Civil society exerts coercive educative pressure without formal legal sanctions

Evidence

But how will each single individual succeed in incorporating himself into the collective man, and how will educative pressure be applied to single individuals so as to obtain their consent and their collaboration, turning necessity and coercion into “freedom”? Question of the “Law”: this concept will have to be extended to include those activities which are at present classified as “legally neutral”, and which belong to the domain of civil society; the latter operates without “sanctions” or compulsory “obligations”, but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 910

Categorization

• DEFINE: Extends the concept of law to include civil society’s sanctionless collective pressure — key for how consent is manufactured outside government.
• XREF: Underpins how ‘common sense’ and everyday social norms do ideological work in later Islamophobia analysis; connects forward to hegemony-as-consent discussions. — connects to: Incivility is endemic to civil society, not a departure from it. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 254