Gramsci’s civil society shifts meaning from economic sphere to hegemony sphere

Evidence

A distinction must be made between civil society as understood by Hegel, and as often used in these notes (i.e. in the sense of political and cultural hegemony of a social group over the entire society, as ethical content of the State), and on the other hand civil society in the sense in which it is understood by catholics, for whom civil society is instead political society of the State, in contrast with the society of family and that of the Church. … Between the economic structure and the State with its legislation and its coercion stands civil society, and the latter must be radically transformed, in a concrete sense and not simply on the statute-book or in scientific books. The State is the instrument for conforming civil society to the economic structure, but it is necessary for the State to ‘be willing’ to do this; i.e. for the representatives of the change that has taken place in the economic structure to be in control of the State. To expect that civil society will conform to the new structure as a result of propaganda and persuasion, or that the old homo oeconomicus will disappear without being buried with all the honours it deserves, is a new form of economic rhetoric, a new form of empty and inconclusive economic moralism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 829

Categorization

• DEFINE: Critical: Gramsci deliberately redefines ‘civil society’ away from the Hegelian-Marxist economic sense toward a cultural-hegemonic sense, the reader’s core toolkit term.
• XREF: This reading of civil society/State/civil society positioning directly feeds the construction-of-the-Other literature that Islamophobia studies build on.