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establish its political power. Hegemony need not depend upon consensus
nor consent to particular ideological constructions. It is a matter of
containment rather than compulsion or even incorporation. Hegemony
defines the limits within which we can struggle, the field of ‘common sense’
or ‘popular consciousness’. It is the struggle to articulate the position of
‘leadership’ within the social formation, the attempt by the ruling bloc to win
for itself the position of leadership across the entire terrain of cultural and
political life. Hegemony involves the mobilization of popular support, by a
particular social bloc, for the broad range of its social projects. In this way,
the people assent to a particular social order, to a particular system of
power, to a particular articulation of chains of equivalence by which the
interests of the ruling bloc come to define the leading positions of the
people. It is a struggle over ‘the popular’, a matter of the articulated
relations, not only within civil society (which is itself more than culture) but
between the state (as a condensed site of power), the economic sector and
civil society.
Hall (1980) describes hegemony as the struggle between ‘popular’ and
‘populist’ articulations, where the latter points to structures which
neutralize the opposition between the people and the power bloc. He has
used this framework (1978, 1980b, 1988a) to describe the unique
configuration, emergence and political successes of the New Right and
Thatcherism in Britain. However it is important that we do not romanticize
the ‘popular’ (1984a):

Since the inception of commerical capitalism and the drawing of all
relations into the net of market transactions, there has been little or
no ‘pure’ culture of the people—no wholly separate folk-realm of the
authentic popular, where ‘the people’ existed in their pure state,
outside of the corrupting influences. The people have always had to
make something out of the things the system was trying to make of
them.

Nor can we locate the popular outside of the struggle for hegemony in the
contemporary world. For hegemony is never securely achieved, if even
momentarily. But it does describe a different form of social and political
struggle, what Gramsci called a ‘war of positions’ (as opposed to the more
traditional war of manoeuvre) in which the sites and stakes of struggles
over power are multiplied and dispersed throughout the social formation.
Hall argues that the left must enter into this complex set of struggles,
across the entire range of social and cultural life, if it is to forge its own
hegemonic politics, one dedicated to making a better life for everyone.
Once again, Hall enjoins us to recognize that ‘people make history but in
conditions not of their own making.’ This is Hall’s model of practice, a
model of our own practices, or our struggles to understand the relations,