ABSTRACT
There is an oddity in US intellectual life that seems to discourage it from producing its own social or cultural theories and that encourages it to turn to Europe to fill the gap. The problem that European theories were designed to address in Europe was the remarkable health of both capitalism and patriarchy. This lack of a working-class consciousness in US society is characterized by a reluctance to identify the class at all, which, to European ears, is strange indeed. They tended to turn for their theoretical underpinnings to cultural anthropologists such as Victor Turner and to treat the US as a vast tribe whose national media and national sports acted as community-building rituals. Gramsci's theory of hegemony has features which suit it to US conditions better than those of other European Marxists. Despite hegemony theory's greater ability to cope with social diversity and cultural struggle, its limits are exposed in the analysis of US Black-white relations.
