Hegemony: Difference between revisions

Hegemony is the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that the terms of trade are dictated by the dominant party to its advantage, for instance, or more broadly, that cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group. Throughout history, cultural and political power in any arena has rarely achieved a perfect balance, but hegemony results in the empowerment of certain cultural beliefs, values, and practices to the submersion and partial exclusion of others. Hegemony affects the perspective of mainstream history as it is written by the cultural victors for a sympathetic readership. The official history of Christianity, marginalizing its defined "heresies", is a richly-exampled arena of cultural hegemony.

Jás Elsner in Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph 1998 has written:

"Power is very rarely limited to the pure exercise of brute force.... The Roman state bolstered its authority and legitimacy with the trappings of ceremonial— cloaking the actualities of power beneath a display of wealth, the sanction of tradition, and the spectacle of insuperable resources.... Power is a far more complex and mysterious quality than any apparently simple manifestation of it would appear. It is as much a matter of impression, of theatre, of persuading those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation. Insofar as power is a matter of presentation, its cultural currency in antiquity (and still today) was the creation, manipulation, and display of images. In the propagation of the imperial office, at any rate, art was power." (quoted at [1])

Theories of hegemony attempt to explain how the dominant group is able to maintain this power, the capacity of dominant classes to persuade subordinate ones to accept, adopt and interiorize their values and norms. The dominant group is called the hegemon. One of the best known theories of hegemony was devised by Antonio Gramsci. His theory defined the State by its coercion combined with hegemony; according to Gramsci, hegemony is political power that flows from intellectual and moral leadership, authority or consensus, as distinguished from mere armed force.

The word "hegemon" was originally used in ancient Greece, and derives from the word hegeisthai (meaning "to lead"). An early example of hegemony during ancient Greek history was when Sparta became the hegemon of the Peloponnesian League in the 6th century BC. Later, in 337 BCE, Philip II of Macedon became Hegemon of the League of Corinth, a position he passed on to his son Alexander the Great.

Hegemony is a cultural phenomenon, and is maintained through cultural institutions. The Medici maintained their hegemony in Tuscany through control of Florence's major gild, the Arte della Lana. Modern hegemonies are also maintained through cultural institutions, in which membership is often presented as "voluntary": the Boy Scouts of America or the National Rifle Association— countless modern associations might be adduced.

In more recent times, the term has been used in a more abstract sense to describe the "proletarian dictatorships" of the 20th century, resulting in regional domination by local powers, or domination of the world by a global power. An example of the first is China's position of domiance in East Asia for most of its history. The Cold War (1945 - 1990) is often seen as a battle for hegemony, in which main avenues of coercion were the Warsaw Pact led by the USSR and NATO led by the United States. Details of their respective ideologies are irrelevant to the concept of hegemony: both sides were superpowers battling to dominate the arms race and become the supreme world superpower.

Since the end of the Cold War, "hegemony" has been used to describe the United States' role as the sole superpower (the hyperpower) in the modern world. However, some scholars of international relations (such as John Mearsheimer) argue that the United States does not have global hegemony, since it lacks the resources to impose dominance over the entire globe.

Recently the term hegemony has been re-defined by critical theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

See also: cultural hegemony.

to be written: the idea of "hegemony" in Marxist theory.

See also

• Spartan hegemony (404 BC - 371 BC)
• Theban hegemony (371 BC - 362 BC)
• Dollar hegemony
• Hegemony or Survival, a book by Noam Chomsky

External links

• Google Directory: Hegemonism
• Stuart Hainsworth, "Gramsci's hegemony theory and the ideological role of the mass media"