Parliamentary rule achieved permanent urban-class hegemony through privately organised consent

Evidence

The development of Jacobinism (of content), and of the formula of Permanent Revolution put into practice in the active phase of the French Revolution, found its juridical constitutional ‘completion’ in the parliamentary regime. The latter, in the period in which ‘private’ energies in society were most plentiful, realised the permanent hegemony of the urban class over the entire population in the Hegelian form of government with permanently organised consent. (However, this organisation of consent was left to private initiative, and was thus of a moral or ethical character, because it was consent ‘voluntarily’ given in one way or another.) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1952

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how ‘consent’ in Gramsci’s hegemony is a moral-ethical voluntary adhesion organised through private initiative, not state coercion — a nuance Islamophobia literature frequently relies on.
• XREF: The claim that voluntary consent has a moral/ethical character prefigures how later theorists (e.g., Hall on race as floating signifier) analyze public consent to exclusionary policy as something manufactured through civil society rather than state mandate. — connects to: Business investment in capturing parliaments proves those institutions matter — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1681