Hegemony. James Martin
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an objective and a subjective phenomenon. We can speak of it in terms of social conditions that are external to us and independent of our attitudes – the ‘facts’ of material inequality, the disproportionate presence of white men in positions of institutional authority, empirical evidence of prejudice and violence against specific groups, and so on. But how those conditions are perceived and connected, and therefore whether they are experienced as ‘oppressive’, is not an automatic consequence of their objective presence. That requires them to be experienced as unacceptable, exploitative, and realistically open to transformation. Yet one consequence of inequalities and hierarchies in power is that those who benefit from them often have the resources to define how everyone’s circumstances are interpreted. Or, as Marx and Engels famously put it, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas’ (1996: 145). Thus, conditions of systematic constraint or exclusion – which are usually multiple, interwoven, and layered such that they cannot always be viewed as one thing – are frequently justified, defended, and selectively represented in ways that ‘naturalize’, or at least minimize and isolate, their pernicious effects.
But hegemony is not simply a fictive veneer obscuring naked oppression. Rather than hiding, distracting from, or embellishing an unpleasant reality, it implies something stronger. ‘Leadership’ suggests a sense of inexorable, collective movement towards a common goal. To lead is to provide unforced direction, to inspire people to endorse certain choices over their own, or even as their own. That way, hierarchies and inequalities are perceived not as domination at all, but as acceptable or unavoidable inconveniences. When they are led, people often assume that their ultimate, shared interests are being advanced, that they have a greater stake in what is coming than in how things currently are. Hegemony, I want to suggest, centres on this more encompassing way of understanding the acceptance of domination.
A vital influence here was Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the Italian Marxist whose ideas on hegemony from the 1930s offer insights into how social classes seek to exercise what he called ‘national-popular’ leadership over society. Before Gramsci, hegemony had described, rather narrowly, the ‘preeminence’ or ‘supremacy’ of one city state, nation state, or group over others in a political alliance (see Lebow and Kelly 2001; Anderson 2016: 1–11). After its incorporation into debates about revolution, however, Gramsci enriched the concept by making leadership a feature of class domination in general. Classes rule, he argued, not always by forcing others to obey them but by cultivating a broad-based cultural and political consensus – an inclusive sense of belonging – that rationalizes and endorses domination. Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony helped others to explain how apparently stable societies were built on certain social alliances and compromises, under the influence of certain cultural values and political ideals. Moreover, hegemony encouraged analysts to identify mechanisms for producing consent (such as the media, culture, and ideology) and to note where, as hegemony waned, forms of conflict and violence were likely to erupt. Many – though not all – later applications of the concept have worked from the ideas developed by Gramsci.
We will look more closely at Gramsci’s contribution in chapter 2. But what is important to remember here is that, with him, hegemony describes the paradox of domination – that people accept the leadership of a certain set of figures, ideas, and institutions, despite the domination these support. Unless we appreciate this paradox, then hegemony won’t make much sense. Worse, it might be (as it has been) crudely reduced to either the purely objective or the subjective dimensions of domination, in isolation. That is, hegemony might be conceived as either some automatic binding force built in to all power relations without the need to generate leadership, or else as an all-pervasive ‘dominant ideology’ that is externally imposed to distract people from reality.
But hegemony really only illuminates anything if we regard it as a concept for exploring how, to what extent, and with what resulting tensions the reality of domination and the complexities of experience co-exist. That, I want to suggest, means understanding hegemony as the name for a practice, one that operates on different scales, varies in depth and breadth, expands and retracts, and undergoes resistance and reinvention. That is to say, it is another name for politics.
Power, Subjectivity, Ethics
With all this in mind, how are we to explore different approaches to hegemony?
Across the twentieth century, debates over hegemony have been moments of innovation in political theory and analysis, as well as occasions for disagreement and controversy. From Gramsci onwards, hegemony has been regularly revised according to new situations and priorities. What is at stake in different approaches is more than just the meaning of a concept, but questions about the shape and mechanisms of social domination and political rule, how to connect objective structures to subjective experiences, and thus how to challenge and reconstitute power anew.
To distinguish approaches to hegemony, we need to review the broad contexts and debates from which they arose. I also suggest we consider how those debates figure three, distinct but overlapping, dimensions of the concept: power, subjectivity, and ethics. These dimensions are present – if unevenly so – in most approaches. There are, of course, other ways to proceed (see, for example, Haugaard and Lentner 2006; Opratko 2012; Worth 2015), but this one encourages a sense of the complexity of the concept while also recognizing its evolution over time. Let us look briefly at each in turn.
Power – a strategic concept
Hegemony, as I’ve suggested, helps to explain power and domination in terms of the exercise of leadership. Analysing power by reference to the various strategies, contests, and phases in such leadership is one of the concept’s most significant contributions to political theory and analysis. It involves a distinctive, ‘strategic’ concept of power.
In modern political analysis, power has widely been conceived through a theoretical model drawn originally from the natural sciences. Power has been a ‘causal concept’ (Ball 1975) whereby one independent entity changes the behaviour of another. It is a model introduced in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes, who took it from the (then) new science of mechanics (see Hobbes 1991). To ‘hold’ power, in his account, is a capacity to make someone act in a way they would not otherwise have chosen. For example, Hobbes understood the Sovereign (or ‘Leviathan’) as an agent whose overwhelming concentration of power causes others to obey. Since then, that model of power – understood as a ‘zero-sum’ possession with causal properties – has been paradigmatic for social and political analysts, even when they disagree about who possesses it or how it operates (Clegg 1989).
But the causal model cannot really explain human behaviour. Undoubtedly, some individuals, groups or organizations concentrate resources, which gives them a greater ability to shape others’ actions. But humans are not mindless ‘objects in motion’ whose interactions are externally determined. They are agents who create and share meaning, and their actions are conditioned by their self-understanding, and so by the conceptual and linguistic terms and rule-based frameworks they employ. Behaviour is mediated by symbolic constructions that dispose towards – not ‘determine’ – some choices over others. The causal model of power is a metaphor that does not helpfully grasp the varied and complex ways in which symbols can ‘shape’, ‘influence’, ‘urge’, ‘threaten’, ‘encourage’ or ‘provoke’ behaviour (Ball 1975). These terms describe reasons, not causes. Because behaviour is subjectively mediated, it is usually impossible to isolate a single, independent ‘cause’ that acts externally upon individuals.
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