The H-Word by Perry Anderson — follow the leader
by: Adam Tooze
To ward off the mighty Persians in the 5th century BC, the Greek city states formed the Delian League. The League's leader was Athens. But what was the nature of Athenian pre-eminence? Was it a superiority imposed by might, commanding only forced acquiescence, or was the league ultimately founded on attachment and consent? Contemporaries did not agree, nor do historians. But the key term coined in the course of that argument has echoed down the millennia. What first Athens and then Sparta exercised, Aristotle tells us, was hegemonia.
The term went out of use with the Romans — for them Republic and Empire sufficed. But as Perry Anderson shows in his fascinating history The H-Word, talk of hegemony was revived in the mid 19th-century by those who fancied that in fractured, post-Napoleonic Germany, Prussia might play the role that Athens once had in Greece. Since then, talk of hegemony has never gone away. The term was put to use by revolutionary Marxists, international relations theorists, political scientists and economists. Today, hegemony is the bread and butter of highbrow op-eds. With the rise of Trump is the hegemony of Davos-style liberalism over? Will Angela Merkel's Germany emerge as the new liberal hegemon, or has the mantle of global leadership passed to Beijing? For Anderson, since the 1960s one of the foremost voices on the academic left, similar questions have been present in work ranging from Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) to his 2015 intellectual history of modern American foreign policy.
From the Greeks onwards, the question has been: does hegemony merely put the gloss of consent over more naked forms of domination? In retrospect, it seems obvious that the hegemon of the 19th century was Britain. Britain was an empire. In India, the heart of that empire, it ruled mainly by force. As Ranajit Guha, father of the Subaltern Studies school of history from below and one of Anderson's heroes, described it, the Raj secured dominance but without hegemony. It rested on force not persuasion. But that was not typical of Britain's wider role, which blended the firepower and reach of the Royal Navy with subtler forms of influence. Britain's informal empire rested less on gunboat diplomacy than on technology, money and ideas. The global cable network, the "Westminster system", common law, the religion of free trade, the vision of modernity offered by the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851: all these together defined its hegemony.
One of the striking things revealed by Anderson's survey is that open talk about the role of persuasion in the exercise of power tends to be a sign of its weakening grip. As Anderson shows, it was precisely as Victorian Britain's pre-eminence faded in the late 19th century that uses of the term hegemony proliferated. As challenger states such as Japan, Germany and Italy appeared on the scene, hegemony became a term not of approbation but of criticism. The Kaiser's Germany threatened hegemony on the continent. Russian Marxists took up the term to describe how the working class would lead the peasant masses to revolution. From a prison cell in fascist Italy Antonio Gramsci, the leader of Italian communism, invoked hegemony to conceptualise how the bourgeois maintained its grip on power.
To Gramsci, it was clear that hegemony in the 20th century would still speak English, but with an American accent. He was among the first to describe a new age of mass-produced affluence, what he called Fordism. America also gave the world Woodrow Wilson and his promise of self-determination. Hollywood was the world's dream factory.
In the 1920s and 1930s, America's influence was everywhere. The world was waiting for American power. But as one perceptive contemporary remarked, interwar America remained an "absent presence". It exerted huge influence, but did so indirectly. As a new wave of insurgents arose — Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan — what was revealed was the painful deficits of hegemony without dominance, influence and persuasion without the backing of political commitment or the means of deterrence or coercion.
It would take a second world war for the US to emerge as a power willing and able to impose order on Europe and east Asia. Europe would witness in the Marshall Plan what the economic historian Charles Kindleberger would dub the era of fully fledged American hegemony. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, Kindleberger gave the history survey that shaped an entire generation of American political scientists and economists. The world economy, Kindleberger argued, worked well when it had an anchor. It stuttered and slipped when it did not.
Once again, by the time it was theorised, hegemony was in crisis. As the Bretton Woods monetary system collapsed, stagflation set in. Was this an inevitable side effect of America's loss of leadership? Did the world economy really need a dominant centre? With Europe recovered from the destruction of the war and with Japan booming, might co-operation and co-ordination not be enough? That is precisely what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their followers in Europe — Helmut Kohl, Bettino Craxi and, eventually, François Mitterrand too — would deliver. As America's position was relativised, what emerged was not chaos but something more all-pervasive: liberal hegemony reborn in the form of the market revolution or, as we have learnt to call it, neoliberalism.
By 1989 the new hegemony seemed poised to declare the ultimate victory, nothing less than the end of history. As we now know, that was premature. We read Anderson because no historical commentator has taken the intellectual structure of liberal power more seriously and no one has criticised it more effectively. We read Anderson today with even greater attention, because the 10 years since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 have delivered a crushing vindication of the basic prediction of academic Marxism: liberal hegemony is not self-sustaining. It is crisis-ridden, haunted by radical uncertainty and endlessly productive of enemies within and without.
Indeed, given the events of 2016 we may have reached the point at which, to borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, the intellectual left is "tired of winning". The H-Word was finished in October 2016 and one senses that Anderson was sharpening his critical weapons to handle Hillary Clinton's coronation. Instead, like everyone else he faces the challenge of making sense of a very different presidency. How will the foremost critic of liberal hegemony respond to the jarring displacement of the mellifluous Barack Obama by the crude power-grab of Trump and his entourage? As is commonly remarked, Trump is putting comedy out of business. Will he do the same to sophisticated intellectual leftism? Given the evident threat from the right and its own political weakness, should the left fall in with centrist calls for unity, forming a kind of 21st-century Popular Front? One can hardly imagine Anderson agreeing. At its peak, the liberal hegemony was only too happy to declare, "there is no alternative". It would be painfully ironic if that hegemonic declaration were to command even greater practical force amid liberalism's shambolic decomposition.
The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony, by Perry Anderson, Verso, RRP£16.99/RRP$26.95, 208 pages
Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University and author of 'The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order' (Allen Lane/Penguin Press)
Photograph: Bridgeman Images
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