never a once-and-for-all achievement, but 'has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified'. ²⁰ As a concept, then, hegemony is inseparable from overtones of struggle, as ideology perhaps is not. No single mode of hegemony, so Williams argues, can exhaust the meanings and values of any society; and any governing power is thus forced to engage with counter-hegemonic forces in ways which prove partly constitutive of its own rule. Hegemony is thus an inherently relational, as well as practical and dynamic, notion; and it offers in this sense a signal advance on some of the more ossified, scholastic definitions of ideology to be found in certain 'vulgar' currents of Marxism.

Very roughly, then, we might define hegemony as a whole range of practical strategies by which a dominant power elicits consent to its rule from those its subjugates. To win hegemony, in Gramsci's view, is to establish moral, political and intellectual leadership in social life by diffusing one's own 'world-view' throughout the fabric of society as a whole, thus equating one's own interests with the interests of society at large. Such consensual rule is not, of course, peculiar to capitalism; indeed one might claim that any form of political power, to be durable and well-grounded, must evoke at least a degree of consent from its underlings. But there are good reasons to believe that in capitalist society in particular, the ratio between consent and coercion shifts decisively towards the former. In such conditions, the power of the state to discipline and punish -- what Gramsci terms 'domination' -remains firmly in place, and indeed in modern societies grows more formidable as the various technologies of oppression begin to proliferate. But the institutions of 'civil society' -- schools, families, churches, media and the rest -- now play a more central role in the processes of social control. The bourgeois state will resort to direct violence if it is forced to it; but in doing so it risks suffering a drastic loss of ideological credibility. It is preferable on the whole for power to remain conveniently invisible, disseminated throughout the texture of social life and thus 'naturalized' as custom, habit, spontaneous practice. Once power nakedly reveals its hand, it can become an object of political contestation. ²¹

[. . .]

In his Prison Notebook, Gramsci rejects out of hand any purely negative use of the term ideology. This 'bad' sense of the term has become widespread, he remarks, 'with the effect that the theoretical analysis of the concept of ideology has been modified and denatured'. ²² Ideology has been too often seen as pure appearance or mere obtuseness, whereas a distinction must in fact be drawn between 'historically organic' ideologies -- meaning those necessary to a given social

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