Hegemony means intellectuals rule by consent while dictatorship rules by force

Evidence

Croce seeks to maintain a distinction between civil society and political society, between hegemony and dictatorship; the great intellectuals exercise hegemony, which presupposes a certain collaboration, i.e. an active and voluntary (free) consent, i.e. a liberal, democratic regime. Gentile sees the economic-corporate phase as an ethical phase within the historical act: hegemony and dictatorship are indistinguishable, force and consent are simply equivalent; one cannot distinguish political society from civil society; only the State, and of course the State-as-government, exists, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1006

Categorization

• DEFINE: A clean statement of Gramsci’s core distinction: hegemony = civil society + consent; dictatorship = political society + force, with Croce loyal to the separation and Gentile dissolving it.
• XREF: Directly connects to the toolkit purpose — this is the canonical source definition later Islamophobia theory inherits for ‘hegemony vs. dictatorship’.