Hegemony

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James Martin. Hegemony

Table of Contents

Guide

Pages

Series Title. Key Concepts in Political Theory series

Hegemony

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1 What is Hegemony?

Domination as Leadership?

Power, Subjectivity, Ethics

Power – a strategic concept

Subjectivity – capturing experience

Ethics – uniting leaders and led

Chapter Outline

2 Gramsci: Hegemony and Revolution

Gramsci’s Fusion

Revolution and the Italian State

Hegemony and the Prison Notebooks

Building consent: state and civil society

Intellectuals, ideology, and common sense

Revolutionary ethics: the ‘Modern Prince’

Tensions in Gramsci’s Analysis

Togliatti and the ‘New Party’

Conclusion

3 Marxism: Hegemony and the State

Consensus Politics?

Class Consciousness and Elite Culture

Structuralism and the Capitalist State

A Dialectic of Structure and Strategy?

Popular Culture, Ideology, and Crisis

Rebuilding Consent: from Thatcherism to Populism

Conclusion

4 Post-Marxism: Hegemony and Radical Democracy

Politics in Fragments

Deconstructing Marxism

Subjects of Discourse

Radical Democracy and Pluralism

A Populism of the Left?

Conclusion

5 Beyond the State: Hegemony in the World

Leading the World

Gramsci and International Relations

A New Global Order?

Global Subjects

Counter-Hegemony

Conclusion

6 The End of Hegemony?

Radical Politics Without Hegemony

Power and Ontology

Affective Subjectivity

Ethics of Commitment

A Moment for Strategy

Conclusion

References

Index

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James Martin

In recent political theory, hegemony has been something of a ‘dissident’ concept, employed to expose and challenge, rather than justify, power relations. It is a favoured term of radical critics opposed to dominant social structures and unquestioned beliefs. Focusing on leadership puts the onus on the strategies and techniques by which some agent seeks to transform rivals and opponents into supporters. More than just a description of bare power, then, hegemony invites enquiry into unacknowledged conditions – the social alliances and cultural resources of leadership – that help to institute power relations and make them acceptable, perhaps even desirable. That enquiry is usually undertaken with an understanding that the grip of such leadership can be weakened and domination can be dismantled. Hegemony can also name the objective of those who resist power and seek an alternative, fairer or emancipated, society.

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Hegemony, by contrast, invokes a model of power that we can call ‘strategic’. That model, as described by Clegg (1989: 29–34), rejects the notion of power as a causal force concentrated in one place, as Hobbes argued. Instead, it treats power as an evolving and unstable field of forces. The strategic model derives from the work of the sixteenth-century political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli. For him, power was never fully captured or possessed by any one agent (see Machiavelli 1988). Rather, politics was characterized by shifting strengths and concentrations of resource, in which changing abilities and fluctuating opportunities perpetually alter wider relations, and make the exercise of ‘dominion’ provisional. Machiavelli therefore treated political analysis as the interpretation of changing strategies of rule, not the advocacy of a single structure to order society (see Clegg 1989: 34–6).

Hegemony, I want to suggest, aligns with Machiavelli’s strategic model of power more than it does with Hobbes’ causal account. That makes it problematic for those who conceive power and domination as emanating from an objective and unitary structure. To exercise hegemony is to be in a temporary relation of supremacy over others, not in absolute possession of power. That is not to deny the existence of structures of domination and concentrations of power. But such forces are only ever partially effective and require active support to sustain them. Hegemony directs attention, then, to the strategies, practices, and networks of influence that achieve this. But, in so doing, it transforms the idea of power as absolute mastery into something less precise: a terrain or field of relations whose various parts do not automatically cohere but are, momentarily, held in balance.

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