Summary
In Antonio Gramsci’s usage as Said takes it up in Orientalism, the cultural leadership exercised in civil society by consent rather than by the direct domination of political society — the indispensable concept, for Said, that gives Orientalism its durability and strength (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.15-16 / printed p.6-7).
Details
- Hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, is what gives Orientalism the durability and strength Said attributes to it: a system of ideas remaining unchanged as teachable wisdom from Renan in the late 1840s to the present in the United States (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.15-16 / printed p.6-7).
- The relationship between Occident and Orient is described in the same terms, a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.14 / printed p.5).
- The hegemony of European ideas about the Orient reiterates European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent or skeptical thinker might have had different views (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.16 / printed p.7).
- Gramsci’s civil/political distinction also frames Said’s account of political knowledge: political society reaches into the academy and saturates civil-society fields with significance of direct concern to it (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.20 / printed p.11).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Antonio Gramsci, Orientalism, Representation