ABSTRACT
Antonio Gramsci was concerned with how power was maintained in the modern state. The process of the increasing regulation of the market at all levels of social life from child-rearing practices and marriage, to schooling, to the organisation of work relations through trade unions, reordered the practices of society, or everyday life. The compromise characteristic of hegemony was made vis-a-vis the emerging proletariat as the liberal state took on the role of the regulator of relations between capital and labour in accord with a criterion of distributive social justice-the beginnings of the welfare state. The process is thus its own verification because it can prove that education and authority are the guarantees of the best judgement, by the obvious impossibility of referring back complicated propositions to the populace. Gramsci therefore argues that the structures of the state must be changed in order for other truth statements to become real, i.e. taken up in a socialist counter-hegemony.
