CONCEPT
Civil Society (Gramsci)
In Gramsci's analysis, the dense network of institutions — schools, churches, media, cultural organizations, professional associations — through which <em>consent</em> is produced and <em>hegemony</em> maintained, as distinguished from political society, which rules through coercion.
Gramsci divided the superstructure into two layers: political society, which rules through coercion, and civil society, which rules through consent. The institutions of civil society are the terrain on which hegemony is constructed and maintained. This insight transformed political theory by relocating the center of political struggle from the state to the dense network of non-state institutions through which everyday life is organized and meaning is produced. In the digital age, the platform has become the dominant institution of civil society, collapsing the functions of the school, the newspaper, the public square, and the marketplace into a single architecture that operates continuously, globally, and algorithmically.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gramsci's distinction emerged from his analysis of why revolutionary movements had succeeded in Russia but failed in Western Europe. Russia had what Gramsci called a weak civil society — the Czarist state confronted a population whose allegiance was not heavily mediated by intermediate institutions. Western European societies possessed dense civil
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