Legitimate legal order requires internal assent, not external coercion

Evidence

Thus one can say that the educational principle which was the basis of the old primary school was the idea of work. Human work cannot be realised in all its power of expansion and productivity without an exact and realistic knowledge of natural laws and without a legal order which organically regulates men’s life in common. Men must respect this legal order through spontaneous assent, and not merely as an external imposition—it must be a necessity recognised and proposed to themselves as freedom, and not simply the result of coercion. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: States Gramsci’s core claim that social order must be consented to as freedom rather than imposed by force — the seed of his hegemony concept.
• XREF: This is a direct precursor to the hegemony/common-sense toolkit the reader is assembling; links forward to how Islamophobia normalizes exclusion through consent rather than coercion. — connects to: Binding consultation requires concrete preference-communicating institutions, not rulers’ claims to embody the will. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 167