New Orders: Hegemony as a Method of Political Work

Abstract

This text proposes an understanding of hegemony not as a concept, theory or historical narrative, but as a distinctive method of political work. It thematises this strategic perspective in terms of four central dimensions of Gramsci’s political thought in the Prison Notebooks: the goal of constructing a new order, the nature of self-emancipatory politics as the production of historical progress, the method of leadership conceived as fragility and experimentation, and the organisational form of the party as a pedagogical laboratory. Taken in their productive dialectical interaction, these four perspectives enable us to restore political strategy to the centre of the notion of hegemony, and offer a sophisticated perspective well placed to dialogue with some of the central concerns of contemporary radical social and political movements.