Hegemony

United States has been the world hegemony since the end of the Second World War and has used its power to promote western values across the globe in many different ways. Some of the ways in which the US’s exerts its hegemonic power can be reflected on the way the world functions today. Its power is embedded in economic policies, environmental agreements, and its global institutions like the IMF and the World Bank “since the early 1990s, U.S. policymakers have embraced primacy and adopted an…

In feudal Europe, the Catholic Church created hegemony by using excommunication to establish political control over the kings of Europe. At the end of the 10th century, Pope Gregory V condemned King Robert II of France for marrying his first cousin. Incest was considered a sin by the Catholic Church; therefore the pope did not approve. After the threat of excommunication, Robert “obeyed and married another, and his obedience affirmed Gregory’s authority.” This demonstrated how the Catholic…

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned for much of his life by Mussolini, took these idea further in his Prison Notebooks with his widely influential notions of ‘hegemony’ and the ‘manufacture of consent’ (Gramsci 1971). Gramsci saw the capitalist state as being made up of two overlapping spheres, a ‘political society’ (which rules through force) and a ‘civil society’ (which rules through consent). This is a different meaning of civil society from the ‘associational’ view common…

States emerged as the sole leading power at the time the Soviet Union dissolves into fifteen different countries across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Since the US’s dominant role has remained for almost three decades, one may ask, is American hegemony still as influential as it was during the systemic change in 1989, if it is subject to declining, how has the structure of the international political system changed and who may replace US as the apex? As mentioned previously, in a world…

In her chapter titled “Biographies of Hegemony,” Karen Ho criticizes Wall Street’s method of recruiting students from Harvard and Princeton because of they are misguided into believing that these students are the “the best and the brightest.” Ho explains these students are not intelligent, but rather a batch of privileged and well presented students doing a job that requires very little knowledge in the field of finance. The way that Wall Street recruits Harvard and Princeton students, according…

the 16th century, the legacy of Spanish superiority ran rapidity throughout the newly founded colonies in Latin America. Immediately following the defeat of existing governments in the New World, the Spanish took over colonial control using hegemony. Hegemony is, “a kind of domination that implies a measure of consent by those at the bottom” (Chasteen 57). When the Spanish colonized the New World they brought with them their own hierarchically organized society, where members had clear social…

they possess over the masses. There is also a false sense of superiority that creates a schism between the institutional power and general population due to the overwhelming division of wealth. This idea of wealth is exemplified in “Biographies of Hegemony” by Karen Ho, which examines the influential role that Wall Street…

GRAMSCIAN VIEW OF HOW ORDER IS CREATED OUT OF ANARCHY View on hegemony Bestowing upon Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks and ideas, it is recognised that his perception of hegemony was influenced by historical reflections of his own social and political history. Gramsci, the head of the communist party, witnessed capitalists were manipulating the social classes and infrastructure of early twentieth century Italy. Doing so in favour of the bourgeoisie, without the use of coercive control. Gramsci…

This paper looks into the hegemony embedded within a globally relevant socio- cultural context, and how it is inversely connected to the political- economic structures. It takes into consideration the prevailing dominant psychological structures embedded within the electronic systems of internet whilst accessing information, media and content on a global scale. What are the dominant psychological structures affecting societies worldwide? How is the reality constructed? What is the relation of…

religion (Adam, 2013). Hence, the dominance of one religious group over another creates a hegemony, which is defined as “unconscious reproduction of dominant group norms, values, beliefs, [and] cultural forms carried on as part of everyday life” (Adams & Joshi, 2013, p. 230). In the United States, Protestant Christianity is the dominant religion, and this dominance of Protestant Christianity creates Christian hegemony, which is “society’s unacknowledged adherence to a dominant religious…