Liberal ideology’s internal contradictions are the price paid for hegemony through past concessions.

Evidence

It is important to say that this contradiction within the dominant ideology represents, at the ideological level, real previously won concessions —the price the dominant ideology pays for its continuing hegemony: the vote, universal suffrage, parliamentary representation, the legalization of unions and the right to strike, the ending of monarchical or aristocratic rule, the welfare state, etc. The “liberal ideology” is the consensus philosophy of a society, not without conflict, but with conflict regulated by norms which do not disturb the fundamental agreements. A society of regulated conflicts (and ideologies), “structured in dominance.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 878

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that democratic/liberal contradictions within the dominant ideology are themselves ‘previously won concessions’ — the structural price of hegemony — reframes welfare state, suffrage, and union rights as devices that stabilize rather than threaten bourgeois rule.
• XREF: Echoes Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as consent secured through concessions, and connects to the reader’s goal of reading Hall as economic thought.