In his "Prison Notebooks", Antonio Gramsci anthropomorphizes the sum total of independent choices and attributes to that personification intellect, emotion and volition in an attempt to justify the compulsory by portraying the voluntary as just another hapless way by which individuals are controlled by groups. As another Italian, Vilfredo Pareto, demonstrated, there will always be those one can imagine to be a malignant "hegemony". However, Pareto never went on to attribute to those unrelated individuals a knowledge aforethought. Gramsci was confronted by the fact that Italians chose, willingly chose, Italian Fascism. Gramsci looked down on Italian fascism because it benefited Italians at the expense of everyone else. ( Much in the same way that National Socialism benefited Germans at the expense of everyone else.) Gramsci believed that communism was superior to both Italian Fascism and National Socialism because it was not intended to benefit some at the expense of others. That's ironic because communism went of to be more expensive than National Socialism and Italian Fascism together, by far, in both blood and treasure. There is no reason to believe that Gramsci was aware of Pareto's work. That's a shame too. Antonio Gramsci seems like a well intentioned guy who got off on the wrong foot. His anthropomorphic personification of the same thing that Pareto described was his first mistake. Attributing to that personification (the hegemon) coordination of intent, affect and effect is tinfoil hat crazy.
