Anthem comes as close to a 'purely' ideological activity as one could imagine; it would certainly seem to fulfil no other purpose, aside perhaps from annoying the neighbours. Religion, similarly, is probably the most purely ideological of the various institutions of civil society. But hegemony is also carried in cultural, political and economic forms -- in non-discursive practices as well as in rhetorical utterances.

With certain notable inconsistencies, Gramsci associates hegemony with the arena of 'civil society', by which he means the whole range of institutions intermediate between state and economy. Privately owned television stations, the family, the Boy Scout movement, the Methodist Church, infant schools, the British Legion, the Sun newspaper: all of these would count as hegemonic apparatuses, which bind individuals to the ruling, power by consent rather than by coercion. Coercion, by contrast, is reserved to the state, which has a monopoly on 'legitimate' violence, (We should note, however, that the coercive institutions of a society -- armies, law courts and the rest -- must themselves win a general consent from the people if they are to operate effectively, so that the opposition between coercion and consent can be to some extent deconstructed.) In modern capitalist regimes, civil society has come to assume a formidable power, in contrast to the days when the Bolsheviks, living in a society poor in such institutions, could seize the reins of government by a frontal attack on the state itself. The concept of hegemony thus belongs with the question: How is the working class to take power in a social formation where the dominant power is subtly, pervasively diffused throughout habitual daily practices, intimately interwoven with 'culture' itself, inscribed in the very texture of our experience from nursery school to funeral parlour? How do we combat a power which has become the 'common sense' of a whole social order, rather than one which is widely perceived as alien and oppressive?

[. . .]

If the concept of hegemony extends and enriches the notion of ideology, it also lends this otherwise somewhat abstract term a material body and political cutting edge. It is with Gramsci that the crucial transition is effected from ideology as 'systems of ideas' to ideology as lived, habitual social practice -- which must then presumably encompass the unconscious, inarticulate dimensions of social experience as well as the workings of formal institutions. Louis Althusser, for whom ideology is largely unconscious and always institutional, will inherit both of these emphases; and hegemony as a 'lived' process of political domination comes close in some of its aspects to what Raymond Williams calls a 'structure of feeling'. In his own discussion of Gramsci, Williams acknowledges the dynamic character of hegemony, as against the potentially static connotations of 'ideology': hegemony is

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