A class lacking moral prestige can borrow the State’s reflected authority to found itself

Evidence

At all events, the fact that the State/government, conceived as an autonomous force, should reflect back its prestige upon the class upon which it is based, is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance, and deserves to be analysed fully if one wants a more realistic concept of the State itself. Moreover, this phenomenon is not something exceptional, or characteristic of one kind of State only. It can, it seems, be incorporated into the function of elites or vanguards, i.e. of parties, in relation to the class which they represent. This class, often, as an economic fact (which is what every class is essentially) might not enjoy any intellectual or moral prestige, i.e. might be incapable of establishing its hegemony, hence of founding a State. Hence the function of monarchies, even in the modern era; hence, too, in particular, the phenomenon (especially in England and in Germany) whereby the leading personnel of the bourgeois class organised into a State can be constituted by elements of the old feudal classes, who have been dispossessed of their traditional economic predominance (Junkers and Lords), but who have found new forms of economic power in industry and in the banks, and who have not fused with the bourgeoisie but have remained united to their traditional social group. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1001

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how the State can confer prestige onto its base class, extending the hegemony concept into the machinery of how a ruling class is constituted.
• XREF: Extends the hegemony/common-sense toolkit from Gramsci’s own earlier chapters; connects directly to how Islamophobia readings treat the state as conferring legitimacy on a dominant group. — connects to: A class becomes a people when its name outweighs its concept. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 362