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Finally, hegemony implies an ethical relationship that governs the interactions between leading groups and their key allies and supporters.

Most uses of hegemony are focused on analysing strategic features of domination. They tend not to be overtly ‘normative’ or deal with moral questions. Indeed, theorists of hegemony are usually moral ‘realists’ in that respect, treating normative issues as inseparable from practical problems posed by empirical reality. Nonetheless, leadership usually involves expressing common ideals as well as internally organizing and regulating how different groups and interests relate through them. Priority might be given to certain types of association – class solidarity, national identity, democratic respect – that connect hegemony’s politics to an ethic that assists the integration of its various parts.

Hegemonic strategies raise questions about how leaders enact their responsibility to the forces that sustain them. What kinds of elites rule, and from where do they originate? How is popular experience incorporated into the ways they lead? What relationship do supporting groups have with each other? The ethical dimension of hegemony is particularly relevant to those who wish to substitute domination with an alternative, ‘democratic’ or ‘liberated’, order. But it is not always examined closely, possibly because normative commitments are frequently presupposed as given. The question of what ethical terms organize hegemony is, however, a lively issue when old solidarities and modes of participation can no longer be taken for granted. Of note here is the question of the extent to which strategies of hegemony are compatible with pluralistic, democratic ideals.

Hegemony is a powerful concept because it condenses into one term a variety of complex phenomena. It is probably wise, then, to think of it not simply as a concept in the abstract but as the name for a general framework for examining the interaction of these different dimensions. Doing so can help us to draw attention to the different accents and emphases that have characterized its use.