The State is an equilibrium between coercive political society and hegemonic civil society

Evidence

My study on intellectuals is a vast project… . Moreover, I extend the notion of intellectual considerably, and do not limit myself to the habitual meaning, which refers only to great intellectuals. This study also leads to certain determinations of the concept of State, which is usually understood as political society (or dictatorship; or coercive apparatus to bring the mass of the people into conformity with the specific type of production and the specific economy at a given moment) and not as an equilibrium between political society and civil society (or hegemony of a social group over the entire national society exercised through the so-called private organisations, like the Church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.); it is precisely in civil society that intellectuals operate especially (Benedetto Croce, for example, is a kind of lay pope and an extremely efficient instrument of hegemony- even if at times he may find himself in disagreement with one government or another, etc.) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1869

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core Gramscian definition of the State as hegemony-plus-coercion, split between political society and civil society — central vocabulary for the Islamophobia toolkit.
• XREF: Connects to ‘hegemony’ readings that follow, and to how colonial states deploy both coercive apparatus and civil-society institutions (schools, unions, churches) to manage populations. — connects to: The state is an equilibrium of coercion and consent run through civil society — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1869; Democratic institutions may constrain raw state coercion against opposition — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 72; Political contention engages state coercive power and affects regime future — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 132