State power always rests on the doubled forces of force and consent.

Evidence

Guicciardini’s formula can be translated by various other, less drastic formulae: force and consent; coercion and persuasion; State and Church; political society and civil society; politics and morality (Croce’s ethical political history); law and freedom; order and self-discipline; or (with an implicit judgement of somewhat libertarian flavour) violence and fraud. In any case, in the political conception of the Renaissance, religion was consent and the Church was civil society, the hegemonic apparatus of the ruling group. For the latter did not have its own apparatus, i.e. did not have its own cultural and intellectual organisation, but regarded the universal ecclesiastical organisation as being that. The only way in which this differed from the Middle Ages was the fact that religion was openly conceived of and analysed as an instrumentum regni . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2187

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s core translation of ‘arms and religion’ into the vocabulary this whole toolkit runs on — coercion/persuasion, political society/civil society, hegemony as the ruling group’s apparatus.
• XREF: Directly anchors the Islamophobia module’s concept of hegemony and common sense — ‘consent’ production is what later readings call the manufacture of acceptable anti-Muslim common sense. — connects to: State power depends on borrowing the bodies of its subjects — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 695; State power depends materially on the bodies citizens lend it.; Normal hegemony balances force and consent so that force appears based on majority consent — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1952 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Normal hegemony balances force and consent so that force appears based on majority consent #expands (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1952
• Normal parliamentary hegemony pairs force with consent so force appears majority-backed #expands (0.95)
• Durable domination requires both state force and internalized consent #expands (0.95) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 465
• Every state requires both coercive arms and legitimating belief. #expands (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2187
• State power depends on borrowing the bodies of its subjects #expands (0.90) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 695
• State power depends materially on the bodies citizens lend it. #expands (0.90)