How to Read Hegemony? Reflections on the Reading of Theoretical-Political Texts to Address the Gramsciam Concept

Abstract

The following article proposes a critical review of traditional approaches to reading theoretical-political texts in the search for a way of reading the concept of hegemony and proposing an “heretical” reading that differs from the dominant approaches in the field of Gramscian studies. With this perspective, we review the textualist and contextualist approaches in order to critique the knotting of the meanings of a concept in an authorial intention. At the same time, revisiting contributions from conceptual history and critical theory, we postulate the aporetic character of political concepts, to think about the political problem hegemony condense in it’s multiple meanigs. We therefore propose a reading of the Gramscian texts, and of their subsequent interpretations and reappropriations, which accounts for the polysemy of the concept of hegemony in order to interpret its powers and limits for marxist political theory.