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‘Subjectivity’ refers to how we experience the world – the ways in which our conscious reactions and attitudes are defined and organized through knowledge, moral values, sentiments, or desires. Hegemony’s focus on leadership places emphasis on how these aspects of subjectivity are recruited to support, or oppose, forms of rule. It demands that we think about humans as relatively independent subjects, not as objects that act according to prescribed behaviours derived from their social position.

Hegemony is often associated with categories such as ‘ideology’, ‘culture’, or ‘discourse’ since those describe the broad domains where meanings circulate and are contested. Ideology, in particular, carries both the ‘neutral’ meaning of systems of belief that provide more or less coherent views of the world, and the more ‘critical’ sense of false or partial ideas that mislead people about reality, thereby servicing particular interests. Hegemony combines both senses in so far as some privileged group is often identified as the benefactor of hegemony, though this does not require that all ideas and beliefs are reducible to its interests. One key claim in theories of hegemony is that it succeeds to the extent that people come to experience their world, unquestioningly, through the prism of a dominant group’s preferred categories and concepts (or ideology), which are then accepted as ‘natural’ or ‘universal’.

Our focus, then, might sometimes be the group that benefits from this leadership. But it also might be on the ways other groups and practices come to be led. Some of the most inventive uses of hegemony have been by scholars of cultural studies such as Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall, for whom popular experiences of ‘everyday life’, ‘culture’, or ‘common sense’ (as Gramsci called it) were the locus for ongoing negotiations with dominant social forces. Hegemony, in their analyses, encourages us to ask how seemingly disparate forms of cultural activity – such as writing, cinema, or music – are implicated in contests to determine what it is that society holds in common.

The question of subjectivity is, however, controversial. It requires that we account for how symbols function, how they become activated and deployed (when, and by what mechanisms?), and how they contribute to the persistence (or not) of particular structures of domination. How does ideology or culture relate to social interests (which are assumed to be more or less fixed)? Indeed, what are the limits of this feature of leadership? Hegemony implies that domination is not easily demarcated around one discrete agent but, rather, subtly entangled in the subjectivity of ordinary people via language or forms of cultural attachment. That makes it difficult to identify a single ‘owner’ of ideas or benefactor of power. The complex relation of subjects to forms of violence and coercion is also pertinent here since hegemony rejects exclusive attention to coercion in favour of consent. Yet violence is frequently a feature of struggles over hegemonic leadership – especially when some groups resist it – and sometimes a sign of its internal fracturing. Social crises, when alliances splinter and once-shared values fall into open dispute, may express the subjective symptoms of hegemonic decline.