draw attention to non-coercive aspects of class rule. But, they argue, this is because of his underlying interest in the relationship between the state and 'civil society': it is not the product of a detached interest in the 'superstructures' or in 'culture' in the abstract. ⁶ Perry Anderson gives this question a somewhat different inflection; he notes that Gramsci's use of hegemony is inconsistent, since sometimes he uses it to mean consent rather than coercion; at other times it seems to mean a synthesis of the two. Anderson's explanation -- based on his view that state power is the 'linchpin' of bourgeois hegemony -- is to say that Gramsci 'slipped' towards focus on consent partly as a result of the difficulties of getting the coercion-related arguments past the prison censor. ⁷

Leaving this on one side for a moment, we can say that Gramsci's emphasis was on hegemony in relation to a political and cultural strategy for socialism, and this was also where his greatest interest lay. His concepts of 'war of position' and 'war of manoeuvre' form the heart of a conceptualization of strategy that involves classes moving, on the analogy of trench warfare, to better vantage points and 'positions': hence the 'war of position' is the battle for winning political hegemony, the securing of consent, the struggle for the 'hearts and minds' of the people and not merely their transitory obedience or electoral support. 'War of manoeuvre', by contrast, comes at a later stage: it is the seizing of state power, but (in direct opposition to the Leninist tradition of political thought) cannot take place except in a situation where hegemony has already been secured.

This model of socialist strategy had built into it a theory of the political function of intellectuals. Gramsci did not see these as expressive of particular classes, or as locked into specific and socially defined roles; he saw intellectuals as important actors on the field where class conflict is 'played out' at the ideological level. In particular, he saw the hegemonic process -- from the Left, that is -- as one that would involve detaching 'traditional intellectuals from their base in the ruling bloc and developing what he called 'organic' intellectuals of the working class.

Gramsci's view of these processes is one that folds a theory of ideology, construed mainly as the varying forms of popular and systematic knowledge discussed earlier, into a more general political and cultural project that he theorizes in terms of the broader concept of hegemony. His interest in the relation between the state and civil society leads directly to his work on what has been called the socially 'cementing' functions of ideology and the ways in which consent is secured at a non-violent level.

[. . .]

Gramsci has come into his own as the exponent, par excellence, of a

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