Hegemony operates by making ideological alternatives unthinkable

Evidence

Organizations that strive for power will try to influence the ideology of a society to become closer to what they want it to be. When most people in a society think alike about certain matters, or even forget that there are alternatives to the status quo, we arrive at the Gramscian concept of hegemony. With regard to this key concept of ideology, Van Dijk … sees ideologies as the ‘worldviews’ that constitute ‘social cognition’: ‘schematically organized complexes of representations and attitudes with regard to certain aspects of the social world’… .’ — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 337

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is a useful compact definition of Gramscian hegemony and social-cognition ideology that frames the book’s whole project of reading legal texts for covert assumptions.
• XREF: connects to: Anarchism resurges whenever great-power war becomes unthinkable — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 131; Depoliticization can make political challenge literally unthinkable for young people — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2138; Hegemony is not the same thing as ideological domination — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 755 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Hegemony works by making the status quo appear to lack alternatives. #expands (0.96)
• Ideology works by taking certain frames for granted so alternatives stay unthinkable #expands (0.95)
• Hegemony is not the same thing as ideological domination #complicates (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 755
• Hegemony is not equivalent to ideological domination. #complicates (0.85)
• Ideological hegemony operates when subordinates internalize the dominant group’s justifications of inequality #exemplifies (0.82)
• Ideological hegemony substitutes for physical coercion in stable hierarchies #expands (0.78) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3223
• Hegemony operates by recoding existing discourse, not by asserting one code’s priority #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 847