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The following chapters explore five themes that, in broadly chronological order, have defined new formulations and applications of, or debates about, hegemony. Each chapter deals with a distinct framing of arguments and issues in the evolution of the concept. But the themes are also topics that extend across time and serve as the preferred frame for readers to think about hegemony. So the chapters can be read sequentially or, if preferred, according to the theme that interests you most.

Chapter 2 begins with the seminal work of Antonio Gramsci, who supplied the basic coordinates for many contemporary reflections on hegemony. For him, it was a concept that helped to elaborate a distinctive strategy for revolution in developed capitalist states. That strategy was conceived as a process of consensual state-building rather than a Bolshevik-style, violent seizure of power. It meant gradually extending the cultural and political bases of support for an emergent ruling class. In Gramsci’s work, hegemony expands into a whole framework of analysis for understanding the origins, techniques, and limits of class domination.

In chapter 3, our focus is on Marxist debates over how to apply hegemony to the analysis of the postwar capitalist state. Unlike Gramsci, who wrote during a period of political instability, thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s utilized hegemony to understand the evolution of relatively stable ‘welfare’ states. Hegemony helped to focus on the political integrity of national capitalisms, but also on their changing cultural foundations and sites of ideological tension. Marxist theories of the capitalist state and the emergent discipline of cultural studies each made important contributions to the development of the concept in this period. Their analyses were crucial for understanding efforts to rebuild social bases of consent, such as the phenomenon of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1980s and, more recently, forms of right-wing ‘populism’.

‘Post-Marxist’ approaches to hegemony are the theme of chapter 4. The project of ‘radical democracy’ initiated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe involved a major theoretical reconstruction of hegemony as a framework of analysis and a strategy for emancipation. The obsolescence, as they saw it, of Marxist appeals to economic ‘determination’ and to the political primacy of class demanded new ways to theorize radical politics. Coming near the end of the Cold War and just in advance of the collapse of South African Apartheid, Post-Marxism and radical democracy looked forward, presciently, to a non-revolutionary, pluralist politics of social movements. In Post-Marxist approaches, hegemony became more theoretical but also more mobile, exploring diverse forms of power and domination, numerous different ‘discourses’, and political contests.

In chapter 5, we consider the application of hegemony to the study of international politics. Hegemony has a different lineage here. In theories of International Relations, it has been widely used by so-called ‘realist’ scholars to explain the leading role of a dominant world power in a system of states. That approach was challenged by radical critics – notably, Robert W. Cox – who drew on Gramsci’s insights to reconnect international politics to class struggles within world capitalism. Neo-Gramscian scholars of International Political Economy have subsequently explored the historical, political, and ideological dimensions of international hegemony. They have contributed to the analysis and critique of ‘globalization’, understood as an expansion of ‘neo-liberal’ capitalism.

Finally, chapter 6 turns its attention to critiques of hegemony by recent political theorists. Despite regular reinvention, hegemony is tied to a view of political power as something to be identified, challenged, and remade. For a number of critics, however, the language of hegemony – particularly its preoccupation with strategies that unify people and join them in a common project – remains a project of mastery. Indeed, it is argued – on the basis of radically different ‘ontological’ grounds – that hegemony cannot appreciate the dynamic nature of power and the ‘spontaneous’, ‘autonomous,’ and creative forms of resistance to it. A genuinely radical politics, it is proposed by various ‘new materialists’ and anarchists, demands not the reinvention but the end of hegemony.