The ruling class doesn't need force once its ideas feel like common sense

Writing from an Italian fascist prison, Antonio Gramsci argued that dominant classes maintain power less through coercion than through 'cultural hegemony' — spreading their worldview through schools, media, and institutions until it is simply accepted as neutral common sense. Challenging that power, he argued, meant first contesting whose ideas get to feel natural and inevitable. The concept became a foundational tool in 20th-century cultural and media criticism.

— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks — Written 1929-1935, published posthumously
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