Hegemony as Pedagogy: The Formation of a Collective Will and of Individual Personality According to Gramsci

Abstract

This chapter addresses the relationship between the individual and the social that is central to Gramsci’s well-known understanding of the pedagogical nature of hegemony. Gramsci blended two theoretical approaches in his Prison Notebooks: one approach relates to macro-problems, defined by historical, social, economic and political themes; the other approach pertains to individual micro-problems. The displacement from the individual to the social is conceptualised through a twofold theoretical and political objective: to think and to operate at the same time for the construction of a collective will of the subaltern masses to become hegemonic as well as for the construction of a human personality that attunes the mass with the individual. The first dimension has been better studied than the second one. In both cases this construction involves the action of an educator who is a master and the action of a pupil or an apprentice: it involves the progressive dissolution of the distance that separates these two poles of the pedagogic relationship, the active appropriation by the latter of the resources of civilization, the capacity to create new dispositions and the creation of a socialisation according to a ‘conformity’ achieved through the struggle between conceptions of the world in reciprocal tension and in hegemonic struggle.