This doctoral dissertation examines the various ways in which intellectuals, writers, politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens engaged with cultural and political hegemony in both liberal and fascist Italy. Through utilising and developing Gramscian and Bourdieuan theories on the mechanisms of cultural production, the nature of hegemony and the creation of public consent, this thesis specifically aims to demonstrate how counter-hegemonic critique and opposition formulated by a conservative and nationalist intelligentsia challenged the social, political and economic legitimacy of the dominating liberal system of government, whilst also highlighting how hegemony was concretely materialised through the confluence of political, social and economic capital. Beginning with the publication of Gaetano Mosca’s Teorica dei Governi in 1884, this thesis first analyses elitist examinations of parliamentary hegemony before investigating the ultimately failed realisation of a neo-aristocratic regime in Italy attempted by the fascist regime, which instead created a form of oligarchical hegemony. This thesis moves on to examine two partly interconnected forms of bourgeois activism in Florence, which challenged the power of the liberal state through the identification and exploitation of economic, social and political breaches in the fabric of parliamentary hegemony. Focusing on the writer Enrico Corradini, his journal Il Regno and the rise of the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana, this dissertation first studies how private radicalisation, cultural production and political organisation combined to create counter-hegemonic structures. This dissertation then argues for a re-evaluation of the modernist journal La Voce, which reveals the democratic and populist—rather than the proto-fascist and authoritarian—challenges to liberal hegemony posed by the journal and its collaborators. Finally, this dissertation studies the cultural production of hegemony through the construction of a shared collective memory of the Great War in a so-called letteratura di guerra, which had become one of the most important vehicles of historical legitimisation for the fascist regime in Italy by 1935.