Hegemony via civil society and state coercion are the two superstructural levels

Evidence

It should be possible both to measure the “organic quality” [organicita ] of the various intellectual strata and their degree of connection with a fundamental social group, and to establish a gradation of their functions and of the superstructures from the bottom to the top (from the structural base upwards). What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural “levels”: the one that can be called “civil society”, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private”, and that of “political society” or “the State”. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of “direct domination” or command exercised through the State and “juridical” government. The functions in question are precisely organisational and connective. The intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 277

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines civil society (private organisms) vs. political society/the State, and maps them to hegemony vs. direct domination, with intellectuals as the dominant group’s deputies.
• XREF: This dual model of hegemony-plus-coercion is the foundational scaffold for how later Islamophobia critics frame state vs. civil-society reproductions of exclusion. — connects to: The state is an equilibrium of coercion and consent run through civil society — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1869
• DEEPTHINKING: The architecture here — civil society/political society split doing distinct but combined work, with intellectuals as connective functionaries — is the dense, load-bearing core of Gramscian analysis.