Modern hegemony operates through civil society institutions rather than state coercion alone.

Evidence

Gramsci bases this “transition from one form of politics to another” historically. It takes place in “the West” after 1870 and is identified with “the colonial expansion of Europe,” the emergence of modern mass democracy, a complexification in the role and organization of the state, and an unprecedented elaboration in the structures and processes of “civil hegemony.” What Gramsci is pointing to, here, is partly the diversification of social antagonisms, the “dispersal” of power, which occurs in societies where hegemony is not sustained exclusively through the enforced instrumentality of the state but, rather, is grounded in the relations and institutions of civil society. In such societies, the voluntary associations, relations, and institutions of civil society—schooling, the family, churches and religious life, cultural organizations, so-called private relations, gender, sexual and ethnic identities, etc.—become, in effect, “for the art of politics … the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely ‘partial’ the element of movement which before used to be ‘the whole’ of war” (PN, 243). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 115

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which hegemony is ‘dispersed’ across schooling, family, religion, and cultural institutions in advanced societies.
• XREF: This is the exact mechanism the Islamophobia field applies: anti-Muslim sentiment as civil-hegemonic, reproduced through media, schooling, and cultural organizations, not state force.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s theme of how informal institutions (roots, trenches) hold a system together — civil society as fortification trench parallels root-graft networks.