Gramsci's Propagand The Influence Of Autonomy

In any society, individuals get most of their ideas, beliefs, customs, values, doctrines, etc, in a wholesale fashion from social institutions such as family, peers, media, schools, government among others. These social institutions play a pivotal, continuous and universal role of regimenting of the society, its public mind, in every bit as much as the army regiments the bodies of the soldiers. Virtually all societies exemplify the phenomenon of influential personalities causing social institutions to create circumstances and pictures in the mind of millions that shape events and influence the relations of the public enterprise . In his book, Propaganda, Edward Bernays argues that we are governed, our minds molded or ideas suggested largely

Gramsci theorizes hegemony as an ideological means employed by the ruling class, to achieve domination over masses, simply by manipulating the latter into conceding, the former’s interests is “just, legitimate and designed for the benefit of all” .

Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and subordination in society (Gramsci, 1978) is similar to Foucault’s concept legitimation and dominance of masculine power (Foucault, 1980; 1982) and are both manifest in the nature of elite power politics. To legitimize domination and subordination, the leaders have to understand mental processes and social patterns and occupy key positions in social structure for easy supply of ideas and manipulation of wires which control the public mind. Gramsci is of the view that hegemony plays critical role in the ‘manufacture of consent’ in the subordinate

He argues that civil society is the public sphere where formation such as trade unions and political parties negotiate concessions from the State. It is the sphere in which ideas, norms, values, customs, and beliefs among others are created, shaped and influenced. It is where bourgeois ‘hegemony’ is reproduced in cultural life through law, business, religion, media, education, academia, etc, to ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy to bourgeois state (Heywood 1994: 100-101).

Hegemony can also be understood from Louis Althusser who writes that the ideological apparatuses of the State are over-determined zones of society that comprise complex elements of the ideologies of previous modes of production, thus, are sites of continual political activity in a society, which are: the religious (the system of Churches); the educational (the systems of public and private schools); the family; the legal, the political (the political system, e.g. political parties), the trade union, the communications (such as press, radio, television), and the cultural (literature, the arts, sport,