BiblioVault - Books about Hegemony

Birth of Hegemony

Crisis, Financial Revolution, and Emerging Global Networks

Andrew C. Sobel

University of Chicago Press, 2012

With American leadership facing increased competition from China and India, the question of how hegemons emerge—and are able to create conditions for lasting stability—is of utmost importance in international relations. The generally accepted wisdom is that liberal superpowers, with economies based on capitalist principles, are best able to develop systems conducive to the health of the global economy.

In Birth of Hegemony, Andrew C. Sobel draws attention to the critical role played by finance in the emergence of these liberal hegemons. He argues that a hegemon must have both the capacity and the willingness to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of providing key collective goods that are the basis of international cooperation and exchange. Through this, the hegemon helps maintain stability and limits the risk to productive international interactions. However, prudent planning can account for only part of a hegemon’s ability to provide public goods, while some of the necessary conditions must be developed simply through the processes of economic growth and political development. Sobel supports these claims by examining the economic trajectories that led to the successive leadership of the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States.

Stability in international affairs has long been a topic of great interest to our understanding of global politics, and Sobel’s nuanced and theoretically sophisticated account sets the stage for a consideration of recent developments affecting the United States.

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The Challenge of Hegemony

Grand Strategy, Trade, and Domestic Politics

Steven E. Lobell

University of Michigan Press, 2005

The Challenge of Hegemony explains how international forces subtly influence foreign, economic, and security policies of declining world powers. Using detail-rich case studies, this sweeping study integrates domestic and systemic policy to explain these countries' grand strategies. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications for the future of American foreign policy.

"His conceptually rigorous and tightly reasoned study . . . reminds us that power is never value neutral but organizes commercial systems in liberal or imperial terms."
---Perspectives on Politics

"Lobell's book is tightly written, nicely argued and thoroughly researched to a fault. He seems to delight in historical detail. The complexity of his approach is refreshing."
---International Affairs

"The Challenge of Hegemony is a pleasure to read. It is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich."
---International Studies Review

"The Challenge of Hegemony offers a compelling reinterpretation of key historical cases and provides wise guidance as to how the United States should wield its power today."
--Charles A. Kupchan, Council on Foreign Relations

"Lobell demonstrates clearly how the international environment confronting great powers interacts with their domestic political coalitions to produce different grand strategies. Through a masterful sweep of history, Lobell shows us the alternative trajectories before the United States today."
--David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego

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Combating Jihadism

American Hegemony and Interstate Cooperation in the War on Terrorism

Barak Mendelsohn

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Although terrorism is an age-old phenomenon, jihadi ideology is distinctive in its ambition to abandon the principle of state sovereignty, overthrow the modern state system, and replace it with an extremely radical interpretation of an Islamic world order. These characteristics reflect a radical break from traditional objectives promoted by terrorist groups. In Combating Jihadism Barak Mendelsohn argues that the distinctiveness of the al-Qaeda threat led the international community to change its approach to counterterrorism. Contrary to common yet erroneous conceptions, the United States, in its role as a hegemon, was critical for the formulation of a multilateral response.

While most analyses of hegemony have focused on power, Mendelsohn firmly grounds the phenomenon in a web of shared norms and rules relating to the hegemon’s freedom of action. Consequently, he explains why US leadership in counterterrorism efforts was in some spheres successful, when in others it failed or did not even seek to establish multilateral collaborative frameworks. Tracing the ways in which international cooperation has stopped terrorist efforts, Combating Jihadism provides a nuanced, innovative, and timely reinterpretation of the war on terrorism and the role of the United States in leading the fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

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Geopolitical Economy

After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire

Radhika Desai

Pluto Press, 2013

Geopolitical Economy radically reinterprets the historical evolution of the world order, as a multi-polar world emerges from the dust of the financial and economic crisis.

Radhika Desai offers a radical critique of the theories of US hegemony, globalisation and empire which dominate academic international political economy and international relations, revealing their ideological origins in successive failed US attempts at world dominance through the dollar.

Desai revitalizes revolutionary intellectual traditions which combine class and national perspectives on ‘the relations of producing nations’. At a time of global upheavals and profound shifts in the distribution of world power, Geopolitical Economy forges a vivid and compelling account of the historical processes which are shaping the contemporary international order.

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Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents

The Southwest North American Region Since 1540

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

University of Arizona Press, 2017

Spanish and English have fought a centuries-long battle for linguistic dominance in the Southwest North American Region. Covering the time period of 1540 to the present, Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents provides a deep and broad understanding of the contradictory methods of establishing language supremacy in this U.S.-Mexico transborder region and the manner in which those affected have responded and acted, often in dissatisfaction and at times with inventive adaptations.

Well-regarded author Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez details the linguistic and cultural processes used by penetrating imperial and national states. He argues that these impositions have been not linear but hydra-headed, complex and contradictory, sometimes accommodated and sometimes forcefully imposed. Such impositions have created discontent resulting in physical and linguistic revolts, translanguage versions, and multilayered capacities of use and misuse of imposed languages—even the invention of community-created trilingual dictionaries.

Vélez-Ibáñez gives particular attention to both sides of the border, explaining the consequences of the fragile splitting of the area through geopolitical border formation. He illustrates the many ways those discontents have manifested in linguistic, cultural, educational, political, and legal forms.

From revolt to revitalization, from silent objection to expressive defiance, people in the Southwest North American Region have developed arcs of discontent from the Spanish colonial period to the present. These narratives are supported by multiple sources, including original Spanish colonial documents and new and original ethnographic studies of performance rituals like the matachines of New Mexico. This unique work discusses the most recent neurobiological studies of bilingualism and their implications for cognitive development and language as it spans multiple disciplines. Finally, it provides the most important models for dual language development and their integration to the "Funds of Knowledge" concept as creative contemporary discontents with monolingual approaches.

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Hegemony and Culture

Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba

David D. Laitin

University of Chicago Press, 1986

In this ambitious work, David D. Laitin explores the politics of religious change among the Yoruba of Nigeria, then uses his findings to expand leading theories of ethnic and religious politics.

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Hegemony And Power

On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli

Benedetto Fontana

University of Minnesota Press, 1993

Presents a comparative and textual exploration of Gramsci's interpretation of Machiavelli's political analyses. This valuable contribution to our understanding of Gramsci includes a comparison of the major Machiavellian ideas such as the nature of political knowledge, the new principality, the concept of the people, and the relation between thought and action, to Gramsci's concepts of hegemony, moral and intellectual reform, and the collective will.

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Hegemony Constrained

Evasion, Modification, and Resistance to American Foreign Policy

Davis B. Bobrow

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008

In the post-cold war era, the United States has risen to a position of unprecedented dominance in the world and has often pursued a primarily unilateral approach to international policy issues. Hegemony Constrained examines how nations, ethnic and religious groups, and international organizations cope with American hegemony. The chapters reveal the various ways in which foreign actors attempt and sometimes succeed in keeping official Washington from achieving its preferred outcomes.
An international group of contributors considers how and why a variety of foreigners act strategically to avoid, delay, or change American policy with respect to a broad range of issues in world affairs. Individual chapters analyze the Kurds and Shia in Iraq; the governments of China, Japan, Turkey, and Germany; the G-7; liberalizing the international economy; coping with global warming; regulating harmful tax competition; controlling missile proliferation; limiting public health damage from tobacco; and international public opinion bearing on the politics of responding to a hegemonic America.
By recognizing and illustrating moves that challenge American unilateralism, Hegemony Constrained provides a framework for understanding and anticipating the goals, motives, and means others in the world bring to their dealings with American hegemony in specific situations. Thus, it offers a corrective to naively optimistic unilateralism and naively optimistic multilateralism.

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Hegemony

The New Shape Of Global Power

John Agnew

Temple University Press, 2005

Hegemony tells the story of the drive to create consumer capitalism abroad through political pressure and the promise of goods for mass consumption. In contrast to the recent literature on America as empire, it explains that the primary goal of the foreign and economic policies of the United States is a world which increasingly reflects the American way of doing business, not the formation or management of an empire. Contextualizing both the Iraq war and recent plant closings in the U.S., noted author John Agnew shows how American hegemony has created a world in which power is no longer only shaped territorially. He argues in a sobering conclusion that we are consequently entering a new era of global power, one in which the world the US has made no longer works to its singular advantage.

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Home and Hegemony

Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia

Kathleen M. Adams and Sara Dickey, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

In the intimate context of domestic service, power relations take on one of their most personalized forms. Domestic servants and their employers must formulate their political identities in relationship to each other, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes challenging broader social hierarchies such as those based on class, caste or rank, gender, race and ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and kinship relations.
This pathbreaking collection builds on recent examinations of identity in the postcolonial states of South and Southeast Asia by investigating the ways in which domestic workers and their employers come to know and depict one another and themselves through their interactions inside and outside of the home. This setting provides a particularly apt arena for examining the daily negotiations of power and hegemony.
Contributors to the volume, all anthropologists, provide rich ethnographic analyses that avoid a narrow focus on either workers or employers. Rather, they examine systems of power through specific topics that range from the notion of "nurture for sale" to the roles of morality and humor in the negotiation of hierarchy and the dilemmas faced by foreign employers who find themselves in life-and-death dependence on their servants.
With its provocative theoretical and ethnographic contributions to current debates, this collection will be of interest to scholars in Asian studies, women's studies, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.
Kathleen M. Adams is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Loyola University of Chicago. Sara Dickey is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Bowdoin College.

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Language and Hegemony in Gramsci

Peter Ives

Pluto Press, 2004

Language and Hegemony in Gramsci introduces Gramsci’s social and political thought through his writings on language. It shows how his focus on language illuminates his central ideas such as hegemony, organic and traditional intellectuals, passive revolution, civil society and subalternity. Peter Ives explores Gramsci’s concern with language from his university studies in linguistics to his last prison notebook. Hegemony has been seen as Gramsci’s most important contribution, but without knowledge of its linguistic roots, it is often misunderstood.

This book places Gramsci’s ideas within the linguistically influenced social theory of the twentieth century. It summarizes some of the major ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, language philosophy and post-structuralism in relation to Gramsci’s position. By paying great attention to the linguistic underpinnings of Gramsci's Marxism, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci shows how his theorization of power, language and politics address issues raised by post-modernism and the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau.

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Modernism and Hegemony

A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies

Neil LarsenForeword by Jaime Concha

University of Minnesota Press, 1990

Modernism and Hegemony was first published in 1990. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In Modernism and Hegemony, Neil Larsen exposes the underlying political narratives of modernist aesthetic theory and practice. Unlike earlier Marxist critics, Larsen insists that modernist ideology be approached as a "displaced politics" and not simply as an aesthetic phenomenon. In this view, modernism is broadly ideological project comprising not only the literary-artist canon but also a wide array of theoretical discourses from aesthetics to philosophy, culture, and politics. Larsen gives postmodernism some credit for the apparent breakup of modernism, and for exposing the philosophical and political nature of its aesthetic stance. But he parts company with its ideological and epistemological notions, proposing to change the terms, and thus the framework, of the debate.

For Larsen, modernism is intimately linked to a crisis of representation that affected all aspects of life in the late nineteenth century - a period when capitalism itself was undergoing transformation from its "classical" free market phase into a more abstract, monopolistic and imperialistic stage. Larsen finds the resultant loosening of ties between individuals and society - the breakdown of social and historical agency - behind the growth of modernism. He employs speculative cross-readings of key texts by Marx and Adorno, an examination of Manet's "The Execution of Maximilian," and an analysis of modernism in a Third World setting to explain why modernism made special claims upon the aesthetic, and how it ultimately ascribed historical agency to "works of art."

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The Osage

An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains

Willard H. Rollings

University of Missouri Press, 1995

The Osage Indians were a powerful group of Native Americans who lived along the prairies and plains of present-day Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains, now available in paper, shows how the Osage formed and maintained political, economic, and social control over a large portion of the central United States for more than 150 years.

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Pax Americana

Hegemony Or Decline?

Jochen Hippler

Pluto Press, 1994

Power and Terror

Conflict, Hegemony, and the Rule of Force

Noam Chomsky

Pluto Press, 2011

Saxo Grammaticus

Hierocratical Conceptions and Danish Hegemony in the Thirteenth Century

André Szczawlinska Muceniecks

Arc Humanities Press, 2017

Denmark of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries was a place of transitions, and this volume analyzes that period through the lens of the <i>Gesta Danorum </i>of Saxo Grammaticus and other sources. The <i>Gesta</i> defends not only hierocratic conceptions but the Danish hegemonic project in the Baltic - which was grounded in the crusade movements. Such movements are presented through complex language and imagery about a glorious past brought to bear on the projects in the thirteenth century while internal tensions strengthen the monarchic and ecclesiastical institutions.

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Thicker Than Water

Blood, Affinity, and Hegemony in Early Modern Drama

Lauren Weindling

University of Alabama Press, 2023

Examines the discourses around the role of bloodlines and kinship in the social hierarchies of early modern Europe

“Blood is thicker than water,” goes the old proverb. But do common bloodlines in fact demand special duties or prescribe affections? Thicker than Water examines the roots of this belief by studying the omnipresent discourse of bloodlines and kindred relations in the literature of early modern Europe.

Early modern discourses concerning kinship promoted the idea that similar bloodlines dictated greater love or affinity, stabilizing the boundaries of families and social classes, as well as the categories of ethnicity and race. Literary representations of romantic relationships were instrumental in such conceptions, and Lauren Weindling examines how drama from England, France, and Italy tests these assumptions about blood and love, exposing their underlying political function. Among the key texts that Weindling studies are Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet¸ Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, Giambattista della Porta’s La Sorella and its English analog, Thomas Middleton’s No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s, John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and Machiavelli’s La Mandragola.

Each of these plays offers an extreme limit case for early modern notions of belonging and exclusion, through plots of love, courtship, and marriage, including blood feuds and incest. Moreover, they feature the voices of marginalized groups, unprivileged by these metrics and ideologies, and thus offer significant counterpoints to this bloody worldview.
While most critical studies of blood onstage pertain to matters of guilt or violence, Thicker Than Water examines the work that blood does unseen in arbitrating social and emotional connections between persons, and thus underwriting our deepest forms of social organization.

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Transformations and Crisis of Liberalism in Argentina, 1930–1955

Jorge A. Nallim

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

In this original study, Jorge A. Nállim chronicles the decline of liberalism in Argentina during the volatile period between two military coups—the 1930 overthrow of
Hipólito Yrigoyen and the deposing of Juan Perón in 1955. While historians have primarily focused on liberalism in economic or political contexts, Nállim instead documents a wide range of locations where liberalism was claimed and ultimately marginalized in the pursuit of individual agendas.

Nállim shows how concepts of liberalism were espoused by various groups who “invented traditions” to legitimatize their methods of political, religious, class, intellectual, or cultural hegemony. In these deeply fractured and corrupt processes, liberalism lost political favor and alienated the public. These events also set the table for Peronism and stifled the future of progressive liberalism in Argentina.

Nállim describes the main political parties of the period and deconstructs their liberal discourses. He also examines major cultural institutions and shows how each attached liberalism to their cause.

Nállim compares and contrasts the events in Argentina to those in other Latin American nations and reveals their links to international developments. While critics have positioned the rhetoric of liberalism during this period as one of decadence or irrelevance, Nállim instead shows it to be a vital and complex factor in the metamorphosis of modern history in Argentina and Latin America as well.

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The Two Faces of American Freedom

Aziz Rana

Harvard University Press, 2014

The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin.

However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.

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Unravelling Gramsci

Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy

Adam David Morton

Pluto Press, 2007

Unravelling Gramsci makes extensive use of Antonio Gramsci's writings, including his pre-prison journalism, prison letters, and prison notebooks, to provide a fresh approach to understanding his contemporary relevance in the current neoliberal world order. Adam David Morton examines in detail the themes of hegemony, passive revolution, and uneven development to provide a useful way of analyzing the contemporary global political economy, neoliberalism, state formation, and practices of resistance. The book explores the theoretical and practical limitations to the use of Gramsci's ideas today.

"Powerful and clarifying . . . a landmark volume."
---John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles

"Morton draws upon an impressive knowledge of Gramsci's writings to provide new insights into key processes in today's world order."
---Anne Showstack Sassoon, Kingston University and Birbeck College, University of London.

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War Against the People

Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification

Jeff Halper

Pluto Press, 2015

Long-awaited, War Against the People is a powerful indictment of the Israeli state’s “securocratic” war in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Anthropologist and activist Jeff Halper draws on firsthand research to show the pernicious effects of the subliminal form of unending warfare conducted by Israel, an approach that relies on sustaining fear among the populace, fear that is stoked by suggestions that the enemy is inside the city limits, leaving no place truly safe and justifying the intensification of military action and militarization in everyday life. Eventually, Halper shows, the integration of militarized systems—including databases tracking civilian activity, automated targeting systems, unmanned drones, and more—becomes seamless with everyday life. And the Occupied Territories, Halper argues, is a veritable laboratory for that approach.

Halper goes on to show how this method of war is rapidly globalizing, as the major capitalist powers and corporations transform militaries, security agencies, and police forces into an effective instrument of global pacification. Simultaneously a deeply researched exposé and a clarion call, War Against the People is a bold attempt to shine the light on the daily injustices visited on a civilian population —and thus hasten their end.

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