This study is an investigation of the foundations of hegemony, drawing and expanding on Gramsci's insight about the need for an ‘ethico-political’ principle such as the nation, linking dominant and subordinate to attain hegemony. In order to overcome Gramsci's limitations, it introduces the notion of ‘mechanisms of class accommodation’, referring to inclusive identities whose effect is to render the reality of class divisions politically irrelevant by stressing the ‘organic’ unity of dominant and dominated. It investigates the structural conditions for the nation's emergence, linked to the rise of capitalism, and the concrete ways in which it was constructed, strongly dependent on its nature as a mechanism of class accommodation.
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