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The underlying implication of hegemony is a paradoxical notion: namely, that domination can be experienced as leadership – that is, as a situation to which people give approval despite their apparent subordination. But how can this be so? Usually, domination describes an imbalance of power in which people are subject to a rule that constrains their choices without their express agreement. Of course, domination need not always be ‘direct’ (imposed on us personally) or exercised by one group or individual alone: states, economic systems, and social arrangements generally entail structures of domination. But what does it mean to say that people ‘approve’ such constraints?

We might begin by noting that domination is both an objective and a subjective phenomenon. We can speak of it in terms of social conditions that are external to us and independent of our attitudes – the ‘facts’ of material inequality, the disproportionate presence of white men in positions of institutional authority, empirical evidence of prejudice and violence against specific groups, and so on. But how those conditions are perceived and connected, and therefore whether they are experienced as ‘oppressive’, is not an automatic consequence of their objective presence. That requires them to be experienced as unacceptable, exploitative, and realistically open to transformation. Yet one consequence of inequalities and hierarchies in power is that those who benefit from them often have the resources to define how everyone’s circumstances are interpreted. Or, as Marx and Engels famously put it, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas’ (1996: 145). Thus, conditions of systematic constraint or exclusion – which are usually multiple, interwoven, and layered such that they cannot always be viewed as one thing – are frequently justified, defended, and selectively represented in ways that ‘naturalize’, or at least minimize and isolate, their pernicious effects.

But hegemony is not simply a fictive veneer obscuring naked oppression. Rather than hiding, distracting from, or embellishing an unpleasant reality, it implies something stronger. ‘Leadership’ suggests a sense of inexorable, collective movement towards a common goal. To lead is to provide unforced direction, to inspire people to endorse certain choices over their own, or even as their own. That way, hierarchies and inequalities are perceived not as domination at all, but as acceptable or unavoidable inconveniences. When they are led, people often assume that their ultimate, shared interests are being advanced, that they have a greater stake in what is coming than in how things currently are. Hegemony, I want to suggest, centres on this more encompassing way of understanding the acceptance of domination.

A vital influence here was Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the Italian Marxist whose ideas on hegemony from the 1930s offer insights into how social classes seek to exercise what he called ‘national-popular’ leadership over society. Before Gramsci, hegemony had described, rather narrowly, the ‘preeminence’ or ‘supremacy’ of one city state, nation state, or group over others in a political alliance (see Lebow and Kelly 2001; Anderson 2016: 1–11). After its incorporation into debates about revolution, however, Gramsci enriched the concept by making leadership a feature of class domination in general. Classes rule, he argued, not always by forcing others to obey them but by cultivating a broad-based cultural and political consensus – an inclusive sense of belonging – that rationalizes and endorses domination. Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony helped others to explain how apparently stable societies were built on certain social alliances and compromises, under the influence of certain cultural values and political ideals. Moreover, hegemony encouraged analysts to identify mechanisms for producing consent (such as the media, culture, and ideology) and to note where, as hegemony waned, forms of conflict and violence were likely to erupt. Many – though not all – later applications of the concept have worked from the ideas developed by Gramsci.

We will look more closely at Gramsci’s contribution in chapter 2. But what is important to remember here is that, with him, hegemony describes the paradox of domination – that people accept the leadership of a certain set of figures, ideas, and institutions, despite the domination these support. Unless we appreciate this paradox, then hegemony won’t make much sense. Worse, it might be (as it has been) crudely reduced to either the purely objective or the subjective dimensions of domination, in isolation. That is, hegemony might be conceived as either some automatic binding force built in to all power relations without the need to generate leadership, or else as an all-pervasive ‘dominant ideology’ that is externally imposed to distract people from reality.

But hegemony really only illuminates anything if we regard it as a concept for exploring how, to what extent, and with what resulting tensions the reality of domination and the complexities of experience co-exist. That, I want to suggest, means understanding hegemony as the name for a practice, one that operates on different scales, varies in depth and breadth, expands and retracts, and undergoes resistance and reinvention. That is to say, it is another name for politics.