Self-understanding is achieved through struggle between opposing hegemonies

Evidence

Critical understanding of self takes place therefore through a struggle of political “hegemonies” and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working out at a higher level of one’s own conception of reality. Consciousness of being part of a particular hegemonic force (that is to say, political consciousness) is the first stage towards a further progressive self-consciousness in which theory and practice will finally be one. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1199

Categorization

• DEFINE: Links hegemony to self-consciousness: political consciousness is the route to unifying theory and practice.
• XREF: connects to: Class struggle offers a viewpoint immune to systemic self-regulation’s allure — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 153; Conscientization requires reading social power relations and one’s own formation within them — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 271