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This article attempts to single out key sources, avoiding any unilateral attribution, for the concept of hegemony as developed by Antonio Gramsci throughout the entire course of his prison writings. Among these sources one may point to the wellestablished (albeit usually ignored) use of the term by Italian socialists when Gramsci was a young journalist. Later, when he was a member of the Comintern Executive in Moscow (1922-3), the term circulated freely among leading Bolsheviks (Lenin included), as Bukharin confirms explicitly, and shortly afterward began to appear in Gramsci's letters and other writings. Major inputs, as seen from the Prison Notebooks, ofso sfem from Benedetto Croce and from various aspects of Machiavelli, including language. Gramsci's university linguistics studies also proved important, with the questions of linguistic substrata (which foreshadow later sociolinguistic notions) and the dialect/national language relation being crucial. Overriding all, however, is Gramsci's reading of the concrete situation.
Key Words: Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Italian Philosophers, Language, Bolsheviks
In this article we attempt to identify the principal theoretical origins, about a halfdozen of them including a strong linguistic input, that converged to influence the concept of hegemony as subsequently developed by Gramsci throughout the whole of his Prison Notebooks, from its first appearance there, where "leadership" and "political hegemony" are used synonymously. Not all sources are explicitly stated as such in the Notebooks, but they may be traced by assessing both Gramsci's comments there and his experience before prison. Shedding light on this subject is helpful for challenging often unilateral or debatable interpretations of the concept, whether by friendly commentators, who sometimes overlook or deny economic and class factors, or by hostile ones, who neglect consensual aspects. Both sides, too frequently, also ignore hegemony's essential role as the component that transforms Marx's somewhat static structure/ superstructure metaphor into Gramsci's more dynamic metaphor of the historical bloc.
The Starting Point for the Concept of Hegemony
Gramsci's notion of hegemony rests, as he himself states, on a fundamental text of Marx's, the 1859 preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, which he translated in a part of Notebook 7 set aside for such work (Gramsci 1975, 2358-60).1 A literal English translation of the main lines of interest reads: "With the change in the...