Where does hegemony collide?

The way a dominant social group holds its position not mainly by force but by winning broad consent to its own view of the world, so that its outlook comes to feel like ordinary common sense. Writing from prison in the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci argued in the notes later gathered as his Prison Notebooks that this consent is built and kept up through the institutions of civil society, such as schools, churches, unions, and the press. Bates, reviewing the idea, summed up its core claim as the view that people can be led by ideas as much as they are ruled by force. What marks this meaning is that hegemony names a relation of consent inside one society, and its measure is whose account of the world comes to be treated as common sense. It is not a claim about which state dominates the international order, nor a technical account of how meaning is fixed in language.[1][2]

Unit

A relation of consent within a society, in which one group's worldview is accepted as common sense

Recovery means

Not applicable. This is a relation of leadership and consent, not a state that is regained.

Measured by

Read from the ideas and institutions of civil society, and interpreted historically rather than quantified

In international relations, the argument that the world economy and the wider international order tend to be more open and more stable when a single dominant state, a hegemon, is willing and able to provide public goods such as an open trading system and a stable currency and to enforce the rules. Kindleberger drew the idea from the interwar depression, and Keohane's After Hegemony questioned the theory, asking whether cooperation can persist once a leading state's dominance fades. Snidal set out its limits, separating a benign version, in which the hegemon supplies goods that also benefit others, from a coercive version, in which it extracts advantage. Here hegemony is a position one state holds within the system of states, defined by its share of material power and its role in supplying order. This is a claim about relations between countries, not about consent within a society or about the fixing of meaning.[3][4]

Unit

A dominant state's position in the international system, by its share of power and its provision of order

Recovery means

Not applicable. This is a structural position among states, not a state that is regained.

Measured by

Gauged by a state's share of material capabilities and its provision of public goods, and assessed against how open and stable the order is

In post-Marxist political theory, hegemony is the discursive work of linking together separate demands and identities under a shared banner, and in doing so partly fixing meanings that could always have been arranged otherwise. Laclau and Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, treated society as having no single fixed centre, so political identities are not given in advance but are formed when scattered elements are articulated into a common project. A hegemonic relation, on this account, is one in which a particular demand comes to stand in for a wider whole, holding a chain of others together without ever closing off other possible arrangements. What marks this meaning is that hegemony is a practice of articulation in language and politics, and its measure is which linkages hold and which give way. It is neither a dominant class securing consent nor a leading state supplying order, but the ongoing contest over how meaning and identity are put together.[5]

Unit

An articulation that links demands and identities and partly fixes their meaning

Recovery means

Not applicable. This is a contingent linkage, not a state that is regained.

Measured by

Read from how demands and identities are linked in political discourse, and interpreted rather than quantified