Hegemony and the crisis of legitimacy in Gramsci

Gramsci's concept of hegemony is often believed to be a political account of legitimation. His Marxist critics go on to accuse him of failing to offer a properly structural account of bourgeois legitimation. I argue that Gramsci's theory attempted to straddle both economic and political accounts. In so doing, he presupposed the absence of effective authority in the Italian state. In such conditions, his project was to theorize the way in which economic classes became agents that would institute political order. The difficulties in applying Gramsci's formulation today lie in this combined economic and political account and the assumption of 'organic crisis' that supported it.