Hegemony: Consensus, coercion and culture

Since the publication of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks in English in the 1970s, hegemony is a concept which has been employed by many scholars, notably in Australia by Bob Connell, Terry Irving and Mike Donaldson. Recently, hegemony has become a popular word, used mainly to describe the state of international relations in the world today. In this context it is usually synonymous with descriptions of the alleged US supremacy. It is also a term that appears frequently in Cultural Studies, but usually devoid of any political, specifically class, context.