Hegemony After Hegemony, pt. 1

Coercion, consent, and “mute compulsion”

In his 2017 book The H-Word, Perry Anderson observes that “few terms are so conspicuous in contemporary political literature, technical or polemical, as hegemony.” And yet, as with most conceptual extensions, hegemony’s diffusion has not been accompanied by clarity: “across two millennia,” Anderson argues, “the term has altered its usage and shifted its terrain many times,” leaving it “haunted with ambiguity.”¹

In both its “conspicuousness” and its spectral “ambiguity,” the fortunes of hegemony appear to mirror those of its most cherished modern theorist—Antonio Gramsci—whose prominent place in social and political theory isn’t matched by the sort of careful consideration a canonical status typically commands. As Anderson had already noted in the nineteen-seventies, Gramsci’s reception was “not accompanied by a corresponding depth of enquiry into his work,” so that Gramsci’s writings have been “perhaps more referenced than actually read.”² Forty years on, Peter Thomas (2011) could lament the same problem: Gramsci’s “reputation has not necessarily ensured recognition,” or a “close textual analysis and assessment of his thought.”³ Thus, the “enigmatic Sardinian Marxist” shares the fate of his “signature concept”—hegemony—whose proliferation appears linked to imprecision. As Anderson said of Gramsci: “the price of so ecumenical an admiration is necessarily ambiguity.”⁴

My aim here isn’t so much to dispel this ambiguity as to unpack an important disagreement between Perry Anderson and Peter Thomas over the meaning of hegemony—a disagreement I take to be both difficult and illuminating. In doing so, I don’t intend to “settle” the meaning of hegemony; that would be neither possible nor desirable. My aim is simply to think through the intricacies of a category whose ubiquity has rendered it both powerful and unwieldy, indispensable and imprecise, and then to consider how recent debates around “impersonal domination” and “mute compulsion” under capitalism sit with—or run up against—the concept of “hegemonic politics.”

In this first installment, I’ll reconstruct Anderson’s view with an eye to some of its fault-lines—as well as its strengths. In my next post, I’ll lay out Thomas’s critique, evaluate the fine points of the disagreement, and frame out how I’m thinking about all this relative to more recent work in structural Marxist theory.

Hegemony and its “antinomies”

A good point of entry is Perry Anderson’s classic essay, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (1976), a text that both indexed and structured Gramsci’s reception in the Anglophone New Left. Alongside the formative work of Louis Althusser, Anderson’s Antinomies provided a template for what Thomas calls the “general ‘image of Gramsci’” that would eventually prevail in the academy and broader “intellectual culture.”⁵ Thus, if we operate with a tacit understanding of what hegemony means in social theory, this understanding is probably something like Anderson’s.

The overarching move in Anderson’s argument is to interpret hegemony as a “generic” category of political power. This means it names a set of possibilities or strategies that any social group can, in principle, pursue. Hegemony is in this sense akin to other categories, such as “domination”: while one social group may have a relative monopoly on domination in any given instance, nothing in principle stops the roles from being reversed. Just as any social group can, in principle, dominate another, any social group can, in principle, pursue hegemony. Domination and hegemony are in this sense analogous.

The analogy, however, stops there. For Anderson, hegemony is crucially defined as the “antithesis” of domination—one of a number of “oppositions” or “antitheses” derived from Gramsci’s account of modern politics. Through these oppositions, hegemony emerges as an intelligible category in its own right: it surfaces as a “mode of rule” grounded in “consent”—rather than coercion; it is an exercise of power that tends to unfold within “civil society”—rather than through “the state”; and, because Gramsci believed “civil society” was particularly robust in the bourgeois democracies of Western Europe, hegemonic politics is a phenomenon typical of “the West”—in contrast to “the East.” Through these antithesis (consent/coercion, civil society/state, West/East), Anderson develops a conceptually clear and analytically portable account of hegemony.⁶

Consent and leadership

First, hegemony names a form of rule that operates primarily through the active or passive consent of subordinate groups, rather than through their open repression or the exercise of coercive force. The intuition here is that the stability of a social order can’t be explained by the pure physical or military power of the dominant group: the acceptance of rule by the ruled must play some sort of role, and to the extent that role is an outsized one, the dominant group can be said to be “hegemonic.” Importantly, this does not mean that coercion disappears, but rather that it recedes into the background: force remains available, yet it is normally subordinated to persuasion, ideological integration, and moral leadership. In this sense, hegemony displaces or eclipses violence, but does not eradicate it. It names a mode of political power that “rests” on acceptance, so that power is exercised obliquely, through “leadership” rather than “command.”⁷

The concept of leadership is crucial here, because it helps to distinguish hegemony from something like what Noam Chomsky would refer to as “manufactured consent.” For Chomsky, purportedly liberal or democratic governments tend to sustain themselves through misinformation, corporate media, and rank ideology, which effectively subdue or diffuse internal contestation or opposition. This may be related to hegemony, but for Anderson, it’s not the same thing.

This is because, although hegemony is invoked to explain the stability of “ruling class power in bourgeois democracies,”⁸ it is also intended to cover relations between social groups that are allied, not in conflict. For Gramsci, the paradigmatic example is the relation between the urban working classes and the Jacobin leadership of the French Revolution in its most radical stage (1792-1793). In Gramsci’s account, the Jacobins led the working classes, and the working classes consented to that leadership, but this was precisely not a case of “manufactured” consent in Chomsky’s sense. Rather, the Jacobins formed a genuine alliance with the working classes, and artfully—but not disingenuously—articulated this alliance in terms of a common project: the revolutionary struggle for liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Gramsci’s interpretation of these events is connected to a tacit—roughly Marxian—understanding of interests. He calls the interests of any given group “economico-corporative” interests, and in this sense, the “economico-corporative” interests of the Jacobin leadership and those of the urban working classes were not the same: the Jacobin Club was mostly composed of educated professionals and property owners.

What was remarkable in the French Revolutionary context, for Gramsci, was the way the Jacobins’ hegemony emerged as they loosened their attachment to the full range of their “economico-corporative” interests, building an agenda that reflected and absorbed some of the “economico-corporative” interests of the urban working classes. Once this cross-class alliance was established, he suggests, the Revolution shifted from an “economico-corporative” stage—the struggle of a group of relative elites within the Third Estate—to a “hegemonic” stage, articulated as the struggle of “the nation” as a whole.

From this perspective, hegemony covers a range of relations that hold together relatively consensual forms of cooperation between social groups, provided those groups can be more or less clearly distinguished as “leaders” and “led.” As we’ll see, Thomas’s critique of Anderson brings into focus the curious way Gramsci appears less interested than we might expect in distinguishing “good” hegemonic relations (the leadership of the Jacobin party, or the leadership of the Russian proletariat during the October Revolution) from “bad” hegemonic relations (those that stabilize capitalist social relations under bourgeois democracy).⁹

Civil society and culture

Anderson stresses that building and maintaining hegemony has everything to do with the presence of what sociologists call “intermediary institutions.” In the French Revolution, these institutions included the press, as well as the enormous number of political clubs, regular meetings, and impromptu assemblies in which both the urban working classes and the Jacobin leadership circulated. In non-revolutionary contexts, they include the dense network of more or less formal institutions—the press, political parties, schools and churches, unions, cultural associations, and private organizations—that stand between individuals and the “the state apparatus.”¹⁰ In either case, hegemony is figured as a form of power whose privileged channels run through “civil society,” rather than “the state.”¹¹

The basic thought here is that it is upon this associational terrain that consent is organized and stabilized, as social groups are bound together through practices of education, moral edification, and ideological cultivation. In contrast to “civil society,” the state proper appears as the site where coercion is concentrated and codified, in the form of law, police power, and military force. Hegemony therefore presupposes a relative autonomy of civil society from the state: it is only where social life is not immediately absorbed into political “command” that “leadership” can be exercised through persuasion and cooperation rather than by means of coercive force.

One of the most important upshots of this perspective is that it affects a displacement in the field of political strategy. If political power is in some sense “based on” relations of consent organized outside the state,¹² it follows that this domain of relations should be the target of interventions by groups aimed at transforming the social or political order. Put differently, the “class struggle” need not aim solely at the seizure of state power, but must also insert itself into a protracted series of interventions within civil society—what Gramsci called a “war of position”—where alliances are forged, worldviews consolidated, and authority rendered intelligible as common sense.¹³ Especially in contexts perceived as non-revolutionary (e.g., “the West” for the bulk of the last century) the “war of position” becomes a strategy through which “counter-hegemony” can gradually be built.

For Anderson, hegemony is a “generic” form of political power premised on consent and anchored in the institutions of civil society.

To sum up, Anderson’s 1971 essay systematically develops an account of hegemony that is, to many of us, at least somewhat familiar. Hegemony is a “generic” form of political power premised on consent and anchored in the institutions of civil society.

This implies, finally, that hegemony is deeply linked to the “cultural ascendency” of the “hegemonic” social group—so that what appears as “common sense” is broadly compatible with this group’s “economico-corporative” interests. From this perspective, “intellectuals” in the broadest sense—not only academics, journalists, and media personalities, but also political, cultural, and religious leaders—play a key role in hegemony’s elaboration and maintenance. As Anderson puts it, intellectuals “mediate the hegemony” of the group they represent over other social groups, “via the ideological systems of which they, the intellectuals, are the organizing agents.”¹⁴

The resulting picture of politics privileges ideological struggle in “civil society” over open confrontation with the state. For Anderson, then, Gramsci provides a theoretical foundation for later strategies of socialist gradualism, paradigmatically expressed in the wave of reformist “Eurocommunism” of the 1970s. In the midst of that decade, Anderson’s remarkable discovery was to have found in Gramsci both an anticipation and an authoritative scaffolding for the post-Marxist New Left—which would displace revolutionary struggle with “interventions” of a fundamentally “cultural” and “discursive” order.

Revolution after hegemony

As those familiar with Anderson’s essay will recall, it by no means reflects a celebration of this picture of politics. On the contrary, Anderson treats Gramsci’s privileging of ideological struggle in civil society as a symptom of real “confusion” concerning the nature of “bourgeois class power.”¹⁵

On the one hand, he argues, Gramsci’s reduction of revolutionary strategy to a “war of position” risks dissolving revolutionary politics into a program of cultural and moral transformation—ultimately untethering it from the aim of any real rupture with capitalist social relations. (In the decade following the publication of Anderson’s Antinomies this concern would bear fruit in the work of Laclau and Mouffe). On the other hand, Anderson argues the more serious risk is that Gramsci’s framework allows the coercive core of capitalist power to fall out of view. However dense the networks of civil society may be, the bourgeois state remains, in the last instance, an armed apparatus of repression that cannot be dissolved through persuasion alone. From this perspective, any revolutionary project must reckon with the necessarily sudden and violent character of revolutionary situations—in which speed, audacity, and the fragmentation of the state’s repressive machinery become decisive.¹⁶

However dense the networks of civil society may be, the bourgeois state remains an armed apparatus of repression that cannot be dissolved through persuasion alone.

Anderson’s reading of Gramsci—and his influential account of hegemony, in particular—ultimately acts as a screen against which he can project his own, more transparently “revolutionary” political project: the “war of position” can never entirely eclipse the “war of maneuver,” unless the horizon of revolution is to be definitively abandoned. But this raises an important question: is Anderson’s account of hegemony as compelling as has been assumed? This question matters not only from the relatively trivial perspective of Gramscian exegesis—whether Anderson gets Gramsci “right”—but because an alternative account of hegemony might disclose strategic possibilities that Anderson’s “antinomian” reading of Gramsci pushes out of view.

1. Perry Anderson, The H-Word, vii, 180.

2. Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, 5.

3. Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, xvii.

4. Anderson, ibid.

5. Thomas, ibid., xix.

6. In what follows, I focus on consent/coercion and civil society/the state. Although interesting in its own right and extremely important to Gramsci from the perspective of revolutionary strategy, examining the West/East opposition would open an unnecessary can of worms. Suffice it to say that, for all intents and purposes, “the East” in this context meant: pre-revolutionary Russia. Gramsci’s account of hegemony should be read against the backdrop of debates among Western European communists over the divergent outcomes of the October Revolution and the failed revolutionary movements that swept Western Europe between 1917 and 1920.

7. Anderson, ibid., 41, 21.

8. Ibid., 7.

9. For his part, Anderson takes issue with the structural correspondence Gramsci appears to draw between the proletariat in the struggle against capitalism and the Jacobin leadership of that archetypal “bourgeois” revolution—the French: “[it] is important to recall the familiar Marxist tenet that the working class under capitalism is inherently incapable of being the culturally dominant class, because it is structurally expropriated by its class position from some of the essential means of cultural production—education, tradition, leisure—in contrast to the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment, which could generate its own superior culture within the framework of the Ancien Régime. … So long as the lack of structural correspondence between the positions of the bourgeois class within feudal society and the working class within capitalist society [is] not constantly registered, the risk of a theoretical slide from one to the other [is] always potentially present in [Gramsci’s] common use of the term hegemony for them. The more than occasional assimilation of the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions in his writings on Jacobinism demonstrates that Gramsci was not immune to this confusion.” Ibid., 46.

10. Ibid., 21-22.

11. Ibid., 34-35; cf., 10-12.

12. Ibid., 42.

13. Ibid., 11-13.

14. Ibid., 19, 21.

15. Ibid., 76.

16. Ibid., 75.