The state’s power to define meaning is inseparable from its power to coerce

Evidence

The institutions responsible for the control of deviance thus became a central thread in the story. Control included, not only their capacity to practice authority, but also their ideological and cultural power to signify—give events a social meaning—and to win society to their “definition of the situation.” By putting these two functions together in the same frame, the traditional distinction between the state as an instance of domination (e.g., depriving individuals of their liberty, punishment, etc.) and as a site for “winning popular consent” was decisively undercut. Discursive practices—making definitions prevail in both symbolic and material ways—were as much part of social control as breaking up crowds or imprisoning offenders. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1047

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This collapses the coercion/consent distinction that structures much state theory — the claim that defining situations is itself a mode of control, not a separate function, is paradigm-level.
• XREF: Connects to Gramscian hegemony and to Milgrom/Shapiro work on how institutional reputation systems literally control meaning-making in markets. — connects to: the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how modern platforms’ ‘community standards’ are discursive social control — defining situations, shaping consent — parallel to the state’s ideological power Hall describes.