All essential questions of sociology collapse into questions of political science

Evidence

Conviction that the constitutions and parliaments had initiated an epoch of “natural” “evolution”, that society had discovered its definitive, because rational, foundations, etc. And, lo and behold, society can now be studied with the methods of the natural sciences! Impoverishment of the concept of the State which ensued from such views. If political science means science of the State, and the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules, then it is obvious that all the essential questions of sociology are nothing other than the questions of political science. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 915

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core Gramscian definition of the State, including its cultural-hegemonic activity of winning active consent, not just coercion.
• XREF: This definition anticipates the later Islamophobia readings: the ‘State’ as cultural-consent machine, not mere apparatus. Feeds the toolkit’s hegemony and common-sense module.
• QUESTION: Worth noting how Gramsci’s expansive State concept (hegemony built in) later gets split into State-as-coercive vs civil-society-as-hegemonic in Althusser; a genealogy worth tracing.