Taking consent for granted: A case for rethinking hegemony

Abstract

This paper focuses on the position of consent in prevailing models of hegemony. It is argued that the commonly invoked consent assumption is a weakness in the hegemony construct that demands review. Consent is purportedly a crucial element of the hegemony dynamic, yet is often overlooked in favour of dominance and resistance. To illustrate this, the paper provides a genealogical account of the consent premise as it is formulated in notable models of political hegemony. This reveals a declining interest in the purportedly crucial consent element of the hegemony construct, accompanied by a reductive view of language and discourse. Next, the paper contrasts the collective consent premise with modern notions of individual sexual consent. This highlights the connection between the consent assumption and hegemonic masculinity. It is observed that if hegemony is based on modes of control and the lack of meaningful choice, it is not founded on consensus. Rather, it is postulated that such conditions might aptly be described as a form of tolerance. This concept is outlined here as a means of departure towards theorizing how hegemonic domination might be actualized discursively without the requirement of consent. In this respect, the paper responds to proponents of post-hegemony by arguing that it is not the concept of hegemony that is outmoded, but rather how it is secured.

Introduction

This article explores the concept of tolerance as a category of hegemonic domination. The first section of the article provides an overview of the concepts of hegemony, post-hegemony and repressive tolerance. The second section examines the position of consent in the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1971). The third section examines the position of consent in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation) (Althusser, 1971). The fourth section examines the position of consent in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). The fifth section examines the position of consent in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (Hall, 1988). Reviewing the position of consent in these prevailing models of political hegemony will contribute to the suggested shift to tolerance. The sixth section provides a linguistic critique of the hegemony construct. The seventh section provides a Marxist–feminist critique of the consent premise. The eighth section outlines an alternative coercion/tolerance dichotomy. This is followed by a concluding section that emphasizes the utility of the argument being prosecuted and suggests future directions of travel.

Hegemony, post-hegemony and repressive tolerance

Hegemony broadly connotes the preponderance of one state or class over another. It is thus a concept primarily associated with domination or leadership. This implies two closely intertwined perspectives: hegemony as state domination through material power; and hegemony as class leadership through ideological power. The thrust of this paper is primarily oriented around the latter distinction. The classic portrayal of hegemonic leadership (henceforth hegemony) involves the securement of power for one class over another through a combination of consent and coercion. Consent denotes ideological resources of power used to integrate subalterns and legitimize certain ways of thinking and doing. Coercion denotes material resources of power used to subjugate subalterns and delegitimize certain ways of thinking and doing. However, no class can command complete allegiance because hegemonic power relations are inherently fluid and unstable. This is why winning consent is traditionally viewed as key to maintaining control and adapting to resistance and struggles for legitimacy. Securing and sustaining consent means portraying elite interests as common interests, and as the only rational and universally valid courses of action (Marx and Engels, 1932: 68).

The hegemony concept has informed innumerable accounts of social order reproduction in multiple fields, but it is far from sacrosanct. Notably, Beasley-Murray (2010: ix) has argued that ‘there is no hegemony and never has been,’ citing disillusionment with traditional class-based politics, and the declining efficacy of ideology (see also Lash, 2007; Thoburn, 2007). Adapting Žižek's (1989: 29) critique of ideology as cynical distance (‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’), Beasley-Murray (2003, 2010) asserts that socioeconomic order is no longer sustained discursively or ideologically, but rather below the level of consciousness and directly upon the body through affect and the inculcation of habit (Bourdieu, 2000). Within the ‘post-hegemony’ formulation, consent is redundant, because the legitimacy of extant states of affairs is always already habituated from the beginning of lived experience (see also Althusser, 1971). In my view, Beasley-Murray (2010) is right to identify flaws in the consent/coercion dichotomy. It is true that we live in cynical times. The exploitative nature of waged labour is transparent, and distrust in governance is widespread. Despite these conditions, there is no sign of imminent social change. Thus, I agree that consent is not necessarily a fundamental feature of hegemonic struggle. However, I would contend that this does not need to entail a rejection of discursive or ideological accounts of power. On this front, I agree with Chodor (2014) and Sau (2024). The post-hegemony thesis relies on the inherently ideological belief that ideology is no longer a factor (see Fukuyama, 1992). This is a convenient narrative for proponents of the notion that the triumph of capitalism over communism marks the end of the mobilizing power of ideas. Alternatives to the near-global dominance of neoliberalism remain stubbornly locked out of elite political debate. The point about unconsciously enacted hegemony is astute, but this mode of control remains the terrain of discourse and ideology.

In this paper I expound an alternative view. The socioeconomic order is secured through a combination of coercion and (coercive) tolerance. I situate this proposal within the Marxist–feminist tradition. The conventional understanding of individual sexual consent is an expression of male dominance because it contractually reproduces the a priori subordination of women (Pateman, 1980, 1988; MacKinnon, 1982, 1989). This type of consent is predicated on a binary distinction of acceptance/rejection that reflects the initiative and dominance of men. Because there is no obvious alternative, consent is viewed as a product of structural inequalities. I posit that this critique can be extended to the collective consent element of the hegemony dynamic because it wrongly assumes that subalterns can freely access meaningful alternatives. Here I formulate a notion of (coercive) tolerance (henceforth tolerance) as a discursively and ideologically enacted category of hegemony. This view builds on Marcuse's (1965) partisan distinction between ‘true’ or liberating tolerance and ‘false’ or repressive tolerance. Liberating tolerance connotes the forbearance of socially progressive ideas and the rejection of socially harmful ideas. Repressive tolerance connotes the forbearance of hegemonic conditions and ideas even if their damaging effects are visible. This interpretation has elsewhere been adapted by Brown (2006, see also Žižek, 2008) to describe the process of depoliticizing societal inequalities and injustices, such that they appear natural rather than created and contoured by structures of power. I propose that there is value in extending the conceit to the hegemony dynamic. Like consent, tolerance is a human behaviour. Unlike consent, tolerance does not imply endorsement. Rather, it implies capitulation because ‘it is made compulsory behaviour with respect to established policies’ (Marcuse, 1965: 82). Tolerance does not necessarily emerge organically. Rather, it is enforced politically and promoted discursively. Policies of selective disempowerment keep organized opposition under control. Promoting elite/tolerant discourse and demoting alternative/dissenting discourse keeps disorganized opposition under control. This concept is formulated here as an alternative to transcendental interpretations that reject ideological factors.

Consent in selections from the Prison Notebooks

For Gramsci (1971), the concept of hegemony is bound up with his interpretation of the societal superstructure and a multiplicity of other, overlapping dualisms. The ‘civil society’ level of the superstructure is maintained through hegemony (consent), the ‘political society’ level of the superstructure is maintained through direct domination (coercion). This corresponds to two forms of conflict: the war of position (ideological resources); and the war of manoeuvre (material resources). The state deputizes ‘traditional’ intellectuals as ‘functionaries’ through which the consent/coercion binary of social hegemony and political governance is exercised. The emancipation of the subaltern classes requires ‘organic’ intellectuals to disentangle ‘good sense’ (empirically acquired knowledge) from the ‘common sense’ (ideologically acquired knowledge) promoted by the traditional intellectuals. Consent is positioned as the ‘“spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production’ (Gramsci, 1971: 145). Coercion is depicted as the ‘apparatus of state coercive power which “legally” enforces discipline on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively. This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed’ (Gramsci, 1971: 145).

'Spontaneity’ is a borderline mystical concept in the Prison Notebooks. It is vaguely defined as ‘formed through everyday experience illuminated by “common sense”’ rather than ‘the result of any systematic educational activity’ (Gramsci, 1971: 433). Elsewhere, Gramsci notes that ‘pure’ spontaneity, like ‘pure’ mechanicity, does not exist in history (Gramsci, 1971: 430). In other words, consent and resistance do not emerge from a vacuum. The implication here is that ‘spontaneity’ always contains traces of ‘conscious leadership,’ but because subaltern groups are disconnected from their historical exploitation, it is difficult for ‘conscious leadership’ to fully transcend common sense. Gramsci also does not explicitly explain the difference between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ consent (see Sau, 2024), but he does seem to recognize some of the ambiguities surrounding these terms. Approval/disapproval are said to coexist within a ‘contradictory consciousness’ that ‘unites workers in the practical transformation of the real world,’ and at the same time is ‘inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed’ (Gramsci, 1971: 641). Thus, to maintain legitimacy, the dominant bloc must occasionally contend with disaffection. However, this threat is obviated by the difficulty subaltern classes have in conquering common sense and translating their experience into a unifying discourse. Winning consent means winning the war of position, which takes place within language and culture. Power over language and culture is historically acquired. This means that dominant ideologies will tend to be prioritized within discourse and systems of knowledge (see also Foucault, 1972). Hence, critical approaches in discourse studies that evoke Gramsci tend to focus on ‘the manufacture of consent and other discursive ways to influence the minds (and indirectly the actions) of people in the interest of the powerful’ (van Dijk, 1995: 18). Gramsci is particularly relevant within the field of (critical) discourse studies because language is a central concern (see Beilharz, 2016; Boothman, 2008). Anticipating and perhaps precipitating the discursive turn in Critical Theory, Gramsci (1971: 626) describes language in familiar terms as ‘a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content’ in which ‘there is contained a specific conception of the world.’ The conception of the world derived from common sense is ‘mechanically imposed by the external environment,’ the conception of the world derived from good sense involves ‘refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one's own personality’ (Gramsci, 1971: 626–627). As will be revealed in the forthcoming sections, the reception and application of Gramscian theory in later models of political hegemony discard much of this linguistically oriented emphasis along with his (comparatively) nuanced understanding of the consent premise.

Consent in ideology and ideological state apparatuses

Althusser (1971) explicitly focused on the psychoanalytical rather than linguistic features of ideology and domination. Ideologies are said to ‘represent the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (Althusser, 1971: 162). The ‘real’ conditions of existence are not represented in ideology, but rather a distorted representation of ‘true’ relations between individuals and the conditions of their existence. Representations of imaginary relations to real relations always have a material existence ‘inside an apparatus, and its practice, or practices’ (Althusser, 1971: 166). Ideologies are thus corporeal, enshrined within the repressive state apparatus (RSA) and the ideological state apparatus (ISA). The RSA (i.e., police, courts and prisons) function through violence. The ISA (communications, culture and parliamentary democracy) function through ideology. Despite being relegated to a footnote (Althusser, 1971: 142), this clearly parallels Gramsci (1971): the RSA corresponds to political governance/coercion; the ISA corresponds to social hegemony/consent; and both are wrapped up in his reinterpretation of base/superstructure (i.e., material instruments of production/political and civil society).

The Gramsci/Althusser schism relates to the effects of ideology. Althusser (1971: 173) argues that ‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects,’ and that as ideology is eternal, having no history, all individuals are always–already subjects because ideology has always–already interpellated them. Because individuals are always–already acting as subjects, they are also always–already reproducing institutions unthinkingly, and without reflection. Interpellation is the crucial ideological mechanism in hegemony because it forms and naturalizes reality. Unlike Gramsci, Althusser expressed hostility towards linguistics, noting that ‘linguists and those who appeal to linguistics for various purposes often run up against difficulties which arise because they ignore the action of the ideological effects in all discourses’ (Althusser, 1971: 172). Contradictorily, he uses the example of a police officer hailing a civilian (using language) to illustrate how interpellation operates (Althusser, 1971: 172). The key difference between interpellation and cultural hegemony is that interpellation removes any agency because ideology is viewed as profoundly inescapable. Subordinate consent is not a requirement, in this case, because individuals are always–already ‘transformed’ into or ‘recruited’ as subjects. This paints a hopeless picture of humanity, but also disregards centuries of resistance to, and successful usurpations of, regimes of dominance.

Consent in hegemony and socialist strategy

Laclau and Mouffe (1985) are often singularly blamed/celebrated for the decline of economistic Marxism and the popularization of post-Marxism. The authors advocate a ‘radical democracy’ as a Left alternative to socialism, in response to the triumph/failure of neoliberalism/communism as governing systems. The text is concerned explicitly with hegemony as the principal category of political analysis and is situated firmly in the terrain of post-structuralism. This means a divestment of many fundamental Marxist tenets including pre-constituted structures, pre-constituted agents of change and economic determinism, in favour of an explicit focus on discourse. According to ‘post-structuralist discourse theory,’ society has no natural structure, no underlying principles and no class basis. It is historically contingent but randomly and accidentally so, directionless, and ‘dislocated.’ Central to this ontological position is the idea of ‘articulation,’ which ostensibly restores some of the connection between hegemony and linguistics. Articulation is defined as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice,’ and discourse as the ‘structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 105). It is postulated that all social structure is discursively constituted, provided with stability and meaning only through articulations, or repeated combinations of and connections between words and concepts. This implicitly reflected contemporaneous developments in linguistic theory that emphasized the dialectical relationship between discourse and society (Fowler et al., 1979).

According to post-structuralist discourse theory, hegemony is an outcome of ‘antagonisms’ between opposing political articulations in an open field of infinite possibilities in which competing articulations are charged with meaning to achieve the universal acceptance of a particular discourse. Like Althusser (1971), Laclau and Mouffe (1985) are not interested in consent. Conflict and division are viewed as the drivers of social change. Indeed, they note largely in passing that the ‘central role that the notion of antagonism plays in our work forecloses any possibility of a rational consensus,’ and that ‘any form of consensus is the result of a hegemonic articulation’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: xviii). This is said to provide the necessary conditions for movements of radical democratic progress to succeed, but it also seems to suggest that obtaining some form of popular ‘consent’ is considered a potential outcome of political articulation. However, this is confused by an uncompromising prioritization of discourse as ‘not a merely “cognitive” or “contemplative” entity’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 96), but rather a practice that constitutes and organizes all social structure. Elsewhere, it is explicitly argued that hegemonic relations are ‘not the result of a contractual decision, as the hegemonic link transforms the identity of the hegemonic subjects’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: xii). As with Althusser (1971), this implies that agential consensus is illusory consensus, and therefore fundamentally non-consensual in nature.

Consent in the hard road to renewal

Hall (1977) engaged extensively with Gramsci and provided a renewed emphasis on subordinate consent. Drawing from Poulantzas (1965), Hall (1977) posited that ideology performs three critical functions for the dominant capitalist order. The first function is to ‘mask’ or conceal the class-exploitative and antagonistic foundations of capitalism. The second function is to ‘fragment’ the collective interests of workers into the internal oppositions of different strata of the class. The third function is to ‘unite’ imaginary cohesions across these strata that sustain the fragmentation of collective interests (i.e., ‘consumers’, ‘the nation’ and ‘communities’). Dominant systems and classes engender hegemony by winning ‘consent’ through masking–fragmenting–uniting, which are achieved through violent and non-violent apparatuses of control. This interpretation of Gramsci explicitly places legitimacy and consent at the centre of hegemonic domination, ‘dispersed through fragmentary agencies, reorganized into an imaginary coherence, in the mystical unity of "”the consensus”, into which sovereign individuals “spontaneously” flow’ (Hall, 1977: 339). Hall (1988) would later vastly expand on these ideas with a focus on the conjunctural relationship between the decline of the British Left, the rise of Thatcherism and the emergence of identity politics as a key terrain of resistance. Paralleling Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Hall (1988) contrasts the failure of the British Left to mobilize collective identities with the success of Thatcherite ‘authoritarian populism’ to win consent by harnessing popular discontents.

Crucially, this account rejected the outright determinism of subjectivation (Althusser, 1971), suggesting instead that Thatcherism succeeded by addressing subalterns as included. For instance, by identifying and thus interpellating subordinate individuals as potential homeowners of council houses. For Hall (1988: 137), coercion and consent are mutually constitutive: ‘a dovetailing of the “cry for discipline” from below into the call for an enforced restoration of social order and authority “from above.’” Hall (1988) combines statist and discursive perspectives based on a relatively faithful interpretation of Gramsci. The function of the state is to consolidate power, the function of discourse is to consolidate consent, and this is mediated through abstract processes of articulation. Hall's (1980) use of the articulation concept is cryptic, as much a metaphor for the vague ‘joining up of’ as the ‘giving expression to’ disparate phenomena that coalesce into a ‘complex structure’ or unity of dominance. Elaborating on this in an interview with Grossberg (1986: 53) Hall posits that ‘a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects.’ Thus, Hall (1988) reduces discourses to vehicles for competing articulations that reflect competing hegemonies and struggles for consent – but he does this without explicitly engaging with language. This is emblematic of the gradual disconnect between hegemony and linguistics that emerged from the reception and adaptation of Gramsci in cultural studies and beyond.

Language and hegemony

Language is to hegemony as policy is to governance. All the discussed models of hegemony recognize discourse as a site of hegemonic domination to varying degrees of explicitness and emphasis. Gramsci's (1971) original envisionment of hegemony was rooted in his studies in linguistics and abiding interest in the relationship between language and politics (see Beilharz, 2016; Boothman, 2008). Despite this, over time appropriations of his ideas have popularized a hyper-abstract interpretation of discourse accompanied by a diminished focus on language. In critical discourse studies, the concept of discourse carries much more meaning, principally viewed as the foregrounding or backgrounding of ideologies in texts through linguistic choices (Fairclough, 1989). This derives from Foucault's (1972) view of discourse as the structuring and controlling of systems of knowledge through acts of thinking and communicating about reality. From this perspective, discourse is a way of looking at language and texts as sites of ideological and hegemonic struggle. Making connections between texts and their social purpose enables us to understand the roles that discourses play in shaping society, and the role that society plays in shaping discourses. This implies a dialectical ontology in which discourse and society are viewed as co-constitutive (Bhaskar, 1986). It follows that discourse is assumed to have causal properties, including making possible and/or reproducing social injustices. Knowledge about discourse, and therefore knowledge about hegemony, is broadly acquired by interpreting observable tensions between structure and agency in the language of texts. If articulations charge discourses with meaning, and articulations are composed of multimodalities including language, then language should form an essential analytical category for any model of hegemony that prioritizes discourse. The same is true of ideology, because all discourse is ideological.

Feminism and consent

MacKinnon (1982) adroitly observes the parallels between Marxism and feminism as theories of inequality. Both provide ‘accounts of how social arrangements of patterned disparity can be internally rational yet unjust’ (MacKinnon, 1982: 516). Crudely put, women are presumed to ‘consent’ to the dominance of men, just as workers are presumed to ‘consent’ to the dominance of neoliberalism. The problem is that neither of these presumptions are accurate. Any notion of ‘consent’ falls apart in the face of relations ‘in which many work and few gain, in which some fuck and others get fucked’ (MacKinnon, 1982: 517). Here, MacKinnon is pointing to the crucial hegemony-sustaining function of gendered language. The conventional use of the term ‘consent’ in heteronormative sexual relations reinforces entrenched beliefs about the ‘natural’ hierarchy of women and men. Consent is always taken to be conferred to men by women, and we still lack the language with which to articulate an egalitarian alternative. Even ‘affirmative consent’ – the more recent shift from ‘no means no’ to ‘yes means yes’ – is based on a giver/receiver grammar corresponding to the intransigent reactive/receptive and active/initiative norms of patriarchy in which male desire is central (Torenz, 2021). Pateman (1980) insightfully extends this critique to state/subject relations. The consent premise ‘presents our institutions as if they were actually as consent demands, as if they were actually constituted through the free agreement of equal persons’ (Pateman, 1980: 162). The notion that the state/subject relationship is based on consent collapses under scrutiny because it is difficult to empirically demonstrate how and when the citizenry performs the act of consent. The only obvious evidence is voting, but as Pateman (1979) asserts elsewhere, this takes the form of a promise of obedience to a prospective state for a fixed period and the interminable suspension of the right to collective self-governance. The concept of consent in this context is meaningless because the refusal or withdrawal of consent is not an option. Thus, ‘consent’ ‘cannot be distinguished from habitual acquiescence, assent, silent dissent, submission, or even enforced submission’ (Pateman, 1980: 150). If hegemony is to be understood in continuity with the prevailing models – as an asymmetrical relation of domination/subordination – then I propose that tolerance represents a more meaningful alternative that better reflects the reluctant experience of many living under late capitalism.

The tyranny of tolerance

The socioeconomic order is secured through a combination of coercion and tolerance. Coercion operates much as it has throughout history. It is a top-down strategy. Obedience to the elected state and the interests it represents is enforced politically. This is achieved through the formulation and enforcement of policy and law. What might be called a ‘representation of consent’ begins and ends at the point of election. From here, it is politically and discursively enacted tolerance that ensures the socioeconomic order, until the facade repeats. Politically enacted tolerance means tolerance directly imposed on subjects through policy and law. Most of us will (rationally) submit to policy and law because to resist risks undesirable consequences. Discursively enacted tolerance means tolerance indirectly imposed on subjects through systems of knowledge. Marcuse (1965) identified that perverse tolerance – mainly serving to preserve repressive structures and neutralize opposition – is cognitively engendered. In his own words (Marcuse, 1965: 111): ‘when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin at the place of entrance, there where the false consciousness takes form (or rather: is systematically formed) – it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness.’ The ‘more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media’ (Marcuse, 1965: 111) is identified as the terrain from which the ‘words and images that feed this consciousness’ are primarily sprung, the ‘place of entrance’ where perverse tolerance takes shape. The media landscape has transformed dramatically since A Critique of Pure Tolerance was published. That said, the agenda-setting power of media journalism is well documented (see especially McCombs & Valenzuela, 2021), and developments in critical discourse studies have usefully incorporated elements of cognitive science (see especially van Dijk, 2016).

There are observable features and nuances in written/spoken communication that provide opportunities to investigate how tolerance might be mediated. This is generally achieved through a focus on major features of inclusion/exclusion in written/spoken texts: who is/not represented; what is/not represented; and how are these features organized. Such structures reflect broader distinctions of sanctionable/unsanctionable courses of action and behaviour, including dominant ways of thinking and talking, and transgressive ways of thinking and talking. Take, for example, the austerity narrative that has broadly dominated British politics since the 2007/2008 financial crisis. According to this rhetoric, public sector debt caused by the dangerous overspending of previous governments necessitates brutal fiscal controls including spending cuts and tax increases aimed at deficit reduction – optional measures that disproportionately disadvantage subalterns (Wamsley, 2024). The powerful framing of this narrative as an inevitable consequence of economic mismanagement rather than an ideologically motivated policy choice dominates the prevailing political and media discourse at the expense of popular alternatives including a one-off wealth tax (Philo, 2012). The latest government seems to recognize the negative valency of austerity-speak, but there are few signs of any substantial shift in policy (Bird, 2024). Crucially, the incontestability of the inevitability doctrine plays out in language that seems to appeal directly to the experience of tolerance. Common examples include the evocation of familiar metaphors of inherited misfortune (‘economic black hole’/'social black hole’), proclamations of essentiality (‘the government will have to’/‘people will have to’) and household-economy policy analogies (‘big asks’/‘short term pain for long term good’) (Whannel, 2024). Such language constructs tolerance of austerity or austerity–adjacent policies as a requisite civic duty. The interdependency of political elites, traditional intellectuals, public relations professionals, news agencies and reporters ensure that this view is prioritized in the prevailing politico-economic debate (Lewis et al., 2008). Tolerance is a naturally emergent behaviour, because plausible alternatives are much less visible, much less ‘authoritative,’ and much less likely to mobilize successful counter-hegemonies.

Conclusion

This article has conceptualized tolerance as a politically and discursively enacted category of hegemonic domination. In doing so, the article challenges prevailing models of political hegemony and the consent element of the hegemony dynamic. Like individual sexual consent, the notion of collective consent is meaningless when alternatives are not available or obstructed. This means there is very little to distinguish consent from coercion in traditional accounts of hegemony. The proposition of an alternative coercion/tolerance dichotomy builds on Marxist (Marcuse, 1965) and feminist (MacKinnon, 1982; Pateman, 1980) insights to provide a critique of contemporary relations of domination that more credibly reflects the contentious and antagonistic realities of life in choiceless late capitalism. This account (re)emphasizes the dominance-sustaining function of language and discourse and, in so doing, provides points of focus for empirical research that increasingly abstract accounts of hegemony neglect. In this respect, the article serves as a counterargument to transcendental accounts of hegemony that reject or downplay ideological factors (Beasley-Murray, 2003; 2010; Lash, 2007; Thoburn, 2007). Tolerance is promulgated here as a means of departure toward theorizing nonconsensual hegemonic domination. This implies that to truly understand the intransigence of the neoliberal order demands a renewed focus on processes that coercively sterilize and discursively invisibilize resistance, such that to tolerate the objectionable and vile is naturalized as ordinary (in)human behaviour. Future papers will expand and operationalize this model with a view of promoting application across disciplines.