Gramsci refused to separate hegemony and consent from force and coercion

Evidence

Clearly this thesis is open to reformist interpretations, involving an under-estimate of the problem of the State in revolutionary strategy. But there is little justification for imputing any such illusion to Gramsci himself. The fact that, more than any other great revolutionary Marxist thinker, he concerned himself with the sphere of “civil society” and of “hegemony”, in his prison writings, cannot be taken to indicate a neglect of the moment of political society, of force, of domination. On the contrary, his entire record shows that this was not the case, and that his constant preoccupation was to avoid any undialectical separation of “the ethical-political aspect of politics or theory of hegemony and consent” from “the aspect of force and economics”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 826

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘hegemony’ in Gramsci never excludes force; consent and domination are dialectically fused, which matters for how later readings deploy the concept.
• XREF: Directly relevant to how Islamophobia scholarship splits culturalist (hegemony-led) from state-repression accounts of Western racism; Gramsci here forbids that very split.