Hegemony and critical realism

Abstract

This thesis seeks to develop a theory of hegemony. For too long this concept has been understood solely through its deployment of Antonio Gramsci. By employing a critical realist analysis - both to Gramsci's work and to others - a number of clarifications and distinctions are made which help give the concept greater explanatory power and make its scope more visible.

Employing critical realist terminology, it will be argued that the world is comprised of enduring structures and mechanisms and that these exist in the social as well as the natural world. The task of social science is not simply to identify sequences of events, but to study the underlying generative mechanisms that operate in different ways, exercised or unexercised, giving the world a multi-layered character.

The complex nature of hegemony reflects the complexly structured conditions in which it operates. Given that society is both the ever-present condition and reproduced outcome of human agency, hegemony operates within the context of the reproduction, preservation or transformation of social structures. Thus hegemony sheds light on the relationship between structure and agency and provides strategy with an objective basis. In this way it relates closely to the critical realist concept of the transformational model of social activity - although it gives this model a more political and strategic basis.

This thesis will therefore argue that hegemony has an objective rather than simply an inter-subjective basis. Instead of seeing hegemony simply as a relation between different social groups, this thesis will analyse the relation between these groups and social structures - and the reproduction, preservation or conservation of these structures. It will also make a distinction between two types of hegemony.

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