Hegemony and crisis: An analysis of habit and ideology as mechanisms for achieving ‘consent’

This article presents an analysis of the role played by ideology and habit in ensuring the stability of the socioeconomic order by looking at key passages from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks dealing with the notion of hegemony and its various aspects. This discussion is informed by Beasley-Murray’s criticisms against the notion of hegemony and his insistence that, at times of crisis, ruling classes’ ideologies stop mattering, and we should, instead, focus on domination and habit imposition. This piece attempts to clarify key concepts such as domination, leadership and ideology, as well as presenting distinctions between different ‘forms of consent’. In response to Bealey-Murray’s critique, it will also highlight how economic and political crises effect workers’ habitual life, domination and habit imposition within production/surplus extraction, leadership style and the subsequent ‘form’ bourgeois ideologies must take to appeal to an electorate that has lost trust in political elites. It will then conclude with the opposite assertion: At time of crises, we should pay even closer attention to the ‘morbid symptoms’ displayed by bourgeois ideological trends.