Hegemony means the party internalizing State rules as moral conduct

Evidence

The function of hegemony or political leadership exercised by parties can be estimated from the evolution of the internal life of the parties themselves. If the State represents the coercive and punitive force of juridical regulation of a country, the parties— representing the spontaneous adhesion of an elite to such a regulation, considered as a type of collective society to which the entire mass must be educated—must show in their specific internal life that they have assimilated as principles of moral conduct those rules which in the State are legal obligations. In the parties necessity has already become freedom, and thence is born the immense political value (i.e. value for political leadership) of the internal discipline of a party, and hence the value as a criterion of such discipline in estimating the growth potential of the various parties. From this point of view the parties can be considered as schools of State life. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 996

Categorization

• DEFINE: Central definition of hegemony-as-education: the party models State legal obligations as free moral principles for the mass to adopt.
• XREF: This ‘necessity becomes freedom’ mechanism is the same consent-production process later Islamophobia theory reads into Orientalist knowledge production.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion where party discipline converts State coercion into the elite’s own moral autonomy is a dense, paradigmatic move that rewards repeated return.