| Summary/Abstract |
According to Antonio Gramsci, social hegemony comprises: “1.The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group … 2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively.”1 These two elements of social hegemony — consent to the existent social order and control of the non-consenting — are facilitated through the cultivation of belief structures that determine and limit the horizon of imagined alternatives with regard to life and the social order. These belief structures are informed by many sources, one of which is law. As Robert Gordon observed: “Law … is one of these clusters of belief — and it ties in with a lot of other nonlegal but similar clusters — that convince people that all the many hierarchical relations in which they live and work are natural and necessary.”
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