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.

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)

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)

The local opposes the global or the macro opposes the micro and vice versa, respectively. This dialectical relationship further exposes that scales are socially and politically constructed, representative of a phenomena that is relational, and is thus of important consideration in analysis beyond simple labeling. That is, scale represents more than ‘size’ and ‘complexity’, but also reveals the relational. It is the relational—the relationship between the ‘global’ and its contents or the ‘local’—which provides for or is wont for analytic complexity (...) and theorizing. (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)

" --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.

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)

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. -/- .

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

This volume presents six essays by leading sociologists, philosophers, physicists, and environmental activists that examine the links between science and violence from the Baconian era to the present day. It looks at two basic issues: science as it provides a new justification for state violence; and science as violent technological intervention, invading and disrupting stable patterns of private life in the name of progress and development.

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.

Cette " contribution à la très ancienne doctrine des principes"s'effectue sous forme de topologie : elle cherche à relever les lieux d'extraction phénoménaux et langagiers des principes qui ont exercé les hégémonies qu'elle examine, c'est-à-dire qui ont fonctionné comme des normes pour l'agir et le savoir. Les hégémonies sont celles sous et par lesquelles l'Occident a jusqu'à présent vécu (à savoir agir, pensé et acquis des connaissances). Elles délimitent l'ère de la métaphysique dont notre âge vit le dépérissement. Il y (...) en a trois : la grecque, la latine et la moderne, chacune régie par un principe : respectivement, l'Un, la nature et la conscience de soi. Chacune se déploie dans une langue, qui lui donne ses paramètres : le grec, le latin et le moderne vernaculaire. Ces trois régimes articulent à la fois l'histoire de l'Occident et de la philosophie. En quoi ces hégémonies sont-elles brisées? La topologie discerne trois sortes de principes : d'une part les ultimes, à savoir la natalité ou l'être-pour-la-naissance, et la mortalité ou l'être-pour-la-mort, qui perdurent au travers des âges ; d'autre part les suprêmes et les dernières, qui ont des destins, temporels limités. Les principes suprêmes sont entitatifs : par exemple, chez Kant, Dieu, l'âme et le monde. Les principes derniers sont relationnels. Plus souvent appelés " fantasmes hégémoniques " ou " référents derniers " - un vocabulaire que l'auteur élucide dans l'introduction - ils constituent les hégémonies. Par son effet sur le langage, la natalité institue les principes derniers en nous les faisant poser, tandis que la mortalité les destitue en les brisant de l'intérieur. Co-originaires, les deux principes ultimes forment " le phénomène absolument premier ", le différend tragique. Leur étude appartient à l'analytique des ultimes, qui sert d'outillage à la topologie, et par-là précède. La topologie n'analyse les principes derniers qu'au moment de leur émergence ou institution, et de leur disparition ou destitution (d'où l'organisation de l'ouvrage). Le souci directeur de la topologie est de nous en apprendre plus sur les nuits qui ont assombri notre terrible siècle (en particulier sur les souffrances que l'Occident s'est infligé au cours de la seconde guerre mondiale) et sur celles qui nous menacent (par exemple l'asphyxie à laquelle nous mène la destruction de l'environnement). En effet, elle part de la conviction que ces assombrissements ne peuvent avoir que " des origines lointaines et profondes ". (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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

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.

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.

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)

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)

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)

ABSTRACT The question concerning the connection of scientific inquiry to democratic praxis is central to both Antonio Gramsci and John Dewey. They share a common philosophical origin in Hegel and are essentially both in the tradition of Left Hegelian thought. Likewise, their respective analyses of the forces obstructing democratic emancipation were sharply focused on the distortions of social life caused by economic agents cooperating under hugely unequal power relations. As Gramsci wrote from his prison cell from 1929 to 1937 in (...) Italy, Dewey went through his most fruitful philosophical period in the United States, including his writings on politics and democracy. They both found targets of critique by diagnosing the pathologies of public life resulting from the power of private capital interests in collusion with a co-opted representative body, the authoritarian crimes and attendant culture of fascism, and the theoretical rigidity of the Soviet Marxists. In addition, true to their Hegelian roots, they marshaled their critiques of the abstractions of liberalism and its attendant moral and economic theory by insisting on the embedded, cultural, and historically deep contexts in which emancipatory practice need take place. (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 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)

This article examines the legacy of Gramscian thought in Anglophone social sciences. It focuses in particular on three currents or disciplines, namely Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies. All three have sought and sometimes found in Gramscian categories a number of theoretical and political instruments through which to think the structures of domination, individual or collective subjectivity, and their relation to culture, in particular through the use of the dialectical relationship of hegemony/subalternity. Demonstrating how Gramsci was received in the (...) intellectual and political Anglophone context, the article highlights certain genealogies which have sometimes led to what amounts to a number of fully-fledged “translations” of Gramscian concepts, but also to a series of “lighter”, more distant uses. In this perspective, the article focuses on the translation of Gramsci undertaken by the New Left in the Seventies, insofar as this detour has proved of capital importance for the successive interpretations of Gramscian theories in the Anglophone social sciences. (shrink)

Dans Des hégémonies brisées, Reiner Schürmann pose que tout principe hégémonique est travaillé du dedans par une puissance anarchique qui brise sa normativité. Il en va ainsi du Premier Principe, l’Un, dans les Ennéades de Plotin. À partir d’une étude de la spécificité de la production de la matière par l’âme et de la notion d’audace [tólma], notre article soutient que le lieu de l’anarchie se trouve non pas dans l’Un, mais dans les âmes, c’est-à-dire à un niveau encore dépendant (...) de la principialité du principe. Explorant la notion paradoxale de « principe d’anarchie » telle qu’élaborée par Schürmann, l’objectif de l’article est de questionner la possibilité d’une normativité anarchique s’exerçant sans principialité hégémonique. (shrink)

Analyzes twentieth-century media and cultural theories as they relate to changes in political economy, communication technology, popular culture and collective consciousness in the United States. It argues that much of contemporary media environment is operating as Western capitalist media have for more than a century, making these theories more relevant than ever.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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)