Hegemony is a precarious, ever-rebuilt dominance won mainly through consent plus coercion.

Evidence

Hegemony is that state of “total social au thority” which, at certain specific conjunctures, a specific class alliance wins, by a combination of “coercion” and “consent,” over the whole social formation, and its dominated classes: not only at the economic level, but also at the level of political and ideological leadership, in civil, intellectual, and moral life as well as at the material level: and over the terrain of civil society as well as in and through the condensed relations of the state. This “authority and leadership” is, for Gramsci, not a given a priori but a specific historical “moment”—one of unusual social authority. It represents the product of a certain mastery of the class struggle, certainly, but it is still subject to the class struggle and the “relations of social forces” in society, of which its “unstable equilibrium” is only one, provisional, outcome or result. Hegemony is a state of play in the class struggle which has, therefore, to be continually worked on and reconstructed in order to be maintained, and which remains a contradictory conjuncture. … The important point, for Gramsci, is that, under hegemonic conditions, the organization of consent (by the dominated classes to the “leadership” of the dominant class alliance) takes precedence (though it does not obliterate) the exercise of domination through coercion. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 626

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall grounds Gramsci’s central concept of hegemony precisely: consent-led, coercion-backed class authority that is always provisional and must be continuously reconstructed.
• XREF: Connects to the broader Gramscian tradition Hall engages throughout his work; the ‘war of position vs. war of maneuver’ framework also recurs in cultural studies and postcolonial theory.
• DEEPTHINKING: The passage hinges on a genuinely difficult, non-reductionist idea: that hegemony is not possession but a process, an unstable equilibrium worked on and rebuilt — resisting any one-sentence takeaway.