Hegemony

In its most straightforward use, hegemony describes the dominance of one group over another. Increasingly, the term is used as shorthand to describe the relatively dominant position of a particular set of ideas and their associated capacity to become commonsensical and intuitive, thereby rendering alternative ideas contrary to the precepts of common sense, counterintuitive, irrational, and possibly even incapable of articulation. The associated term hegemon is used to identify the actor, group, class, or state that exercises hegemonic power or that is responsible for the dissemination of hegemonic ideas.

Hegemony derives from a Greek term that translates simply as “dominance over” and that was used to describe relations between city-states. Its use in political analysis was somewhat limited until Antonio Gramsci's intensive discussion of the concept in his political thought. Gramsci's discussion of hegemony followed from his attempts to understand the survival of the capitalist state in the most advanced Western countries. As a follower of Karl Marx, Gramsci understood the predominant mode of rule as class rule and was interested in explaining the ways in which concrete institutional forms and material relations of production came to prominence. The supremacy of a class and thus the reproduction of its associated mode of production could be obtained by brute domination or coercion. Yet, Gramsci's key observation was that in advanced capitalist societies, the perpetuation of class rule was achieved through largely consensual means—through intellectual and moral leadership. Gramsci's analysis of hegemony thus involves an analysis of the ways in which this cognitive domination is achieved, of the dissemination and acceptance of capitalist ideas as commonsensical and normal. A hegemonic class is one that is able to attain the consent of other social forces, and the retention of this consent is an ongoing project. To secure this consent requires a group to understand its own interests in relation to the mode of production, as well as the motivations, aspirations, and interests of other groups. Under capitalism, Gramsci observed the relentless contribution of civil society institutions to the shaping of mass cognitions. Via his concept of the national-popular, he also showed how hegemony required the articulation and distribution of popular ideas beyond narrow class interests.

Gramsci's analysis of bourgeois hegemony was grounded in detailed historical analysis, but it also carried clear implications for revolutionary socialist strategy. The acquisition of consent before gaining power is an obvious implication, and here Gramsci offered a distinction between two strategies: war of maneuver (in essence a full frontal assault on the bourgeois state) and war of position (engagement with and subversion of the mechanisms of bourgeois ideological domination). But it is important to recognize that Gramsci understood hegemony not simply in ideational terms. His idea of historic blocs was used to show how hegemonic classes combine their intellectual leadership of clusters of social forces with an increasing capacity to exercise control of the processes of production.

This understanding of hegemony derived from Gramsci acquired some followers interested in understanding the rise of (Margaret) Thatcherite political economy and the ascendancy of the New Right more generally during the 1970s and 1980s, but perhaps its most extensive application has been to the analysis of international relations and international political economy, via the so-called transnational historical materialism. Scholars within this tradition have been careful to distinguish their project from the way hegemony has been used within orthodox (predominantly) realist international relations (IR). In state-centered IR analysis, hegemony denotes the existence within the international system of a dominant state or group of states. In the branch of realist analysis known as hegemonic stability theory, the presence of a hegemon (say Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States after 1945) generates patterns of stability within the international system. The hegemon has a self-interest in the preservation of the system and is, therefore, prepared to underwrite the system's security with its military might. At the same time, the hegemon is responsible for the formulation of the rules that govern interaction within the international system.

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