It is refreshing to find someone with a good word to say for the concept of cultural hegemony. Even though Leon Fink misconstrues my argument in certain ways, he and I share a lot of common ground more, I think, than he realizes. Certainly he is more sympathetic to Gramscian ideas than some American intellectual historians have been. They have tended to doubt that the concept can be wielded with any precision. In Thomas L. Haskell's wickedly funny formulation, for example, Gramscianism is to Marxism as Unitarianism is to Christianity: a "feather pillow" to catch those falling from the true faith. from this point of view, the concept of cultural hegemony is too soft but also too volatile. "Like dry ice," Haskell writes, "hegemony always tends toward sublimation, becoming merely a diffuse aspect of the human condition rather than a distinct feature of particular societies that one could ever point to in explanation of specific events and actions."' That criticism is accurate but misconceived. As I have already acknowledged, it is probably true that no organized society can exist without governance by a hegemonic group.2 There is no explanatory power inhering in words or phrases like "hegemony" or "historical bloc" anymore than in "modernization," "false consciousness," "consensus," or "social system." Gramscian terms provide a theoretical vocabulary that acquires meaning only in specific contexts; the value of that vocabulary is that it highlights the relation between culture and power without reducing mental and emotional life to a mere epiphenomenon of economics or demography. There is little point in asking: Do we see hegemonic processes operating in this or that society? (That is what Aileen Kraditor once referred to as a "yes-type" question.3) The more salient questions are: Which groups composed a hegemonic (or counterhegemonic) historical bloc at particular historical moments? How were alliances forged through what combination of economic interests, moral impulses, ethnic ties, common prejudices, collective fantasies? How were those alliances dissolved or reshaped? Why did some groups peel away and others remain? Fink's account of the rise and fall of the Knights of Labor poses those questions in provocative ways. He correctly focuses on the "processes by which meanings were