The state educates populations by shaping customs beyond formal legal sanction.

Evidence

Its aim is always that of creating new and higher types of civilisation; of adapting the “civilisation” and the morality of the broadest popular masses to the necessities of the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production; hence of evolving even physically new types of humanity. But how will each single individual succeed in incorporating himself into the collective man, and how will educative pressure be applied to single individuals so as to obtain their consent and their collaboration, turning necessity and coercion into “freedom”? Question of the “Law”: this concept will have to be extended to include those activities which are at present classified as “legally neutral”, and which belong to the domain of civil society; the latter operates without “sanctions” or compulsory “obligations”, but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 910

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s extension of ‘law’ into civil society — the mechanism by which hegemony operates through custom and collective pressure rather than coercion.
• XREF: Directly feeds the hegemony/common-sense module of the reader’s scaffold; civil society as educative pressure parallels how Islamophobic common sense is normalized without legal mandate.