Stuart Hall on Hegemony

"Hegemony...is never completed. It is always trying to enclose more differences within itself. Not within itself. It doesn't want the differences to look exactly like it. But it wants the projects of its individual and smaller identities to be only possible if the larger one becomes possible. That is how Thatcherism locates smaller identities within itself. You want to have the traditional family? You cannot do it for yourself because it depends on larger political and economic things. If you want to do that, you must come inside my larger project. You must identify yourself with the larger things inside my project. That is how you become part of history. You become a little cog in the larger part of history.
Now that is a different game from saying, "I want everybody to be exactly a replica of me." It is a more complicated game. But there is a moment when it always declares itself to be universal and closed, and that is the moment of naturalization. That's the moment when it wants its boundaries to be coterminous with the truth, with the reality of history. And that is always the moment which, I think, escapes it. That's my hope. Something had better be escaping it."

from "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethniticies"