James Martin - Hegemony

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.

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.

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 abilities and fluctuating opportunities perpetually alter wider relations, and make the exercise of ‘dominion’ provisional. Machiavelli therefore treated political analysis as the interpretation of changing strategies of rule, not the advocacy of a single structure to order society (see Clegg 1989: 34–6).

Hegemony, I want to suggest, aligns with Machiavelli’s strategic model of power more than it does with Hobbes’ causal account. That makes it problematic for those who conceive power and domination as emanating from an objective and unitary structure. To exercise hegemony is to be in a temporary relation of supremacy over others, not in absolute possession of power. That is not to deny the existence of structures of domination and concentrations of power. But such forces are only ever partially effective and require active support to sustain them. Hegemony directs attention, then, to the strategies, practices, and networks of influence that achieve this. But, in so doing, it transforms the idea of power as absolute mastery into something less precise: a terrain or field of relations whose various parts do not automatically cohere but are, momentarily, held in balance.

The strategic view of power, we might say, is more like a battlefield than a castle – its parameters shift as allies are made and lost, as key strongholds are taken or relinquished, and as patterns of influence expand and retract. We need to ask what is the scope of hegemony? Who are its agents? What are its techniques? To what degree do concentrations of power – such as the state, capitalism, or patriarchy – rely on consensual leadership, and when do they employ coercion? Is there only ever one system of hegemony or can there be many? These are matters of interpretation that vary according to the focus and application of the concept.

‘Subjectivity’ refers to how we experience the world – the ways in which our conscious reactions and attitudes are defined and organized through knowledge, moral values, sentiments, or desires. Hegemony’s focus on leadership places emphasis on how these aspects of subjectivity are recruited to support, or oppose, forms of rule. It demands that we think about humans as relatively independent subjects, not as objects that act according to prescribed behaviours derived from their social position.

Hegemony is often associated with categories such as ‘ideology’, ‘culture’, or ‘discourse’ since those describe the broad domains where meanings circulate and are contested. Ideology, in particular, carries both the ‘neutral’ meaning of systems of belief that provide more or less coherent views of the world, and the more ‘critical’ sense of false or partial ideas that mislead people about reality, thereby servicing particular interests. Hegemony combines both senses in so far as some privileged group is often identified as the benefactor of hegemony, though this does not require that all ideas and beliefs are reducible to its interests. One key claim in theories of hegemony is that it succeeds to the extent that people come to experience their world, unquestioningly, through the prism of a dominant group’s preferred categories and concepts (or ideology), which are then accepted as ‘natural’ or ‘universal’.