Hegemonic Power

Various Views

As David Wilkinson explains, traditional usage of “hegemony” emphasizes hard power and the ability to coerce, if need be. For classical antiquity, hegemony meant first and foremost political and military supremacy, dominance, and the ability to lead and control. Thus, a hegemonic power was a state, or an empire, that presided over a military-political hierarchy consisting of both allied and subjugated states and commanded these states’ obedience by means of superior military power. According to John Wickerman, a different aspect of hegemonic power was emphasized by those who saw it as based predominantly on ethical leadership, the power of the reasonable, and the willing consent of the governed. Aristotle distinguished between hegemony and domination: the first as leadership directed to the interest of the led, and the second as the raw exercise of power over those who naturally deserve to be slaves. For [Page 788]thinkers in this tradition, says Benedetto Fontana, a hegemonic alliance of states, although necessarily cemented by its leading power, is impossible without the mutual consent of the allies and therefore must differ from the imposition of coercive and despotic rule on unwilling subjects.

In the 20th century, this second line of thought received a new emphasis in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, who argued that hegemonic leadership required conscious efforts to construct a “historical bloc” that would command the emotional, moral, and intellectual support of the governed. Robert W. Cox as well as other neo-Gramscian theorists have extended this insight to relations between states. Rather than seeing hegemony solely in terms of individual state dominance over other states, these theorists represented it as a form of class rule constituted internationally in dialectical interaction among the social relations of production, the forms of state, and world order. For Adam D. Morton, hegemony in this sense is the articulation and justification of a particular set of interests as general interests, the spread and acceptance of ideas and values, as well as rules and institutions that the dominant class imposes nationally and internationally, while expanding and meshing with similar social forces across different countries to shape the world order in its interests.

A separate but related view on the essence of hegemonic power has been developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and the world-systems theory strand of neo-Marxian analysis. According to Wallerstein, hegemony exists when one power can largely impose its rules and its wishes in several areas—in economic, political, military, diplomatic, and even cultural matters. The material base of such a power lies in the ability of enterprises domiciled in that power to operate more efficiently in all three major economic areas—agro-industrial production, commerce, and finance. The world-systems theory's analysis is similar to the neo-Gramscian one, in that both see the world system of states as more or less an expression of the underlying logic of capital accumulation. The differences lie in the accents of their respective views of a hegemonic power: While neo-Gramscians emphasize the intersubjective structures of a hegemonic consensus, world-systems theorists stress productivity and economic competitiveness.

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