Austerity politics, war in the Middle East and at other borders of the European Union, the rise of nationalisms, the emergence of populist parties and politicians, Islamophobia and the refugee crisis are amongst the recent developments suggesting the need for discussions about the theories and concepts that academic disciplines provide for making sense of societal, cultural and political transformations. In this article, we focus on the capacities of feminist political theories to undertake this task. By assessing different feminist (...) approaches to political analysis that range from focusing on women and men, to analysing gender, to doing intersectionality and to adopting post-structural and new materialist approaches, we explore the contributions and the limitations of each framework. This allows us to consider where feminist theoretical debates on gender and politics currently are, to assess old and new developments and to address lacunae in the debate. Our argument is that dominant approaches in political science influence the emergence and marginalisation of particular feminist frameworks for political analysis, but also that feminist theorising of gender and politics, in striving for recognition within mainstream political science, reproduces its own hegemonies and marginalisations. (shrink)

In this hugely influential book, Laclau and Mouffe examine the workings of hegemony and contemporary social struggles, and their significance for democratic theory. With the emergence of new social and political identities, and the frequent attacks on Left theory for its essentialist underpinnings, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy remains as relevant as ever, positing a much-needed antidote against ‘Third Way’ attempts to overcome the antagonism between Left and Right.

Drawing on Burawoy's framework of “factory regimes” and concepts of power and practice from Foucault and de Certeau, this article depicts a production regime of “familial hegemony” found in a Hong Kong electronics factory. It suggests that the social construction of gender has to be inserted into a theory of production politics if the specific forms and processes of this hegemonic regime are to be explained. In this particular case, ethnographic data capture how an everyday culture of familialism, built (...) around notions of gender norms and behavior, is actively constructed by management and workers to serve their respective interests on the shopfloor. (shrink)

Two major developments of the last two decades have radically undermined traditional justifications of leftist politics: the failure of 20th-century `socialist' experiments, and what might be termed the deessentializing movement in contemporary philosophy. However, the social injustices that animated revolutionary thinkers in many respects remain, and some have arguably worsened in the era of globalized capitalism. This article investigates whether it is possible to articulate a new theoretical underpinning for progressive politics that nevertheless avoids the essentialist moves of Marxism. Ethico- (...) class='Hi'>political readings of Derrida — one of the most influential anti-essentialist thinkers — are compared to Ernesto Laclau's attempts at formulating a post-Marxist progressive politics built around the notions of `hegemony' and `radical democracy'. Laclau's intervention in the Marxist tradition is to deconstruct its traditional categories so as to take account of contingency; his intervention in deconstruction is to introduce what in this article is described as `contestation', so as to provide a more coherent account of the political. The article concludes that neither deconstruction nor radical democracy provides an adequate basis for poltical action, but that the latter's account of the political is a meaningful development of the theoretical schema articulated by the former and does point to the possibility of a non-essentialist progressive politics. Key Words: aporia • contestation • contingency • deconstruction • Jacques Derrida • hegemony • justice • Ernesto Laclau • Emmanuel Levinas • responsibility. (shrink)

Although Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès remains amongst the most studied thinkers of the French Revolution, his views on international politics remain largely unexplored, despite his significant role in shaping the foreign policy of the French republic after 1794. This article provides a new account of Sieyès as an international political thinker and actor, drawing on published and archival materials to reconstruct Sieyès' diplomatic programme and its intellectual roots. In so doing, it challenges both the notion that Sieyès was a committed practitioner (...) of an unideological realopolitik and the common assertion that Sieyès was a follower of Immanuel Kant's famous project for perpetual peace. Instead, this article shows that Sieyès charted a distinct course, based on a plan for the ‘republicanisation’ of Europe and its reorganisation into a league of militarily and economically linked states under French hegemony, oriented towards the preservation of republicanism in a hostile world. On this basis it re-evaluates the relationship between Sieyès' and Kant's conceptions of a confederation of republican states, presenting a new account of Kant's Perpetual Peace as a curtailment of his earlier cosmopolitan and pacifist idealism in response to the international situation of the 1790s and the foreign policy pursued by Sieyès and his allies. (shrink)

Democracy has been a flawed hegemony since the fall of communism. Its flexibility, its commitment to equality of representation, and its recognition of the legitimacy of opposition politics are all positive features for political institutions. But democracy has many deficiencies: it is all too easily held hostage by powerful interests; it often fails to advance social justice; and it does not cope well with a number of features of the political landscape, such as political identities, boundary (...) disputes, and environmental crises. Although democracy is valuable it fits uneasily with other political values and is in many respects less than equal to the demands it confronts. In this volume prominent political theorists and social scientists present original discussions of such central issues. Democracy's Values deals with the nature and value of democracy, particularly the tensions between it and such goods as justice, equality, efficiency, and freedom. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of (...) class='Hi'>hegemony is better understood as a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity. (shrink)

This article, originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Chicago, is a critical reading of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Following Antonio Gramsci, their book reverses the meaning of the term hegemony. The traditional use of the term (for military or political leadership) shifts and gives birth to a new signification. Hegemony currently designates a privilege but a discursive one only. It is the privilege conferred (...) to a certain word or category serving as a unifying symbol for different and even heterogeneous forms of political resistance. Hegemony thus understood retains an idea of direction but without any dominating intention. It just orients multiple revolt movements without reducing their differences. Such a unifying symbol appears as a specific signifier devoid of any content or reference, thus ready to bear any contextual meaning. Does this new understanding of hegemony succeed in providing a nondogmatic and nonbinding process of unification, or does it secretely reinstall the logic of commandment? (shrink)

While Marx’s animating spirit can be found at the heart of much work in critical discourse studies, use of his ideas and concepts in this work is much less widespread. This has, however, been slowl...

How to introduce 'politics' as a specific concept within a deconstructive style of thinking? In order to answer this question, this contribution compares Derrida with Laclau. According to the former the starting-point of a deconstructive style of thinking is différance. It links together the economic detour of homecoming and the relation to otherness. Laclau's analysis of politics as hegemonization within a situation of undecidability presupposes this notion of différance and can therefore be useful in introducing politics within a deconstructive style (...) of thinking. But there still is a major difference between Derrida and Laclau's decisionism: if différance as the relation without relation of economy and otherness cannot avoid decisions based on power in order to stabilize the social, these decisions are always marked by passivity and therefore deconstructible in the name of 'justice' that exceeds politics even if it takes place nowhere but within politics. Key Words: decisionism • . Derrida • . hegemony • . Laclau • . law. (shrink)

The unifying idea of Gramsci's famous Prison Notebooks is the concept of hegemony. In his study of these fragmentary writings, now published in paperback for the first time, Dr Femia elucidates the precise character of this concept, explores its basic philosophical assumptions, and sets out its implications for Gramsci's explanation of social stability and his vision of the revolutionary process. A number of prevalent and often contradictory myths are demolished, and, moreover, certain neglected aspects of his thought are stressed, (...) including the predominant role he attributed to economic factors, the importance he gave to 'contradictory consciousness', and the close connection between his political thinking and his fundamental philosophical premises. The author concludes by critically examining Gramsci's novel solutions to three long-standing problems for Marxist theory: why has the Western working class not carried out its revolutionary mission; what is the appropriate strategy for a Marxist party working within an advanced capitalist framework; and what are the reasons behind the failure of existing socialist states in their task of liberation. (shrink)

This study is a comparison of the development of the theories of reification and hegemony in the writings and political activities of Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci during the years from 1918 to 1938. In demonstrating that reification and hegemony were formulated in response to the unsuccessful revolutionary movements in Hungary and Italy of 1919-1920, it becomes evident that the respective theories of Lukacs and Gramsci were meant to constitute critiques of bourgeois cultural domination. Thus, their problematic (...) extends to analyses of more specific issues, such as the role of positivist science as the prevailing "paradigm of rationality" and the instrumental function of "traditional" and "organic intellectuals." The solutions that both theorists sought in order to overcome reification and hegemony are embedded in their neo-Hegelian interpretations of Marxism, where historical materialism is defined as a methodology characterised by its utilisation of the conceptual tools of "dialectic," "totality," and "absolute historicism." However, Lukacs was forced by historical circumstances to retreat into the realm of aesthetics, although he continued the critique of reification by way of his theory of critical realism. Simultaneously, Gramsci began to elaborate more practical solutions to cultural domination through his theory of the "war of position," catharsis, and counter-hegemony. (shrink)

Tracing increasing distrust of politicians and democratic institutions back to the negative idea of political power and freedom as always being a 'power over' and 'freedom from', this text examines Foucault's alternative conception of the politician as one who has the courage to tell people the truth about what has to be done in the face of the dangers they confront. Telling the truth is not sufficient, but must be complemented with empowering people to actively help in overcoming the (...) dangers themselves. Breaking with conceptions of politics as hierarchy and anarchy, Foucault contended that where there is obedience, there cannot be truth and genuine freedom. This book offers a redefinition of power and freedom within a circular logic of true authority and self-governance. It argues that democracy cannot survive without being innovated along these lines, and considers what can be done to reconnect politicians and laypeople in order to rebuild their mutual trust in each other's political capacities. (shrink)

Roy Harris’ view on language can be compared to Antonio Gramsci’s definition of political hegemony as the capacity to create linguistic structures accepted by the majority and to make them become public. If the creation of meaning is rooted in the practical solution of problems, every creation of meaning is also the result of a power negotiation.

Liberal Democratic Law, the Ethics of Civility, and Agonistic Politics between Hegemony and Compromise This article brings Van der Walt’s argument on the importance of an ‘ethics of civility’ in liberal democracies into dialogue with agonistic democratic theory. While agonists agree with Van der Walt that democracy requires citizens’ readiness to live with views that they do not consider ‘reasonable enough,’ they focus on the political processing of conflicts among political actors with opposing views of what is (...) reasonable. The article argues that agonism may be a suitable complement to Van der Walt’s argument, because it shows how politics can help foster citizens’ willingness to act according to the demands of an ‘ethics of civility.’ It refers to Chantal Mouffe’s and James Tully’s agonistic theories and shows that both describe forms of conflict processing that prevent situations in which an ‘ethics of civility’ would demand too unequally distributed sacrifices: continued hegemonic struggle in the case of Mouffe and compromise in the case of Tully. (shrink)

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is currently understood as a theory of power in Western, democratic societies, and therefore as a theory of cultural power (“cultural hegemony”). The aim of this article is to show that this interpretation is erroneous, at least for three reasons. Firstly, because the notion of “democracy” itself has to be placed within its historical context: the meaning of “democracy” in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe was very different from what it became in the (...) post-WWII era. Secondly, because all the regimes Gramsci could have been taking into account when he wrote the Prison Notebooks were the result of the crisis of the Liberal State and parliamentarianism. Even if in different ways, political conflict in each of them unfolded in a manner that is very different from what is today presupposed by the notion of cultural hegemony. And thirdly, because the genetic reconstruction of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, as it is developed in the Prison Notebooks, will show that the core of what is usually considered the Gramscian theory of hegemony was already developed before 1926 (I shall refer to it as “standard theory”), while in the Notebooks he substantially updated this theory, in order to think the new conditions of political struggle in Italy and Europe. This revision can be summarised in three points. First: the notion of hegemony is organically combined with that of “war of position”. The latter will refer no longer the political struggle characterised by a strongly developed civil society, typical of the “West” (as opposed to backward “Eastern” context). The war of position is now the sort of political struggle that we have when huge masses of population enter into political life and actively participate in it. It thus means not a place where political struggles take place but a phase of these struggles, that Gramsci calls “culminating” and “decisive”. The image Gramsci adopts to visualise this phase of political struggles is that of two “reciprocal sieges”: of the masses to the State and of the State to the masses. Second: “hegemony” comes to mean now the means the rulers adopt with the purpose of winning the support of the masses. Politics is no longer the business of active minorities; it is now the organisation of the lifestyle of huge masses of population, in order to control their political agency (hence the notion of “passive revolution”). Third, from the above, the importance of religion follows since it is the most widespread language, as well as that of political myths which manage to mobilise politically social forces, translating religion into political action and the vice-versa, political ideology into religious faith. (shrink)

Any social and political arrangement depends on acceptance. If a substantial part of a people does not accept the authority of its rulers, then those can only remain in power by means of force, and even that use of force needs to be accepted to be effective. Gramsci called this acceptance of the socio-political status quo “hegemony.” Every stable state relies primarily on hegemony as a source of control. Hegemony works through the dissemination of values (...) and beliefs that create acceptance and that serve the interests of the state and/or the ruling elite (the “hegemones”). Hegemony is most efficient if it remains invisible. A key hegemonic belief is the idea that there is no alternative to the current socio-political status quo or that the way things are is “natural.” The current hegemony – that is, the set of values and beliefs that bolster the current socio-political status quo – is a hegemony of psychopathy: it promotes “cultural psychopathy” and destroys empathy and compassion, thus threatening everything that makes us human. The hegemony of psychopathy is responsible for massive human suffering. It must be fought and replaced with a counter-hegemonic set of values and beliefs that promote compassion and care. Fighting hegemony requires fighting the “pillars” that support it. Most important among these are the mass media and culture industry, and mainstream economics. The former is responsible for a continuous stream of hegemonic propaganda; the latter – among others – for providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the false belief that there is no alternative. The book concludes with some considerations on tactics and strategy in the struggle against the hegemony of psychopathy, but does not – and cannot – offer any concrete advice. (shrink)

"Chantal Mouffe's writings have been innovatory with respect to democratic theory, Marxism and feminism. Her work derives from, and has always been engaged with, contemporary political events and intellectual debates. This sense of conflict informs both the methodological and substantive propositions she offers. Determinisms, scientific or otherwise, and ideologies, Marxist or feminist, have failed to survive her excoriating critiques. In a sense she is the original post-Marxist, rejecting economisms and class-centric analyses, and the original post-feminist, more concerned with the (...) varieties of 'identity politics' than with any singularities of 'women's issues'. While Mouffe's concerns with power and discourse derive from her studies of Gramsci's theorisations of hegemony and the post-structuralisms of Derrida and Foucault, her reversal of the very terms through which political theory proceeds is very much her own. She centres conflict, not consensus, and disagreement, not finality. Whether philosophically perfectionist, or liberally reasonable, political theorists have been challenged by Mouffe to think again, and to engage with a new concept of 'the political' and a revived and refreshed notion of 'radical democracy'. The editor has focused on her work in three key areas: - Hegemony: From Gramsci to 'Post-Marxism' - Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Identity - The Political: A Politics Beyond Consensus The volume concludes with a new interview with Chantal Mouffe. James Martin is Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He has published widely on Italian political thought, contemporary political theory and rhetoric."--. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the deployment and the transformation of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and the purpose it serves. I argue that, in its travel from Rome to London, this notion acquired something like a truth-value. In London the notion yielded what I call ‘hegemony thinking’: a distinctive style of thinking that focused on strategy to carry out effective political interventions. To demonstrate my claim I trace the Marxism Today discussion on the crisis of the Left (...) and strategy in the UK. In particular, I look at the engagements of the late historian Eric Hobsbawm and the cultural theorist Stuart Hall with Gramsci’s work, and examine the appropriation of the coordinates of hegemony by the entrepreneur and Blair policy advisor Geoff Mulgan. (shrink)

In a series of memorable exchanges, three eminent theorists engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics.

Social justice struggles are often framed around competing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects. This article compares several organizations of global civil society that have helped shape or have emerged within the changing political-economic landscape of neoliberal globalization, either as purveyors of ruling perspectives or as anti-systemic popular forums and activist groups. It interprets the dialectical relation between the two sides as a complex war of position to win new political space by assembling transnational historic blocs around divergent social visions (...) – the one centered on a logic of replication and passive revolution, the other centred on a logic of prefiguration and transformation. It presents a sociological analysis of the organizational forms and practical challenges that their respective hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects entail. (shrink)

The United States is the hegemon. As the world's superpower, it dominates political discourse and economic policy. Around the world, our hegemony inspires in turn admiration, intimidation, anger, retaliation, and despair. What is the future of our hegemonic world? Is it viable? How will it maintain order? How one answers these questions depends on one's worldview. Many view the world in the clockwork/domination model. Others view it in terms of a self-organizing/web model. Current United States policy works within (...) the first paradigm. I consider the world situation within the self-organization/web paradigm and propose effective methods for conscious evolution. (shrink)

This chapter discusses some strategies pharmaceutical companies employ to establish influence and even hegemony over domains of medical knowledge: marketing products via medical research and education. The chapter thus contributes to understanding the political economy of knowledge in this industry. As a counterpart to traditional epistemology, studying the political economy of knowledge shifts attention from individual claims and their justifications to some of the forces available to shape terrains on which claims are produced, distributed, and consumed.Of pharmaceutical (...) companies’ clinical research, 70–75% is performed by contract research organizations. CROs conduct trials with one eye to the drug approval process and the other to the marketing of products. On the basis of trial data, analyzed by pharmaceutical company statisticians and scientists, publication planners design suites of scientific manuscripts and hire ghostwriters to write them. These are then given to academic authors, who generally have had little prior connection to the research, analysis, or writing. The manuscripts are published in medical journals appropriate for the audiences the companies wish to reach.The doctors and researchers with whom companies engage most closely are generally termed key opinion leaders. In addition to authoring manuscripts, KOLs serve companies in a number of roles, but most prominently as speakers—at professional meetings, in after-dinner and similar settings arranged by sales representatives, and in continuing medical education courses, which doctors must take to keep their licenses. Research, education, and marketing, then, are often fused. (shrink)

This book offers a critical analysis of the rise of the US to global hegemony against a background of increased erosion of democracy and rule of law, and a rising linear pattern of near-absolute capitalist development. The author argues that the significant shrinkage of the ideological spectrum globally, as a result of worrisome levels of business and government interpenetration, has created a dangerous 'prefascist configuration' whereby unthinkable levels of violence have been normalized through the use of technologies such as (...) drones, increasingly condoned even by 'liberal' groups and the so-called political left. Using the example of the Obama administration and its increased reliance on drone assassinations, the volume makes a case for the dangers that lie in today's unique convergence of lack of transparency in government, business-government interpenetration, informal social regimentation, and militarization of capitalism. (shrink)

Exploration of the political roles firms play in society is a flourishing stream within corporate social responsibility research. However, few empirical studies have examined multiple levels of political CSR at the same time from a critical perspective. We explore both how the motivations of managers and internal organizational practices affect a company’s choice between competing CSR approaches, and how the different CSR programs of corporate and civil society actors compete with each other. We present a qualitative interpretative case (...) study of how a French children’s clothing retailer develops CSR practices in response to accusations of poor working conditions and child labor in its supply chain. The company’s CSR approach consists of superficial practices, such as supplier audits by a cooperative business-organized nongovernmental organization and philanthropic activities, which enable managers to silence more radical alternative models defended by other NGOs, activists, and trade unions. By this approach, the core business model based on exploitative low-cost country sourcing remains intact through self-regulated CSR. Through the case study, we develop a framework of dynamism in competing CSR programs. We discuss the implications of our study for CSR researchers, company managers, and policy makers. (shrink)

Based in a holistic exposition and appraisal of Gramsci’s writings that are of relevance to education in neoliberal times, this book--rather than simply applying Gramsci's theories to issues in education--argues that education constitutes the leitmotif of his entire oeuvre and lies at the heart of his conceptualization of the ancient Greek term hegemony that was used by other political theorists before him. Starting from this understanding, the book goes on to compare Gramsci's theories with those of later thinkers (...) in the development of a critical pedagogy that can confront neoliberalism in all its forms. (shrink)

Gramsci's concept of hegemony is often believed to be a political account of legitimation. His Marxist critics go on to accuse him of failing to offer a properly structural account of bourgeois legitimation. I argue that Gramsci's theory attempted to straddle both economic and political accounts. In so doing, he presupposed the absence of effective authority in the Italian state. In such conditions, his project was to the orize the way in which economic classes became agents that (...) would institute political order. The difficulties in applying Gramsci's formu lation today lie in this combined economic and political account and the assumption of 'organic crisis' that supported it. (shrink)

Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of ‘posthegemony’. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony – temporal, foundational and expansive – characterized by different understandings (...) of the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their ‘pre-Gramscianism’, their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser encountered Machiavelli’s work and they both attempted to rethink the very possibility of political practice through their respective readings of the Florentine thinker. In a certain way for both Gramsci and Althusser, the reading of Machiavelli was the experimental site where they elaborated their own conceptions of politics, either in the form of Gramsci’s quest for the ‘modern Prince’, the political and organizational form of a potential hegemony of the subaltern, or in (...) the form of Althusser’s constant redefinition of a potential new practice of politics in a communist perspective. The reading of Machiavelli was for Althusser also one of the terrains upon which he attempted to confront Gramsci, something that is particularly evident in a series of Althusser’s texts in the 1970s from Machiavelli and Us to the recently published Que faire? The aim of this article is to do a comparative reading of the approaches to Machiavelli offered by Gramsci and Althusser, focusing in particular on the tensions running through Althusser’s reading of Gramsci’s writings on Machiavelli. In particular, I will offer a reading of Althusser’s extensive criticism of Gramsci in 1977–1978, linking it to his critique of Eurocommunism. Then, I will go back to Gramsci, and in particular Notebook 13, in order to bring forward not only the aspects of Gramsci that Althusser tended to overlook but also how Gramsci is in fact thinking the very question that Althusser attempted to pose, namely that of a new practice of politics for communism. (shrink)

The treatment in what follows of the politics of hegemony is not per se one of Gramsci, or Laclau or of Stuart Hall's earlier work. At stake is something that encompasses a more general regime of power that will be developed throughout the length of this: what might be called 'extensive politics'. What I will try to show is that such extensive power or such an extensive politics is being progressively displaced by a politics of intensity. I will trace (...) the shift from hegemony or extensive politics to such an intensive politics in terms of: 1) a transition to an ontological regime of power, from a regime that in important respects is 'epistemological', 2) a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of 'power over' to an intensive notion of power from within (including domination from within) and power as generative force, 3) a shift from power and politics in terms of normativity to a regime of power much more based in what can be understood as a 'facticity'. This points to a general transition from norm to fact in politics. From hegemonic norm to what we will see are intensive facts. The fourth section will look at this shift through a change from an extensive (and hegemonic) regime of representation to an intensive regime of communications. (shrink)

This paper situates itself in Reiner Schürmann's theory that the metaphysical representations have hegemonically governed epochs of western history. It argues that the contemporary alertness about the acute loss of affinity between rhetoric and philosophy reports the end of metaphysics. Specifically, the paper discusses that the phenomenon of globalization of scientific rationalism, with its homogenizing effects requires an anarchic mode of thinking and acting and a certain political life that refuses ultimate representations. As such, the proper epochal response to (...) the rift between rhetoric and philosophy is an anarchic one. The ease with which a whole age continues to graze, in spite of exterminations still alive in our memories and planetary asphyxiations already in our throats, gives ground for perplexity (Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies). (shrink)

This article responds to Lash and Thoburn's articles in this volume by arguing for the value of Gramsci's strategic concept of hegemony today. It places post-hegemony theories as replicating one particular reading of Gramsci as a theorist of ideology and politics only, a reading that was deepened by certain appropriations of post-structuralist theory in the 1980s. It argues that the Prison Notebooks contain a richer legacy of concepts and historical methods, many of which are applicable to today's global (...) reach of power and communication. In particular, Gramsci was concerned with the relations between Fordist innovation and changes in state, civil society, intellectual formations and ways of living. He was especially interested in popular 'common sense', which, in his view, was the starting point of political work and could be the product of a renovative political activism. His ideas remain relevant to understanding recent transitions, especially since 11 September 2001, and the reach and limits of global neo-liberal hegemonies today, including the role of neo-liberal intellectuals and of a deepened individualism in everyday life. They also offer resources for counter-hegemonic strategies. Although Lash and Thoburn grasp a crucial coagulation of power today, their superseding of hegemony is based on an impoverished reading of the history of Gramscianism in cultural studies, and on a collapse of key complexities and local differences which is typical of some versions of social theory. (shrink)

The neo‐Gramscian framework offers one of the more innovative contributions to a discipline long embedded in the self‐same verities of behaviouralism, positivism and neo‐Realism. As with conventional wisdom, however, neo‐Gramscians reproduce either assumptions of liberal neutrality or cultural thickness in relation to the ‘peripheral zones’ of the global political economy. These tendencies produce a variant that can be likened to ‘soft Orientalism’. In the first instance, cultural difference is not much of an impediment to the establishment of (West‐centred) global (...) hegemony. In the second instance, otherness becomes the principal source of counter‐hegemonic movements or resistance. This article provides a Gramscian rereading of these antinomies in relation to the apparent consolidation of a natural attitude towards Islam in the wake of recent dramatic events. (shrink)

A distinctive characteristic of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony is its insistence on the denial of an essence or ground of the subject. This element of their theory is derived from their notion of antagonism, in which a relation with a ground is brought into question by revealing its contingency. This article argues that the political dimension of this argument makes sense only in the context of Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of modernity. However, the universalizing of modernity (...) as the form of hegemony reduces the ontological notion of antagonism to a dialectical or empirical notion of contradiction. This article examines two key moves in this process: first, the reduction of the subject to Lacan’s account of the subject; and second, the reduction of modernity to an ontotheologicalpolitical structure derived from Lefort as the support of the hegemonic subject. From this the article examines Laclau’s response to the exhaustion of political modernity in the figure of complexity, from which antagonism is evacuated through the hegemony of the category of myth. Finally, the article discusses a nonhegemonic approach to antagonism derived from the work of Foucault, Wolin and Rancière. (shrink)