Supremacy requires both domination and intellectual-moral leadership

Evidence

The major focus, in the event, of Gramsci’s historical writing was the Risorgimento. He began his analysis by a statement of “the methodological criterion on which our own study must be based … that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as “domination” and as “intellectual and moral leadership”. The Risorgimento, for Gramsci, was characterised by an absence of the second element, and concretely by an absence of an Italian equivalent of the Jacobins. (What Gramsci meant by “Jacobin” will be discussed more fully in the introduction to “The Modern Prince” below. He saw the essence of “Jacobinism” as the subordination of the “countryside” to the ” city” in an organic relationship, i.e. the organising of peasant “consent”.) … The basic problem confronting Gramsci was that of identifying the specific weaknesses of the Italian national state which emerged from the Risorgimento—weaknesses which culminated in the advent to power of Fascism sixty years later. His analysis was a complex one, whose point of departure was the question of what the Risorgimento was not . Mazzini and the Action Party, the potential “Jacobins”, did not make any attempt to rouse the peasantry and draw it into the process of national unification; they did not promote any agrarian reform. Consequently, they failed to give the Risorgimento any popular dimension or themselves any solid class base. … The result was that “what was involved was not a social group which ‘led’ other groups, but a State [Piedmont] which, even though it had limitations as a power, ‘led’ the group which should have been ‘leading’ ”. What was involved was a “passive revolution”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 376

The methodological criterion on which our own study must be based is the following: that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as “domination” and as “intellectual and moral leadership”. A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to “liquidate”, or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise “leadership” before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to “lead” as well. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 428

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the two faces of class supremacy — coercion plus consent/leadership.
• XREF: This domination/leadership pair is the seed of the later ‘hegemony’ concept; connects forward into hegemony literature the reader tracks for Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Durable domination requires both state force and internalized consent — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 465; Skill in valued domains earns prestige that grounds leadership even without formal hierarchy. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 391
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 376; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 428