The Meanings of Hegemony: Conceptual Itineraries in Gramsci’s Writings

Abstract

This paper shows the polysemy of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Understanding
Gramscian texts as a laboratory in which the concept of hegemony develops through a series of “experiments”, I argue that the concept does not have a single original meaning that can be restored through a textual analysis. To problematize the concept of hegemony – and its re-appropriations – necessarily implies dealing with the multiple meanings that can be found in both his precarcelary texts and the Prison Notebooks. In order to maintain the richness of the concept, it is then necessary to unravel the different elements that reside in its polysemy; elements that have become the basis of diverse theoretical reappropriations in social and human sciences. Therefore, I propose a reconstruction of the concept of hegemony, starting from the recognition of the multiplicity of its uses throughout Gramsci’s texts. Instead of attempting to resolve this multiplicity in a synthetic unit, the central task of this paper is to account for these diverse meanings as well as to theoretically analyze them.