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Contemporary Cultural Theory

social stability. Hence the famous formula: ‘State = political
society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the
armour of coercion’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 263). The term ‘hegemony’
here refers to something very similar to Weber’s legitimate
authority: to the permeation throughout the whole of society of
a system of values and beliefs supportive of the existing ruling
class. This is, in effect, a value consensus, and one very often
embodied in commonsense, but constructed, however, in the
interests of the ruling class.
‘The intellectuals’, Gramsci argued, ‘are the dominant group’s
“deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony
and political government’ (p. 12). They are not in themselves an
autonomous and independent social class, but rather, the ‘func-
tionaries’ of the superstructures. Gramsci distinguished between
‘organic’ intellectuals, that is, the type of intellectual that each
major social class creates for itself so as to ‘give it homogeneity
and an awareness of its own function’ (p. 5), and ‘traditional’
intellectuals, that is, ‘categories of intellectuals already in existence
. . . which seem to represent... historical continuity’ (p. 7). Intel-
lectuals of the latter type, most importantly the clergy, but also
administrators, scholars and scientists, theorists and philosophers
affect a certain autonomy from the dominant social classes, but
it is an autonomy that is ultimately illusory. For Gramsci himself,
the central political problem was that of the creation of a layer
of organic working-class intellectuals capable of leading their
class in the battle for counter-hegemony. But in his own work,
and even more so in that of subsequent Gramscians, the substan-
tive focus very easily slides towards the explanation of an
apparently impregnable bourgeois hegemony. If hegemony is
never in principle either uncontested or indefinite, it can quite
often come to appear both.

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

From Marx, the Frankfurt School inherited the theory of ideol-
ogy and a model of capitalism as exploitative and oppressive;
from Weber, a suspicion of rationalism and a diagnosis of

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