richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Tracking the Hegemony of Hegemony: Classical Marxism and Liberalism 47hegemony has become hegemonic, how it has come to structure thepolitical sense that is common to (neo)liberalism and most forms ofmarxism, including postmarxism. At the same time, I want to showhow the theory and practice of hegemony are unravelling, beingtaken apart from within their own traditions by the very forces thathad to be excluded to establish these traditions in the first place. 1In the Introduction I proposed a preliminary definition ofhegemony as a struggle for dominance, generally limited to thesymbolic, geographical, economic and political context of a particularnation-state or group of states, but increasingly occurring at a globallevel. This definition was an attempt to capture the shades of meaningthat this term evokes in postmarxism, cultural studies and otherdisciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Such an attemptalways fails, of course, so I will now begin to unpack this definition,to give it life by placing it in its historical contexts. 2 Like so muchin the western tradition, the concept of hegemony originated inAncient Greece, where the term hegemonia signified the dominationof one city-state by another. 3 The rhetorical content of this term isnot apparent from the dictionary definition, however. To understandthis we must note how it is used with reference to what is commonlypresented as the commanding height of Ancient Greek civilization:democratic Athens, which provides a mythical foundation for westernideas about freedom and equality. Athenians are thought to have hada ‘natural’ impulse to govern themselves, but the scholarly literatureis full of references to ‘The Spartan Hegemony’ and ‘The ThebanHegemony’, that is, to ‘exceptional’ times when (rich, geneticallycorrect, male) Athenians were governed by others. Similarly, Philipof Macedonia (Alexander’s father) is known for having establishedhimself as the hegemon (leader) of most of Greece, primarily by way ofsuperior military force. Thus to be hegemonized meant to be unable torule oneself because one was under the sway of another; not anotherclass, or even another nation—Spartans, Thebans and Macedonianswere all considered Greeks—but another political formation in whichone did not have an equal voice. Hegemony, in Ancient Greece, wasvery clearly seen as a non-democratic from of political organization.In its current usage the concept of hegemony is deeply tied upwith the system of nation-states that began to form with the rise ofEuropean constitutional monarchies, and was further entrenched bythe creation of institutions of liberal democracy. Thus, hegemony mustbe seen as very much a modern European phenomenon. Its conditionswere established by Enlightenment liberals, who did not use the