Theories of Hegemony: How to build and hold a political (not just parliamentary) majority

Learning the strategic lessons of Thatcherism.

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In the introduction, we saw how Thatcher’s Conservatives didn’t just win an election: they built a movement. That movement brought together free-market economists, social conservatives, and nationalists into a single force that could change the country’s direction for a generation.

The question is: how? How do you take different groups with different priorities, sometimes even clashing priorities, and get them to pull in the same direction? How do you turn a set of frustrations into a single, coherent political project?

This is where the political theory of hegemony comes in. The word sounds abstract and academic (and it is), but the ideas behind it are surprisingly practical. They’ve been used to understand everything from the rise of fascism to the success of trade union movements; and, as we’ll see, they aren’t locked to the left or the right.

In fact, while most of the major theorists of hegemony have been on the political left, their frameworks can just as easily be used to explain, or even build, projects like Thatcherism. That’s why understanding them is so useful for anyone trying to change the political weather today.

What “Hegemony” Really Means

The word hegemony comes from the Greek for “leadership” or “rule,” but in political theory it means something richer. It’s not just about controlling the government. It’s about shaping how people think about politics and society, to the point where your way of seeing the world becomes “common sense.”

Think about it like this:

If you have hegemony, you don’t need to win every argument, because the big assumptions are already in your favour. People take them for granted. The job market should be competitive. The state should provide healthcare. Britain should have a strong military. These “givens” can shift over time — and when they do, it’s often because a hegemonic project has redefined them.

So hegemony isn’t brute force. It’s consent. It’s getting enough people, across enough parts of society, to accept your story about how the world works.

Gramsci and the Two Kinds of Power

The modern conversation about hegemony starts with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist writing in the 1920s and ’30s while imprisoned by Mussolini. Gramsci wanted to know why revolution had succeeded in Russia but failed in Western Europe, where the working class was supposedly just as oppressed.

His answer: in the West, ruling classes didn’t just rely on the state’s force — they built legitimacy in civil society (churches, schools, newspapers, voluntary groups). They exercised intellectual and moral leadership that made their position seem natural and inevitable.

Gramsci distinguished between:

• Domination — ruling through coercion, the stick.

• Leadership (hegemony) — ruling through consent, the story people buy into.

In Britain, for example, the post-war consensus between 1945 and the 1970s was a form of hegemony. Both Labour and Conservative governments accepted the welfare state, Keynesian economic management, and a degree of state ownership. This wasn’t imposed at gunpoint — it was the settled common sense of politics.

Gramsci’s insight was that if you want to replace a dominant order, you can’t just win an election or stage a revolution. You have to build your own historic bloc — a coalition of forces that shares a unifying vision and can root it in everyday culture.