Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

Often invoked in both academic and popular discourse, the concept of hegemony carries many different meanings. Most frequently, it serves as a synonym for "political domination," a usage that is at once more precise and more ambiguous than the way it is employed in anthropology and culture studies. Coming from the Greek verb hegeisthai ("to lead"), the concept of hegemony in our tradition goes back through Antonio Gramsci to Karl Marx and his writings on "hidden" or "false consciousness," and further still, if we want to be exhaustive, to Aristotle's wariness of the masses. In essence, the Marxist usage of hegemony refers to a situation in which people are exploited and do not realize it. Marx was clearest on the point in his essay "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in which he laments the fact that the French peasants were supporting a second coming of Napoleon Bonaparte through his nephew Louis Bonaparte, even though the nephew was selling out their patrimony to an emergent merchant class.' Marx disparages the French peasantry as ignorants duped by Napoleonic rhetoric into acting against their own self-interest:

The mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital toward which its development pushes it unavoidably, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist's caldron of capital. The Code Napoldon is now nothing but the codex of distraints, of forced sales and compulsory auctions.

Marx ponders why "a nation of thirty-six millions [sic] can be surprised and delivered without resistance into captivity by three knights of industry,"3 observing wryly that "nations and women, are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them."" Marx sees a false consciousness at work among the French peasantry, with Napoleonic political rhetoric acting an as opiate of the masses.

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