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.

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 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)

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)

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)

field: Issue 8 Embodying an Anti-Racist Architecture comprises essays, articles, podcasts, drawings, designs, the cover image, and a film. ‘This Call to Action' is a document borne from dialogue, and as such derives its power from the activism that collaboration and cooperation engender. -/- Asma Mehan, Carolina Lima, Faith Ng’eno, and Krzysztof Nawratek discuss white hegemony across different geopolitical and academic spaces, mindful of the nuances of using English as their shared yet borrowed language. -/- .

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)

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)

Against the background of enduring crisis dynamics, an increasingly popular Gramscian line of interpretation has the merit of shedding light on the ambivalences of the present political scenario as a series of ongoing struggles for hegemony. Yet how to concretely conceive, structure and operationalize empirical investigations interested in these struggles without neglecting their complex interplay of discursive and extra-discursive dynamics? I suggest that cultural political economy, historical materialist policy analysis and critical discourse analysis of practical argumentation can be productively (...) combined into a transdisciplinary research framework to investigate key strategic aspects at play in conflicts over the making and challenging of hegemony. Building on the potential for synergy between CPE and HMPA, I argue that a CDA of practical argumentation can improve their analytical strength in investigating strategies within the broader context of hegemony struggles. Both CPE and HMPA, in fact, imply a process of practical reasoning as a key element in their respective approaches to questions of strategy. This implicit concern, I suggest, should be made explicit and a CDA focusing on practical argumentation can be an ideal candidate to strengthen CPE and HMPA in this respect. (shrink)

There is a broad consensus, within the interlocking system of art institutions, on the goals viewed as worth achieving. Artists, for example, will strive to realize broadly formalist values in their work; critics will strive to discern and articulate the achievement of such values; dealers will strive to discover and promote artists whose work successfully reflects these standards; and collectors will strive to acquire and exchange such work.The long-range effect of this tightly defended consensus is that the art practitioners who (...) share it determine - through their shared values and practices, and the economic and social factors that determine them - the criteria of critical evaluation for all art that aspires to entry into existing art institutions. I shall describe this as a state of critical hegemony. That is, the socioeconomically determined aesthetic interests of these individuals define not only what counts as "good" and "bad" art, but what counts as art, period. (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)

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)

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 article examines the phenomenon of feminist hegemony in contemporary media culture through a corpus of films from the post-#MeToo period. Three clusters are investigated: utopian and dystopian narratives with a strong feminist optic, historical biopics about female figures of power, and films in which bodily and mythological otherness becomes the main resource of subjectivity. This material analyzes the shift from feminism as a struggle for representation to a regime in which the female optic defines the symbolic conditions of (...) visibility, desires, and affect. Special attention is paid to how the female gaze, bodily vulnerability, and traumatic experience begin to structure not only the plot but also the visual-affective regimes of truth, transforming female subjectivity from a marginalized position into a demiurgic center of contemporary visual imagination. The methodological framework combines gnostic optics (nomos–pleroma–pneuma), feminist theory of subjectivity, Lacanian triangulation of desire, and visual studies, allowing the operationalization of the interception of authorship, the structuring role of the gaze, and the ritual of refusal in the analysis of corpus films. The scientific novelty of the study lies in interpreting feminist subjectivity as an expression of gnostic epistemology, rather than merely a political or legal project. The concept of "hegemony of exceptionality" is proposed, within which female otherness functions not as an object of inclusion but as a principle of normalization: it sets the filters of visibility, the distribution of affect, and regimes of permissible desires. An analytical distinction is introduced between three states of female gnosis – refusal, authorship, and bodily pleroma – and the limits of these regimes are demonstrated in cases of bodily and mythological otherness. The conclusion is drawn about the formation of a regime of "hegemony of incompleteness" in media culture, where feminist power is understood as the right to reassemble the symbolic order while preserving cracks and open otherness. This clarifies the understanding of contemporary media culture as a field of competing gnostic myths. (shrink)

Power rarely works by force alone: it also rules by winning hearts and minds. States, classes, and social groups all seek political dominance by exerting political, ideological, or cultural leadership over others. This idea – hegemony – is a subtle, complex one, which is too often applied crudely. In this succinct introduction, political theorist James Martin skilfully examines these nuances and shines a new light on hegemony. He introduces its component ideas and critically surveys the most influential thinking (...) about hegemony, from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a revolutionary strategy and Marxist theories of the state, politics, and culture to the Post-Marxist project of radical democracy. He then considers the concept’s critical role in analysing international politics and global political economy, and evaluates the criticism that hegemony is too state-centric to truly capture the dynamics of contemporary struggles for emancipation. This lucid and accessible guide to hegemony will be essential reading for all students of radical politics and social and political theory. (shrink)

Hegemony and Education explores how the educational insights implicit in Antonio Gramsci's historical materialist outlook have been reconciled to the post-Marxist theory of 'radical democracy.' The author argues that there is an urgent need to redefine the dynamics of hegemony as a theory centering on the problem of cognitive and moral submissiveness; that is, a problem indicative of the pathologies of capitalism with respect to democratic theorizing.

Although some scholars propagate cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) as a panacea for addressing the grand challenges of the 21st century, scholars also acknowledge that this type of collaboration faces significant barriers since the institutional logics of partners such as business, civil society, and government potentially have contradicting interests and future visions. This inductive longitudinal case study on integrating skilled migrants into the German labor market examines the institutional work by which CSP members, particularly government actors, deliberately rein in contradictory logics to (...) reproduce the dominant government logic, and in doing so, establish a high level of institutional coherence. In disclosing the processes by which the dominant logic maintains its hegemony, I contribute new insight into the institutional dynamics within government-sponsored CSPs. I identify various actions and I illuminate CSP tensions and dark sides. (shrink)

This paper engages debates on diversity and epistemic hegemony in economics by focusing on caste-blindness in research concerning South Asia. The author uses Bourdieu’s practice of reflexivity to trace their training through graduate coursework, dissertation research, and peer-reviewed publishing. These normative stages determine legitimate research problems, permitted methodologies, and acceptable knowledge in Economics. This paper makes two contributions: first, it traces identity formation of the economist through a reflexive auto-ethnography; second, it shows how the theoretical and methodological ‘hardness’ of (...) economics and the identity of the economist can interact to shape knowledge-production, creating opportunities for invisibilizing, and silencing epistemic injustice. This is especially relevant to knowledge construction about South Asia, where caste biases can be invisibilized in economic knowledge production and only become visible through reflexivity. I argue that while reflexivity alone won't mitigate caste-blindness in economics, it is essential for a just, scientifically aware discipline that recognizes its biases. (shrink)

Hegemony, as popularized by Antonio Gramsci, has earned great importance in Marxist debates over the conquest of power. Unsurprisingly, this has also led to a renewed exploration of its origins in the writings of Vladimir Lenin, Georgi Plekhanov, and even Karl Kautsky as argued by the historian Lars Lih. This paper examines that history by returning to their original writings and contemporary analysis by Grigory Zinoviev. In doing so, I demonstrate a fundamental break between the original "strategy" of (...) class='Hi'>hegemony found in earlier theorists and Lenin’s "theory" of hegemony as elaborated upon by Gramsci. (shrink)

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

" --John Sallis In Broken Hegemonies, the late distinguished philosopher Reiner Schürmann offers a radical rethinking of the history of Western philosophy from the Greeks through Heidegger.

Money plays a powerful role in modern medicine, both in terms of how health services are organized and delivered and increasingly in how physicians understand themselves and their work. The phrase “the hegemony of money” is intended to capture that power.

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 paper reconstructs Gramsci’s account of social objects in light of recent developments in analytic social ontology. It combines elements of Gramsci’s account with that of John Searle, and argues that when taken together their theories constitute a robust account of social reality and a nuanced view of the relation between social reality and power. Searle provides a detailed analysis of the creation of social entities at the level of the agent, while Gramsci, by employing his concepts of hegemony (...) and domination, is able to provide an analysis of the differential ability of societal subgroups to construct the social world. (shrink)

Throughout the last two decades, discussions around “post-hegemony” have stimulated exchanges around different theorizations of “hegemony” and their limits – not only the one by Antonio Gramsci, but also the predominantly discursive reformulation put forward by Laclau & Mouffe. Very recently, a new article by Peter Thomas on post-hegemony (2020) is triggering new debates on the issue. In this paper, Thomas’s contribution is, first, presented and discussed. In the second section, certain issues that have been recently raised (...) from a post-hegemonic perspective vis-à-vis Thomas’s intervention and beyond are thematized. These two exercises provide an opportunity to clarify further, by way of conclusion, certain issues at stake in the ensuing debate from an Essex School perspective. (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)

This article proposes rhetorical hegemony as a new materialist intervention into the production of alternative political economic futures. It problematizes contemporary theories of hegemony that assert affect as beyond rhetorical engagement, suggesting that these accounts fail to produce viable political economic alternatives because they use, but do not reinvent, the prevailing affective relations. Turning to and extending Foucault's middle and late work to forge a different model, the article discusses rhetorical hegemony as the entangled relationships between materiality (...) and power. In conversation with other contemporary theories, it argues for a practice of rhetorical hegemony that materially recapacitates energetic potential and, consequently, the milieu. The article ends by outlining the rhetorical, political, and intellectual implications of this shift. (shrink)

Genetic Modified Organisms (GMO) became a flagship of agro-neoliberalism in Brazil, despite the opposition of environmentalists and social movements advocating other forms of production. GMO status quo seems inevitable and unquestionable, overcoming resistance and avoiding systemic change in the Brazilian context. In this research, we aim to uncover the formation of GMO hegemony through a decolonial perspective. Relying on longitudinal analysis, we identified that the GMO hegemony is grounded and undissociated with North–South dependency relations in both the productive (...) and the epistemological realms, producing productive and epistemic subalternisation. These dependency relations are based on discourses that normalise a subaltern position and enable perverse structures that take away control of food production and undermine alternative ways of confronting inequality, poverty and exclusion, phenomena that call for further studies in Business Ethics and Critical Management realms. (shrink)

In the present essay, I argue that the current EU governance reflects a contradiction between the presumption of a European constitutional framework based on human rights, democracy and the rule of law and the recently adopted economic stability governance defined outside the horizon of the EU treaties. I propose to understand this scenario through the prism of two distinct and context-specific assumptions: a political-sociological hypothesis for which internal contradictions of capitalism are thought to be capable of ‘self-displacing’ to other societal (...) sectors and a political-philosophical thesis for which EU governance is connected to a decrease in democratic legitimacy and right-standards due to hegemonic control by economic powers. Both hypotheses testify to the lowering of the standards of protection of fundamental rights and member states’ regulatory capacities as well as to an overall de-constitutionalization of the EU architecture. (shrink)

This article analyzes the bioethical implications of using a control/placebo group when conducting clinical trials (CTs) investigating the treatment of periodontitis. For this, the deductive method was used, proposing the interrelation of values, and a scoping systematic review was carried out. A total of 53% of the CTs reviewed were performed in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries, and 92% used a control/placebo group as a comparison group. Although there is a gold standard for the adjunctive treatment of periodontitis, the research (...) ethics committees of most of the analyzed studies approved the use of control/placebo groups for the performance of CTs that did not explore new therapeutic alternatives. In some cases, the CT protocols were not approved by ethics committees, nor was informed consent used. In the LMI countries, a shorter period of recruitment was observed for patients who attended universities and public hospitals. Likewise, most of the CTs reviewed had public funding, a significant amount of which came from the pharmaceutical industry. Only one CT reported the low economic and educational level of its participants. Furthermore, none of the authors of the reviewed CTs declared conflicts of interest. Although the axiology of techno-science always takes into account at least the epistemic, technical and economic value systems, the hegemony of the economic values imposed by the pharmaceutical industry is evident in the performance of CTs investigating the treatment of periodontitis in LMI countries. (shrink)

In the present article, the first section recapitulates my “figuration” philosophy of dance, the “dancing-with” interpretive method derived therefrom, and my previous application of figuration to salsa dance as a decolonizing gestural discourse. The second section deepens and modifies this analysis through a reinterpretation of Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau’s concept of hegemony and his dance-resonant interpretations of Derrida. And the final section offers a template for this hegemonic dancing-with in the Birmingham, Alabama Latin dance troupe, Corazon de Alabama (Heart (...) of Alabama), as a new strategy for decolonizing and reconstructing social justice. (shrink)

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)

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)

This chapter develops a research framework for the study of hegemony struggles with a specific research interest in questions of strategy. It focuses first on the instruments that cultural political economy (CPE) envisages for empirical analyses of hegemony production. Second, it suggests enhancing the analytical strength of CPE empirical investigations of the making and challenging of hegemony by integrating it with a historical materialist policy analysis (HMPA). Third, it argues for merging CPE, HMPA and critical discourse analysis (...) of practical argumentation to improve the analytical strength of CPE/HMPA when investigating strategies in the more overarching domain of struggles over hegemony. Building on this, the chapter turns to the concrete operationalization of the suggested research framework in the following study of the Italian case. (shrink)

In order to consider the advantages, pitfalls, and potential of employing the concept of hegemony in philosophy and the history of science, we must first of all reflect on how Antonio Gramsci is directly or indirectly present in this field of enquiry. It is a question well worth asking as Gramsci’s thought did not enter into these disciplines in a direct manner. Internationally, the influence of his Prison Notebooks was felt rather late—between the 1960s and 1970s—and only in a (...) subordinate position within science studies. Indeed, at the end of the 1980s, Anglo-American philosophy of science could still avoid dealing with Gramsci when discussing the relationship between science and power. Thirty years later, it would be almost inconceivable to do so. Crucial concepts such as “hegemony,” "subalternity," and "civil society" have been thrust into philosophy as well as cultural studies, history, the history of ideas, and other areas of social and humanistic research. To this it must be added that the growing interest of historians of science in the political dimension of their subject has led to a re-evaluation of central categories of Gramscian thought, first and foremost that which has repeatedly been indicated as the cornerstone of his philosophical framework: hegemony. (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.

When perception is made the subject of philosophy, it is primarily understood as pre-theoretical sensual knowledge, and the question of its truth content becomes the focus of attention. In contrast, approaches that fall within the philosophy of embodiment quite rightly point out that perception is bodily anchored and closely linked to interests in action. The primacy of knowledge is therefore substituted by a primacy of praxis. This article aims to point out the blind spots that such a hegemony of (...) the practical entails. In a phenomenological way, it is to be shown that beside the aspect of instrumentality, perceptive situations are also experienced as pleasant or unpleasant as such. This points to the importance of the pathical character of perception. However, it is not a call to enthrone the primacy of affect instead of the primacy of practice. The paper concludes with a thought on the philosophy of pedagogy and education. Proceeding from that perceptive position, it is argued that film in particular offers a chance to apply the phenomenology of pathical perception to the field of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism portrays the high tide of nineteenth-century imperialism as the defining moment in the establishment of a global discursive hegemony, in which European attitudes and concepts gained a universal validity. The idea of “religion” was central to the civilizing mission of imperialism, and was shaped by the interests of a number of colonial actors in a way that remains visibly relevant today. In East and Southeast Asia, however, many of the concerns that statecraft, law, scholarship, (...) and conversion had for religion transcended the European impact. Both before and after the period of European imperialism, states used religion to engineer social ethics and legitimate rule, scholars elaborated and enforced state theologies, and the missionary faithful voiced the need for and nature of religious conversion. The real impact of this period was to integrate pre-existing concerns into larger discourses, transforming them in the process. The ideals of national citizenship and of legal and scholarly impartiality recast the state and its institutions with a modernist sacrality, which had the effect of banishing the religious from the public space. At the same time, the missionary discourse of transformative conversion located it in the very personal realm of sincerity and belief. The evolution of colonial-era discourses of religion and society in Asia since the departure of European imperial power demonstrates both their lasting power and the degree of agency that remains implicit in the idea of hegemony. (shrink)

The originality and depth of Gramsci's theory of hegemony is now evidenced in the wide-ranging intellectual applications within a growing corpus of research and writings that include social, political and cultural theory, historical interpretation, gender and globalization. The reason that hegemony has been so widely and diversely adopted lies in the unique way that Gramsci formulated the 'problematics' of structure/superstructure, coercion/consensus, materialism/idealism and regression/progression within the concept hegemony. However, in much of the contemporary literature the full complexity (...) of hegemony is either obfuscated or ignored. _Hegemony_, through comprehensive and systematic analyses of Gramsci's formulation, a picture of hegemony as a complex syncretism of these dichotomies. In other words, hegemony is presented as a concept that is as much about aspiration and progressive politico-social relations as it is about regressive and dominative processes. Thus, the volume recognises and presents this complexity through a selection of contemporary theoretical as well as historico-social investigations that mark a significantly innovative moment in the work on hegemony. (shrink)

Recent setbacks to international institutions and projects of global governance have been viewed as marking a resurgence of nation-state sovereignty. In fact, however, many of the major controversies and developments in contemporary international law and geopolitics concern the administration, autonomy, and internal hierarchy not of states, but of supra-state regions. The spatial logic of a world divided into such regions is best articulated in Carl Schmitt’s theory of the Großraum, which in various respects describes and explains key features of modern (...) world order. Taking regional systems as self-constituting political units characterized by internal forms of dominance and legitimation aids in identifying the operation of hegemony in contemporary international law and institutions. It also makes possible a reinterpretation of global constitutionalist discourse as a democratizing project that finds its most important expressions in counter-hegemonic movements within the various “great spaces” constituting today’s world. (shrink)

Zimbabwe's communal farmers are now less food secure than they were two generations ago. The roots of this decline lie not only in the confinement of Africans to marginal land but also in the historic forced replacement of their sustainable, indigenous farming system with one whose productivity now relies on the use of large amounts of expensive chemical inputs. Environmentally-friendly, traditional farming practices such as pyro-culture, minimum tillage, mixed cropping, and bush fallowing were completely wiped out and replaced with a (...) highly technical western or ganic farming system based on plough cultivation and continuous monocultures of commodity crops, that were supposed to be sustained by liberal amounts of green and animal manures. This gave rise to an effective agricultural hegemony that was due, mainly, to the zealous dedication of an American Mormon missionary whose motives were evangelical rather than scientific. (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)

Abstrak: Kapitalisme kontemporer dicirikan oleh beberapa transformasi makro-struktural, seiring dengan kemajuan teknologi informasi dan komunikasi. Salah satu dari transformasi paling drastis terjadi di dalam aktivitas kerja. Sebagai aktivitas utama yang mendorong akumulasi modal, dunia kerja hari ini ditandai oleh hegemoni kerja imaterial. Artikel ini menyajikan pikiran dan gagasan dari Autonomia, sebuah “aliran pemikiran” kontemporer dari Italia yang merenungkan sifat dan karakter dari jenis kerja “baru” tersebut. Para pemikir Autonomia berargumen bahwa hegemoni kerja imaterial memberikan tantangan dan peluang baru dalam tatanan (...) kapitalisme. Sementara pekerja imaterial rentan untuk dieksploitasi oleh pihak kapitalis, mereka juga dapat membebaskan dirinya dari penindasan kapitalis. Hal ini dimungkinkan karena kerja imaterial memuat karakteristik khusus dalam kaitannya dengan modal. Emansipasi dari relasi kapitalis dapat terjadi apabila pekerja imaterial, bersama dengan korban kapitalisme lainnya, bersatu sebagai jaringan jamak dan melakukan dua strategi perlawanan: penolakan kerja dan eksodus. Kata-kata Kunci: Kerja imaterial, Autonomia, kapitalisme, jaringan jamak, penolakan kerja, eksodus. Abstract: Contemporary capitalism is characterized by some macro structural transformations, along with the advancement of information and communication technologies. One of the most drastic transformations occurs in the nature of labor. As the main activity which drives the accumulation of capital, today’s labor world is marked by the hegemony of immaterial labor. This article presents thoughts and ideas of Autonomia, a contemporary “school of thought” originating from Italy which has a distinctive view on traits and characters of this “new” kind of labor. Autonomia thinkers argue that the hegemony of immaterial labor poses new challenges and opportunities within capitalist order. While immaterial laborers are prone to be exploited by capitalists, they also can liberate themselves from the capitalist oppression. It is because immaterial labor embodies special characteristics in its relation to capital. The emancipation from capitalist relations can happen if immaterial laborers, together with other capitalism’s victims, unite as a multitude and enforce two resistance strategies, namely, refusal of work and exodus. Keywords: Immaterial labor, Autonomia, capitalism, multitude, refusal of work, exodus. (shrink)

This article compares the colonial and contemporary canvas of the hegemonic discourse of White Western writers and their portrayal of Malaysia and her people. The first half of the discussion will focus on the figurative elements of classical colonialist discourse through an exploration of The Soul of Malaya (1931) a text written by Henri Fauconnier, a French planter of Colonial Malaya. Here, cultural hegemony is revealed mostly through the employment of the Manichean allegory, of what we see as “ideological (...) allegory”. The second half of the discussion adopts a more linguistic oriented framework, as it reveals patterns in linguistic selection in the novel , Borneo Fire (1995)by contemporary white writer, William Riviere. This latter is what we term “ideological stylistics”. The main objective of the article is to compare the underlying ideological constructs of the discursive landscape of the two texts and to determine whether white western superiority manifested in the discourse of the contemporary text has evolved from that seen in its colonial predecessor. The paper concludes that time changes little in terms of the location of the other, for despite its being published in 1995, the discourse of Borneo Fire has not moved away from the approach and conventions of the colonial text, The Soul of Malaya. (shrink)

The paper analyzes current situation in epistemology that is characterized by the appearance of the so called alternative epistemologies opposing the classical epistemology. The ties between alternative epistemologies and Karl Marx’ class consciousness concept and its development in the neo- and postmarxist works (by A.Gramsci, E.Laclau, Ch.Mouffe) is demonstrated. The research is focused on the concept of “false consciousness” that serves as a basis of the concepts of ideology and hegemony. The concept of hegemony in neo- and postmarxism (...) is analyzed, it is shown how its application is reflected in the research of scientific knowledge: some authors claim that science is an agent of hegemony and it helps to maintain the illusion of the objectivity of the existence of certain phenomena. The proponents of this position – social constructionists, feminist philosophers et. al. – suggest to accept the equal value of the positions of different social groups each of which holds its own special discourse that helps to express the “knowledge” specific to this certain group. It is shown that such position sees “knowledge” as no longer universal, the knowledge is equaled to local understanding of the world. The conclusion is drawn that the position of K. Marx that gives basis to many claims of postmarxists and social constructionist is more favorable in comparison to them, because Marx whilst speaking of class consciousness assigns an important role to the individual subject. It allows to combine both universalistic understanding of knowledge and account not only for group differences, but for each individuality. (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 essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau engaged with Gramsci and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left, and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist between Hall and (...) Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture. The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and political ontology has a significant impact on Hall’s and Laclau’s respective understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics. Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall’s work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of Laclau’s, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their interventions as well as the fact that Hall’s theory of hegemony, as a theory of the conjuncture, ultimately possesses stronger explanatory power than Laclau’s political ontology. (shrink)