Hegemony

A Realist Analysis

Jonathan Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134493678
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Hegemony: A Realist Analysis is a new and original approach to this important concept. It presents a theoretical history of the use of hegemony in a range of work starting with a discussion of Gramsci and Russian Marxism and going on to look at more recent applications. It examines the current debates and discusses the new direction to Marx made by Jacques Derrida, before outlining a critical realist/Marxist alternative.
This book employs critical realist philosophy in an explanatory way to help clarify the concept of hegemony and its relation to societal processes. This work contributes to recent debates in social science and political philosophy, developing both the concept of hegemony itself, and the work of critical realism.

1 Realism and hegemony

Introduction

The concept of hegemony is normally understood as emphasising consent in contrast to reliance on the use of force. It describes the way in which dominant social groups achieve rulership or leadership on the basis of attaining social cohesion and consensus. It argues that the position of the ruling group is not automatically given, but rather that it requires the ruling group to attain consent to its leadership through the complex construction of political projects and social alliances. These allow for the unity of the ruling group and for the domination of this group over the rest of society. In its simplistic form hegemony concerns the construction of consent and the exercise of leadership by the dominant group over subordinate groups; in its more complex form, this deals with issues such as the elaboration of political projects, the articulation of interests, the construction of social alliances, the development of historical blocs, the deployment of state strategies and the initiating of passive revolutions.

However, this view is still one-sided. In its extreme, this view of hegemony defines it as a purely agential process, that is to say, that hegemony is exclusively concerned with the plans and actions of social agents, groups and individuals. This leads to a Machiavellian view of politics as if hegemony were simply the conscious project or cunning plan of different social groups. The construction of hegemony becomes an intersubjective affair to be worked out by or between different sets of people. If the concept of hegemony is restricted to this agential approach, then a mistaken view of history and politics emerges that sees important social processes as simply the products of significant social actors or groups. By contrast, this book seeks to move away from a purely agential conception of hegemony, although an emphasis on the importance of agency will be maintained. In keeping with the advice of Marx and Engels, it will be argued that although human beings create hegemony through their actions, they do so under conditions not of their own choosing. Two crucial questions immediately arise. First, what are the conditions under which hegemony operates? Second, what makes hegemony a necessary social feature?

These questions push the study of hegemony away from a simplistic examination of agency towards more material, objective factors. This book concentrates on how the agential aspect of hegemony coincides with its basic structurality. The following chapters will trace the understanding of hegemony from Gramsci through classical Marxism to historical, structuralist and post-structuralist analysis. In attempting to draw out the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, a conception of hegemony will emerge that will hopefully be able to combine both structural and agential aspects of this important social process. This analysis will take a broadly Marxist approach and a number of basic Marxist concepts are taken for granted. Other aspects of Marxism, the more simplistic and deterministic models of the classical tradition, will be challenged. This is in keeping with the idea of hegemony which attempts to replace economic determinism with a more complex view of the social totality. However, this book will also be adopting a critical realist approach based on the ideas recently advocated by Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Margaret Archer and others. As well as analysing the concept of hegemony this work will also be attempting to assess the relationship between critical realist philosophy and Marxist analysis of society. The arguments of critical realism, although now starting to gain a foothold, are still relatively new, not to mention complex, and are continuing to evolve and develop. The rest of this chapter will therefore be concerned with briefly outlining the basics of critical realism, while some tentative comments on the relationship between realism, Marxism and hegemony will be made. The book will then divide into two parts, with the first section examining how the concept of hegemony develops in the work of such theorists as Gramsci, Lenin, Trotsky, Anderson, Thompson, Williams, Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe. Following this theoretical history, the book will go on to draw out a realist conception of hegemony by posing such theoretical questions as objectivity and intersubjectivity, the economic and the social, and the way that hegemony is articulated in space and time. The main aim of this analysis is to develop a distinction between a structural aspect of hegemony concerned with social reproduction and an agential aspect that depends upon this, but which represents conscious hegemonic projects and strategies. A Marxist understanding of hegemony will be developed through the use of critical realist arguments. So, first, to the arguments of critical realism.

Method: critical naturalism

The concept of hegemony extends beyond simple political, cultural, humanist or hermeneutic interpretations. Since it is part of an understanding of the conditions of society it should be treated as a social scientific concept. To say that the study of hegemony is part of a scientific study of society is in keeping with a position of critical naturalism, which is to argue that the social sciences can and should be treated along similar lines to the natural sciences, using similar methods of analysis, albeit ones that recognise the specificity of the social domain. Thus it is necessary to reject the idea, as is found in the positivist tradition, that there is an identical correspondence between the methods of social and natural science, but it is important to resist the hermeneutic view that there is an absolute separation between the two realms. The term critical implies that it is necessary to make important qualifications to the naturalist approach and these will be outlined below. However, the critical naturalist position also entails a number of common perspectives that link the social and natural sciences together and it is they that provide the starting point for a critical realist approach.

Above all, realism stresses the separation of thought and being and the primacy of being over thought or the ontological over the epistemological (theory of being over theory of knowledge). This distinction can then be used to make a transcendental argument along the lines that given that knowledge is possible and is meaningful, this presupposes that the world itself is a certain way, while the practice of science shows that the world is intelligible and open to investigation. Unlike Kantian transcendental idealism, which moves from the status of knowledge to the necessary structure of the mind, critical or transcendental realism looks at what knowledge and human practice presupposes about the world itself. Given that certain things are intelligible to us, this presupposes that the world is ordered or structured in a particular way. The possibility of knowledge and the forms that it takes (as practices and disciplines) reflects the fact that the world has an ordered, intelligible and relatively enduring structure that is open to scientific investigation. That knowledge is possible presupposes that the world is a certain way.

However, the fact that the world has this structuring makes it necessary for us to distinguish ontologically between the knowledge we have of the world and the independently existing objects that this knowledge is about. The scientificity of a theory depends upon its ability to explain these social or natural objects. This knowledge may develop or change and one theory may replace another, but the objects of this knowledge will remain as they are; in other words, the objects of the real world exist independently of the knowledge we may have of them. Indeed, these objects must exist independently of the knowledge we have of them if changes in our understanding are to have any meaningful significance. The existence of competing theories presupposes an independent reality over which they vary or differ.

This separation of thought and object can be extended to a distinction between practice and structure. The process of knowledge is, after all, just one form of social practice. Indeed, knowledge itself can be divided into a number of sub-practices and these various practices intersect one another in various ways. Scientific practice may be divided into a number of different disciplines such as physics and biology. Knowledge may also be divided into different practices, some of which are scientific, while others, such as common sense, practical knowledge, religion, political ideology and the aesthetic, may be categorised in a different way. Meanwhile, there are other practices – like fishing, shopping and drinking – which are not primarily knowledge-based. But a study of society cannot be reduced to a study of such human activities. As well as studying practices (ordered or established activity), it is also necessary to examine deeper social structures which have a more abstract nature, comprised of a set of elements that are internally related. These are necessary relationships that endure over time. The social world, it will be argued, is made up of a variety of structures and relations – social, economic, political, communicative, etc. – that have a relatively enduring nature. These social structures are not reducible to the activities that they govern or the practices they support; rather, it is these social structures that make human activity and social practices possible and it is within this structural context that a theory of hegemony must be developed.

The transitive and intransitive

To develop the distinction between epistemology and ontology, Roy Bhaskar employs the terms transitive and intransitive. Our knowledge of the world is described as transitive and is actively embodied in a set of theories which form a kind of raw material for scientific practice. Transitive knowledge corresponds to an Aristotelian material cause or antecedently established knowledge which is used to generate new knowledge. This includes established theories, models, methods, facts and so on (Bhaskar 1978: 21). The practice of science, although it studies the intransitive world, produces a transitive object.

By contrast the intransitive is that which science seeks to study. Intransitive objects of knowledge are those structures, relations, processes and generative mechanisms which exist independently of us in a relatively enduring state. Therefore, while science is a transitive process with antecedent knowledge that is dependent on human activity, its objects are intransitive objects which do not depend on either. As Bhaskar says:

The intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of them; they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are quite independent of us … They are the intransitive, science-independent, objects of scientific discovery and investigation.

(Bhaskar 1978: 22)

The intransitive, whether natural or social, is largely a transfactual world comprised of structures and mechanisms that are relatively enduring. It is this relatively enduring, independent, intransitive nature of the social and natural worlds that makes scientific practice possible. The identification of scientific laws and relations is dependent upon the relatively enduring, transfactuality of the intransitive realm. This returns us to the ontological argument that, given that scientific investigation is intelligible, this presupposes that the world is structured in a certain way and that these transfactual structures, processes and mechanisms are possible objects of knowledge that are open to scientific investigation. It is the fact that the world is structured and ordered that makes science possible and gives this scientific knowledge, in turn, a structured and intelligible character.

This position has radical consequences for any theory of science. A distinction must be made between the transitive identification of causal laws and the intransitive causal mechanisms themselves. For example, it is necessary to distinguish between the theory of the law of gravity and the existence of this ‘law’ in nature itself. There is also a distinction in the social world between our transitive social explanation and the real or intransitive mechanism, so, for example, we must distinguish between the Marxist theory that isolates the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the actual economic mechanisms that may or may not confirm this theory. Science should study these mechanisms and structures and aim to produce a plausible explanation of them. This is in contrast to those theories that rely on identifying a pattern of events or empirical invariances and which consequently fail to adequately identify the deeper causal structures and mechanisms that generate these events. In these cases the theorist undermines the independent existence of causal structures and mechanisms by conflating them with his/her own observations and empirical theories In order to explain the realist approach Bhaskar therefore identifies three differing levels of scientific enquiry and their philosophical underpinnings.

Empirical, actual and real

The crudest form of empiricism defines the world according to human experiences. But while the ontology of empiricism is based on human experience, the sociology of empiricism is based on the passive individual who exists in a world of objective facts which the individual, in turn, observes, but does not create. The observation aspect of such crude empiricism can be dismissed rather easily in that there are many events that are not experienced, yet nevertheless occur. An explanation of the world cannot therefore be reduced to our experience of it. However, this sort of empiricism provides the base for another set of philosophical positions which Bhaskar calls actualism.

Actualism recognises that events occur whether we experience them or not. It therefore moves beyond the crudeness of the former position. However, this version of explanation, like crude empiricism, is still tied to the conception of causality derived from the work of David Hume. According to the Humean conception of causality, scientific laws depend upon constant conjunctions or regularities. The status of scientific theories is then decided according to whether or not these constant conjunctions can be confirmed or falsified by various instances. But to simply posit that A causes B fails to adequately analyse the underlying mechanisms that produce such events. Indeed, Humean accounts effectively deny that such mechanisms exist. Actualism may move beyond the empirical level of perceptions, impressions and sensations, but it does not go beyond the level of events and states of affairs in order to examine deeper structures and mechanisms that may generate these events and regularities.

Another problem with actualism is the tendency to view the world through the closed conditions by which such regularities are produced. Actualism refuses to take account of the fact that the world itself has an open character that contains many more mechanisms than those present under the closed conditions of scientific experimentation that produces such regularities. Reality is thus treated or defined as if it were simply an extension of the closed conditions of experimentation. Actualist theories operate by seeking constant conjunctions of events which are then used to explain causal occurrences and, ceteris paribus, reality is produced. However, by tying its explanation to constant conjunctions, actualism fails to go beyond the occurrences of these events. As a consequence, actualist accounts end up denying the existence of underlying structures and mechanisms. In particular, actualism sees everything in terms of the exercise of powers, yet the openness of the world means that there are a whole number of powers and liabilities which may not be realised. We know, for example, that while water is said to boil at 100 degrees centigrade, this is affected by other factors such as air pressure. The real world, rather than being a series of constant conjunctions, is comprised of various interacting and counteracting structures and causal mechanisms.

Indeed, to reduce the complexity of the world to a series of constant conjunctions, as actualism does, is to remove the need for scientific experimentation at all. Scientific closure is necessary precisely because constant conjunctions are not readily produced in the open and complex social and natural domains. The critical realist approach therefore insists on the need to move beyond regularities, experiences and events and to study the underlying causal structures and generative mechanisms that produce these. In open systems a whole number of these structures and mechanisms operate together and determine things in various combinations, giving the world a multi-layered character. Critical realism recognises this in its notion of ontological depth. It attempts to move from one level of explanation to an underlying one. When a stratum of reality has been described, the next step is to examine what mechanisms underlie or intersect with this level. This is a radical approach focusing on processes of emergence and change.

The world is seen as stratified in the sense that these structures and mechanisms are ordered in a certain way. Science itself reflects this stratification; for example, biology is rooted in and emergent from physics. We can also see this sort of layering or stratification in society. However, the temptation for reductionism must be avoided. It is not possible to explain a biological process simply in terms of physical ones. Nor is it possible to explain political events by reducing them to economic conditions. An emergence-based theory argues that reality has different layers or strata and that higher layers (e.g. the mind) presuppose lower, more fundamental levels (e.g. matter) but that higher layers cannot be reduced to lower ones. To say that the mind is emergent out of matter is to say that it depends on it in a fundamental way, but that the complexities of the mind and its workings cannot be reduced to a study of grey matter. The mind clearly has its own irreducible emergent properties (e.g. thoughts) which cannot simply be explained in material terms, although they do clearly operate within the framework of material laws which cannot be broken (not least the fact that a brain must exist if a mind is to work).

Traditionally, Marxist explanation has been based on a rather crude and reductionist base-superstructure relationship (where the economic base is said to determine the political–ideological superstructure). An alternative to this model is to see society as comprised of a multitude of strata with structures that interrelate and codetermine one another. Within this, economic structures may still be regarded as the most important or dominant ones, but they are not exclusively determinant and the different strata of the social formation have their own emergent (irreducible) properties, laws and powers. Such a view of society will be important when it comes to assessing how a process such as hegemony relates to a variety of social, economic, political and cultural domains while developing its own character and dynamics.

Critical naturalism and social science

Critical naturalism argues that the social world can be studied along similar lines to the natural world and that therefore social science is as valid a practice as natural science. However, Bhaskar outlines three important differences (Bhaskar 1989b: 185–9). Founded on social relations, social structures are ontologically different from natural ones in the sense that they are praxis and concept dependent. Social structures, unlike natural structures, depend both on human activity and on some kind of human conception of that activity. Such a position embraces a kind of critical hermeneutics. The fact that social structures are praxis and concept dependent means that the objects of social science are thus of a social and historical nature...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Realism and hegemony
• PART 1 A theoretical history
• PART 2 Theoretical questions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index