The H-Word

The Peripeteia of Hegemony

Perry Anderson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786633682
• eBook ISBN: 9781786633705
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Few terms are so widely used in the literature of international relations and political science, with so little agreement about their exact meaning, as hegemony.

In the first full historical study of its fortunes as a concept, Perry Anderson traces its emergence in Ancient Greece and its rediscovery during the upheavals of 1848-1849 in Germany. He then follows its checkered career in revolutionary Russia, fascist Italy, Cold War America, Gaullist France, Thatcher's Britain, post-colonial India, feudal Japan, Maoist China, eventually arriving at twenty-first-century US geopolitics and Germany's place within an expanded European Union.

The result is a surprising and fascinating expedition into global intellectual history.

1

ORIGINS

Historically, of course, the origins of the term hegemony are Greek, from a verb meaning to ‘guide’ or to ‘lead’, going back to Homer. As an abstract noun, hēgemonia first appears in Herodotus, to designate leadership of an alliance of city-states for a common military end, a position of honour accorded Sparta in resistance to the Persian invasion of Greece. It was tied to the idea of a league, whose members were in principle equal, raising one of their number to direct them all for a given purpose. From the outset it coexisted with another term indicating rule in a more general sense—arkhē. What were the relations between the two? In a famous passage of his History of Greece, discussing the evolution of the Delian League headed by fifth-century Athens, the eminent liberal historian Grote—an associate of John Stuart Mill—argued that hēgemonia was leadership freely based on ‘attachment or consent’, whereas arkhē implied the ‘superior authority and coercive dignity’ of empire, extracting by contrast mere ‘acquiescence’. Thucydides had carefully distinguished between the two, and criticised the passage of Athens from the first to the second as the fatal cause of the Peloponnesian War.¹ The latest scholar to consider the classical evidence concurs. Conceptions of hegemony and empire were ‘in deadly conflict’. Force is ‘what makes the difference’.²

So stark an opposition was, however, foreign to contemporaries. In Herodotus and Xenophon, hēgemonia and arkhē are used all but interchangeably. Was Thucydides more punctilious? The paragraph on which Grote relied opens with the first term and ends with the second, tracing a development without counterposing them.³ Elsewhere in his narrative, actors make no distinction between the two. In the course of the Sicilian expedition, an Athenian envoy straightforwardly equates them: ‘After the Persian Wars we acquired a fleet and rid ourselves of Spartan rule and hegemony’—arkhēs kai hēgemonias.⁴ Most pointedly, it was Pericles himself who made clear to his fellow citizens that it was arkhē—not hēgemonia—of which they should be proud, and not let slip from their grasp. ‘You should all take pride in the prestige the city enjoys from empire and be prepared to fight in defence of it’, he told them, ‘You cannot shirk the burden without abandoning also pursuit of glory. Do not think that the only issue at stake is slavery or freedom: there is also loss of empire, and the danger from the hatred incurred under your rule’. The statesman to whom Thucydides gave unstinting praise for his moderation concluded: ‘Posterity will remember that we held the widest sway of Greeks over Greeks, in the greatest wars held out against foes united or single, and inhabited a city that was in all things the richest and the greatest’.⁵ Underlining the positive valence of arkhē, Thucydides proceeded to confer it as the highest compliment on Pericles himself. ‘So Athens, in name a democracy, became in fact a government ruled by its foremost citizen’—tou prōton andros arkhē. ⁶

That there was a conceptual continuity, rather than any clear-cut contrast, between the ideas of hegemony and empire in classical Greece was rooted in the meanings of both. Written at the end of the Weimar Republic, the first scholarly study of the former, by Hans Schaefer, showed that hegemony was indeed leadership freely conceded by members of a league, but it was a specific commission, not a general authority. Granted was command on the battlefield.⁷ War, not peace, was its domain of application. But since military command is the most imperative of all types of leadership, hegemony was the exercise of an unconditional power from the start. That power was temporary and delimited. But what could be more natural or predictable than for a hegemon, once elected, to expand it in duration and scope?⁸ If hēgemonia was inherently inflatable at one end of the spectrum of power, arkhē was constitutively ambiguous at the other, translatable according to context (or leaning of the translator) as neutral rule or dominative empire. In the rhetoric of the fifth century, associations of the first with consent and the second with coercion were tactically available, but the sliding surface between them precluded any stable demarcation.

In the fourth century, this changed. After defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Athenian oratory, no longer able to extol empire as before, revalued the virtues of hegemony, now suitably moralised as an ideal of the weakened. Isocrates, calling on Greeks to unite once more against Persia under the leadership of Athens, claimed hegemony for his city by exalting its cultural merits—the benefits it had historically conferred on others, above all its blessings in philosophy, eloquence and education. His panegyric is the most systematic vindication of hegemony as a freely acknowledged preeminence to be found in the literature. But even it could not dispense with the telltale counterpoint of its other: Greeks should also be deeply grateful for ‘the very great empire’ that Athens had enjoyed.⁹ Twenty-five years of further setbacks and humiliations later, pleading for peace with allies who had risen against domination by Athens, Isocrates lamented that ‘we covet an empire that is neither just nor tenable nor advantageous to us’, whose pursuit in the Peloponnesian War had brought ‘more and greater disasters’ on the city than in all the rest of its history.¹⁰ By then, arkhē abandoned, he had etherealised hegemony altogether in his Hymn to Logos, where it becomes the power of the word over all things—hapantōn hēgemona logon—of whose authority he was the bearer.¹¹ In the real world, its finale was the radical opposite, as the king whom he had once sought to appease crushed city-state resistance to Macedonian rule. By force of conquest, Philip became the ‘hegemon of Greece’, formally installed as such at Corinth.¹²

Looking back, Aristotle would write of Athens and Sparta that ‘each of the two states that were hegemonic in Greece took their form of government as a standard and imposed it on other cities, in one case democracies and in the other oligarchies, paying no regard to the interest of the cities, but only to their own advantage’, until it became a ‘fixed habit with the people of the various cities not even to desire equality, but either to seek to rule or to endure subjection’.¹³ Hegemony, in other words, was inherently interventionist. The articles of the League of Corinth, also nominally an alliance of equals, went further than any precedent, as befitted Philip’s autocratic power, in authorising the hegemon to take action against any change in the constitution of a city, and specifically proscribing ‘confiscation of property, redistribution of land, cancellation of debts, and liberation of slaves for revolutionary purposes’. Even George Cawkwell, the leading modern historian of Philip’s career, a staunch admirer of the king, was impelled to ask: ‘Was Greek society to be frozen from 337 onwards? And in whose interests? Were Macedon’s quislings to be in power for ever?’, before urging ‘mitigation of this severe judgment’, since after all ‘the settlement of Philip in 337 remained popular’.¹⁴ Concluding that ‘it is in the role of Hegemon that the real secret of the League to Corinth is to be found’, he may have said more than he intended.

II

There, in the age of Aristotle, the term rested. The political vocabulary of Rome, where allies were broken and absorbed into an expanding republic whose structure no Greek city-state could match, did not require it. There was less need for ambiguity or euphemism. Nor, after the fall of Rome, was hegemony carried into the languages of mediaeval or early modern Europe. In Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides, the word is nowhere to be found.¹⁵ As a contemporary political term, it remained all but unknown till the mid-nineteenth century, when it first resurfaced in a non-antiquarian context in Germany, at the crossroads between national unification and classical studies, as Prussia was hailed by historians steeped in the Greek past, of which the country had many, as the kingdom capable of leading other German states on the path to unity. In England, Grote had not been able to naturalise the word, critics complaining of his introduction of it, and he himself falling back on a vaguer ‘headship’ in his later volumes. Underlining the alien novelty of the locution, the Times observed from London: ‘No doubt it is a glorious ambition which drives Prussia to assert her claim to the leadership, or as that land of professors phrases it, the “hegemony” of the Germanic Confederation’.¹⁶

From the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon onwards, liberal and nationalist thinkers had looked to Prussia to bring unity to a splintered nation—hopes for its eventual Führung or Vorherrschaft in such an enterprise were common terms in a still inchoate aspiration. In 1831, a liberal jurist from Württemberg, Paul Pfizer, an accomplished classicist, for the first time altered this vocabulary in making a much more developed case for the role Berlin should play in the future of Germany, in the form of a dialogue between two friends, Briefwechsel zweier Deutscher. Must Germany first achieve political freedom to attain national unity, or could freedom only come when Prussian military power had achieved national unity? Pfizer left little doubt which argument was stronger: ‘If all the signs do not deceive us, Prussia is summoned to the protectorate of Germany by the same destiny that gifted it Frederick the Great’, a ‘hegemony’ that would at the same time stimulate ‘the development of a public life, the interaction and struggle of different forces’ in the inner space of the country.¹⁷

By the time of the revolution of 1848, the term had become a watchword for liberal historians, pressing on Prussia a role the court in Berlin declined. Mommsen, a rising star in the study of Roman law, plunged into journalism, declaring that ‘Prussians have the right to insist on their hegemony as a condition of their entrance into Germany’, for ‘only Prussian hegemony can save Germany’.¹⁸ Droysen, holder of a chair at Kiel, had published a pathbreaking study of Alexander the Great in the 1830s, followed by two volumes on his successors that effectively coined the notion of a Hellenistic epoch of ancient civilisation, presented as the vital bridge from the Classical to Christian worlds.¹⁹ Preceding this pious theme, however, was a panegyric to Macedonian power as the creative force that had put an end to the ‘wretched and shameful’ conditions of a Greece ‘deathly ill in its confused small state politics’—Philip and Alexander triumphing over the ‘thread-bare, decrepit democracy’ of Athens defended by Demosthenes, and ‘opening Asia’ to an ‘influx of Hellenic life’.²⁰ The contemporary analogy was lost on few. ‘The position of the military monarchy of Macedon vis-a-vis the fragmented, particularistic world of Greece appears almost as if a stucco façade on the Prussian supremacy over the petty German states for which patriots longed’, Hintze would observe in his obituary of Droysen. ‘National unification and a common national state figure as the highest demand of the time and measure of historical judgment. All light falls on Alexander, all shadows on Demosthenes’.²¹

Droysen was thus perfectly positioned for a leading role in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, of whose Constitutional Committee he became secretary. ‘Is not the power and greatness of Prussia a blessing for Germany?’ he had asked a year earlier. On the eve of the Parliament, he noted in April: ‘Prussia is already a sketch for Germany,’ into which it should merge, its army and treasury becoming the framework of a united country, for ‘we need a powerful Oberhaupt’.²² In December he was writing to a friend: ‘I am working, to the best of my abilities, for the hereditary hegemony of Prussia’—that is, the offer to the Hohenzollern dynasty of an imperial rule in Germany.²³ Frederick William IV’s refusal to pick up a crown from the gutter of the Frankfurt Parliament was a bitter blow. But Droysen did not lose faith. His group should withdraw from the Assembly, he told colleagues in May 1849, but remain true to ‘the everlasting thought of Prussian hegemony’.²⁴ He devoted the rest of his life to the history of the Hohenzollern monarchy and its servants.

More radical than Droysen and other friends in the Casino faction of the Parliament, the literary historian Gervinus—one of the Göttingen Seven dismissed from their positions for defying royal abrogation of the constitution of Hanover—had founded the Deutsche Zeitung in mid-1847 as the combative voice of German liberalism, after years in which, as he later wrote, ‘I preached Prussian leadership in German affairs, from the chair and in the press, at a time when no Prussian paper dared say anything of the kind’.²⁵ In the Frankfurt Parliament and in the pages of the Deutsche Zeitung, he continued to urge Prussian hegemony in a German federation, and by early 1849 he was calling for war with Austria to achieve kleindeutsch unity. When Frederick William IV declined the role allotted him, Gervinus—exclaiming ‘all Prussia has deserted us’—swore hostility to Berlin thereafter, at the end of his life comparing Prussian unification of Germany to Macedonia’s extinction of the liberties and autonomies of Greece, and Bismarck’s war with France to the French conquest of Algeria.²⁶ Looking back, he reproached and defended himself for his earlier illusions, citing his own articles in the Deutsche Zeitung as painful evidence against himself, while protesting that even in his paeans to the leadership of Prussia he had always remained a strict federalist, who had never advocated any ‘coerciv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Origins
• 2. Revolutions
• 3. Inter-War
• 4. Post-War
• 5. Cold War
• 6. Americana
• 7. Fade-Out
• 8. Sequels
• 9. Inversion
• 10. Cross-cutting
• 11. Enduring or Ebbing
• 12. Aspiring
• 13. Conclusions
• Notes
• Index