modern, U.S. example, consider the word "welfare." What feelings and images
    come to mind? Someone who is poor. Unhappy, perhaps. Passive. Irresponsible.
    Overloaded with children. Struggling to go to school. Ashamed. Maybe out to cheat
    the system. A drain on the taxpayers. A bureaucratic institution that needs
    continual attention and reform. All negative images, evoking anger or pity. Think
    about it.
    We have had no word to describe this system of government payments that carries
    a positive connotation.
    No word that evokes images of dignity and family pride or of a nation's debt to
    those it cannot or will not furnish with the opportunity for meaningful work and a
    relevant education.
    Gramsci's point is that we have been conditioned by our language to think -- and
    feel about that thinking -- in ways that serve the dominant ideology.

    And if that dominant ideology insists that poverty is the fault of the individual while
    systematically keeping certain groups or classes of people poor, that hegemony
    must be dislodged by substantive, revolutionary change.
    Gramsci added another dimension to the definition of hegemony: domination by
    consent.
    It seems impossible that anyone would consent to be oppressed, or that we
    ourselves might be consenting to oppress others. But no matter how outraged we
    are at the poverty that exists in the richest country in the world, all most of us do to
    fight it is tinker with the system.
    We know that the rich are getting richer while the poor and the middle class are
    feeling less and less secure. We know, but we accept. "What can one person do?"
    we say. "The poor have always been with us." It's a fatalistic feeling we have, but
    Gramsci doesn't blame us for it. "Indeed," he says, "fatalism is nothing other than
    the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position."(1)
    Gramsci believed that everyone, no matter what their occupation, their interests, or
    their education, is able to work out their own coherent ideas of how the world really
    works.
    Despite his description of hegemony as society's brainwashing, he had great faith in
    people's ability to go beyond the mere acceptance of the ideas they grew up with
    and become critical thinkers.
    "To criticize one's own conception of the world means to make it a coherent unity
    and to raise it to the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world,"
    Gramsci wrote from his prison cell.
    "The starting-point of critical elaboration is the product of the historical process to
    date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an
    inventory."(2)
    In other words, critical thinking about our own thinking process can move us toward
    our own coherent philosophy when we begin to trace the origins of our most deeply
    held beliefs.
    "What do I really think about this difficult teenager I'm tutoring?" "Where did these
    beliefs come from?" "What people and what institutions taught me to think this
    way?" "And where did their beliefs come from?"
    Gramsci's fate might lead us to think of ways people in our own country with
    disturbing ideas have been silenced -- by censorship, by rumor mongering, by
    lynching, by incarceration.

    If you volunteer for a prison education project you may be surprised by the number
    of creative, deeply intelligent men and women who are thinking, discussing, writing
    and growing as human beings in much the same way Gramsci did -- despite the
    sometimes cruel and retaliatory conditions of their incarceration.

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