The Left at War by Bérubé Michael;

Author:Bérubé, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2009-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

IS IT HEGEMONIC YET?

It is widely agreed that Stuart Hall developed a complex neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony and of Thatcherism. However, at the time, there was no universal agreement as to just what Hall was saying about Thatcherism as a hegemonic formation in British politics. Some leftists—usually the targets of Hall’s critiques—were apoplectic (and remained apoplectic for years) that Hall urged the left to learn from Thatcherism; as Hall put it in the conclusion to Hard Road to Renewal, “it is a sign both of the defensiveness and the residual sectarianism afflicting many parts of the left that it misreads an injunction to analyse ‘Thatcherism’ for a recommendation to swallow it whole” (272). Others defended the Althusserian Marxist project against Hall’s attempts to leaven it with his reading of Gramsci and his interests in race and ethnicity; and still others complained that Thatcherism wasn’t nearly as popular as the phrase “authoritarian populism”—or Hall’s project in general—seemed to suggest. This last objection, the most plausible-sounding of the three, involved a serious misunderstanding of Hall’s project, and because that misunderstanding is important not only to its moment but to the period of the second term of the Bush-Cheney administration, when the American left remained flummoxed at the phenomenon of a far-right president whose approval ratings languished in the 20s and low 30s for more than two years but who nonetheless managed to set much of the political and ideological agenda for American politics, I dwell on it briefly before moving to a consideration of Hall’s work on the left’s relation to the state, to the nation, and to international crises.

If Hall is to be read as a left theorist who claimed that Thatcherism dominated every aspect of British life, implemented its programs seamlessly, and brought the post-1973 economy to heel while reversing Britain’s century-long decline, then Hall can be—and should be—dismissed fairly easily. But this dismissal depends on a debilitating misreading of what Hall meant when he said that Thatcherism was a “hegemonic” project, and it depends on a severe misreading of what a “hegemony” might consist of. To paraphrase Hall, hegemony is not a stable, unitary, or permanent state; it is composed of multiple and contradictory elements, not all of which are moving at the same speed, so to speak, or working equally effectively. And it does not forestall dissatisfaction and dissent; far from it.

In adapting Nicos Poulantzas’s term “authoritarian statism” and dubbing Thatcherism “authoritarian populism,” Hall was not saying that Thatcherism was actually popular; he was saying that, like its American cousin, Reaganism, it combined a commitment to free-market/monetarist economics with a dramatic enhancement of the police powers of the state—and did so in the name of the people. As Hall put it in his 1979 Cobden Trust Human Rights Day Lecture, “make no mistake about it: under this regime, the market is to be Free; the people are to be disciplined” (“Drifting into a Law and Order Society,” 5). The conundrum is familiar to Americans, no doubt, as the

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